“Oh fart,” said the ambassador, revealing depths of language that Stormont had never guessed at.
The deluge became absurd. Leaving the ball to fend for itself, they repaired to a regimental bandstand set before a crescent of married officers’ mansions. But the old caddie didn’t like the bandstand. He preferred the dubious shelter of a cluster of palm trees, where he stood with the torrent streaming off his hat.
“Otherwise,” said Maltby, “as far as I know, we’re rather a jolly crowd. No feuds, everyone chipper, our stock in Panama never higher, fascinating intelligence pouring in from all directions. What more can our masters ask? one wonders.”
“Why? What are they asking?”
But Maltby would not be hurried. He preferred his own strange path of indirection.
“Long chats with all sorts of people last night on Osnard’s secret telephone,” he announced in a tone of fond reminiscence. “Have you had a go on it?”
“I can’t say I have,” said Stormont.
“Hideous red affair, wired up to a Boer War washing machine. You can say anything you like on it. I was terribly impressed. Such nice chaps too. Not that one has ever met them. But they sounded nice. A conference call. One spent one’s entire time apologising for interrupting. A man called Luxmore is on his way to us. A Scottish person. We’re to call him Mellors. I’m not supposed to tell you, so naturally I shall. Luxmore-Mellors will bring us life-altering news.”
The rain had stopped dead, but Maltby didn’t seem to have noticed. The caddie was still huddled under the palm trees, where he was smoking a plump roll of marijuana leaves.
“Perhaps you should stand that chap down,” Stormont suggested. “If you’re not playing anymore.”
So they put some wet dollars together and sent the caddie back to the clubhouse with Maltby’s clubs, and sat themselves on a dry bench at the edge of the bandstand and watched a swollen stream racing through Eden, and the sun like God’s glory breaking out on every leaf and flower.
“It has been decided—the passive voice is not of my choosing, Nigel—it has been decided that Her Majesty’s Government will lend secret support and aid to Panama’s Silent Opposition. On a deniable basis, naturally. Luxmore whom we must call Mellors is coming out to tell us how to do it. There’s a handbook on it, I understand. ‘How to Oust Your Host Government,’ or something of the sort. We must all dip into it. I don’t know yet whether I shall be asked to admit Messrs. Domingo and Abraxas to my kitchen garden at dead of night or whether this will fall to you. Not that I have a kitchen garden, but I seem to remember that the late Lord Halifax did, and met all sorts of people there. You look askance. Is askance what you’re looking?”
“Why can’t Osnard take care of it?” Stormont asked.
“As his ambassador, I have not encouraged his involvement. The boy has enough responsibilities as it is. He’s young. He’s junior. These opposition people like the reassurance of a seasoned hand. Some are people like us, but some are hoary working-class chaps— stevedores, fishermen, farmers and the like. Far better we take the burden upon ourselves. We’re also to support a shadowy body of bomb-making students, always tricky. We shall take over the students too. I’m sure you’ll be very good with them. You seem troubled, Nigel. Have I upset you?”
“Why don’t they send us more spies?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary. Visiting firemen perhaps, men like Luxmore-Mellors, but nobody permanent. We mustn’t inflate the embassy’s numbers unnaturally; it would invite comment. I made that point also.”
“You did?” said Stormont incredulously.
“Yes, indeed. With two such experienced heads as yours and mine, I said, additional staff were quite unnecessary. I was firm. They would litter the place up, I said. Unacceptable. I pulled rank. I said we were men of the world. You would have been proud of me.”
Stormont thought he saw an unfamiliar sparkle in his ambassador’s eye, best compared with the awakening of desire.
