"Is that his money you"re holding in your hand?"

"Yes,"

"Why?"

Click.

"He gave it me," Marta said.

"For f.u.c.king?"

"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 housecoat 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."

"Does he love anybody else?"

"Yes,"

"Who?"

"Me."

She was examining a piece of paper. "Is this Mr Osnard"s correct home address? Torre del Mar? Punta Paitilla?"

Click.

"Yes," Marta said.

The conversation was over but Marta didn"t realise this at first because Louisa went on clicking the lighter and smiling at the flame. And there were quite a few clicks and smiles before it occurred to Marta that Louisa was drunk in the way Marta"s brother used to get drunk when life became too much for him. Not singing drunk or wobbly drunk, but crystal-headed, perfect-vision drunk. Drunk with all the knowledge she had been drinking to get rid of. And stark naked inside her housecoat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

It was one-twenty on the same morning when Osnard"s front doorbell rang. For the last hour he had been in a state of advanced sobriety. At first, still raging from his defeat, he had revelled in violent methods of ridding himself of his hated guest: hurl him off the balcony to crash through the roof of the Club Union a dozen floors below, ruining everybody"s evening, drown him in the shower, put Jeyes Fluid in his whisky - "Eh, well, Andrew, if you insist, but only the merest finger, if you please" - suck of the teeth as he expires. His fury was not confined to Luxmore: Maltby! My Amba.s.sador and golfing partner, Christ"s sakes! Queen"s own b.l.o.o.d.y representative, faded flower o" the British b.l.o.o.d.y Diplomatic Service and gyps me like a pro!

Stormont! Soul o" probity, one o" life"s born losers, last o" the white men, Maltby"s faithful poodle with the stomach ache, egging his master on with nods and grunts while my Lord Bishop Luxmore gives them both his blessing!

Was it conspiracy or c.o.c.k-up? Osnard asked himself, over and over again. Was Maltby tipping a wink when he spoke of "share and share alike" and "can"t hang on to the whole game"? Maltby, that smirking pedant, putting his fingers in the till? b.a.s.t.a.r.d wouldn"t know how. Forget it. And Osnard to a degree did indeed forget it. His natural pragmatism rea.s.serted itself, he abandoned vengeful thoughts and applied himself instead to saving what remained of his great enterprise. The ship is holed but not sunk, he told himself. I"m still BUCHAN"s pay-master. Maltby"s right.

"Care for something different, sir, or prefer to stay with the malt?"

"Andrew, please. I beseech you. Scottie, if you don"t mind."

"I"ll try," Osnard promised and, stepping through the open French doors, poured him another industrial-sized shot of malt whisky from the sideboard in the dining room and returned with it to the balcony. Jetlag, whisky and insomnia were finally taking their toll of Luxmore, he decided, clinically examining his master"s semi-rec.u.mbent figure in the deckchair before him. So was the humidity - the flannel shirt soaked through, tracks of sweat streaming down the beard. So was his terror at being stuck out here in enemy territory with no wife to look after him - the haunted eyes flinching with every sudden clatter of footsteps or police siren or ribald shout that zigzagged up at them through the gimcrack canyons of Punta Paitilla. The sky was clear as water and strewn with brittle stars. A poacher"s moon etched a lightpath between the anch.o.r.ed shipping in the mouth of the Ca.n.a.l, but no breeze came off the sea. It seldom did.

"You asked me whether there was anything Head Office might do to make life a bit easier for the Station, sir," Osnard reminded Luxmore diffidently.

"Did I, Andrew? Well, I"m d.a.m.ned." Luxmore sat up with a jolt. "Fire ahead, Andrew, fire ahead. Though I"m pleased to see you"ve already done yourself pretty well out here," he added, not entirely pleasantly, with an erratic swing of the arm that took in both the view and the grand apartment. "Don"t think I"m criticising you, mind. I drink to you. To your grit. Your ac.u.men. Your youth. Qualities we all admire. Good health!" Slurp. "You"ve a great career ahead of you, Andrew. Easier times than we had in my day, I may add. A softer bed. You know how much this costs at home now? Lucky if you see change out of a twenty pound note."

"It"s about this safe house I mentioned, sir," Osnard reminded him, in the manner of an anxious heir at his dying father"s bedside. "Time we weaned ourselves away from pushb.u.t.tons and three-hour hotels. Thought maybe one o" those conversions in the Old City would give us greater operational scope."

