The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  “You’d go along with that, wouldn’t you, Nigel?” Maltby cried. “Yes, he would. Done, Mellors.”

  Or: “We give ’em the gold, they buy the guns through Gully. Far simpler than supplying them direct. And more deniable—agreed, Nigel?—yes, Gully?—done, Mellors.”

  Or: “No, no, Mr. Mellors, thank you, no need for an extra body at all. Nigel and I are perfectly equal to a little skulduggery, aren’t we, Nigel? And Gully here knows the ropes of old. What’s a few hundred anti-personnel mines between friends, eh, Gully? Made in Birmingham. You can’t beat ’em.”

  And Gully simpering and hammering his moustache with his handkerchief and jotting greedily in his order book, while Mellors pushes what looks like a shopping list across the table at him, turning his eyes to heaven so that he doesn’t see himself do it.

  “With the minister’s most enthusiastic approval,” he breathes, meaning: don’t blame me.

  “Our only problem here, Mellors, is keeping the circle of knowledge to an absolute minimum,” Maltby is saying keenly. “That means corralling everybody who’s likely to find out by mistake, like young Simon here”—a leer at Simon Pitt, who sits in a state of shell shock at Gully’s side—“and threatening them with penal servitude in the galleys for life if they blabber one indiscreet word. Right, Simon? Right? Right?”

  “Right,” Simon agrees under torture.

  A different Maltby, one Fran hasn’t met before but always guessed at because he was so underused and underappreciated. A different Stormont too, who frowns into a void every time he speaks, and endorses whatever Maltby says.

  And a different Andy? Or is he the same model as before, only I never knew till now?

  Covertly, she allows her eyes to focus on him.

  A changed man. Not larger or fatter or thinner. Just further away. So far away, in fact, that she hardly recognised him across the table. His departure had begun in the casino, she now realised, and gathered speed with the dramatic news of Mellors’ imminent arrival.

  “Who needs the little shit?” he had demanded of her furiously, as if he held her responsible for summoning the wretched man. “BUCHAN won’t see him. BUCHAN TWO won’t see him. She won’t even see me. None o’ them will see him. I’ve told him that already.”

  “Then tell him again.”

  “This is my fucking patch. Not his. My fucking operation. Fuck’s it got to do with him?”

  “Do you mind not swearing at me? He’s your boss, Andy. He posted you here. I didn’t. Regional heads have a right to drop in on their flock. Even in your service, I presume.”

  “Bullshit,” he retorted, and the next thing she knew she was calmly packing up her possessions and Andy was telling her to make sure there were no nasty little hairs in the bath.

  “What are you so afraid of him finding?” she demanded, ice cold. “He’s not your lover, is he? You’re not sworn to chastity, are you? Are you? So you had a woman here. What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t have to have been me.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Andy!”

  He made a brief and graceless show of penitence.

  “Don’t like being spied on, that’s all,” he said sulkily.

  But when she broke out in relieved laughter at this good joke, he grabbed her car key from the sideboard, forced it into her palm and marched her with her luggage to the lift. All day long they had succeeded in avoiding each other until now, when they were obliged to sit across a table in this gloomy white jail, with Andy glowering and Fran tight-lipped, keeping her smiles for the stranger—who to her secret indignation was flattering Andy and deferring to him in the most nauseating way imaginable:

  “But do these proposals make sense to you, now, Andrew?” Mellors insists, with a suck of his teeth. “Speak up, now, young Mr. Osnard. It’s your achievement, good heavens! You’re the man at the controls here, the star—saving His Excellency’s presence. Is it not better for the man in the field—at the front line, my God—to be unfettered by wearisome administration, Andrew, tell us frankly now? Nobody round this table wishes to impair your exemplary performance.”

  To which sentiment Maltby then lends his enthusiastic support, seconded some moments later and with less enthusiasm by Stormont—the point at issue being the two-key system for controlling the Silent Opposition’s finances, a task which, it is generally agreed, is best entrusted to senior officers.