“We shall need an enormous amount of stuff,” Maltby went on, with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy looking forward to a new train set. “Radios, cars, safe houses, couriers, not to mention matériel—machine guns, mines, rocket launchers, masses of explosive, naturally, detonators, everything your heart has ever dreamed of. No modern Silent Opposition is complete without them, they assured me. And spares are frightfully important, one’s told. Well, you know how careless students are. Give them a radio in the morning, it’s covered in graffiti by lunchtime. And I’m sure Silent Oppositions are no better. The weapons will all be British, you’ll be relieved to hear. There’s a tried and tested British company already standing by to supply them, which is nice. Minister Kirby thinks the world of them. They earned their spurs in Iran, or was it Iraq? Probably both. Gully thinks the world of them too, I’m pleased to say, and the Office has accepted my suggestion that he be advanced immediately to the rank and condition of Buchaneer. Osnard is swearing him in even as we speak.”
“Your suggestion,” Stormont repeated numbly.
“Yes, Nigel, I have decided that you and I are well cast for the business of intrigue. I once remarked to you how I yearned to take part in a British plot. Well, here it is. The secret bugle has sounded. I trust that none of us will be found wanting in our zeal—I do wish you could look a little happier, Nigel. You don’t seem to realise the import of what I’m telling you. This embassy is about to take an amazing leap forward. From a silted diplomatic backwater we shall become the hottest post in the ratings. Promotion, medals, notice of the most flattering kind will overnight be ours. Don’t tell me you doubt our masters’ wisdom? That would be very bad timing.”
“It’s just that there seem to be rather a lot of stages missing,” Stormont said feebly, grappling with the acquisition of a brand-new ambassador.
“Nonsense. Of what sort?”
“Logic, for one.”
“Oh, really?”—coldly. “Where precisely do you detect a want of logic?”
“Well I mean take the Silent Opposition. Nobody’s even heard of it apart from us. Why hasn’t it done something—leaked something to the press—spoken up?”
Maltby was already scoffing. “But my dear chap! That’s its name. That’s its nature. It’s silent. It keeps its counsel. Awaits its hour. Abraxas isn’t a drunk. He’s a bravura hero, a closet revolutionary for God and country. Domingo isn’t a drug dealer with an oversized libido, he’s a selfless warrior for democracy. As to the students, what is there to know? You remember how we were. Scatty. Inconstant. One thing one day, another thing the next. I fear you’re becoming jaded, Nigel. Panama’s getting you down. Time you took Paddy to Switzerland. Oh, and yes”—he went on, as if there was something he had omitted to say—“nearly forgot. Mr. Luxmore-Mellors will be bringing the gold bars,” he added, in the tone of someone tying a last administrative knot. “One can’t trust banks and courier services in these cases, not in the dark world of intrigue that you and I are entering, Nigel, so he’s posing as a Queen’s Messenger and bringing them by diplomatic bag.”
“The what?”
“Gold bars, Nigel. It seems they’re what one gives to Silent Oppositions these days in preference to dollars or pounds or Swiss francs. I must say one can see the sense of it. Can you imagine running a Silent Opposition on pounds sterling? They’d devalue before one had mounted one’s first abortive putsch. And Silent Oppositions don’t come cheap, I’m told,” he added in the same throwaway tone. “A few million is nothing these days, not if you’re counting on buying a future government at the same time. Students, well, one can rein them in a bit, but do you remember how we used to get into debt? Good quartermastering will be essential on both fronts. But I think we’re up to it, Nigel, don’t you? I see it as a challenge myself. The sort of thing one dreams of in the midlife of one’s career. A diplomatic El Dorado without the sweat of all that panning in the jungle.”
Maltby was musing. Stormont, tight-lipped at his side, had never known him so relaxed. Yet
of himself he knew nothing at all. Or nothing he could explain. The sun was still radiant. Crouched in the blackness of the bandstand, he felt like a life prisoner who can’t believe that the door of his cell stands open. His bluff was being called—but what bluff? Whom had he been fooling, except himself, as he watched the embassy flourish under Osnard’s spurious alchemy? “Don’t knock a good thing,” he had warned Paddy sharply when she had dared suggest that BUCHAN was a bit too gorgeous to be true, particularly when you got to know Andy a bit better.