But Luxmore was transmitting, not receiving. "The way those stuffed-shirts backed you up this evening, Andrew. My G.o.d, it"s not often you see respect like that lavished on a younger man. There"s a medal in here somewhere for you when this is over. A certain little lady across the river may feel obliged to show her appreciation."

A lull while he gazed in perplexity at the bay and seemed to confuse it with the Thames.

"Andrew!" - abruptly as he woke.

"Sir?"

"That fellow Stormont."

"What about him?"

"Came a cropper in Madrid. Some woman he took up with, social tart. Married her, if I remember rightly. Beware of him."

"I will."

"And her, Andrew."

"I will."

"Do you have a woman here?" - peering round facetiously, under the sofa, at the curtains, acting bright. "No hot-a.r.s.ed Latin lovely tucked away at all? Don"t answer that. Good health again. Keep her to yourself. Wise fellow."

"I"ve been a bit too busy actually, sir," Osnard confessed with a rueful smile. But he refused to give up. He had a notion he was printing things into Luxmore"s subliminal memory for later. "Only in my view, you see, in a perfect world we should be shooting for two safe houses. One for the network, which would obviously be my sole responsibility. Cayman Islands holding company"s the best answer - and another house - available on an extremely limited, need-to-know basis and more representational in style - to service the Abraxas team, and eventually - provided always we can do it without creating interconsciousness, which at this stage I rather doubt - the students. And I think probably I should be handling that one too - as far as the purchase and cover details go - even if Amba.s.s and Stormont have sole use at the end of the day. I don"t think they have our expertise, frankly. It"s a risk we just don"t need to take. I"d love your view on this. Not now, necessarily. Later."

A long-delayed suck of the teeth told Osnard that his regional director was still with him, if only just. Reaching out, Osnard removed the empty gla.s.s from Luxmore"s hand and set it on the ceramic table.

"So what do you think, sir? An apartment like this one for the Opposition - fashionable, anonymous, handy for the financial community, n.o.body has to step out of his element - and a second house in the Old City to be run in tandem?" He had been thinking for some time of getting a foot on the ladder of Panama"s booming property market. "Basically, in the Old City you get what you pay for. It"s location and location and location. A decent conversion at the moment - good duplex, architect-designed - sets you back give or take fifty grand. Top o" the range you get a twelve-room mansion, bit o" garden, rear access, sea view - offer them half a mil and they"ll cut your arm off. Couple o" years from now, you"ve doubled your money, long as n.o.body does anything dramatic with the old Club Union building that Torrijos turned into an Other Ranks Club out o" spite because the Club wouldn"t have him as a member. Better get an update before we plunge. I can arrange that."

"Andrew!"

"Right here."

Suck of the teeth. Eyes close, then sharply reopen.

"Eh, tell me something, Andrew."

"If I can, Scottie."

Luxmore cranked his bearded head round until he was facing his subordinate. "That prim Sa.s.senach virgin with large attachments and come-hither eyes who graced our little gathering this evening -"

"Yes, sir?"

"Is she what in my young day we called a c.o.c.k-teaser, by any chance? Because it seemed to me that if ever I saw a young woman who needed the undivided attention of a seven-foot tall - Andrew! For the love of G.o.d! Who the devil"s that at this hour of the night?"

Luxmore"s prescription for Fran was never revealed in its entirety. The ring of the front doorbell became a peal, then a blast. Like a scared rodent, Luxmore and his beard retreated to the furthest corner of the armchair.

The trainers had not been mistaken when they praised Osnard"s apt.i.tude in the black arts. A few measures of malt whisky in no way impaired his reactions and the prospect of being disagreeable to Fran sharpened them. If she had come to kiss and make up she had picked the wrong man and a worse moment. Which he now proposed to tell her in words of one Anglo-Saxon syllable. And she could take her foot off his b.l.o.o.d.y bell while she was about it.

Gratuitously instructing Luxmore to remain where he was, Osnard sidled across the dining room to the hall, closing doors along his way, and squinted through the fish-eye of his front door. The lens was coated with condensation. With a handkerchief from his pocket he wiped it clear on his own side, and made out one misty eye, its s.e.x ambivalent, squinting back at him while the blast of the doorbell continued like a fire alarm. Then the eye pulled away and he recognised instead Louisa Pendel, wearing horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and precious little else, standing on one leg while she took her shoe off as a prelude to beating down the door with it.