  So why is Andy down in the mouth at having such a heavy load lifted from his shoulders? Why isn’t he grateful that Maltby and Stormont are falling over themselves to take the job off his hands?

  “Up to you people,” he mumbles churlishly, with a sideways glower at Maltby. And goes back into deep sulk.

  And when the question arises of how Abraxas and Domingo and the other Silent Opponents can be persuaded to deal directly with Stormont on matters of finance and logistics, Andy comes close to losing his temper altogether.

  “Why don’t you take over the whole bloody network while you’re about it?” he flares, flushing crimson. “Run it from chancery in office hours, five days a week, be done with it. Help yourselves.”

  “Andrew, Andrew, come—no hard words here, please!” cries Mellors, tutting like an old Scottish hen. “We are a team, Andrew, are we not? All that is being offered here is a helping hand—the counsel of wise heads—a steadying influence upon a brilliantly managed operation. Is it not, Ambassador?” Suck of the teeth, sad frown of troubled father, the placatory tone raised to entreaty. “These opposition fellows, they’ll be driving a hard bargain, Andrew. Binding assurances will have to be given from the hip. Snap decisions of immense consequence will abound. Deep waters, Andrew, for a fellow of your tender years. Better to leave such matters in the capable hands of men of the world.”

  Andy sulks. Stormont stares into his void. But dear, kind Maltby feels constrained to add a few comforting words of his own.

  “My dear chap, you can’t possibly hang on to the whole game—can he, Nigel? It’s share and share alike in my embassy— isn’t it, Nigel? Nobody’s taking your spies away from you. You’ll still have your network to look after—brief, debrief, pay and so forth. All we want is your opposition. What could be fairer than that?”

  But still, to Fran’s embarrassment, Andy refuses to accept the hand that is so courteously outstretched to him. His glittery little eyes switch to Maltby, then Stormont, then go back to Maltby. He mutters something nobody catches, which is probably as well. He pulls a bitter grin and nods to himself like a man cruelly cheated.

  A last symbolic ceremony remains. Mellors stands, ducks beneath the table and reappears with two black leather shoulder bags of the sort Queen’s Messengers cart about, one to each shoulder.

  “Andrew, kindly open up the strong room for us,” he commands.

  Now everyone is standing. Fran stands too. Shepherd advances on the strong room, unlocks the grille with a long brass key, and pulls it back, exposing a solid steel door with a black dial at its centre. On Mellors’ nod, Andy steps forward and, with an expression of such pent-up venom that she is heartily glad she never saw it until now, swivels the dial this way and that until the lock yields. Even then, it takes an encouraging word from Maltby before Andy draws back the door and, with a mocking bow, invites his ambassador and head of chancery to enter ahead of him. Still standing at the table, Fran makes out, beside an oversized red telephone attached to a kind of reconstructed vacuum cleaner, a steel safe with two keyholes. Her father the judge has one like it in his dressing room.

  “One each now,” she hears Mellors pipe skittishly.

  For a moment Fran is in her old school chapel, kneeling in the front pew and watching a huddle of handsome young priests as they chastely turn their backs to her and busy themselves with exciting things in preparation for her first Communion. Gradually her field of view clears, and she sees Andy, under Mellors’ parental eye, presenting Maltby and Stormont with one long-stemmed silver-plated key apiece. There is English amusement, which Andy does not share
, while each man tries the other’s keyhole before Maltby lets out a jolly “Gotcha” and the safe door clunks open.

