The Tailor of Panama Part 4

He had stopped. Dried up. His throat was sore, his eyes hurt and there was a singing in his ears. But somewhere in him there was also a sense of accomplishment. I did it. My leg was broken, I had a temperature of a hundred and five, but the show went on.

'Fabulous,' Osnard breathed.

'Thank you, sir.'

'Most beautiful bulls.h.i.t I've ever listened to in my life and you socked it to me like a hero.'

Pendel was hearing Osnard from a long way off, among a lot of other voices. The Sisters of Charity at his North London orphanage telling him Jesus would be angry with him. The laughter of his children in the four-track. Ramon's voice telling him that a London merchant bank had been enquiring about his status and offering inducements for the information. Louisa's voice telling him that one good man was all it took. After that he heard the rush-hour traffic heading out of town and dreamed of being stuck in it and free.

'Thing is, old boy, I know who you are, you see.' But Pendel saw nothing at all, not even Osnard's black gaze boring into him. He had put up a screen in his mind and Osnard was the other side of it. 'Put more accurately, I know who you aren't. No cause for panic or alarm. I love it. Every bit of it. Wouldn't be without it for the world.'

'I'm not anybody,' Pendel heard himself whisper from his side of the screen, and after that, the sound of the fitting room curtain being swept aside.

And he saw with deliberately fogged eyes that Osnard was peering through the opening, making a precautionary survey of the Sportsman's Corner. He heard Osnard speaking again, but so close to his ear that the murmur made it buzz.

'You're 906017 Pendel, convict and ex-juvenile delinquent, six years for arson, two-and-a-half served. Taught himself his tailoring in the slammer. Left the country three days after he had paid his debt to society, staked by his paternal Uncle Benjamin, now deceased. Married to Louisa, daughter of Zonian roughneck and Bible-punching schoolteacher, who dogsbodies five days a week for the great and good Ernie Delgado over at the Panama Ca.n.a.l Commission. Two kids, Mark eight, Hannah ten. Insolvent, courtesy o' the rice farm. Pendel & Braithwaite a load o' b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. No such firm existed in Savile Row. There was never a liquidation because there was nothing to liquidate. Arthur Braithwaite one of the great characters o' fiction. Adore a con. What life's about. Don't give me that swivel-eyed look. I'm bonus. Answer to your prayers. You hearing me?'

Pendel heard nothing at all. He stood head down and feet together, numb all over, ears included. Rousing himself, he lifted Osnard's arm until it was level with the shoulder. Folded it so that the hand rested flat against the chest. Pressed the end of the tape to the centre point of Osnard's back. Led it round the elbow to the wrist-bone.

'I asked you who else is in on it?' Osnard was saying.

'In on what?'

'The con. Mantle o' Saint Arthur falling on the infant Pendel's shoulders. P&B, tailor to the royals. Thousand years o' history. All that c.r.a.p. Apart from your wife, of course.'

'She isn't in on it at all,' Pendel exclaimed in naked alarm.

'Doesn't know?'

Pendel shook his head, mute again.

'Louisa doesn't? You're conning her too?'

Keep shtumm, Harry boy. Shtumm's the word.

'How about your little local difficulty?'

'Which one?'

'Prison.'

Pendel whispered something he himself could barely hear.

'Is that another no?'

'Yes. No.'

'She doesn't know you did time? She doesn't know about Uncle Arthur? Does she know the rice farm's going down the tube?'

The same measurement again. Centre-back to wrist-bone, but with Osnard's arms straight down. Pa.s.sing the tape over his shoulder with wooden gestures.

'No again?'

'Yes.'

'Thought it was joint-ownership.'

'It is.'

'But she still doesn't know.'

'I look after the money matters, don't I?'

'I'll say you do. How much are you in for?'

'Pushing a hundred grand.'

'I heard it was nearer two hundred and rising.'

'It is.'

'Interest?'

'Two.'

'Two per cent quarterly?'

'Monthly.'

'Compound?'

'Could be.'

'Set against this place. h.e.l.l d'you do that for?'

'We had something called the recession, I don't know if it ever came your way,' said Pendel, incongruously recalling the days when, if he only had three customers, he would book them back-to-back at half-hour intervals in order to create an air of flurry.

'What were you doing? Playing the Stock Exchange?'

'With the advice of my expert banker, yes.'

'Your expert banker specialise in bankruptcy sales or something?'

'I expect so.'

'And it was Louisa's lolly, right?'

'Her dad's. Half her dad's. She's got a sister, hasn't she.'

'What about the police?'

'What police?'

'Pans. Local whoosies.'

'What's it to them?' Pendel's voice had finally unlocked itself and was running free. 'I pay my taxes. Social Security. I do my worksheets. I haven't gone bust yet. Why should they care?'

'Thought they might have dug up your record. Invited you to fork out a little hush-money. Wouldn't want 'em chucking you out because you couldn't pay your bribes, would we?'

