"My advice, Harry, is negotiate. Cut your losses, do a deal. You want me to feel these guys out? Start a dialogue with them?"

"No."

"So go to your banker. Ramon"s a tough guy. He"ll do the talking for you."

"How come you know Ramon Rudd?"

"Everybody knows Ramon. Listen, I"m not just your manager, okay? I"m your friend."

But Pendel has no friends, except for Marta and Mickie, and just possibly Mr Charlie Bluthner who lives ten miles up the coast and is expecting him for chess.

"Bluthner like piano?" Pendel asked the living Benny centuries ago as they stood on the rainswept dockside at Tilbury, studying the rusted freighter that will convey the released convict on the next stage of his life"s toil.

"The same, Harry boy, and he owes me," Benny replied, adding his tears to the rain. "Charlie Bluthner is the shmatte king of Panama and he wouldn"t be where he is today if Benny hadn"t kept shtumm for him just like you did for me."

"Did you burn his summer frocks for him?"

"Worse, Harry boy. And he"s never forgotten." For the first and last time in their lives, they embraced. Pendel wept too but wasn"t sure why, because all he could think as he trotted up the gangway was: I"m out and I"ll never come back.

And Mr Bluthner had been as good as Benny"s word. Pendel had scarcely set foot in Panama before the maroon chauffeur-driven Mercedes was whisking him from his pitiful lodgings in Calidonia to the stately Bluthner villa, set in its own manicured acres overlooking the Pacific, with its tiled floors and air-conditioned stables and paintings by Nolde and illuminated testimonials from impressive-sounding, non-existent North American universities appointing Mr Bluthner their well-beloved Professor, Doctor, Regent, etc. And an upright piano from the ghetto.

Within weeks Pendel had become in his own eyes Mr Bluthner"s cherished son, taking his natural place among the raucous, gingery children and grandchildren, the stately aunts and podgy uncles and the servants in their pastel-green tunics. At family festivals and Kiddush Pendel sang badly and n.o.body minded. He played lousy golf on their private golf course and didn"t bother to apologise. He splashed around on the beach with the children and rode the family buggies at breakneck speed over sand-black dunes. He fooled with the sloppy dogs and threw fallen mangoes for them, and watched the squadrons of pelicans crank themselves across the sea, and believed in all of it: their faith, the morality of their wealth, the Bougainvilia, the thousand different greens, and their respectability which far outglowed whatever little blazes Uncle Benny might have started in the days of Mr Bluthner"s struggle.

And Mr Bluthner"s kindness didn"t stop in the home, because when Pendel took his first steps into bespoke tailoring it was Bluthner Compania Limitada who gave him six months" credit on their huge textile warehouse in Colon, and the Bluthner word that sent him his first customers and opened early doors for him. And when Pendel tried to thank Mr Bluthner, who was small and wrinkled and shiny, he only shook his head and said, "Thank your Uncle Benny," adding his habitual advice: "Find yourself a good Jewish girl, Harry. Don"t leave us."

Even when Pendel married Louisa, his visits to Mr Bluthner did not cease but they acquired a necessary furtiveness. The Bluthner household became his secret paradise, a shrine that he could only ever visit alone and under a pretext. And Mr Bluthner, by way of reciprocation, preferred to ignore Louisa"s existence.

"I"ve got a bit of a liquidity problem, Mr Bluthner," Pendel confessed, as they sat over chess on the north verandah. There was a verandah on each side of the headland so that Mr Bluthner could always be protected from the wind.

"Liquidity at the rice farm?" Mr Bluthner asked.

His little jaw was made of rock until he smiled, and he wasn"t smiling. His old eyes spent a lot of time asleep. They were sleeping now.

"Plus the shop," said Pendel, blushing.

"You have mortgaged the shop to finance the rice farm, Harry?"

"Only in a manner of speaking, Mr Bluthner." He tried humour. "So naturally I"m looking for a mad millionaire."

Mr Bluthner always spent a long time thinking, whether he was playing chess or being asked for money. He sat quite still while he thought, and seemed not to breathe. Pendel remembered old lags who were the same.

"Either a man is mad or he"s a millionaire," Mr Bluthner replied at last. "Harry boy, it"s a law. A man"s got to pay for his own dreams."

