The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  A hasty refutation put out by three Panamanian pathologists claiming that Abraxas was an inveterate alcoholic who had shot himself in a fit of depression after drinking a quart of Scotch whisky was greeted with the derision it deserved. A Hatry tabloid summed up public reaction: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FOOLING, SEÑORES? An official statement by the British chargé, Mr. Simon Pitt, to the effect that “Mr. Abraxas had no formal or informal ties with this embassy or any other official British representation in Panama,” was made to look particularly absurd when it was discovered that Abraxas had been sometime president of the Anglo-Panamanian Society of Culture. His tenure had been curtailed “for health reasons.” An expert on espionage matters explained the hidden logic of this for the benefit of the uninitiated. Having been “spotted” by local intelligence operatives as a potential British agent, Abraxas would for cover reasons have been ordered to sever all overt ties with the embassy. The proper way to do this would have been to concoct a “dispute” with the embassy in order to “alienate” Abraxas from his controllers. No such dispute was acknowledged by Mr. Pitt, and Abraxas may have paid dearly for this want of imagination on the part of British Intelligence. Informed sources reported that the Panamanian security authorities had for some while been interested in his activities. A shadow minister on the Opposition benches who had the temerity to paraphrase Oscar Wilde to the effect that one man’s dying for a cause did not make that cause valid was duly pilloried by the tabloids, with one Hatry organ promising its readers shocking revelations about the man’s luckless sex life.

  Then one morning as if to order the spotlight turned to THE PANAMA HAT TRICK, as they were henceforth dubbed, namely the three British diplomats who in the words of one commentator had “sneaked their goods, women and wagons out of the embassy compound on the very eve of the ferocious U.S. air assault.” The fact that they were four and one was herself a woman was not allowed to spoil a good headline. A luckless Foreign Office spokesperson’s explanation for their departure met with hilarity:

  “Mr. Andrew Osnard was not a regular member of the Foreign Service. He was temporarily engaged for his expertise on matters related to the Panama Canal, in which he was highly qualified.”

  The press was delighted to note his high qualifications: Eton, greyhound racing, and go-carting in Oman.

  Q: Why did Osnard leave Panama in such a hurry?

  A: Mr. Osnard’s usefulness was deemed to have expired.

  Q: Was this because Mickie Abraxas had expired?

  A: No comment.

  Q: Is Osnard a spook?

  A: No comment.

  Q: Where’s Osnard now?

  A: We have no knowledge of Mr. Osnard’s whereabouts.

  Poor woman. Next day the press was proud to enlighten her with a photograph of Osnard making no comment on the ski slopes of Davos in the company of a society beauty twice his age.

  “Ambassador Maltby was recalled to London for consultations shortly before Operation Safe Passage was launched. The timing of his recall was coincidental.”

  Q: How shortly?

  A: (the same unfortunate spokesperson) Shortly.

  Q: Before he disappeared or afterwards?

  A: That is a ridiculous question.

  Q: What was Maltby’s relationship with Abraxas?

  A: We know of no such relationship.

  Q: Panama was a pretty humble posting, wasn’t it, for a man of Maltby’s intellectual calibre?

  A: We have great respect for the Republic of Panama. Mr. Maltby was considered the right man for the job.

  Q: Where is he now?

  A: Ambassador Maltby is on indefinite leave of absence while he attends to matters of a personal nature.

  Q: Can you define the nature?

  A: I just did. Personal.

  Q: What sort of personal?

  A: We understand that Mr. Maltby has come into an inheritance and may be contemplating a new career. He’s a distinguished scholar.

  Q: Is that another way of saying he’s been sacked?

  A: Certainly not.

  Q: Paid off?

  A: Thank you for coming to this press conference.

