The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  “Afraid not. Had it out when I was a kid.”

  Then one of her hands was hauling at his shirt-tails, the other was delving clumsily in the waistband of his Pendel & Braithwaite trousers and she was whispering things to herself that he didn’t catch and anyway were of no interest to him. He groped for the third button but she hit his hand impatiently aside and pulled the wrapper over her head in one movement. He stepped out of his shoes and peeled off his trousers, underpants and socks in a single damp roll. He pulled his shirt over his head. Naked and apart, they appraised each other, wrestlers about to engage. Then Osnard grabbed her in both arms and, lifting her clean off the ground, carted her across the threshold of his bedroom and dumped her on the bed where she at once began attacking him with great lunges of her thighs.

  “Wait, Christ’s sake,” he ordered, and pushed her off him.

  Then he took her very slowly and deliberately, using all his skills and hers. To shut her up. To tie a loose cannon to the deck. To get her safely into my camp before whatever battle lay ahead. Because it’s a maxim of mine that no reasonable offer should ever be passed up. Because I always fancied her. Because screwing one’s friends’ wives is never less than interesting.

  Louisa lay with her back to him, her head under the pillows and her knees drawn up to protect her while she clutched the bedsheet to her nose. She had closed her eyes, more to die than to sleep. She was ten years old in her bedroom in Gamboa with the curtains drawn, sent there to repent her sins after slicing up Emily’s new blouse with a pair of sewing scissors on the grounds that it was brazen. She wanted to get up and borrow his toothbrush and dress and comb her hair and leave, but to do any of those things was to admit the reality of time and place and Osnard’s naked body in the bed beside her and the fact that she had nothing to wear except a flimsy red wrapper with the buttons torn off it—and where the hell was it anyway?—and a pair of flat shoes that were supposed not to show off her height—and what the hell had happened to them?—and her headache was so terrible that she had a good mind to demand to be taken to a hospital, where she could begin last night again from the beginning, without vodka or smashing up Harry’s desk if that was what she had done, without Marta or the shop or Mickie dying or Delgado’s reputation being ripped to shreds by Harry, and without Osnard and all this. Twice she had gone to the bathroom, once to be sick, but each time she had crept back into bed and tried to make everything that had happened unhappen, and now Osnard was talking on the telephone and there was no way on earth she couldn’t hear his hateful English drawl eighteen inches from her ear however many pillows she might pull over her head, or the sleepy bewildered Scottish accent from the other end of the line, like last messages from a faulty radio.

  “We’ve got some disturbing news coming through, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “Disturbing? Who’s disturbing?” The Scots voice waking up.

  “About that Greek ship of ours.”

  “Greek ship? What Greek ship? What are you talking about, Andrew?”

  “Our flagship, sir. The flagship of the Silent Line.” Long pause.

  “Got you, Andrew! The Greek, my God! Point taken. Tricky how? Why tricky?”

  “It seems to have foundered, sir.”

  “Foundered? What against? How?”

  “Sunk.” Pause for “sunk” to sink in. “Written off. Up west somewhere. Circumstances not yet established. I’ve sent a writer there to find out.”

  More puzzled silence from the other end, reflecting Louisa’s own.

  “Writer?”

  “A famous one.”

  “Got you! Understood. The best-selling author from bygone times. Quite so. Say no more. Sunk how, Andrew? Sunk totally, you mean?”

  “First reports say he’ll never sail again.”

  “God. God! Who did it, Andrew? That woman, I’ll be bound. I’d put nothing beyond her. Not after last night.”

  “Further details pending, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “What about his crew?—his shipmates, dammit—his silent ones—have they gone down too?”

  “We’re waiting to hear. Best you go on back to London as planned, sir. I’ll call you there.”

  He rang off and yanked the pillow from her head where she was clutching it. Even with her eyes crammed shut she couldn’t escape the sight of his replete young body stretched carelessly at her side or his idle, bloated penis, half awake.

  “I never said this,” he was telling her. “All right?”

  She turned resolutely away from him. Not all right.

  “Your husband’s a brave chap. He’s under orders never to talk to you about it. Never will. Nor will I.”

  “Brave how?”

  “People tell him things. He tells ’em to us. What he doesn’t hear he goes and finds out, often at some risk. Recently he stumbled on something big.”