He drove to her nervously, as he always did, by way of 4th July Avenue that had once formed the boundary of the Ca.n.a.l Zone. Low to his left, the bay. High to his right, Ancon Hill. Between them lay the reconstructed El Chorrillo with its patch of too-green gra.s.sland marking the spot where the comandancia had stood. A cl.u.s.ter of gimcrack highrises had been built by way of reparation and painted in pastel bars. Marta lived in the middle one. He climbed the filthy staircase cautiously, remembering how the last time he had come here he had been p.i.s.sed on from the pitch darkness above him while the building convulsed itself with prison catcalls and wild laughter.

"You are welcome," she said solemnly, having unlocked the door to him, four locks.

They lay on the bed where they always lay, dressed and separated from each other, Marta"s small dry fingers curled in Pendel"s palm. There were no chairs, there was very little floor. The flat consisted of one tiny room divided by brown curtains: a cubicle to wash in, another to cook in and this one to lie in. At Pendel"s left ear stood a gla.s.s case crammed with china animals that had belonged to Marta"s mother, and at his stockinged feet a three-foot-high ceramic tiger that her father had given to her mother for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary three days before they were blown to smithereens. And if Marta had gone with her parents to visit her married sister that night instead of lying in bed nursing her smashed face and beaten body, she would have been blown to smithereens as well, because her sister had lived in the first street to be hit, though today you wouldn"t find it: any more than you would find Marta"s parents, sister, brother-in-law or six-month-old baby niece or their orange cat called Hemingway. Bodies, rubble and the whole street had been swept into official oblivion.

"I just wish you"d move back to your old place," he said to her as usual.

"I can"t."

Can"t because her parents had lived where this building now stood.

Can"t because this was her Panama.

Can"t because her heart was with the dead.

They spoke little, preferring to contemplate the monstrous secret history that joined them: A young, idealistic, beautiful female employee has been taking part in a public demonstration against the tyrant. She arrives at her place of work breathless and afraid. Come evening, her employer offers to drive her home with the undoubted aim of becoming her lover, because in the tension of recent weeks they have become irresistible to each other. The dream of a better Panama is like the dream of a shared life together, and even Marta agrees that only the Yanquis can cure the mess the Yanquis have created, and that the Yanquis must act soon. On the way, they are stopped at a roadblock by Dingbats who wish to know why Marta is wearing a white shirt, which is the symbol of resistance to Noriega. Receiving no satisfactory explanation, they obliterate her face. Pendel lays the freely-bleeding Marta in the back of his car and drives in blind panic and at breakneck speed to the university - Mickie is a student too in those days - and by a miracle finds him in the library, and Mickie is the only person Pendel can think of who is safe. Mickie knows a doctor, calls him, threatens, bribes him. Mickie drives Pendel"s four-track, Pendel sits in the back with Marta"s head bleeding all over his lap, soaking his trousers and messing up the family upholstery for ever. The doctor does his worst, Pendel informs Marta"s parents, gives money, showers and changes clothes at the shop, goes home by cab to Louisa and for three days is prevented by guilt and fear from telling her what has happened, preferring to regale her instead with a c.o.c.k-and-bull story about some idiot driving into the side of the four-track, total write-off, Lou, have to get a whole new one, I"ve spoken to the insurance boys, doesn"t seem to be a problem. Not till day five does he find the courage to explain deprecatingly that Marta got herself mixed up in a student riot, Lou, facial injuries, long recuperation necessary, I"ve promised to take her back when she"s recovered.

"Oh," says Louisa.

"And Mickie"s gone to prison," he goes on inconsequentially, omitting to add that the craven doctor has informed on him, and would have informed on Pendel also, if he had only known his name.

"Oh," says Louisa a second time.

"Reason only functions when the emotions are involved," Marta announced, holding Pendel"s fingers to her lips and kissing each in turn.

"What does that mean?"

"I read it. You seem to be puzzling about something. I thought it might be useful."

"Reason is supposed to be logical," he objected.

"There"s no logic unless the emotions are involved. You want to do something, so you do it. That"s logical. You want to do something and don"t do it, that"s a breakdown of reason."

"I suppose that"s true then, isn"t it?" said Pendel, who distrusted all abstracts except his own. "I must say, those books do give you the lingo, then, don"t they? Proper little professor you sound like, and you haven"t even taken your exams."

She never pressed him, which was why he was not afraid to come to her. She seemed to know that he never spoke the truth to anyone, that he kept it all inside himself for politeness. The little he told her was therefore precious to them both.

"How"s Osnard?" she asked.

"How should he be?"

"Why does he think he owns you?"

"He knows things," Pendel replied.

"Things about you?"

"Yes."

"Do I know them?"

"I don"t think so."

"Are they bad things?"

"Yes."

