For having summoned everyone to table, Mr Blüthner placed himself at the centre of it and Pendel at his side and remained standing happily at attention, as they all did, while Dutch Henk delivered himself of a long, incomprehensible grace, the drift of which being that the company would be even more virtuous than it already was if it ate the food before it – a premise Pendel was inclined to question as he took his first fatal mouthful of the most character-changing curry that had come his way since Benny last whisked him round the corner for a nice touch of Mr Khan’s while your Auntie Ruth is doing her piety up the Daughters of Zion.
But no sooner had they sat than Mr Blüthner bounded to his feet again with two messages that were delightful to the company: our Brother Pendel making his first appearance among us here today – thunderous applause, interspersed with jocular obscenities, the company becoming by now mellow – and allow me to introduce a Brother who needs no introduction, so a big hand, please, for our wandering sage and longtime Servant of the Light, diver of the deep and explorer of the unknown, who has penetrated more dark places – dirty laughter – than any of us round this table today, the one and only, the irrepressible, the immortal Jonah, freshly returned from a triumphant wreck-raising expedition in the Dutch East Indies, of which some of you will have read. (Cries of ‘Where?’)
And Pendel, peering into his gardenia wall, could discover Jonah now as he did a year ago: crouched and cantankerous, with a yellowed complexion and lizard eyes, methodically provisioning his plate with the best of everything before him – red-hot pickles, spiced poppadoms and chapattis, chopped chili, nan bread, and an oozing speckled, red-brown lumpy substance that Pendel had already privately identified as unrefined napalm. Pendel could hear him too. Jonah, our wandering sage. The gardenia wall’s sound-system is faultless, even if Jonah has some difficulty making himself heard above the babel of smutty stories and fatuous toasts.
The next world war, Jonah was telling them, in thick Australian accents, would be played in Panama, the date had already been set, and you bastards had better bloody believe it.
The first to challenge this assertion was an emaciated South African engineer named Piet.
‘It’s been done, Jonah, old boy. Little fellow we had here called Operation Just Cause. George Bush waved his wimp factor at us. Thousands dead.’
Which in turn provoked indistinct enquiries along the lines of ‘What did you do in the invasion, Daddy?’ and responses of an equally intellectual kind.
Here a firefight of charge and countercharge burst from several quarters at once, to the innocent pleasure of Mr Blüthner whose smile switched from one speaker to the next as keenly as if he were following a great tennis match. But Pendel heard little above the clamour of his intestines, and by the time he was restored to partial consciousness, Jonah had turned his attention to the shortcomings of the Canal.
‘Modern shipping can’t use the fucker. Ore containers, supertankers, container ships are too big for it,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s a dinosaur,’
Olaf the Swede reminded the company that there was a plan to add more locks. Jonah treated this intelligence with the scorn it obviously deserved.
‘Oh dead on, squire, great idea. More fucking locks. Fantastic. Incredible. What, I wonder, will science do next? Let’s use the old French cut too, while we’re about it. And take a slice through the Rodman Navy Base. And sometime around 2020, with God’s grace and all the wonders of modernity, we’ll have a very slightly wider Canal, and a much longer transit time. I drink to you, squire. I stand up and raise my glass to progress in the twenty-first fucking century.’
And probably beyond the smoke Jonah did exactly that, for Pendel, as he watches the replay on the gardenia wall, has a high-fidelity memory of Jonah leaping to his feet but remaining exactly the same height until, with exaggerated ceremony, he raises his tankard and ducks his yellowed face into it, lizard eyes and all, so that for a second Pendel wonders whether he will ever surface again, but these divers know their trade.