The Tailor of Panama Part 28

'Why can't Osnard take care of it?' Stormont asked.

'As his Amba.s.sador I have not encouraged his involvement. The boy has enough responsibilities as it is. He's young. He's junior. These Opposition people like the rea.s.surance of a seasoned hand. Some are people like us, but some are h.o.a.ry working-cla.s.s chaps, stevedores, fishermen, farmers and the like. Far better we take the burden upon ourselves. We're also to support a shadowy body of bomb-making students, always tricky. We shall take over the students too. I'm sure you'll be very good with them. You seem troubled, Nigel. Have I upset you?'

'Why don't they send us more spies?'

'Oh, I don't think that's necessary. Visiting firemen perhaps, men like Luxmore-Mellors, but n.o.body permanent. We mustn't inflate the Emba.s.sy's numbers unnaturally, it would invite comment. I made that point also.'

'You did?' said Stormont incredulously.

'Yes, indeed. With two such experienced heads as yours and mine, I said, additional staff were quite unnecessary. I was firm. They would litter the place up, I said. Unacceptable. I pulled rank. I said we were men of the world. You would have been proud of me.'

Stormont thought he saw an unfamiliar sparkle in his Amba.s.sador's eye, best compared with the awakening of desire.

'We shall need an enormous amount of stuff,' Maltby went on, with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy looking forward to a new train-set. 'Radios, cars, safe houses, couriers, not to mention materiel - machineguns, mines, rocket-launchers, ma.s.ses of explosive, naturally, detonators, everything your heart has ever dreamed of. No modern Silent Opposition is complete without them, they a.s.sured me. And spares are frightfully important, one's told. Well you know how careless students are. Give them a radio in the morning, it's covered in graffiti by lunchtime. And I'm sure Silent Oppositions are no better. The weapons will all be British, you'll be relieved to hear. There's a tried and tested British company already standing by to supply them, which is nice. Minister Kirby thinks the world of them. They earned their spurs in Iran, or was it Iraq? Probably both. Gully thinks the world of them too, I'm pleased to say, and the Office has accepted my suggestion that he be advanced immediately to the rank and condition of Buchaneer. Osnard is swearing him in even as we speak.'

'Your suggestion,' Stormont repeated numbly.

'Yes, Nigel, I have decided that you and I are well cast for the business of intrigue. I once remarked to you how I yearned to take part in a British plot. Well, here it is. The secret bugle has sounded. I trust that none of us will be found wanting in our zeal - I do wish you could look a little happier, Nigel. You don't seem to realise the import of what I'm telling you. This Emba.s.sy is about to take an amazing leap forward. From a silted diplomatic backwater we shall become the hottest post in the ratings. Promotion, medals, notice of the most flattering kind will overnight be ours. Don't tell me you doubt our masters' wisdom? That would be very bad timing.'

'It's just that there seem to be rather a lot of stages missing,' Stormont said feebly, grappling with the acquisition of a brand new Amba.s.sador.

'Nonsense. Of what sort?'

'Logic, for one.'

'Oh, really?' - coldly. 'Where precisely do you detect a want of logic?'

'Well I mean take the Silent Opposition. n.o.body's even heard of it apart from us. Why hasn't it done something - leaked something to the press - spoken up?'

Maltby was already scoffing. 'But my dear chap! That's its name. That's its nature. It's silent. It keeps its counsel. Awaits its hour. Abraxas isn't a drunk. He's a bravura hero, a closet revolutionary for G.o.d and country. Domingo isn't a drug dealer with an oversized libido, he's a selfless warrior for democracy. As to the students, what is there to know? You remember how we were. Scatty. Inconstant. One thing one day, another thing the next. I fear you're becoming jaded, Nigel. Panama's getting you down. Time you took Paddy to Switzerland. Oh, and yes' - he went on, as if there were something he had omitted to say - 'nearly forgot. Mr Luxmore-Mellors will be bringing the gold bars,' he added, in the tone of someone tying a last administrative knot. 'One can't trust banks and courier services in these cases, not in the dark world of intrigue that you and I are entering, Nigel, so he's posing as a Queen's Messenger and bringing them by diplomatic bag.'