  “Is that why he photographed my papers?”

  “We needed Delgado’s engagements. There are missing hours in Delgado’s life.”

  “They’re not missing hours. They’re when he goes to Mass or looks after his wife and kids. He’s got a kid in hospital. Sebastian.”

  “That’s what Delgado tells you.”

  “It’s true. Don’t give me that bullshit. Is Harry doing this for England?”

  “England, America, Europe. Civilised free world. You name it.”

  “Then he’s an asshole. So’s England. So’s the civilised free world.” It took her time and effort, but eventually she managed it. She climbed onto her elbow and turned to look down on him.

  “I don’t believe a fucking word you’re telling me,” she said. “You’re a slimy English crook with a sackful of clever lies, and Harry is out of his mind.”

  “Then don’t believe me. Just keep your big mouth shut.”

  “It’s bullshit. He makes it up. You’re making it up. Everyone’s jerking off.”

  The phone was ringing, a different phone, one she hadn’t noticed, although it was on her side of the bed, linked to a pocket tape recorder next to the reading light. Osnard rolled roughly over her and grabbed the receiver and she was in time to hear him say “Harry” before she clapped her hands over her ears, squeezed her eyes shut and yanked her face into a rigid grimace of refusal. But somehow one of her hands didn’t do its job properly. And somehow one ear heard her husband’s voice above the babel of screaming and rejecting that was going on inside her head.

  “Mickie was murdered, Andy,” Harry was announcing. His voice was deliberate and forearmed, but pressed for time. “A professional shooting, by the sound of it, which is all I can say at the present time. However, I’m told there’s more of the same on the way, and precautions should therefore be taken by all interested parties. Rafi has already left for Miami, plus I’m getting word to the others in accordance with laid-down procedure. I’m worried about the students. I don’t know how we’re going to stop them calling out the flotilla.”

  “Where are you?” Osnard asked.

  And there was a spare moment after that when Louisa might have asked Harry a question or two on her own account—something on the lines of: “Do you still love me?” or “Will you forgive me?” or “Are you going to notice the difference in me if I don’t tell you?” or “What time will you be home this evening and shall I get food in so that we can cook together?” But she was still trying to select one of these when the line went dead and there was Osnard on his elbows above her, with his fluid cheeks hanging down and his little wet mouth open, but otherwise not apparently with any intention of making love to her because for the first time in their brief acquaintance he seemed to be at a loss.

  “Hell was that?” he demanded of her as if she were at least in part responsible.

  “Harry,” she said stupidly.

  “Which one?”

  “Yours, I suppose.”

  At which he puffed and flopped onto his back beside her with his hands behind his head as if he were taking a short break on a nudist beach. Then he picked up the phone again,
not Harry’s but the other one and, having dialled, asked for Señor Mellors in room something-or-other.

  “It seems to have been murder,” he said without preamble, and she guessed he was speaking to the same Scottish man as before. “Looks as though the students may break ranks . . . lot of emotion riding on the ball . . . much-respected man . . . A professional wet job. Details still coming in. What do you mean, a peg, sir? Don’t get you. Peg for what? No, of course. I understand. As soon as I can, sir. Straight away.”

  Then for a while he seemed to go through a lot of things in his mind, because she heard him snorting and occasionally letting out a grim laugh, until he sat up sharply on the edge of the bed. Then he stood up and walked to the dining room, to return with his rolled-up clothes. He fished out last night’s shirt and pulled it on.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded. And when he didn’t answer, “What are you doing? Andrew, I do not understand how you can get up, and dress, and walk out on me, and leave me here with no clothes and no place to go and no provision for my—”

  She dried up.

  “Well, sorry about that, ol’ girl. Bit abrupt. Got to break camp, afraid. Both of us. Time to go home.”

  “Home where?”

  “Bethania for you. Merrie England for me. Rule one o’ the house. Joe topped in the field, case officer gets out in his socks. Don’t pass Go, don’t collect two hundred quid. Hurry home to Mummy, shortest route.”

  He was tying his tie in the mirror. Chin up, spirits revived. And for a passing moment and no longer, Louisa thought she sensed a stoicism about him, an acceptance of defeat that in a poor light could have passed for nobility.