"I"ll do whatever you want. I"ll help you, whatever it is. You want me to kill him, I"ll kill him and go to jail."

"For the other Panama?"

"For you."

Ramon Rudd had shares in a casino in the Old City and liked to go there to relax. They perched on a plush bench looking down on bare-shouldered women and puffy-eyed croupiers seated at empty roulette tables.

"I"m going to pay off the debt, Ramon," Pendel told him. "The princ.i.p.al, the interest, the lot. I"m going to wipe the slate clean."

"What with?"

"Let"s say I"ve met a mad millionaire."

Ramon sucked some lemon juice through a straw.

"I"m going to buy your farm from you, Ramon. It"s too small to make money and you"re not there for the farming. You"re there to rip me off."

Rudd examined himself in the mirror and was unmoved by what he saw.

"Have you got another business going somewhere? Something I don"t know about?"

"I only wish I had, Ramon."

"Something unofficial?"

"Nothing unofficial either, Ramon."

"Because if you have, I need a piece of it. I lend you money, so you tell me what your business is. That"s morality. That"s fair."

"I"m not in a moral mood tonight, Ramon, to be frank."

Rudd considered this and it seemed to make him unhappy.

"You"ve got a mad millionaire so you pay me three thousand an acre," he said, citing another immutable moral law.

Pendel got him down to two thousand and went home.

Hannah had a temperature.

Mark wanted best of three at ping-pong.

The clothes-washing maid was pregnant again.

The floor-mopper was complaining that the gardener had propositioned her.

The gardener was insisting that at seventy he was ent.i.tled to proposition whomever he d.a.m.n well chose.

The saintly Ernesto Delgado had arrived home from Tokyo.

Entering his shop next morning, Harry Pendel glumly inspects his lines, starting with his Cuna finishing hands, proceeding to his Italian trouser-makers, his Chinese coat-makers and ending with Senora Esmeralda, an elderly mulatto lady with red hair who does nothing but make waistcoats from dawn till dusk and is content. As a great commander on the eve of battle he exchanges a comforting word with each of them, except that the comfort is for Pendel because his troops are not in need of it. Today is payday and they are in jolly mood. Locking himself in his cutting room, Pendel unrolls two metres of brown paper onto the table, props his open notebook on its wooden stand and, to the melodious lament of Alfred Deller, begins delicately sketching the contours for the first of Andrew Osnard"s two alpaca suits by Messrs Pendel & Braithwaite Co., Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of Savile Row.

The Mature Man of Affairs, the Great Weigher of Arguments and Cool a.s.sessor of Situations is voting with his shears.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Amba.s.sador Maltby"s mirthless announcement that a Mister Andrew Osnard - was that some sort of bird? he rather wondered - would shortly be added to the strength of the British Emba.s.sy in Panama struck disbelief then apprehension into the good heart of the Head of Chancery, Nigel Stormont.

Any normal Amba.s.sador would have taken his Head of Chancery aside, of course. Courtesy alone required it: "Oh, Nigel, I thought you should be the first to know..." But after a year of one another they had pa.s.sed the stage where courtesy could be taken for granted. And anyway Maltby prided himself on his droll little surprises. So he held back the news until his Monday morning Amba.s.sadorial meeting, which Stormont privately regarded as the low point of every working week.

His audience of one beautiful woman and three men including Stormont sat before his desk in a crescent of chrome chairs. Maltby faced them like the creature of a larger, poorer race. He was late forties and six feet three, with a mangy black forelock, a First Cla.s.s Honours degree in something useless and a permanent smirk that should never be mistaken for a smile. Whenever his gaze settled on the beautiful woman, you knew it would like to be there all the time and didn"t dare, for no sooner had it settled than it darted shamefully away to the wall and only the smirk remained. The jacket of his suit hung over the back of his chair and the dandruff on it twinkled in the morning sun. His taste in shirts was flamboyant and this morning he was nineteen stripes wide. Or so reckoned Stormont, who hated the ground he loped on.

If Maltby did not conform with the imposing image of British officialdom abroad, neither did his Emba.s.sy. No wrought-iron gates, no gilded porticos or grand staircases to instil humility in lesser breeds without the law. No eighteenth-century portraits of great men in sashes. Maltby"s patch of Imperial Britain was suspended quarter of the way up a skysc.r.a.per owned by Panama"s biggest law firm and crowned with the insignia of a Swiss bank.