'The what?'

'Gold bars, Nigel. It seems they're what one gives to Silent Oppositions these days in preference to dollars or pounds or Swiss francs. I must say one can see the sense of it. Can you imagine running a Silent Opposition on pounds sterling? They'd devalue before one had mounted one's first abortive putsch. And Silent Oppositions don't come cheap, I'm told,' he added in the same throwaway tone. 'A few million is nothing these days, not if you're counting on buying a future government at the same time. Students, well, one can rein them in a bit, but do you remember how we used to get into debt? Good quartermastering will be essential on both fronts. But I think we're up to it, Nigel, don't you? I see it as a challenge myself. The sort of thing one dreams of in the midlife of one's career. A diplomatic El Dorado without the sweat of all that panning in the jungle.'

Maltby was musing. Stormont, tight-lipped at his side, had never known him so relaxed. Yet of himself he knew nothing at all. Or nothing he could explain. The sun was still radiant. Crouched in the blackness of the bandstand, he felt like a life-prisoner who can't believe that the door of his cell stands open. His bluff was being called - but what bluff? Whom had he been fooling, except himself, as he watched the Emba.s.sy flourish under Osnard's spurious alchemy? 'Don't knock a good thing,' he had warned Paddy sharply when she had dared suggest that BUCHAN was a bit too gorgeous to be true, particularly when you got to know Andy a bit better.

Maltby was philosophising: 'An Emba.s.sy is not equipped to evaluate, Nigel. We may have a view, that's different. We may have local knowledge. Of course we do. And sometimes it appears to conflict with what is told us by our betters. We have our senses. We can see and hear and sniff. But we don't have acres of files, computers, a.n.a.lysts and scores of delicious young debutantes scampering up and down corridors, alas. We have no overview. No awareness of the world's game. Least of all in an Emba.s.sy as small and irrelevant as our own. We're b.u.mpkins. You agree, I take it?'

'Did you tell them this?'

'Indeed I did, and on Osnard's magic telephone. One's words are so much more weighty when they're said in secret, don't you agree? We are aware of our limitations, I said. Our work is humdrum. From time to time we are granted glimpses of the bigger world. BUCHAN is such a glimpse. And we are grateful, we are proud. It is neither proper nor appropriate, I said, that a tiny Emba.s.sy, charged with reading the mood of the country and propagating the views of our own government, should be called upon to pa.s.s an objective judgment on matters too large for our horizons.'

'What made you say that?' Stormont asked. He meant to be louder, but something was catching his throat.

'BUCHAN, naturally. The Office accused me of being n.i.g.g.ardly in my praise of the latest material. You too, by inference, were similarly accused. "Praise?" I said. "You can have all the praise you want. Andrew Osnard is a charming fellow, conscientious to a fault, and the BUCHAN operation has provided us with enlightenment and food for thought. We admire it. We support it. It enlivens our little community. But we do not presume to award it a place in the grand scheme of things. That is for your a.n.a.lysts and our masters." '

'And they were content with that?'

'They devoured it. Andy is a very nice fellow, as I told them. Goes down a treat with the girls. a.s.set to the Emba.s.sy.' He broke off, leaving a note of question, and resumed on a lower key. 'All right, maybe he doesn't quite play to eight. Maybe he cheats a bit here and there. Who doesn't? My point is, it's absolutely nothing to do with you or me or anyone else in this Emba.s.sy, with the possible exception of young Andy, that the BUCHAN stuff is the most frightful tosh.'

Stormont's reputation for composure in crisis was deserved. He sat painfully still for a while - the bench was teak and he had a bit of a back, particularly in damp weather. He considered the line of sterile ships, the Bridge of the Americas, the Old City and its ugly modern sister across the bay. He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. And he wondered whether, for reasons not yet revealed, he was witnessing the end of his career, or beginning a new one of which the outlines were unclear to him.

Maltby by contrast was basking in a kind of confessional ease. He was leaning right back, his long, goatish head propped against an iron pillar of the bandstand, and his tone was magnanimity itself.

