The Tailor of Panama Part 25

'Thank you. I'm sure that will be fine. And muster the people from the other side of the bridge, obviously,' he suggested as an afterthought.

'Naturally. Students are only the vanguard of the proletarian movement.'

'I'm sorry about Mickie,' Pendel muttered after a pause. 'I couldn't stop myself.'

'When we can't hurt our enemies we hurt our friends. As long as you know that.'

'I do.'

'The Bear rang.'

'About his article?'

'He didn't mention the article. He said he needs to see you. Soon. He's in his usual place. He made it sound like a threat.'

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

The Boulevard Balboa on the Avenida Balboa was a low, spa.r.s.e bra.s.serie with a polystyrene ceiling and prison striplights boxed in with wooden slats. Some years ago it had been blown up, n.o.body remembered why. The big windows looked across the Avenida Balboa to the sea. At a long table, a heavy-jowled man protected by black-suited bodyguards in sungla.s.ses was pontificating to a television camera. The Bear sat in his own s.p.a.ce, reading his own newspaper. The tables around him were empty. He was wearing a P&B striped blazer and a sixty-dollar Panama hat from the boutique. His shiny pitch-black pirate beard looked as if it had just been shampooed. It matched the jet-black frames of his spectacles.

'You rang, Teddy,' Pendel reminded him after a minute of sitting unnoticed on the wrong side of the newspaper.

The newspaper reluctantly descended.

'What about?' the Bear asked.

'You phoned, I came. The jacket looks nice then.'

'Who bought the rice farm?'

'A friend of mine.'

'Abraxas?'

'Of course not.'

'Why of course not?'

'He's running out.'

'Who says?'

'He does.'

'Maybe you pay Abraxas. Maybe he works for you. You got some racket with Abraxas? You doing drugs together, like his father?'

'Teddy, I think you're out of your mind.'

'How did you pay off Rudd? Who's this mad millionaire you boast about without giving Rudd a piece of the action? That was most offensive. Why have you opened this ridiculous clubroom above your shop? Have you sold out to somebody? What's going on?'

'I'm a tailor, Teddy. I make clothes for gentlemen and I'm expanding. Are you going to give me some nice free publicity, then? There was an article in the Miami Herald not a long time back, I don't know if it came your way.'

The Bear sighed. His voice was inert. Compa.s.sion, humanity, curiosity had all drained out of it long ago, if they had ever been there in the first place.

'Let me explain the principles of journalism,' he said. 'I make money two ways. One way, people pay me to write stories, so I write them. I hate writing but I must eat, I must finance my appet.i.tes. Another way, people pay me not to write stories. For me, that's the better way because I don't have to write anything and I still get the money. If I play my cards right I get more for not writing than for writing. There's a third way I don't like. I call it my last recourse. I go to certain people in government and offer to sell them what I know. But that way's unsatisfactory.'

'Why?'

'I don't like selling in the dark. If I deal with somebody ordinary - with you - with him over there - and I know I can ruin his reputation or his business or his marriage, and he knows it too, then the story has its price, we can agree on something, it's normal commercial discourse. But when I go to the certain people in government' - very slightly, he shook his long head in disapproval - 'I don't know what it's worth to them. Some of them are smart. Some are donkeys. You don't know whether they're ignorant or they're not telling you. So it's bluff, it's counterbluff, it's time-consuming. Maybe they also threaten me with my own dossier in order to beat me down. I don't like wasting my life that way. You want to do business, you want to give me a quick answer and save me trouble, I'll give you a good price. Since you have a mad millionaire at your disposal, clearly he must be factored into any objective a.s.sessment of your means.'

Pendel had the sensation of putting his smile together by numbers, first one side then the other side, then the cheeks and, when he allowed them to focus, the eyes. Finally his voice.

'Teddy, I think what you're trying to pull here is a very old confidence trick. You're telling me "Fly, fly, all is known" and reckoning you'll move into my house while I'm on my way to the airport.'

'Are you working for the Yanquis? The certain people in government wouldn't like that. An Englishman trespa.s.sing on their preserves, they'd take a strong line. It's different if they do it themselves. They're betraying their own country. That's their choice, they were born here, it's their country, they can do what they like with it, they've worked their way. But for you to come here as a foreigner and betray it for them would be extremely provocative. There's no knowing what they might do.'

'Teddy, you are right. I'm proud to say I am working for the Yanquis. The General in charge of Southern Command likes a plain single-breasted with the extra trousers and what he calls the vest. The Charge, he's a mohair tux and a tweed jacket for his holidays in North Haven.'

Pendel stood up and felt the backs of his knees trembling against his trousers.