Pendel shook his head, then laid his palm on the top of it, either to pray or to make sure it was still on his body. After that he took on the posture dinned into him by his Uncle Benny before he went to jail.

'You've got to drucken yourself, Harry boy,' Benny had insisted, using an expression Pendel never heard before or since from anyone but Benny. 'Dress yourself in. Go small. Don't be anybody, don't look at anybody. It bothers them, same as being pathetic. You're not even a fly on the wall. You're part of the wall.'

But quite soon he grew tired of being a wall. He lifted his head and blinked round the fitting room, waking up in it after his first night. He remembered one of Benny's more mystifying confessions and decided that he finally understood it: Harry boy, my trouble is, everywhere I go, I come too and spoil it.

'What are you, then?' Pendel demanded of Osnard with a stirring of truculence.

'I'm a spy. Spy for Merrie England. We're reopening Panama.'

'What for?'

'Tell you over dinner. What time d'you close the shop on Fridays?'

'Now, if I want. Surprised you had to ask.'

'What about home? Candles. Kiddush. Whatever you do?'

'We don't. We're Christian. Where it hurts.'

'You're a member of the Club Union, right?'

'Just.'

'Just what?'

'I had to buy the rice farm before they'd make me a member. They don't take Turco tailors but Mick farmers are all right. Long as they've got twenty-five grand for the membership.'

'Why did you join?'

To his amazement Pendel found he was smiling beyond what was normal to him. A crazy smile, forced out of him by astonishment and terror maybe, but a smile for all that, and the relief it brought him was like discovering he still had the use of his limbs.

'I'll tell you something, Mr Osnard,' he said with a rush of companionability. 'It's a mystery to me yet to be resolved. I'm impetuous and sometimes I'm grandiose with it. It's my failing. My Uncle Benjamin you mentioned just now always dreamed of owning a villa in Italy. Perhaps I did it to please Benny. Or it could have been to give two fingers to Mrs Porter.'

'Don't know her.'

'The Probation Officer. A very serious lady who thought I was destined for the bad.'

'Go to the Club Union for dinner ever? Take a guest?'

'Very rarely. Not in my present state of economic health, I'll put it that way.'

'If I'd ordered ten suits instead o' two and I was free for dinner, would you take me there?'

Osnard was pulling on his jacket. Best to let him do it for himself, thought Pendel, restraining his eternal impulse to be of service.

'I might. It depends,' he replied cautiously.

'And you'd ring Louisa. "Darling, great news, I've flogged ten suits to a mad Brit and I'm buying him dinner at the Club Union." '

'I might.'

'How would she take it?'

'She varies.'

Osnard slipped a hand into his jacket, drew out the brown envelope that Pendel had already glimpsed and handed it to him.

'Five grand on account o' two suits. No need for a receipt. More where it came from. Plus a couple o' hundred extra for the nosebag.'

Pendel was still wearing his fly-fronted waistcoat so he slipped the envelope into the hip pocket of his trousers where his notebook was.

'In Panama everyone knows Harry Pendel,' Osnard was saying. 'Hide somewhere, they'll see us hiding. Go somewhere you're known, they won't think twice about us.'

They were face to face again. Seen closer, Osnard's was lit with suppressed excitement. Pendel, always quick to empathise, felt himself brighten in its glow. They went downstairs so that he could call Louisa from his cutting room while Osnard tested his weight on a furled umbrella marked 'as carried by the Queen's Brigade of Guards'.

'You and you alone know, Harry,' Louisa said into Pendel's hot left ear. Her mother's voice. Socialism and Bible School.

'Know what, Lou? What am I supposed to know?' - jokey, always hoping for a laugh. 'You know me, Lou. I don't know anything. I'm dead ignorant.'

On the telephone she could hand out pauses like prison time.

'You alone, Harry, know what it is worth to you to desert your family for the night and go to your club and amuse yourself among other men and women instead of being a presence to those who love you, Harry.'

Her voice dropped into tenderness and he nearly died for her. But as usual she couldn't do the tender words.

'Harry?' - as if she were still waiting for him.

'Yes, darling?'

'You have no call to blandish me, Harry,' she retorted, which was her way of saying 'darling' back. But whatever else she was proposing to say, she didn't say it.

'We've got the whole weekend, Lou. It's not as if I was doing a bunk or something.' A pause as wide as the Pacific. 'How was old Ernie today? He's a great man, Louisa. I don't know why I tease you about him. He's right up there with your father. I should be sitting at his feet.'

It's her sister, he thought. Whenever she gets angry, it's because she's jealous of her sister for putting herself about.

'He's given me five thousand dollars on account, Lou' - begging her approval - 'cash in my pocket. He's lonely. He wants a bit of company. What am I supposed to do? Shove him out into the night, tell him thank you for buying ten suits from me, now go out and find yourself a woman?'

'Harry, you don't have to tell him anything of the kind. You are welcome to bring him home to us. If we are not acceptable, then please do what you must do and don't punish yourself for it.'