  But Fran by now is no longer looking at the safe. Her gaze is all upon Andy as he stares and stares at the gold bars that Mellors is taking one by one from his black shoulder bags and handing to Shepherd to be stacked crisscross like spillikins. And it is Andy’s sagging face that for the last time holds her in its spell, because it tells her everything she ever did or didn’t want to know about him. She knows he’s been caught, and she has a shrewd notion of what he’s been caught at, though she has no idea at all whether those who have caught him know what they have done. She knows he is a liar, with or without the licence of his profession. She knows the source of the fifty thousand dollars he put on red. It is standing before her with its door open. She entirely understands why he is so angry that he has been forced to give away the keys. And after that, Fran can’t watch anymore, partly because her eyes have misted over in humiliation and self-disgust and partly because the ungainly frame of Maltby is bearing down on her with a pirate’s grin, asking whether she would regard it as an offence against Creation if he took her to the Pavo Real for a boiled egg.

  “Phoebe has decided to leave me,” he explains with pride. “We’re getting a divorce immediately. Nigel’s plucking up his courage to break it to her. She’ll never believe it if it comes from me.”

  Fran took a moment to reply, because her first instinct was to shudder and say no thank you very much. It was only when she kept thinking that she realised a number of things she might have realised earlier. Namely that for months she had been touched by Maltby’s devotion to her and grateful for the presence in her life of a man who longed for her so hopelessly. And that Maltby’s sheepish adoration of her had become a source of priceless support as she wrestled with the knowledge that she was sharing her life with an amoralist whose lack of shame or scruple had at first attracted and now repelled her; whose interest in her had never been more than expedient and carnal; and whose net effect on her had been to instil a craving for the shambling devotion of her ambassador.

  And having thus rationally thought her way to this conclusion, Fran decided that it had been a long time since she had been so grateful for an invitation.

  Marta sat hunched on the finishing hands’ workbench, looking down at the wad of money he had pressed on her and thinking: His friend Mickie is dead, he believes he killed him, and perhaps he did, the police are spying on him but he wants me to sit on a beach in Miami and eat the buffet lunch at the Grand Bay and buy clothes and wait until he comes. And be happy and believe in him and get a tan and have my face mended. And get a boy as well if I can, because he would like me to have a handsome boy, a proxy Harry Pendel, doing his loving for him while he stays faithful to Louisa. That’s who he is, and you may call it complicated or you may call it very simple. Harry has a dream for everyone. Harry dreams all our lives for us, and gets them wrong every time. Because number one, I don’t want to leave Panama. I want to stay here and lie to the police for him and sit at his bedside the way he sat at mine and find out what’s gone wrong for him and cure it. I want to tell him to get up and hobble round the room, because for as long as you stay lying down all you can think of is getting another beating. But when you stand up you start to be a mensch again, which is his word for dignity. And number two I can’t leave Panama because the police have taken my passport by way of encouragement to spy on him.

  Seven thousand dollars.

  She had counted them onto the worktable by the glow from the skylight above her. Seven thousand dollars from his back pocket, pressed on her like guilt money the moment he heard of Mickie’s death—here, take this, it’s Osnard’s money, Judas money, Mickie money, now it’s yours. You’d think a man setting out to do what Harry had to do would keep his money in his pocket for eventualities. Undertaker money. Police money. Chiquilla money. But Harry had scarcely put the receiver down before he was pulling the wad out of his back pocket, wanting to be shot of every dirty dollar. Where had he got it from? the police had asked her.

  “You’re not stupid, Marta. You can read, study, make bombs, make trouble, lead marches. Who gives him his money? Does Abraxas give it to him? Is he working for Abraxas and Abraxas is working for the British? What does he give Abraxas in return?”

  “I don’t know. My employer tells me nothing. Get out of my flat.”

  “He fucks you, doesn’t he?”

  “No, he doesn’t fuck me. He comes to see me because I have headaches and vomiting attacks and he is my employer and he was with me when I was beaten. He is a caring man and happily married.”

  No, he doesn’t fuck me, that at least was true, though it cost her more to tell them this precious truth than any number of easy lies. No, officer, he doesn’t fuck me. No, officer, I don’t ask him to. We lie on my bed, I put my hand in the heat of his crotch but only outside, he puts his hand inside my blouse, but one breast is all that he allows himself though he knows he can have the whole of me anytime he wants, because he has the whole of me already, but the guilt owns him, he has more guilt than sins. And I tell him stories of who we might be if we were young and brave again in the days before they took my face off with their clubs. And that is love.