Louisa did not remember which particular straw had broken her camel"s back. Neither did she care. She had returned from squash to an empty house. The children were visiting with the Rudds and staying over. She rated Ramon one of the Great Unspeakables of Panama and detested letting them anywhere near him. It wasn"t that Ramon hated women, it was the way he hinted that he knew more about Harry than she did, and all of it bad. And the way that, just like Harry, he clammed up when she talked about the rice farm, although it was her money that had bought it.

But none of this accounted for how she felt when she came home from squash, or why she found herself weeping without a reason, when so often in the last ten years she had had a reason but refused to weep. So she supposed that what had happened to her was some kind of acc.u.mulation of despair, a.s.sisted by a large vodka on the rocks before her shower because she felt like it. Having showered, she examined herself naked, all six feet of her in the bedroom mirror.

Objectively. Forgetting my height for a moment. Forgetting my beautiful sister Emily with her golden tresses and Playboy centrefold a.s.s and t.i.ts to kill for and list of conquests longer than the Panama City telephone directory. Would I or would I not, if I was a man, wish to sleep with this woman? She reckoned she might, but on what evidence? She only had Harry to go by.

She phrased her question differently. If I was Harry, would I still want to sleep with me after a dozen years of marriage? And the answer to that was: on recent evidence, not. Too tired. Too late. Too placatory. Too guilty about something. All right, he was always guilty. Guilt was his best thing. But these days he wore it like a placard: I am forfeit, I am untouchable, I am guilty, I don"t deserve you, goodnight.

Brushing away her tears with one hand and clutching her gla.s.s in the other, she continued to parade back and forth across the bedroom, studying herself, pushing herself out and in, and thinking how for Emily everything came too easily, whether she was playing tennis or riding a horse or swimming or washing up, she couldn"t make an ugly movement if she tried. Even as a woman, you practically had an o.r.g.a.s.m watching her. Louisa tried writhing obscenely, the worst wh.o.r.e ever. A frost. Too k.n.o.bbly. No flow. No hip movement. Too old. Always have been. Too tall. Fed up, she marched back to the kitchen and, still naked, determinedly poured herself another vodka, no ice this time.

And it was a real drink, not "maybe I could do with a drink," because she had to open a new bottle and find a knife to cut round the seal before she could pour, which is not the sort of thing you do when, just casually, almost by accident, you pour yourself a little something to keep your spirits up while your husband"s out s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his mistress.

"f.u.c.k him," she said aloud.

The bottle came from Harry"s new hospitality store. Chargeable, he said.

"Chargeable, who to?" she had demanded.

"Tax," he said.

"Harry, I do not wish my house to be used as a tax-free bar."

Guilty smirk. Sorry, Lou. Way of the world. Didn"t mean to upset you. Won"t do it again. Creep, cringe.

"f.u.c.k him," she repeated, and felt the better for it.

And f.u.c.k Emily too because without Emily to compete with I would never have taken the moral high road, never pretended to disapprove of everything, never kept my virginity so long it became a world record, just to show everyone how pure and serious I was by contrast with my rucking beautiful sister! I would never have fallen in love with every minister under the age of ninety who climbed into the pulpit in Balboa and told us to repent us of our sins and Emily"s specially, never have set myself up as pious Miss Perfect and the arbiter of everyone"s bad behaviour when all I really wanted was to be touched and admired and spoiled and f.u.c.ked like all the other girls on the lot.

And f.u.c.k the rice farm too. My rice farm that Harry won"t take me to any more because he"s put his b.l.o.o.d.y chiquilla in it - here, darling, keep looking out of the window for me till I come back. f.u.c.k you. Gulp of vodka. Another gulp. Then a great big gulp and feel it hit the parts that really count, oh boy. Thus fortified, she swept back to the bedroom to resume her gyrations with greater abandon - is this erotic? - go on, tell me! - is this? - all right, so get a load of this! But no one to tell her. No one to clap or laugh or get h.o.r.n.y with her. No one to drink with her, cook for her, kiss her neck and talk her down. No Harry.

b.r.e.a.s.t.s not bad for forty, all the same. Better than Jo-Ann"s when she bares all. Not as good as Emily"s but whose are? Here"s to them. Here"s to my t.i.ts. t.i.ts, stand up, you"re being toasted. She sat down abruptly on the bed, chin in hands, watching the phone ring on Harry"s side.

"Go f.u.c.k yourself," she advised it.

And to make her point more strongly, she lifted the receiver an inch, yelled "Go f.u.c.k yourself" and put it down again.

But with kids, you always pick up in the end.

