The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  Passing Chitré, Pendel remembered the shrimp farm where shrimps laid their eggs in the trunks of mangrove trees and Hannah had asked whether they got pregnant first. And after the shrimps he remembered a kind Swedish horticulturist lady who told them about the orchid called Little Prostitute of the Night, because by day it smelled of nothing but at night no decent person would let it into the house.

  “Harry, it will not be necessary for you to explain this to our children. They are exposed to quite enough explicit material as it is.”

  But Louisa’s strictures made no difference because all week long Mark had called Hannah his putita de noche, till Pendel told him to shut up.

  And after Chitré came the battle zone: first the approaching red sky, then the rumble of ordnance, then the glow of flares as he was waved through one police checkpoint after another on his road to Guararé.

  Pendel was walking, and people in white were walking beside him, leading him to the gallows. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself so reconciled to death. If he ever lived his life again, he decided, he would insist on a brand-new actor in the leading role. He was walking to the gallows and there were angels at his side, and they were Marta’s angels, he recognised them at once, the true heart of Panama, the people who lived the other side of the bridge, didn’t take bribes or give them, made love to the people they loved, got pregnant and didn’t have abortions, and come to think of it, Louisa would admire them too, if only she could jump over the fences that confined her—but who can? We’re born into prison, every one of us, sentenced to life from the moment we open our eyes, which was what made him so sad when he looked at his own children. But these children were different and they were angels and he was very glad to be meeting them in the last hours of his life. He had never doubted that Panama had more angels per acre, more white crinolines and flowered headdresses, perfect shoulders, cooking smells, music, dancing, laughter, more drunks, malign policemen and lethal fireworks than any comparable paradise twenty times its size, and here they were assembled to escort him. And he was very gratified to discover bands playing, and competing folk dance teams, with gangly, romantic-eyed black men in cricket blazers and white shoes and flat hands that lovingly moulded the air round their partners’ gyrating haunches. And to see that the double doors of the church were pulled open to give the Holy Virgin a grandstand view of the bacchanalia outside, whether She wanted it or not. The angels were evidently determined She should not lose touch with ordinary life, warts and all.

  He was walking slowly, as condemned men will, keeping to the centre of the street and smiling. He was smiling because everybody else was smiling, and because one discourteous gringo who refuses to smile amid a crowd of ridiculously beautiful Spanish-Indian mestizo revellers is an endangered species. And Marta was right, these were the most beautiful and virtuous and unsullied people on earth, as Pendel had already observed. To die among them would be a privilege. He would ask to be buried the other side of the bridge.

  Twice he enquired after the way. Each time he was sent in a different direction. The first time, a group of angels earnestly pointed him across the middle of the square, where he became the moving target for salvos of multi-warhead rockets fired at head height from windows and doorways on all four sides of him. And though he laughed and grinned and covered up and gave every sign of taking the joke in good part, it was actually a miracle that he reached the opposite bank with both eyes, ears and balls in place and not a burn on him, because the rockets were not a joke at all and there was no laughter to say they were. They were red-hot, highvelocity missiles spewing molten flame, fired at short range under the guidance of a knobbly-kneed, freckled, red-haired Amazon in frayed shorts who was the self-appointed mistress-gunner of a wellarmed unit, and she was trailing her lethal rockets in a string like a tail behind her back while she lewdly pranced and gesticulated. She was smoking—what substance was anybody’s guess—and between puffs she was screaming orders to her troops around the square: “Cut his cock off, bring the gringo to his knees—” then another drag of cigarette smoke and the next command. But Pendel was a good chap and these were angels.

  And the second time he asked the way he was shown a row of houses that lined one side of the square, with verandahs occupied by overdressed rabiblancos slumming it, with their shiny BMWs parked alongside, and Pendel as he walked past one noisy verandah after another kept thinking: I know you, you’re So-and-so’s son, or daughter, my goodness how time passes. But their presence, when he thought about it more, did not concern him, neither did he care whether they spotted him in return, because the house where Mickie had shot himself was just a few doors along on his left, which was a very good reason to concentrate his thoughts exclusively on a sex-driven fellow prisoner called Spider, who’d hanged himself in his cell while Pendel was sleeping three feet away from him, Spider’s being the only dead body Pendel had had to handle at close quarters. So it was Spider’s fault in a way that Pendel in his distraction found that he had wandered into the middle of an informal police cordon consisting of a police car, a ring of bystanders, and about twenty policemen who couldn’t possibly have all fitted into the car but, as policemen are wont to do in Panama, had collected like gulls around a fishing boat the moment there was a smell of profit or excitement in the air.

  The point of attraction was a dazed old peasant seated on the curb with his straw hat between his knees and his face in his hands, and he was roaring a lament in gorilla-like gusts of rage. Gathered round him were some dozen advisors and spectators and consultants, including several drunks who needed one another’s support to remain upright, and an old woman presumably his wife who was loudly agreeing with the old man whenever he let her get a word in. And since the police were disinclined to clear a path through the group, and certainly not through their own ranks, Pendel had no option but to become a bystander himself though not an active participant in the debate. The old man was quite badly burned. Every time he took his hands from his face to make a point or rebut one it was easy to see he had been burned. A large patch of skin was missing from his left cheek and the wound extended southward into the open neck of his collarless shirt. And because he was burned, the police were proposing to take him to the local hospital where he would receive an injection which, as everyone agreed, was the appropriate remedy for a burn.