  “Say goodbye to Harry for me, will you? Great artist. My successor will be in touch. Or not.” Still in his shirt-tails he pulled open a drawer and chucked a track suit at her. “Better have this for the cab. When you get home, burn it, then break up the ash. And keep your head down for a few weeks. Chaps back home are getting out the war drums.”

  Hatry the great press baron was at luncheon when the news came through. He was sitting at his usual table at the Connaught, eating kidneys and bacon and drinking house claret and refining his views on the new Russia, which were to the effect that the more the bastards tore themselves apart, the more Hatry was pleased.

  And his audience by a happy accident was Geoff Cavendish, and the bringer of the news was none other than young Johnson, Osnard’s replacement in Luxmore’s office, who twenty minutes earlier had fished the crucial British Embassy signal—penned by Ambassador Maltby himself—from the pile of papers that had accumulated in Luxmore’s in-tray during his dramatic dash to Panama. Johnson, as an ambitious intelligence officer, naturally made a point of sifting through Luxmore’s in-tray whenever a suitable opportunity allowed.

  And the wonderful thing was, Johnson had no one to consult about the signal but himself. Not only was the entire top floor out to lunch, but with Luxmore on his way home there was no one in the building who was BUCHAN cleared apart from Johnson. Spurred by excitement and aspiration, he at once telephoned Cavendish’s office to be told that Cavendish was lunching with Hatry. He telephoned Hatry’s office to be told that Hatry was lunching at the Connaught. Risking all, he slapped a preemptive requisition on the only car and driver available. For this act of hubris, as for others, Johnson was later called to account.

  “I’m Scottie Luxmore’s assistant, sir,” he told Cavendish breathlessly, selecting the more sympathetic of the two faces peering up at him from their table in the bay. “I’ve a rather important message for you from Panama, I’m afraid, sir, and I don’t think it will keep. I didn’t feel I should read it to you over the telephone.”

  “Sit down,” Hatry ordered. And to the waiter: “Chair.”

  So Johnson sat down and, having done so, was about to hand Cavendish the full decoded text of Maltby’s signal when Hatry snatched it from his hand and wrenched it open, so vigorously that other diners turned to stare and guess. Hatry read the signal cursorily and passed it to Cavendish. Cavendish read it, and so probably did at least one waiter, because by now there was a rush on to set a third place for Johnson and make him look more like an ordinary lunch guest and less like a perspiring young runner in a sports coat and grey flannels—attire that the Grill Room manager did not view with any favour, but it was a Friday after all and Johnson had been looking forward to a weekend in Gloucestershire with his mother.

  “That’s the one we want, isn’t it?” Hatry asked Cavendish, through half-masticated kidney. “We can go.”

  “That’s it,” Cavendish confirmed with quiet relish. “That’s our peg.”

  “What about passing the word to Van?” said Hatry, wiping a piece of bread round his plate.

  “Well, I think, Ben—the best thing in this case is to let Brother Van read it in your newspapers,” said Cavendish in a series of dancing little phrases. “Do excuse me, I’m so sorry,” he added to Johnson, stepping over his feet. “Must just telephone.”

  He said sorry to the waiter too and took his double damask napkin with him in his haste. And Johnson not long afterwards was sacked, nobody was ever quite sure why. Ostensibly, it was for riding around London with a decoded text that was complete with all its symbols and operational code names. Unofficially, he was held to be a little too excitable for secret work. But probably it was barging into the Connaught Grill Room in a sports coat that was held to be the most grave of these offences.

  22

  To reach the fireworks festival at Guararé in the Panamanian province of Los Santos, which forms part of a stunted peninsula on the southwest tip of the Gulf of Panama, Harry Pendel drove by way of Uncle Benny’s house in Leman Street which smelled of burning coal, the Sisters of Charity orphanage, several East End synagogues and a succession of grossly overcrowded British penal institutions under the generous patronage of Her Majesty the Queen. All these establishments and others lay in the jungle blackness either side of him and on the pitted winding road ahead of him, on hilltops cut against a star-strewn sky and on the steel-grey ironing board of the Pacific under a very clean new moon.