  Discovered at her home in Wimbledon, where she was a renowned bowls player, Mrs. Maltby wisely declined to comment on her husband’s whereabouts:

  “No, no. Off you go, all of you. You’ll get nothing out of me. I know you press johnnies of old. You’re leeches and you make it up. We had you in Bermuda when the Queen came. No, haven’t heard a word from him. Don’t expect to. His life’s his own, nothing to do with me. Oh, I expect he’ll ring in one day, if he can remember the number and get his coins together. That’s all I’m going to say. Spy? Don’t be utterly ridiculous. Do you think I wouldn’t know? Abraxas? Never heard of him. Sounds like a health club. Yes, I have. He was the brute who was sick all over me at the Queen’s birthday bash. Dreadful person. What do you mean, you silly man, romantically linked? Haven’t you seen their photographs? She’s twenty-four, he’s forty-seven and that’s an understatement.”

  I’LL SCRATCH LAW LORD’S DAUGHTER’S EYES OUT SAYS JILTED ENVOY’S WIFE.

  One intrepid reporter claimed to have traced the couple to Bali. Another, famed for his secret sources, had them living in the lap of luxury in a hilltop mansion in Montana which the CIA puts at the disposal of “assets” who have earned its special thanks.

  “Miss Francesca Deane resigned voluntarily from the Foreign Service while en poste in Panama. She was a capable officer and we regret her decision, which was taken on entirely personal grounds.”

  Q: Same grounds as Maltby’s?

  A: (the same spokesperson, bloodied but unbowed) Pass.

  Q: Does that mean no comment?

  A: It means pass. It means no comment. What’s the difference? Can we please give up this topic and return to something serious?

  A Latin American journalist through her interpreter:

  Q: Was Francesca Deane the lover of Mickie Abraxas?

  A: What are you talking about?

  Q: Many people in Panama are saying she was responsible for the breakup of the Abraxas marriage.

  A: I cannot conceivably comment on what many people in Panama are supposed to be saying.

  Q: Many people in Panama are also saying that

  Stormont, Maltby, Deane and Osnard were a cadre of highly trained British terrorists tasked by the CIA to infiltrate the democratic Panamanian government and bring it down from inside!

  A: Is this woman accredited? Has anyone ever set eyes on her before? Excuse me! Would you kindly show your press card to the janitor?

  The case of Nigel Stormont caused little stir. FO LOTHARIO GOES WALKABOUT and a rehash of his much publicised love affair with a former colleague’s wife while serving at the British Embassy in Madrid failed to survive the early editions. Paddy Stormont’s admission to a Swiss cancer clinic and Stormont’s deft handling of the press put a blight on further speculation. As the days went by, Stormont was arbitrarily dismissed as a minor player in what was now seen as a vast and impenetrable British coup that in the words of Hatry’s highest-paid leader writer had “saved America’s bacon and proved that Britain under a Tory leadership is capable of being a willing and welcome partner in the grand old Atlantic Alliance, whether or not her so-called European partners choose to waver on the touchlines.”

  The participation of a minuscule British token force in the invasion, unnoticed outside the United Kingdom, was a cause for national rejoicing. The better churches flew the flag of St. George and schoolchildren not already truant were awarded a day’s holiday. Regarding Pendel, the very mention of his name was the subject of a grand-slam gagging order observed by every patriotically minded newspaper and television network in the land. Such is the fate of secret agents everywhere.

  24

  It was night and they were sacking Panama again, setting fire to its towers and hovels, terrifying its animals and children and womenfolk with cannon fire, cutting down the men in the street and getting it al
l over by morning. Pendel stood on the balcony where he had stood the last time, watching without thinking, hearing but not feeling, druckening himself without stooping, atoning without moving his lips, just as his Uncle Benny had atoned into his empty tankard, word for sacred word:

  Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child or a home for a refugee. . . . Our knowledge is without measure, and we build the weapons that will destroy us. . . . We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. . . . We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

  From inside the house Louisa was yelling again but Pendel wasn’t really bothered. He was listening to the shrieks of the bats that were wheeling and protesting in the darkness above him. He loved bats and Louisa hated them and it always scared him when people hated things unreasonably because you never knew where it would end. A bat is ugly, therefore I hate it. You are ugly, therefore I will kill you. Beauty, he decided, was a bully, and perhaps that was why, although he was by trade a beautifier, he had always regarded Marta’s disfigurement as a force for good.