  Marta’s head was throbbing again, and she felt sick. She stood up, clutching the money in both hands. She couldn’t stand another minute in the Cuna work room. She walked down the corridor as far as the door to her office and, like a guided tourist a hundred years from now, stood at the threshold and looked in while she gave herself the commentary:

  This is where the halfbreed Marta sat and did her accounts for the tailor Pendel. Over there in the shelves you see the books on sociology and history that Marta used to read in her spare time in an effort to raise herself in society and fulfil the dreams of her dead father the carpenter. As a self-educated man, the tailor Pendel was concerned that all his staff but particularly the halfbreed Marta develop themselves to their maximum potential. This is the kitchen area, where Marta made her famous sandwiches, all the prominent men of Panama would speak in bated breath of Marta’s sandwiches, including Mickie Abraxas the famous suicidal spy, tuna was her speciality but in her heart she wished she could poison the whole pack of them except for Mickie and her employer, Pendel. And over there in the corner behind the desk we have the very spot where in 1989 the tailor Pendel, having first closed the door, was sufficiently overcome to take Marta in his arms and protest his undying love for her. The tailor Pendel proposed they visit a pushbutton but Marta preferred to take him to her own apartment, and it was on the drive there that Marta incurred the facial injuries that left her permanently scarred, and it was the fellow student Abraxas who suborned the cowardly doctor into leaving his indelible imprint upon her—that doctor was so terrified of losing his rich practice that he couldn’t keep his hands still. The same doctor afterwards had the wisdom to inform on Abraxas, an act that led effectively to his destruction.

  Closing the door on her dead self, Marta continued down the corridor to Pendel’s cutting room. I’ll leave the money in his top left drawer. The door was ajar. Lights were burning inside the room. Marta was not surprised. Not long ago, her Harry had been a man of unearthly discipline but in recent weeks the stitching of his too many lives had been too much for him. She pushed the door. Now we are in the tailor Pendel’s cutting room, known to customers and employees alike as the Holy of Holies. Nobody was permitted to enter without knocking, or during his absence—except apparently for his wife, Louisa, who was seated at her husband’s desk with her spectacles on and a pile of his old notebooks at her elbow, and a lot of pencils and an order book, and a tin of fly spray in front of her, opened at the base, while she played with the ornate cigarette lighter that Harry said a rich Arab had given him, though P & B had no rich Arabs on its books.

  She was dressed in a thin red cotton wrapper and apparently nothing else, because as she leaned forward she revealed her breasts in their entirety. She was clicking t
he lighter on and off and smiling at Marta through the flame.

  “Where’s my husband?” Louisa asked.

  Click.

  “He’s gone to Guararé,” Marta replied. “Mickie Abraxas killed himself at the fireworks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. So is your husband.”

  “However, it was not unexpected. We have had about five years’ warning of the event,” Louisa pointed out quite reasonably.

  Click.

  “He was appalled,” Marta said.

  “Mickie?”

  “Your husband,” Marta said.

  “Why does my husband keep a special invoice book for Mr. Osnard’s suits?”

  Click.

  “I don’t know. It puzzles me too,” Marta said.

  “Are you his mistress?”

  “No.”

  “Does he have one?”

  Click.

  “No.”

  “Is that his money you’re holding in your hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Click.

  “He gave it me,” Marta said.

  “For fucking?”

  “For safekeeping. It was in his pocket when he heard the news.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  Click, and a flame that lit Louisa’s left eye, so close that Marta wondered why her eyebrow didn’t catch fire and the flimsy red wrapper with it.

  “I don’t know,” Marta replied. “Some customers pay cash. He doesn’t always know what to do with it. He loves you. He loves his family more than anything on earth. He loved Mickie too.”