The Emba.s.sy"s front door was of bulletproof steel lined with a veneer of English oak. You attained it by touching a b.u.t.ton in a silent lift. The royal crest, in this air-conditioned stillness, suggested silicone and funeral parlours. The windows like the doors had been toughened to frustrate the Irish and tinted to frustrate the sun. Not a whisper of the real world penetrated. The silent traffic, cranes, shipping, old town and new town, the brigade of women in orange tunics gathering leaves along the central reservation of the Avenida Balboa, were mere specimens in Her Majesty"s inspection chamber. From the moment you set foot in British extra-territorial air-s.p.a.ce, you were looking in, not out.

The meeting had discussed, in short order, Panama"s chances of becoming a signatory to the North American Free Trade Agreement (negligible in Stormont"s view), Panama"s relations with Cuba (seedy trade alliances, Stormont reckoned, mostly drug-related) and the impact of the Guatemalan elections on the Panamanian political psyche (nil, as Stormont had already advised Department). Maltby had dwelt - as he invariably did - on the rebarbative topic of the Ca.n.a.l; on the omnipresence of the j.a.panese; and of Mainland Chinese disguised as representatives of Hong Kong; and on certain bizarre rumours in the Panamanian press of a Franco-Peruvian consortium that proposed to buy up the Ca.n.a.l with the aid of French know-how and Colombian drug money. And it was somewhere around this point, most likely, that Stormont, partly out of boredom and partly in self-defence, drifted off into a troubled review of his life till now: Stormont, Nigel, born too long ago, educated not very well at Shrewsbury and Jesus, Oxford. Second in History like everybody else, divorced like everybody else: except that my little escapade happened to make the Sunday newspapers. Married finally to Paddy, short for Patricia, peerless ex-wife of cher collegue at British Emba.s.sy, Madrid, after he tried to immolate me with a silver wa.s.sail bowl at the All Ranks Christmas party; and currently serving a three-year sentence in Sing Sing, Panama, local population 2.6 million, quarter of it unemployed, half of it below the poverty line. Personnel undecided what to do with me after this, if anything at all apart from chuck me on the sc.r.a.p heap, see their crabbed reply of yesterday to mine of six weeks ago. And Paddy"s cough a continuing anxiety - when will those b.l.o.o.d.y doctors find a cure for it?

"Why can"t it be a wicked British consortium for a change?" Maltby was complaining in a thin voice delivered mostly through the nose. "I"d adore to be at the centre of a fiendish British plot. I never have. Have you, Fran?"

The beautiful Francesca Deane smiled blandly and said, "Alas."

"Alas yes?"

"Alas no."

Maltby was not the only man Francesca drove mad. Half Panama was after her. A body to kill for, the brains to go with it. One of those creamy blond English complexions that Latin men go crazy over. Stormont would catch sight of her at parties, surrounded by Panama"s most eligible studs, every one of them begging for a date with her. But by eleven she"d be home in bed with a book, and next morning at nine sitting at her desk wearing her legal black powersuit and no make-up, all set for another day in Paradise.

"Don"t you think a terrifically secret British bid to turn the Ca.n.a.l into a trout farm would be fun, Gully?" Maltby asked with elephantine facetiousness of the tiny, immaculately rigged Lieutenant Gulliver RN, retired, the Emba.s.sy"s Procurement Officer. "Baby fish in the Miraflores locks, bigger chaps in the Pedro Miguel, grown-ups in Gatun Lake? I think it"s a marvellous idea."

Gully let out a boisterous laugh. Procurement was the last of his concerns. His job was to offload as many British weapons as he could on anybody with enough drug money to pay for them, landmines a speciality.

"Marvellous idea, Amba.s.s, marvellous," he boomed with his habitual messroom heartiness, pulling a spotted handkerchief from his sleeve and vigorously dusting his nose with it. "Bagged a jolly good salmon over the week-end, by the by. Twenty-two pounder. Had to drive two hours to catch the b.u.g.g.e.r, but worth every mile."

Gulliver had taken part in the Falklands Thing and won a gong for it. Since when, so far as Stormont knew, he had never left this side of the Atlantic. Occasionally when he was drunk he would raise a gla.s.s to "a certain patient little lady across the pond" and heave a sigh. But it was a sigh of grat.i.tude rather than deprival.

"Political Officer?" Stormont echoed.

He must have spoken louder than he realised. Perhaps he had nodded off. After sitting up with Paddy all night, he wouldn"t be surprised.

"I"m the Political Officer, Amba.s.sador. Chancery"s the political section. Why isn"t he being posted to Chancery where he belongs? Tell "em no. Dig your toes in."