  “Come inside,” Louisa was screaming. “Come inside now, Harry, for the love of God. Do you think you’re invulnerable or something?”

  Well he would have liked to come inside, he was a family man at heart, but the love of God was not on Pendel’s mind tonight, neither did he consider himself invulnerable. Quite the reverse. He considered himself wounded without cure. As to God, He was as bad as anyone else at not being able to end what He had started. So instead of coming inside, Pendel preferred to hang around on the balcony, away from the accusing glances and too much knowledge of his children and the scolding tongue of his wife and the unleavable memory of Mickie’s suicide, and watch the neighbours’ cats charging in tight order from left to right across his lawn. Three were tabby, one was ginger, and by the daylight of the magnesium flares that burned without getting any lower, you could see them in their natural colours instead of the black that cats should be at night.

  There were other things that interested Pendel intensely amid the mayhem and the din. The way Mrs. Costello in number 12 went on playing Uncle Benny’s piano, for example, which was what Pendel would have done if he could play and had inherited the piano. To be able to hold on to a piece of music with your fingers when you’re terrified out of your wits—that must be a truly wonderful way of keeping a grip on yourself. And her concentration was amazing. Even from this distance he could see how she closed her eyes and moved her lips like a rabbi to the notes she was playing on her keyboard, the way Uncle Benny used to while Auntie Ruth put her hands behind her back and pushed her chest out and sang.

  Then there was the Mendozas’ enormously cherished metallic-blue Mercedes from number 7, which was rolling down the hill because Pete Mendoza had been so glad to get home before the attack that he had left the car in neutral with the handbrake off, and the car had gradually woken up to this. I’m sprung, it said to itself. They’ve left the cell door open. All I have to do is walk. So it started walking, first lumbering like Mickie and, like Mickie perhaps, hoping very much for the chance collision that would change its life, but in its despair running at full gallop, and heaven alone knew where it would finish up or at what speed, or what collateral damage it might cause before it stopped, or whether by some freak of German overengineering the pram sequence from some Russian film that Pendel had forgotten the name of had been programmed into one of its sealed units.

  All of these fiddly details were of immense importance to Pendel. Like Mrs. Costello, he could get his mind round them, whereas the shelling from Ancón Hill and the hovering gunships cranking themselves round and coming in again were wearyingly familiar to him, part of everyday reality if that was what everyday reality was: a poor tailor boy lighting fires to please his friend and betters, then watching the world go up in smoke. And all the stuff you thought you cared about, ill-placed levity on the way there.

  No, Your Honour, I did not start this war.

  Yes, Your Honour, I grant you, it is possible I wrote the anthem. But allow me to point out with due respect that the one who writes the anthem does not necessarily start the war.

  “Harry, I do not understand why you remain outdoors when your family is begging you to join them. No, Harry, not in a minute. Now. We wish you to come inside please, and protect us.”

  Oh Lou, oh Christ, I wish so much, so very much, that I could join them too. But I have to leave the lie behind, even if, hand on heart, I don’t know what the truth is. I have to stay and go at the same time, but at this moment I can’t stay.

  There had been no warning but then Panama was under warning all the time. Behave your little self or else. Remember you are not a country but a canal. Besides, the need for such warnings was exaggerated. Does a runaway blue Mercedes pram without a baby in it give a warning before it bounces down a couple of flights of snake road and crashes into a bunch of fugitives? Of course it doesn’t. Does a football stadium give a warning before it collapses, killing hundreds? Does a murderer warn his victim in advance that the police will call on him and ask whether he’s a British spy, and whether he would like to spend a week or two with a few hard cases in Panama’s best-stocked nick? As to a specific warning of human intent—“We are about to bomb you”—“We are about to betray you”—why alarm everyone? A warning wouldn’t help the poor, since there was nothing they could do about it, except what Mickie did. And the rich didn’t need a warning, because it was by now an established principle of invading Panama that the rich were not at risk, which was what Mickie always said, whether he was drunk or sober.