"Yeah? So who is it?" she yells, when it rings again.

It is Naomi, Panama"s Minister of Misinformation, preparing to share some choice piece of scandal with her. Good. This conversation has been outstanding for too long already.

"Naomi, I am pleased to hear you because I have been meaning to write to you and now you have saved me a stamp. Naomi, I want you out of my f.u.c.king life. No, no, listen to me, Naomi. Naomi, if you happen to be pa.s.sing through the Vasco Nunez de Balboa Park and see my husband lying on his back enjoying oral intercourse with Barnum"s baby elephant, I would be grateful if you would tell your twenty best friends and never tell me. Because I don"t want to hear your f.u.c.king voice again till the Ca.n.a.l freezes over. Good night, Naomi."

Tumbler in hand, Louisa puts on a red housecoat that Harry recently brought home for her, three big b.u.t.tons and cleavage according to your mood, fetches a chisel and hammer from the garage and crosses the courtyard to Harry"s den, which these days he keeps locked. Great sky. She hasn"t seen a beautiful sky for weeks. Stars we used to tell our children about. That"s Orion"s belt with the dagger, Mark. And those are your Seven Sisters, Hannah, the ones you always dream of having. The new moon, pretty as a foal.

This is where he writes to her, she thought as she approached the door to his kingdom. To my darling chiquilla, care of my wife"s rice farm. Through the misted window of her bathroom, Louisa has watched him for hours on end, silhouetted at his desk, head tilted to one side and tongue out while he writes his love letters though writing never came naturally to Harry, it is one of the things that Arthur Braithwaite, greatest living saint since Laurent, neglected in his fosterchild"s education.

The door is locked as she has antic.i.p.ated, but presents no problem. The door, when you really beat on it with a good heavy hammer, taking the hammer back as far as it will go, then smashing it down on Emily"s head, which was what Louisa dreamed of doing all through her adolescence, is a piece of s.h.i.t like most things in the world.

Having smashed the door, Louisa homed on her husband"s desk and smashed open the top drawer with the hammer and chisel - three good heaves before she realised the drawer wasn"t locked in the first place. She ransacked the contents. Bills. Architect"s drawings for the Sportsman"s Corner. n.o.body"s lucky first time. Not me anyway. She tried the second drawer. Locked, but surrenders at the first a.s.sault. The contents immediately more uplifting. Unfinished essays on the Ca.n.a.l. Learned journals, press cuttings, notes in Harry"s flowery tailor"s hand summarising the above. Who is she? Who the f.u.c.k is he doing it all for? Harry, I am speaking to you. Listen to me, please. Who is this woman whom you have installed at my rice farm without my consent and whom you need to impress with your non-existent erudition? Who owns this dreamy, cowlike smile you have these days - I am chosen, I am blessed, I walk on water. Or the tears - oh s.h.i.t, Harry, who owns those bloodcurdling tears that form in your eyes and never fall?

Rage and frustration welling in her again, she smashed open another drawer and froze. Holy s.h.i.t! Money! Serious, real money! A whole drawer crammed full of f.u.c.king money. Hundreds, fifties, twenties. Lying loose in the drawer like old parking tickets. A thousand. Two, three thousand. He"s been robbing banks. Who for?

For his woman? She does it for money? For his woman, to take her out to meals without it going through the housekeeping account? To keep her in the style she isn"t accustomed to, at my rice farm, bought with my legacy? Louisa tried shouting his name several times, first to ask him politely, then to order him because he wouldn"t answer, then to curse him because he wasn"t there.

"f.u.c.k you, Harry Pendel! f.u.c.k you, f.u.c.k you, f.u.c.k you! Wherever you are. You"re a f.u.c.king cheat!"

It was f.u.c.k everything from now on. It was her father"s language when he"d had a skinful, and Louisa felt a daughter"s pride that, having had a skinful herself or getting that way, she swore like her f.u.c.king father.

"Hey, Lou, sweetheart, come over here. Where"s that t.i.tan?" - he calls his daughter t.i.tan after the giant German crane in Gamboa harbour - "Don"t an old man deserve a little attention from his daughter? Ain"t you got a kiss for your old man? Call that a kiss? f.u.c.k you! f.u.c.k you, hear me? f.u.c.k you!"