'Now I don't know,' he was saying, 'and you don't know, which one of them makes it up. Is it BUCHAN? Is it Mrs BUCHAN? Is it the subsources, whoever they are - Abraxas, Domingo, the woman Sabina or that disgusting journalist one sees around the place, Teddy Somebody? Or is it Andrew himself, bless him, and all else is vanity? He's young. They could be fooling him. On the other hand, he's quick-witted and he's a rogue. No he's not. He's rotten through and through. He's a major s.h.i.t.'

'I thought you liked him.'

'Oh, I do, I do, enormously. And I don't hold the cheating against him one bit. A lot of chaps cheat, but it's usually the bad players like me. I mean, I've known chaps apologise. I've practically apologised myself a couple of times.' He bestowed a shameful grin on a pair of big yellow b.u.t.terflies who had decided to join the conversation. 'But Andy's a winner, you see. And winners who cheat are s.h.i.ts. How does he get on with Paddy?'

'Paddy adores him.'

'Oh my Lord, not too much, I hope? He's s.h.a.gging Fran, I'm sorry to say.'

'Rubbish,' Stormont replied hotly. 'They barely talk to each other.'

'That's because they're s.h.a.gging in secret. They've been at it for months. Seems to have turned her head completely.'

'How can you possibly know that?'

'My dear chap, I can't take my eyes off her, you must have noticed. I watch her every move. I've followed her. I don't think she spotted me. But then of course we prowlers rather hope they do. She left her flat and went to Osnard's. Didn't come out. Next morning, seven o'clock, I faked an urgent telegram and phoned her flat. No answer. You can't get it clearer than that.'

'And you haven't said anything to Osnard?'

'Whatever for? Fran's an angel, he's a s.h.i.t, I'm a lecher. What would we possibly achieve?'

The bandstand started to crack and rattle with the next downpour, and they had to wait a few minutes for the sun.

'So what do you intend to do?' Stormont said gruffly, fending off all the questions he refused to ask himself.

'Do, did you say, Nigel?' It was Maltby as Stormont remembered him: arid, pedantic and aloof. 'Whatever about?'

'BUCHAN. Luxmore. The Silent Opposition. The students. The people beyond that bridge over there, whoever they are. Osnard. The fact that BUCHAN is a fiction. If he is. That the reports are tosh, as you call them,'

'My dear man. We're not being asked to do anything. We're merely the servants of a higher cause.'

'But if London's swallowing it whole, and you think it's total c.r.a.p-'

Maltby leaned forward in the way he would normally lean across his desk, fingertips together in an att.i.tude of mute obstruction. 'Go on.'

' - then you've got to tell them,' said Stormont stoutly.

'Why?'

'To stop them being led up the garden path. Anything could happen.'

'But Nigel. I thought we had already agreed that we were not evaluators.'

A sleek olive-coloured bird had entered their domain and was quizzing them for crumbs.

'I've nothing for you,' Maltby a.s.sured it anxiously. 'I really haven't. Oh d.a.m.n,' he exclaimed, plunging his hands into his pockets, patting them vainly for anything that would do. 'Later,' he told it. 'Come back tomorrow. No, the day after, about this time. We've got a top spy descending on us.'

'Our duty here in the Emba.s.sy, in these circ.u.mstances, Nigel, is to provide logistical support,' Maltby went on in a tight, businesslike tone. 'You agree?'

'I suppose it is,' said Stormont doubtfully.

'To a.s.sist, where a.s.sistance is helpful. To applaud, to encourage, to cool brows. To ease the burden on those in the firing seat.'

'Driving seat,' said Stormont absently. 'Or firing line, I suppose, if that's what you mean.'

'Thank you. Why is it that whenever I reach for a modern metaphor I come unstuck? I suppose I imagined a tank at that moment. One of Gully's, paid for in gold bars.'

'I suppose you did.'