  So there was no warning and the helicopter gunships came in from the sea as usual but this time there was no resistance because there was no army, so El Chorrillo had taken the wise course of giving itself up before the planes got there, which was a sign that the place was finally coming to heel, and that Mickie in taking the same pre-empting line of action was not mistaken either, even if the results were messy. A block of flats similar to Marta’s fell to its knees of its own accord, reminding him of Mickie upside down. A makeshift primary school set fire to itself. A sanctuary for geriatrics blew a hole in its own wall almost the exact size of the hole in Mickie’s head. Then it turfed half its inmates into the street so that they could help deal with the fire problem, the way people had dealt with it in Guararé, mainly by ignoring it. And a whole lot of other people had sensibly started running before they could possibly have anything to run from—as a sort of fire drill—and screaming before they had been hit. And all this, Pendel noticed over Louisa’s yelling, had taken place before the first edge of troubled air reached his balcony in Bethania or the first tremors shook the broom cupboard under the stairs where Louisa had taken the children.

  “Dad!” Mark this time. “Dad, come inside. Please! Please!”

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Hannah now. “I love you!”

  No, Hannah. No, Mark. Of love another time, please, and alas I cannot come inside. When a man sets fire to the world and kills his best friend into the bargain, and sends his nonmistress to Miami to spare her the further attentions of the police, though he had known from her turned-away eyes that she wouldn’t go, he does best to abandon any ideas he has of being a protector.

  “Harry, they have it all worked out. Everything is pinpoint. Everything is high-tech. The new weaponry can select a single window from a distance of many miles. They do not bomb civilians anymore. Kindly come indoors.”

  But Pendel could not have gone indoors although in many ways he wanted to, because once again his legs wouldn’t work. Each time he set fire to the world or killed a friend, he now realised, they ceased to function. And there was a big blaze forming over El Chorrillo, with black smoke coming out of the top of the blaze—though, like the cats, the smoke wasn’t black all over, being red underneath from the flames and silver on the top from the magnesium flares in the sky. This gathering blaze held Pendel fixed in its stare and he couldn’t move his eye
s or legs an inch in any other direction. He had to stare it back and think of Mickie.

  “Harry, I wish to know where you are going, please!”

  So do I. Nevertheless her question puzzled him until he realised that he was after all walking, not towards Louisa or the children but away from her, and away from the shame of them, that he was on a hard road going downhill in long strides following the path that Pete’s Mercedes pram had taken when it set off on its own, although with the back of his head he was longing to turn round, run up the hill and embrace his children and his wife.

  “Harry, I love you. Whatever you’ve done wrong, I’ve done worse. Harry, I do not mind what you are or who you are or what you’ve done or who to. Harry, stay here.”

  He was walking in long steps. The steep hill was hitting the heels of his shoes, making him jolt, and it’s a thing about going downhill and losing height that it gets harder and harder and harder to turn back. Going downhill was so seductive. And he had the road to himself, because generally during an invasion those who aren’t out looting stay indoors and try to telephone their friends, which was what the people were doing in their lighted windows as he strode past. And sometimes they got through to them, because their friends, like themselves, inhabited areas where normal services are not disturbed in time of war. But Marta couldn’t telephone anybody. Marta lived among people who, if only spiritually, came from the other side of the bridge, and for them war was a serious and even fatal obstruction to the conduct of their daily lives.

  He kept walking and wanting to turn back but not doing it. He was distracted in his head and needed to find a way of turning exhaustion into sleep, and maybe that was what death was useful for. He would have liked to do something that would last, like have Marta’s head in his neck again, and her other breast in his hand, but his trouble was, he felt unsuited to companionship and preferred his own society to anybody else’s, on the grounds that he caused less havoc when he was safely isolated, which was what the judge had told him and it was true, and was what Mickie had also told him, and it was even truer.