  But the old man didn’t want an injection and he didn’t want the remedy. He would rather have the pain than the injection, he would rather get blood poisoning and any other evil after-effect than go with the police to the hospital. And the reason was, he was an old drunk and this was probably the last festival of his life and everyone knew that when you had an injection you couldn’t drink for the rest of the festival. He had therefore taken the conscious decision, of which his Maker and his wife were witness, to tell the police to shove the injection up their arses because he preferred to drink himself into a stupor, which would anyway take care of the pain. So he would be obliged if everyone got the hell out of his way please, including the police, and if they really wanted to do him a good turn, the best thing they could do was bring him a drink and another for his wife; a bottle of seco would be particularly welcome.

  To all of which Pendel listened studiously, sensing the presence of a message in everything, even if its meaning was not clear to him. And gradually the police faded away, the crowd also. The old woman sat down beside her husband and put her arm round his neck and Pendel walked up the steps of the only house in the street with its lights out, saying to himself: I’m dead already, I’m as dead as you are, Mickie, so don’t think your death can frighten me.

  He knocked and no one came, but his knocking caused heads to turn in the street because who on earth knocks on anyone’s door at festival time? So he stopped knocking and kept his face in the shadow of the porch. The door was closed but not locked. He turned the handle and stepped inside, and his first thought was that he was back in the orphanage and Christmas was coming up and he was a Wise Man in the Nativity play
again, holding a lantern and a stick and wearing an old brown trilby that someone had given to the poor—except that the actors inside the house he was now entering were in the wrong places and somebody had snatched the Holy Infant.

  There was a bare tiled room for a stable. There was an aura of flickering light from the fireworks in the square. And there was a woman in a shawl watching over a crib and praying with her hands to her chin, who was Ana apparently feeling a need to cover her head in the presence of death. But the crib was not a crib. It was Mickie, upside down as she had promised, Mickie with his face flat on the kitchen floor and his arse in the air and a map of Panama one side of his head, where one ear and one cheek should have been, and the gun he had done it with lying beside him pointing accusingly at the intruder, telling the world quite needlessly what the world already knew: that Harry Pendel, tailor, purveyor of dreams, inventor of people and places of escape, had murdered his own creation.

  Gradually, as Pendel’s eyes became used to the fickle light of fireworks, flares and streetlights from the square, he began to make out the rest of the mess that Mickie had left behind when he blew one side of his head off: the traces of him on the tiled floor and walls and in surprising places like a chest of drawers crudely daubed with rollicking pirates and their molls. And it was these that prompted his first words to Ana, which were of a practical rather than consoling kind.

  “We ought to put something over the windows,” he said.

  But she didn’t answer, didn’t stir, didn’t turn her head, which suggested to him that in her way she was as dead as he was, Mickie had killed her too, she was contingent damage. She had tried to make Mickie happy, she had mopped him down and shared his bed, and now he had shot her: take this for all your trouble. So for a moment Pendel was angry with Mickie, accusing him of an act of great brutality not just against his own body but against his wife and mistress and children, and his friend Harry Pendel as well.

  Then of course he remembered his own responsibility in the matter and his depiction of Mickie as a great resister and spy; and he tried to imagine how Mickie must have felt when the police dropped by to tell him he was going to do more prison; and the truth of his own guilt at once swept away any convenient reflections upon Mickie’s irrelevant shortcomings as a suicide.

  He touched Ana’s shoulder and when she still didn’t budge, some residual sense of the responsibility of the entertainer sparked in him: this woman needs a bit of cheering up. So he put his hands under her armpits and hauled her to her feet and held her against him, and she was as stiff and cold as he imagined Mickie was. Clearly she had been stuck for so long in one position, keeping watch over him, that his stillness and placidity had got into her bones somehow. She was a flighty, funny, skittish girl by nature, judging from the couple of occasions when Pendel had met her, and probably she had never in her life watched anything so motionless for so long. First she had screamed and ranted and complained— Pendel reckoned, remembering their telephone conversation—and when she had got all that out of her system, she’d gone into a kind of watching decline. And as she had cooled, she had set, which was why she was so stiff to hold and why her teeth were chattering and why she couldn’t answer his question about the windows.

  He looked for drink to give her but all he could find was three empty whisky bottles and a half-drunk bottle of seco, and he decided on his own authority that seco was not the answer. So he led her to a wicker chair and sat her in it, found some matches, lit the gas and put a saucepan of water on the flames, and when he turned and looked at her he saw that her eyes had found Mickie again, so he went to the bedroom and took the coverlet from the bed and put it over Mickie’s head, smelling for the first time the warm rusty smell of his blood above the cordite and cooking smells and firesmoke that was rolling in from the verandah while the fireworks went on popping and whizzing in the square and the girls screamed at the bangers that the boys held on to till the absolute last moment before chucking them at their feet. It was all there for Pendel and Ana to watch anytime they wanted; they only had to lift their heads from Mickie and look out of the French windows to see the fun.