Notes, mostly about Delgado. Distorted versions of things Harry had pumped her about over the dinners he liked to cook her. My Delgado. My beloved father-figure, Ernesto himself, probity on wheels, and my husband makes dirty notes about him. Why? Because he"s jealous of him. He always was. He thinks I love Ernesto more than I love him. He thinks I want to f.u.c.k Ernesto. Headings: Delgado"s Women - what women? Ernesto doesn"t do that stuff! Delgado and the Pres - Mr Osnard"s Pres again. Delgado"s Views on j.a.panese - Ernesto"s scared of them. Thinks they want his Ca.n.a.l. He"s right. She exploded again. Aloud this time: "f.u.c.k you, Harry Pendel, I never said that, you"re making it up! Who for? Why?"

A letter, not completed, not addressed. A sc.r.a.p he must have meant to throw away: I thought you would like to hear a rather interesting snippet Louisa overheard at work yesterday regarding our Ernie and saw fit to pa.s.s on to me - Saw fit? I didn"t see fit. I told him a piece of office gossip! Why the f.u.c.k does a wife have to see fit before she tells her husband a piece of office gossip in their own home about a benign, upright man who wishes only to do right by Panama and the Ca.n.a.l? f.u.c.k fit! f.u.c.k you - you who would like to hear what we see fit to tell each other in our own home! You"re a b.i.t.c.h. A foul-eared b.i.t.c.h who"s stolen my husband and my rice farm.

You"re Sabina!

Louisa had found the b.i.t.c.h"s name at last. In trim tailor"s capitals, because capitals came easiest to him, sabina written small and loving with a balloon drawn round her. SABINA, followed by RAD STUD in brackets. You"re Sabina and you"re a rad stud and you know about other studs and you work for dollar signs from the US - or think you do, because works for US is between inverted commas and you get five hundred bucks a month plus a bonus when you put on a great performance. It was all there, laid out in one of Harry"s flow-charts that he"d learned about from Mark. Flow-chart ideas don"t have to be linear, Dad. They can float about like gas balloons on strings in any order you like. You can take them singly or together. They"re really neat. The string from Sabina"s gas balloon led straight as a die to H which was Harry"s Napoleonic signature for himself when he was being grandiose. Whereas Alpha"s string - because now she had discovered Alpha - led to Beta, then to Marco (Pres) and only then back to H. The Bear"s string led to H too, but the Bear"s balloon had tense wavy lines drawn round it as if it were about to explode at any moment.

And Mickie had a balloon all for himself and he was described as the supremo of SO and his string linked him to Rafi"s balloon in eternity. Our Mickie? Our Mickie is the supremo of SO? And has a total of six strings leading out of him, to Arms, Informants, Bribes, Communications, Cash, Rafi? Our Rafi? Our Mickie who calls once a week in the middle of the night to announce his umpteenth suicide?

She began rummaging again. She wanted that b.i.t.c.h Sabina"s letters to Harry. If she"d written letters Harry would have kept them. Harry couldn"t throw away an empty matchbox or a spare egg yolk. It was his poor childhood again. She was turning everything over, hunting for Sabina"s letters. Under her money? Under a floorboard? In a book?

Holy G.o.d, Delgado"s diary. Kept by Harry, not Delgado. Not the real one, but a mock-up with the lines ruled in hard pencil, he must have copied it from my papers. Delgado"s real engagements entered correctly. Unreal engagements entered in the s.p.a.ces where he had none: Midnight meeting with j.a.p "harbourmasters", secretly attended by Pres... secret car-ride with Fr Amba.s.sador, suitcase of money changes hands... meets emissary from Colombian drugs cartel 11 p.m. Ramon"s new casino... Hosts private out-of-town dinner j.a.p "harbourmasters" and Pan officials and Pres...

My Delgado does all this? My Ernesto Delgado is on the take from the French Amba.s.sador? Is fooling with the Colombian drug cartels? Harry, are you f.u.c.king mad? What filthy libels are you inventing about my boss? What dreadful lies are you telling? Who to? Who pays you for this filth?

"Harry!" she screamed, in outrage and despair. But his name came out as a whisper as the phone started ringing again.

Cunning this time, Louisa lifted the receiver, listened, said nothing, not even Get out of my f.u.c.king life.

"Harry?" A woman"s voice, strangled, dragging, pleading. It"s her. Long distance. Calling from the rice farm. Banging in the background. They must be breaking up the mill.

"Harry? Speak to me!" the woman"s voice screams.

A Spanish b.i.t.c.h. Daddy always said don"t trust them. Whimpering. It"s her. Sabina. Needing Harry. Who doesn"t?