Maltby's voice gathered power as if for the benefit of the audience outside the bandstand, but there was none. 'So it is in this spirit of wholehearted collaboration that I have made the point to London - and I am sure you will agree with me - that Andrew Osnard, whatever his sterling virtues, is too inexperienced to be handling very large sums of money, whether in the form of cash or gold. And that it is only fair, on him as well as the recipients of the money, that he be provided with a paymaster. As his Amba.s.sador, I have selflessly volunteered for the task. London sees the wisdom of this. Whether Osnard sees it is to be doubted, but he can scarcely object, particularly since it is we - you and I, Nigel - who in due course will be taking over liaison with the Silent Opposition and the students. Money from secret funds is notoriously hard to account for and quite impossible to pursue once it has disappeared into the wrong hands. All the more important that it be scrupulously husbanded while it is in our care. I have asked that Chancery be provided with a safe of the type that Osnard has in his strongroom. The gold - and whatever else - will be stored there and you and I will be joint keyholders. If Osnard decides that he requires a large sum of money he may come to us and state his case. a.s.suming the sum is within the agreed guidelines you and I will jointly draw the cash and place it in the appropriate hands. Are you a rich man, Nigel?'

'No.'

'Nor I. Did your divorce effectively impoverish you?'

'Yes.'

'I would imagine so. And it will be no better when my turn comes. Phoebe is not easily satisfied.' He glanced at Stormont for confirmation of this, but Stormont's face, turned towards the Pacific, was set in iron.

'It's so very unreasonable of life,' Maltby went on by way of small talk. 'Here we are in middle age, healthy chaps with healthy appet.i.tes. We made a few mistakes, faced up to them, learned the lessons. And we've still got a few precious, wonderful years before the Zimmer frame. Only one blot spoils an otherwise perfect prospect. We're broke.'

From the sea Stormont's eyes had lifted to a range of cotton-wool clouds that had formed above the distant islands. And it seemed to him that he saw snow on them, and Paddy, cured of her cough, pottering cheerfully up the path to the chalet, bearing shopping from the village.

'They want me to sound out the Americans,' he said mechanically.

'Who do?' Maltby asked quickly.

'London,' said Stormont in the same toneless voice.

'To what end?'

'To find out how much they know. About Silent Oppositions. Students. Secret meetings with the j.a.panese. I'm to test the water and give nothing away. Fly kites, trail coats. All the fatuous things that people tell you to do when they're sitting on their a.r.s.es in London. Neither State nor me CIA has seen Osnard's material, apparently. I'm to find out whether they have independent awareness.'

'Meaning: whether they know?'

'If you prefer,' said Stormont.

Maltby was indignant. 'Oh I do detest the Yanks. They expect everyone to go to the devil at the same hectic pace as themselves. It takes hundreds of years to do it properly. Look at us.'

'Suppose the Yanks know none of it. Suppose it's virgin. Or they are.'

'Suppose there's nothing to know. That's far more likely.'

'Some of it may be true,' said Stormont with a kind of stubborn gallantry.

'On the principle that a broken clock tells the truth once every twelve hours, yes, I grant you, some of it may be true,' said Maltby with contempt.

'And suppose the Yanks believe it. Whether it's true or not,' Stormont went on doggedly. 'Fall for it, if you like. London did.'

'Which London? Not our London, that's for sure. And of course the Yanks won't believe it. Not the real ones. Their systems are vastly superior to ours. They'll prove it's tosh, they'll thank us, say they've taken note and shred it.'

Stormont refused to be put off. 'People don't trust their own systems. Intelligence is like exams. You always think the chap sitting next to you knows more than you do.'

'Nigel,' said Maltby firmly, with all the authority of his appointment, 'allow me to remind you that we are not evaluators. Life has given us a rare opportunity to find fulfilment in our work and be of service to those whom we regard. A golden future stretches ahead of us. The crime in such cases is to waver.'

Still staring ahead of him but without the consolation of the clouds, Stormont sees his future until now. Paddy's cough eating her to nothing. The decaying British health service all they can afford. Premature retirement to Suss.e.x on a pittance. The going-going-gone of every dream he has ever cherished. And the England that he used to love six feet under ground.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

They lay in the room for finishing hands, on the floor, on a pile of rugs which the Cuna Indian women kept for the influx of cousins, aunts and uncles from San Blas. Above them hung ranks of tailored suits awaiting b.u.t.ton-holes. The only light came through the skylight, and it was pink from the city's glow. The only sound came from the traffic in the Via Espana, and Marta's mewing in his ear. They were dressed. Her smashed face was buried in his neck. She was trembling. So was Pendel. They were one cold scared body together. They were children in an empty house.