  “Get him away from here,” she blurted from her wicker chair. And much, much louder: “My father will kill me. Get him out. He’s a British spy. They said so. So are you.”

  “Be quiet,” Pendel told her, surprising himself.

  And suddenly Harry Pendel changed. He was not a different man but himself at last, a man possessed and filled with his own strength. In one glorious ray of revelation he saw beyond melancholy, death and passivity to a grand validation of his life as an artist, an act of symmetry and defiance, vengeance and reconciliation, a majestic leap into a realm where all the spoiling limitations of reality are swept away by the larger truth of the creator’s dream.

  And some intimation of Pendel’s resurrection must have communicated itself to Ana, because after a few sips of coffee she put down her cup and joined him in his ministrations: first to fill the handbasin with water and pour disinfectant into it, then to track down a broom, a squeegee mop, rolls of paper towels, dishcloths, detergent and a scrubbing brush, then to light a candle and place it low down so that its flame would not be visible from the square, where a fresh display of fireworks, fired this time into the air and not at passing gringos, was announcing the successful selection of a beauty queen—and there she was on her float with her white mantilla, her white pearflower crown, her white shoulders and blazing proud eyes, a girl of such candescent beauty and excitement that first Ana and then Pendel paused in their labours to watch her pass with her retinue of princesses and prancing boys and enough flowers for a thousand funerals for Mickie.

  Then back to work, scrubbing and slopping till the disinfected water in the handbasin was black in the half-light and had to be replaced and then replaced again, but Ana toiled with the goodwill Mickie always said she had—a good sport, he always said, as insatiable in bed as in a restaurant—and soon the scrubbing and the slopping became a catharsis for her and she was chattering away as blithely as if Mickie had just sidled out for a moment to fetch another bottle or have a quick Scotch with a neighbour on one of the lighted verandahs either side of them, where groups of revellers were this minute clapping and cheering at the beauty queen—and not lying facedown in the middle of the floor with the bedspread over him and his arse in the air, and his hand still stretched towards the gun that Pendel had, unnoticed by Ana, slipped into a drawer for later use.

  “Look, look, it’s the minister,” Ana said, all chat.

  A group of grand men in white panabrisas had arrived at the centre of the square, surrounded by other men in black glasses. That’s how I’ll do it, Pendel was thinking. I’ll be official like them.

  “We’ll need bandages. Look for a first-aid box,” he said.

  There wasn’t one, so they cut up a sheet.

  “I’ll have to buy a new bedspread as well,” she said.

  Mickie’s P & B magenta smoking jacket hung over a chair. Pendel delved, pulled out Mickie’s wallet and handed Ana a bunch of notes, enough for a new bedspread and a good time.

  “How’s Marta?” Ana asked, secreting the money in her bodice.

  “Just great,” said Pendel heartily.

  “And your wife?”

  “Thank you, well too.”

  To put the bandages round Mickie’s head, they had to sit him in the wicker chair where Ana had sat. First they put towels over the chair, then Pendel turned Mickie over and Ana just made it to the lavatory in time, retching with the door open and one hand up in the air behind her and her fingers splayed in a gesture of refinement. While she was retching, Pendel stooped to Mickie and remembered Spider again and giving him the kiss of life knowing that no amount of kissing was going to enliven him in any way, however much the guilty warders shouted at Pendel to bloody try harder, son.

  But Spider had never been a friend on Mickie’s huge scale, or a first customer, or a prisoner of his father’s past, or Noriega’s prisoner
of conscience, or had the conscience beaten out of him while he was inside. Spider had never been passed round the prison as new meat for the psychopaths to eat their fill of. Spider had gone loco because he was accustomed to screwing two girls a day and three on Sundays, and the prospect of five years without screwing a single girl looked like slow starvation to him. And Spider had strangled himself and messed himself and stuck his tongue out while he did it, which made the kiss of life even more ridiculous, whereas Mickie had obliterated himself, leaving one good side to him, if you ignored the blackened hole, and one really awful side that you couldn’t ignore any part of.

  But as a cellmate and victim of Pendel’s betrayal, Mickie had all the stubbornness of his size. When Pendel got his hands under his armpits, Mickie just made himself heavier, and it took a huge heave on Pendel’s part to get him going, and another to prevent him from collapsing again when he was already halfway up. And it needed a lot of padding and bandaging before the two sides of his head looked anything like even. But somehow Pendel managed all of it and when Ana returned he put her straight to work pinching Mickie’s nose so that he could wind the bandage above it and below it and leave Mickie room to breathe, which was as futile in its way as trying to make Spider breathe, but at least in Mickie’s case it had a purpose. And by running the bandages at a slant Pendel was also able to leave one eye clear for Mickie to see through, because Mickie, whatever he had done while he was pulling the trigger, had finished up with his remaining eye wide open and looking very startled indeed. So Pendel bandaged round it, and when he had done that he mustered Ana’s help to haul Mickie and the chair as far as the front door.