'You don't know anything bad about me, Teddy. If you did, you wouldn't be asking. And the reason you don't know anything bad is that there isn't anything to know. And while we're on the subject of money, I'd be grateful if you'd pay for that nice jacket you're wearing so that Marta can clear her books.'

'How you can f.u.c.k that faceless halfbreed is beyond me.'

Pendel left the Bear as he had found him, head back, beard up, reading what he had written in his newspaper.

Arriving home, Pendel is pained to be greeted by an empty house. And this is my reward for a day's hard toil? he demands of the empty walls. A man with two professions, working himself to a shadow, must bring his own food home in the evenings? But there are consolations. Louisa's father's briefcase is once more lying on her desk. Popping it open, he takes out a hefty office diary with Dr E. DelG.o.do done in black Gothic lettering on the cover. Next to it nestles a file of correspondence marked 'Engagements'. Ignoring distractions, including the imminent threat of exposure by the Bear, Pendel wills himself once more to become all spy. The overhead light is on a dimmer switch. He turns it to full. Pressing Osnard's cigarette lighter to one eye, he closes the other and squints through the tiny peephole while trying to keep his nose and fingers out of the way of the lens.

'Mickie rang,' Louisa said in bed.

'Rang where?'

'Me. At the office. He's going to kill himself again.'

'Oh, right.'

'He says you've gone mad. He says somebody's stolen your head.'

'That's nice then.'

'And I agreed,' she said, putting out the light.

It was Sunday night and their third casino but Andy still hadn't put G.o.d to the test which was what he had promised Fran he was going to do. She had barely seen him all weekend, apart from a few stolen hours of sleep and a bout of frenzied early-morning lovemaking before he hurried back to work. The rest of his weekend had been spent in the Emba.s.sy with Shepherd in his Fair Isle pull-over and black plimsolls bringing hot towels and cups of coffee. Or so at least Fran had pictured it. It wasn't kind of her to put Shepherd in black plimsolls because she had never seen him wearing them. But she remembered a physical training instructor at boarding school who had worn them and Shepherd had the same servile enthusiasm.

'Heavy batch o' BUCHAN stuff,' Andy had explained cryptically. 'Got to knock it into report form. All a bit tense and get-it-to-us-by-yesterday.'

'When do the Buchaneers have the benefit?'

'London's pulled down the shutters. Too hot for local consumption till the a.n.a.lysts have run it through the sheep-dip.'

And so matters had rested till two hours ago when Andy had swept her off to an amazingly expensive restaurant on the waterfront where, over a bottle of expensive champagne, he had decided it was time to put G.o.d to the test.

'Picked up a legacy from an aunt last week. Piddling sum. No good to anyone. Get G.o.d to double it. Only way.'

He was in his h.e.l.l-bent mood. Restless, questing eyes, flaring at anything, spoiling for collision.

'Do you take requests?' he yelled at the bandleader while they danced.

'Whatever Madame desires, Senor.'

'Then why not take the night off?' Andy suggested as Fran swung him smartly out of earshot.

'Andy, that's not tempting G.o.d, that's asking to get us killed,' she told him severely while he paid for dinner with damp fifty-dollar bills dragged from the inside pocket of a new linen jacket by his local tailor.

In the first casino he sat at the big table, watching but not playing, while Fran stood protectively behind him.

'Got a favourite colour?' he asked her over his shoulder.

'Isn't that for G.o.d to decide?'

'We do the colour, G.o.d does the luck. Rule o' the game.'

He drank more champagne but didn't place a bet. They know him, she thought suddenly as they left. He's been here before. She could tell by their faces and knowing smiles and come-again-soons.

'Operational,' he said curtly when she taxed him.At the second casino a security guard made the mistake of trying to frisk them. Things would have turned ugly if Fran had not produced her diplomatic card. Once again Andy watched the play but took no active part, while two girls at the end of the table kept trying to catch his eye and one even called to him, 'Hi, Andy.'

'Operational,' he repeated.

The third casino was in a hotel she'd never heard of, in a bad part of town she had been told not to enter, in room 303 on the third floor, knock and wait. A huge bruiser patted Andy down and this time he did not object. He even advised Fran to let the man inspect her handbag. The croupiers stiffened as Fran and Andy entered the second room and a serious hush fell, turning heads and ending conversations: which was not surprising when you realised that Andy was asking for fifty thousand dollars' worth o' chips in five hundreds and thousands, don't need those little ones, thanks, you can put 'em back where they came from.