  The difficult drive was made harder for him by the clamour of his children demanding songs and funny voices from the back of the four-track, and by the well-meant exhortations of his unhappy wife which rang in his ears even on the most desolate parts of his journey: go slower, watch out for that deer, monkey, buck, dead horse, metre-long green iguana or family of six Indians on one bicycle, Harry, I do not understand why you have to drive at seventy miles an hour to keep an appointment with a dead man, and if it’s the fireworks you’re afraid of missing, you should please to know that the festival continues for five nights and five days and this is the first night and if we don’t get there till tomorrow the children will entirely understand.

  To this was added Ana’s unbroken monologue of grief, the terrible forbearance of Marta asking him for nothing he wasn’t able to give, and the presence of Mickie, slumped huge and morose in the passenger seat beside him, riding up against him with his spongy shoulder whenever they negotiated a bend or bounced over a pothole, and asking him in a glum refrain why he didn’t make suits the way Armani did.

  His feelings about Mickie were terrible and overwhelming. He knew that in all of Panama and in all his life he had only ever had one friend, and now he had killed him. He saw no difference anymore between the Mickie he had loved and the Mickie he had invented, except that the Mickie he had loved was better, and the Mickie he had invented was some sort of mistaken homage, an act of vanity on Pendel’s part: to create a champion out of his best friend, to show Osnard what grand company he kept. Because Mickie had been a hero in his own right. He had never needed Pendel’s fluence. Mickie had stood up and been counted when it mattered, as a reckless opponent of the tyranny. He had richly earned his beatings and imprisonment, and his right to be drunk forever after. And to buy however many fine suits he needed to take away the scratch and stink of prison uniform. It was not Mickie’s fault that he w
as weak where Pendel had painted him strong, or that he had given up the struggle where Pendel’s fictions had painted him continuing it. If only I’d left him alone, he thought. If only I’d never fiddled with him, then chewed his head off because I had the guilts.

  Somewhere at the foot of Ancón Hill he had filled the four-track with enough petrol to last him the rest of his life and given a dollar to a black beggar with white hair and one ear eaten off by leprosy or a wild animal or a disenchanted wife. At Chame, through sheer inattention, he shot a customs roadblock, and at Penonomé he became aware of a pair of lynxes riding on his left taillight—lynxes being young, very slim, American-trained policemen in black leather who ride two to a motorcycle, carry submachine guns and are famous for being polite to tourists and killing muggers, dopers and assassins—but tonight, it seemed, also murderous British spies. The lynx in front does the driving, the lynx on the pillion does the killing, Marta had explained to him, and he remembered this as they pulled alongside and he saw the fish-eye reflection of his own face floating among the streetlights in the liquid blackness of their visors. Then he remembered that lynxes only operated in Panama City and he fell to wondering whether they were on a jaunt of some kind or whether they had followed him out here in order to shoot him in privacy. But he never had an answer to his question because when he looked again they had returned to the blackness they had sprung from, leaving him the pitted, twisting road, the dead dogs in his headlights and the bush that was so dense to either side you saw no tree trunks, just black walls and eyes of animals and, through the open sunroof, heard the exchange of insults between species. Once he saw an owl that had been crucified to an electricity pole and its breast and the inside of its wings were white as a martyr’s and its eyes were open. But whether it belonged to a recurring nightmare he had, or was the ultimate incarnation of it, remained a mystery.

  After that Pendel must have dozed for a time and probably he took a wrong turning as well, because when he looked again he was on family holiday in Parita two years ago, picnicking with Louisa and the children on a grass square surrounded by one-storey houses with raised verandahs and stone mounting blocks for getting on and off your horse without spoiling your nice clean shoes. In Parita an old witch in a black hood had told Hannah that the people of the town put young boa constrictors under their roof tiles to catch mice, at which Hannah refused to enter any house in town, not for an ice cream, not for a pee. She was so scared that instead of attending Mass as they had planned, they had to stand outside the church and wave at an old man in the white bell tower, who tolled the big bell with one hand while he waved back at them with the other, which they all afterwards agreed was better than going to Mass. And when he had finished with his bell he gave them an amazing slow-motion performance of an orangutan, first swinging from an iron crossbar, then fleaing himself, armpits, head and crotch, and eating the fleas between searches.