‘Harry.’
‘Mr Blüthner, sir, always a pleasure,’
It’s the same every time. The enigmatic smile, the formal handshake, the waterproof respectability and no mention of Louisa. Except that on this day the smile is sadder and the handshake longer and Mr Blüthner is wearing a black tie from stock.
‘Your Uncle Benjamin was a great man,’ he says, patting Pendel’s shoulder with his powdery little claw.
‘A giant, Mr B.’
‘Your business prospers, Harry?’
‘I’m fortunate, Mr B.’
‘You don’t worry that the world gets warmer all the time? Soon nobody will buy your jackets?’
‘When God invented the sun, Mr Blüthner, he was wise enough to invent air-conditioning.’
‘And you would like to meet some friends of mine,’ says Mr Blüthner, with a twinkly smile.
Mr Blüthner in Colón is several degrees racier than his familiar on the Pacific side.
‘I don’t know why I ever put it off,’ says Pendel.
On other days they would have taken the back stairs to the textiles department for Pendel to admire the new alpacas. But today it’s the crowded streets they take to, Mr Blüthner leading at a good snap until, sweating like stevedores, they arrive before an unmarked door. Mr Blüthner holds a key in his hand, but first he must give Pendel a roguish wink.
‘You don’t mind we sacrifice a virgin, Harry? Tarring and feathering a few schwartzers not going to be a problem to you?’
‘Not if it’s what Benny would have wanted for me, Mr Blüthner.’
Having darted a conspiratorial glance up and down the pavement, Mr Blüthner turns his key and gives the door a vigorous shove. It is a year ago or more, but it is here and now. On the gardenia wall in front of him Pendel sees the same door open, and the same pitch blackness beckon.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
From bouncing sunlight Pendel followed his host into darkest night, lost him and stood still, waiting for his eyes to make the change, smiling in case he could be seen. Whom would he meet, in what weird attire? He sniffed the air but, instead of incense or warm blood, smelt old tobacco smoke and beer. Then gradually the instruments of the torture chamber came floating forward to present themselves: bottles behind a bar, a mirror behind the bottles, an Asian barman of great age, a cream-coloured piano with cavorting girls daubed on its raised lid, wooden fans puttering from the ceiling, a high window and a cord to open it, broken off short. And last, because they gleamed the least, Pendel’s fellow-searchers for the Light, dressed, not in zodiacal robes and conical hats, but in the drab fatigues of Panamanian commerce: white short-sleeved shirts, buckled trousers under brick-layer bellies, loosened neckties patterned in red cauliflower.
Several faces were known to him from the humbler fringes of the Club Unión: Dutch Henk, whose wife had recently bolted to Jamaica with his savings and a Chinese drummer, tiptoeing gravely towards him with a frosted pewter tankard in each hand – ‘Harry, our Brother, we are proud you have at last arrived among us’ – as if Pendel had trekked across the polders to get to him. Olaf, Swedish shipping agent and drunk, with pebble spectacles and a wire-wool hairpiece, yelling in his cherished Oxford accent that wasn’t one: ‘I say, Brother Harry, old chap, good show, cheers.’ Belgian Hugo, self-styled scrap-metal merchant and former Congo hand, offering Pendel ‘something very special from your old country’ out of a shaking silver hip flask.
No tethered virgins, no bubbling tar barrels or terrified schwartzers: just all the other reasons why Pendel had never joined till now, the same old cast in the same old play, with ‘What’s your poison, Brother Harry?’ and ‘Let’s fill that up for you, Brother,’ and ‘What took you so long to come to us, Harry?’ Until Mr Blüthner himself, adorned in a Beefeater’s cape and mayoral chain, sounded two hoarse blasts on a dented English hunting horn, and a pair of double doors was kicked open to admit a column of Asian porters with trays above their heads marching into the room at punishment speed to a chant of ‘Hold him down, you Zulu warrior’ led by none other than Mr Blüthner himself who, as Pendel was beginning to understand, was retrieving certain elements that had gone missing from his early life, such as delinquency in adolescence.