Maltby was philosophising:
“An embassy is not equipped to evaluate, Nigel. We may have a view, that’s different. We may have local knowledge. Of course we do. And sometimes it appears to conflict with what is told us by our betters. We have our senses. We can see and hear and sniff. But we don’t have acres of files, computers, analysts and scores of delicious young debutantes scampering up and down corridors, alas. We have no overview. No awareness of the world’s game. Least of all in an embassy as small and irrelevant as our own. We’re bumpkins. You agree, I take it?”
“Did you tell them this?”
“Indeed I did, and on Osnard’s magic telephone. One’s words are so much more weighty when they’re said in secret, don’t you agree? We are aware of our limitations, I said. Our work is humdrum. From time to time we are granted glimpses of the bigger world. BUCHAN is such a glimpse. And we are grateful, we are proud. It is neither proper nor appropriate, I said, that a tiny embassy, charged with reading the mood of the country and propagating the views of our own government, should be called upon to pass an objective judgment on matters too large for our horizons.”
“What made you say that?” Stormont asked. He meant to be louder, but something was catching his throat.
“BUCHAN, naturally. The Office accused me of being niggardly in my praise of the latest material. You too, by inference, were similarly accused. ‘Praise?’ I said. ‘You can have all the praise you want. Andrew Osnard is a charming fellow, conscientious to a fault, and the BUCHAN operation has provided us with enlightenment and food for thought. We admire it. We support it. It enlivens our little community. But we do not presume to award it a place in the grand scheme of things. That is for your analysts and our masters.’ ”
“And they were content with that?”
“They devoured it. Andy is a very nice fellow, as I told them. Goes down a treat with the girls. Asset to the embassy.” He broke off, leaving a note of question, and resumed on a lower key. “All right, maybe he doesn’t quite play to eight. Maybe he cheats a bit here and there. Who doesn’t? My point is, it’s absolutely nothing to do with you or me or anyone else in this embassy, with the possible exception of young Andy, that the BUCHAN stuff is the most frightful tosh.”
Stormont’s reputation for composure in crisis was deserved. He sat painfully still for a while—the bench was teak, and he had a bit of a back, particularly in damp weather. He considered the line of sterile ships, the Bridge of the Americas, the Old City and its ugly modern sister across the bay. He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. And he wondered whether, for reasons not yet revealed, he was witnessing the end of his career or beginning a new one of which the outlines were unclear to him.
Maltby by contrast was basking in a kind of confessional ease. He was leaning right back, his long, goatish head propped against an iron pillar of the bandstand, and his tone was magnanimity itself.
“Now I don’t know,” he was saying, “and you don’t know, which one of them makes it up. Is it BUCHAN? Is it Mrs. BUCHAN? Is it the subsources, whoever they are—Abraxas, Domingo, the woman Sabina or that disgusting journalist one sees around the place, Teddy Somebody? Or is it Andrew himself, bless him, and all else is vanity? He’s young. They could be fooling him. On the other hand, he’s quick-witted and he’s a rogue. No he’s not. He’s rotten through and through. He’s a major shit.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“Oh, I do, I do, enormously. And I don’t hold the cheating against him one bit. A lot of chaps cheat, but it’s usually the bad players like me. I mean, I’ve known chaps apologise. I’ve practically apologised myself a couple of times.” He bestowed a shameful grin on a pair of big yellow butterflies who had decided to join the conversation. “But Andy’s a winner, you see. And winners who cheat are shits. How does he get on with Paddy?”
“Paddy adores him.”
“Oh my Lord, not too much, I hope? He’s shagging Fran, I’m sorry to say.”
“Rubbish,” Stormont replied hotly. “They barely talk to each other.”
“That’s because they’re shagging in secret. They’ve been at it for months. Seems to have turned her head completely.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“My dear chap, I can’t take my eyes off her, you must have noticed. I watch her every move. I’ve followed her. I don’t think she spotted me. But then of course we prowlers rather hope they do. She left her flat and went to Osnard’s. Didn’t come out. Next morning, seven o’clock, I faked an urgent telegram and phoned her flat. No answer. You can’t get it clearer than that.”
“And you haven’t said anything to Osnard?”
“Whatever for? Fran’s an angel, he’s a shit, I’m a lecher. What would we possibly achieve?”