And the next thing Fran knew, Andy was sitting at the croupier's side and she was again standing behind him, and the croupier was a doughy, voluptuous wh.o.r.e with thick lips and a low halter-dress and small fluttery hands with red fingernails cut like claws and the wheel was spinning. And when it stopped Andy was ten thousand dollars better off because he was backing red. He played, so far as she could afterwards establish, eight or nine times. He had changed from champagne to Scotch. He doubled his fifty thousand dollars, which was apparently what he had set G.o.d as a target, then gave himself one last fling for a bit o' fun and picked up another twenty thousand. He asked for a carrier bag and a taxi at the door, because he thought it would be silly to walk down the road with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a bag and said Shepherd could fetch the b.l.o.o.d.y car tomorrow or give it away, he hated it.

But the sequence of these events remained disordered in Fran's mind because all she could concentrate on while they were unfolding was her very first gymkhana when her pony which like every other pony in the world was called Misty took the first fence perfectly then bolted four miles down the main road to Shrewsbury with Fran hanging onto its neck and the traffic going past in both directions and n.o.body seeming to give a d.a.m.n except herself.

'The Bear came to my flat last night,' Marta said, having closed Pendel's cutting room door behind her. 'He brought a friend in the police.'

It was Monday morning. Pendel sat at his worktable, adding the finishing touches to an Order of Battle of the Silent Opposition. He put down his 2H pencil.

'Why? What are you supposed to have done?'

'They wanted to know about Mickie.'

'What about him?'

'Why he comes to the shop so much, why he calls you at such crazy hours.'

'What did you tell them?'

'They want me to spy on you,' she said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

The arrival of the first material from Panama Station to bear the codename BUCHAN TWO had raised Scottie Luxmore, its originating genius in London, to unprecedented heights of self-congratulation. But this morning his euphoria had given way to a fretful nervousness. He paced at twice his usual speed. His hortatory Scottish voice had acquired a creak. His gaze veered restlessly across the river, northward and westward where his future now lay.

'Cherchez la femme, Johnny boy,' he advised a haggard youth named Johnson, who had succeeded Osnard in the ungrateful post of Luxmore's personal a.s.sistant. 'The female of the species is worth five men in this business any day.'

Johnson, who like his predecessor had mastered the essential art of sycophancy, leaned forward in his chair to show how keenly he was listening.

'They have the perfidy, Johnny. They have the nerve, they are born dissemblers. Why do you suppose she insisted on working exclusively through her husband?' His voice had the protest of a man pleading excuses in advance. 'She knew very well she would outshine him. Where would he be then? On the pavement. Dispensed with. Paid off. Why should she let that happen?' He wiped his open palms down the sides of his trousers. 'Swap two salaries for one and make a fool of her man while she's about it? Not our Louisa. Not our BUCHAN two!' His eyes narrowed, as if he had recognised some-one at a distant window. But his peroration did not pause. 'I knew what I was doing. So did she. Never underrate a woman's intuition, Johnny. He's reached his ceiling. He's played out.'

'Osnard?' said Johnson hopefully. It was six months since he had been a.s.signed to Luxmore's shadow and still no posting was in sight for him.

'Her husband, Johnny,' Luxmore retorted irritably, and drew the tips of his fingers in a clawing gesture down one side of his bearded cheek. 'BUCHAN ONE. Oh, his work was promising enough at first. But he'd no breadth of vision, they never have. No scale. No awareness of history. It was all t.i.ttle-tattle and warmed-up leftovers and covering his own backside. We could never have stuck with him, I see that now. She saw it too. She knows her man, that woman. Knows his limitations better than we do. And her own strength.'

'The a.n.a.lysts are a bit worried there's no collateral,' ventured Johnson, who could never resist a chance to chip at Osnard's pedestal. 'Sally Morpurgo called the BUCHAN TWO stuff overwritten and undersourced.'

The shot caught Luxmore on the turn, just as he was beginning his fifth length of the carpet. He smiled the broad, blank smile of an entirely humourless man.

'Did she now? And Miss Morpurgo is a most intelligent person, no question.'

'Well, I think she is.'

'And women are harsher on other women than we men are. Rightly.'

'It's true. I hadn't thought of it till now.'

'They are also subject to certain jealousies - envy is perhaps the better word here - from which we men are naturally immune. Are we not, Johnny?'

'I expect so. No. Yes, I mean.'

'What is Miss Morpurgo's objection precisely?' Lux-more asked in the tone of a man who can take fair criticism.

Johnson wished he had kept his mouth shut.

'She just says, well, there's no collateral. From the entire daily deluge, as she called it. Zero. No sigint, no friendly liaison, not a squeak out of the Americans. No travel int, no satellites, no unusual diplomatic traffic. It's Black-Hole stuff all the way. She says.'

'Is that all?'