'They said you were cheating on your taxes,' she said. 'I told them you paid your taxes. "I keep the books," I said. "I know."' She broke off in case he wanted to say something but he had nothing to say. 'They said you were cheating on your employer's insurance for the staff. I said, "I do the insurance. The insurance is in order." They said I shouldn't ask questions, they had a file on me and I needn't think that, because I had been beaten once, I was immune.' She moved her head against him. 'I hadn't asked any questions. They said they would write in the file that I had Castro and Che Guevara on my bedroom wall. They said I was going around with radical students again. I said I wasn't, which is true. They said you were a spy. They said Mickie was another. They said his drunkenness was just a trick to hide his spying. They're mad.'

She had finished, but it took Pendel time to understand this, so there was a delay before he rolled onto her and with both hands pressed her cheek against his own, making their faces into a single face.

'Did they say what sort of spy?'

'What other sorts are there?'

'Real ones.'

The phone was ringing.

It rang above their heads, which telephones in Pendel's life didn't normally do, on an instrument that he always thought of as internal until he remembered that his Cuna women lived on the telephone, rejoiced in it, wept into it, hung on its every word as they listened to husbands, lovers, fathers, chiefs, children, headmen and an infinite number of relations with insoluble personal problems. And after the telephone had rung a while - for ever, in the arbitrary measurements of his personal existence, but in the rest of the world four times - he noticed that Marta was no longer in his arms but standing, b.u.t.toning her blouse for decency while she prepared to take the call. And that she wished to know whether he was here or somewhere else, a thing she always asked if a call appeared inconvenient. Then a stubbornness took hold of him and he stood up also, with the result that they were close again, as they had been when they were lying down.

'I am here and you are not,' he said emphatically into her ear.

Not a trick, not an affectation: just the protector in him speaking from the heart. As a precaution he then interposed himself between Marta and the telephone and by the pink glow of the skylight directly above him - a few stars had made it through the haze - he considered the instrument while it went on ringing, and tried to fathom its purpose. Think the worst threats first, Osnard had said in their training sessions. So he thought them and the worst threat seemed to be Osnard himself, so he thought Osnard. Then he thought the Bear. Then he thought the police. And then, because he had been thinking of her all along, he thought Louisa.

But Louisa wasn't a threat. She was a casualty he had created long ago, in collaboration with her mother and father and Braithwaite and Uncle Benny and the Sisters of Charity and all the other people who made up the person he himself had become. And she didn't threaten him so much as remind him of the mistaken nature of their relationship, and how it had gone so wrong in spite of all the care he had put into composing it, which was the mistake he had been thinking of: we shouldn't compose relationships, but if we don't, what else do we do?

So finally, when there was nothing much left to think about, Pendel reached for the telephone and picked it up at much the same moment that Marta picked up his other hand and held its knuckles to her lips and bared teeth, investing them with light, swift, rea.s.suring bites. And her gesture roused him in some way for, with the phone to his ear he straightened instead of druckening himself, and spoke in a bold, clear, not to say playful Spanish voice designed to show that there was fight in him yet, not just an endless submission to circ.u.mstance.

'Pendel & Braithwaite here! Good evening and how can we be of service to you?'

But if his gay humour was subconsciously intended to draw his attacker's sting, it failed miserably because the shooting had already begun. The first incoming rounds reached him before he had finished speaking: a pattern of deliberate, ascending single explosions interspersed with the chatter of light machineguns, grenades and the short triumphant whine of ricochets. So for a second or two Pendel a.s.sumed it was the invasion all over again; except that this time he had agreed to keep Marta company in El Chorrillo, which was why she was kissing his hand. Then over the sounds of shooting came the predictable whimpering of victims, echoing in a make-shift shelter of some kind, accusing and protesting and cursing and demanding, choked with horror and outrage, begging for everything from compensation to G.o.d's forgiveness, until gradually all these voices became one voice, and it belonged to Ana, chiquilla to Mickie Abraxas, childhood friend to Marta and the one woman left in Panama who would put up with him, and clean him when he was sick from too much of whatever he had been taking, and listen to his ramblings.