The bandstand started to crack and rattle with the next downpour, and they had to wait a few minutes for the sun.
“So what do you intend to do?” Stormont said gruffly, fending off all the questions he refused to ask himself.
“Do, did you say, Nigel?” It was Maltby as Stormont remembered him: arid, pedantic and aloof. “Whatever about?”
“BUCHAN. Luxmore. The Silent Opposition. The students. The people beyond that bridge over there, whoever they are. Osnard. The fact that BUCHAN is a fiction. If he is. That the reports are tosh, as you call them.”
“My dear man. We’re not being asked to do anything. We’re merely the servants of a higher cause.”
“But if London’s swallowing it whole, and you think it’s total crap—”
Maltby leaned forward in the way he would normally lean across his desk, fingertips together in an attitude of mute obstruction. “Go on.”
“Then you’ve got to tell them,” said Stormont stoutly.
“Why?”
“To stop them being led up the garden path. Anything could happen.”
“But Nigel. I thought we had already agreed that we were not evaluators.”
A sleek olive-coloured bird had entered their domain and was quizzing them for crumbs.
“I’ve nothing for you,” Maltby assured it anxiously. “I really haven’t. Oh damn,” he exclaimed, plunging his hands into his pockets, patting them vainly for anything that would do. “Later,” he told it. “Come back tomorrow. No, the day after, about this time. We’ve got a top spy descending on us.”
“Our duty here in the embassy, in these circumstances, Nigel, is to provide logistical support,” Maltby went on in a tight, businesslike tone. “You agree?”
“I suppose it is,” said Stormont doubtfully.
“To assist, where assistance is helpful. To applaud, to encourage, to cool brows. To ease the burden on those in the firing seat.”
“Driving seat,” said Stormont absently. “Or firing line, I suppose, if that’s what you mean.”
“Thank you. Why is it that whenever I reach for a modern metaphor I come unstuck? I suppose I imagined a tank at that moment. One of Gully’s, paid for in gold bars.”
“I suppose you did.”
Maltby’s voice gathered power as if for the benefit of the audience outside the bandstand, but there was none. “So it is in this spirit of wholehearted collaboration that I have made the point to London—and I am sure you will agree with me—that Andrew Osnard, whatever his sterling virtues, is too inexperienced to be handling very large sums of money, whether in the form of cash or gold. And that it is only fair, on him as well as the recipients of the money, that he be provided wit
h a paymaster. As his ambassador, I have selflessly volunteered for the task. London sees the wisdom of this. Whether Osnard sees it is to be doubted, but he can scarcely object, particularly since it is we—you and I, Nigel—who in due course will be taking over liaison with the Silent Opposition and the students. Money from secret funds is notoriously hard to account for and quite impossible to pursue once it has disappeared into the wrong hands. All the more important that it be scrupulously husbanded while it is in our care. I have asked that chancery be provided with a safe of the type that Osnard has in his strong room. The gold—and whatever else— will be stored there, and you and I will be joint key holders. If Osnard decides that he requires a large sum of money he may come to us and state his case. Assuming the sum is within the agreed guidelines you and I will jointly draw the cash and place it in the appropriate hands. Are you a rich man, Nigel?”
“No.”
“Nor I. Did your divorce effectively impoverish you?”
“Yes.”
“I would imagine so. And it will be no better when my turn comes. Phoebe is not easily satisfied.” He glanced at Stormont for confirmation of this, but Stormont’s face, turned towards the Pacific, was set in iron.
“It’s so very unreasonable of life,” Maltby went on by way of small talk. “Here we are in middle age, healthy chaps with healthy appetites. We made a few mistakes, faced up to them, learned the lessons. And we’ve still got a few precious, wonderful years before the Zimmer frame. Only one blot spoils an otherwise perfect prospect. We’re broke.”
From the sea Stormont’s eyes had lifted to a range of cottonwool clouds that had formed above the distant islands. And it seemed to him that he saw snow on them, and Paddy, cured of her cough, pottering cheerfully up the path to the chalet, bearing shopping from the village.
The Tailor of Panama Page 31