Hiatus while a volunteer is looked for.
‘The Yanks,’ said somebody bold, and paid the price:
‘Bullshit, Yanks! Haven’t you heard of flags of fucking convenience now sanctified by the delightful and harmless title of Open Registries? Who owns the convenience? The Japs and the Chinese. Which bastard’s going to be building the next generation of Canal-going ships?’
‘The Japs,’ someone whispered.
A shaft of divine sunlight fights its way through the window of Pendel’s cutting room and settles like a white dove on his head. Jonah’s voice becomes sonorous. The fatuous expletives, like unneeded notes, fall away. ‘Who’s got the best high tech, the cheapest, fastest? Forget the Yankee big boys. It’s the Japs. Who’s got the best heavy machinery, the wiliest negotiators? The best engineering brains, the best skilled labour and organisers?’ he is declaiming in Pendel’s ear. ‘Who dreams night and day of commanding the world’s most prestigious gateway? Whose surveyors and engineers are at this very moment boring for soil samples a thousand feet underneath the estuary of the Caimito River? You think they’ve given up just because the Yanks came in and pasted the place? You think they’re going to kowtow to Uncle Sam, apologise for having had naughty thoughts about dominating world trade? The Japs? You think they’re tearing their kimonos about the ecological mayhem of joining two incompatible oceans that have never been introduced to each other? The Japs, when their own survival’s on the table? You think they’re going to back down because they’ve been told to? The Japs? This isn’t geopolitics, it’s combustion. All we’re doing is sitting here waiting for the bang.’
Somebody asks diffidently where the Chinese might figure in this scenario, Brother Jonah. It is Olaf again with his Oxford English undimmed: ‘I mean, good Heavens, Jonah old chap, don’t the Japanese hate the Chinese, and isn’t it a two-way thing, actually? Why should the Chinese stand by while the Japs help themselves to all the power and glory?’
Jonah in Pendel’s memory is by now nothing but tolerance and sweetness.
‘Because the Chinks want the same as the Japs, Olaf, my good friend. They want expansion. Wealth. Status. Recognition in the councils of the world. Respect for the yellow man. What do the Japs want of the Chinese? you are asking me. Allow me to explain. Firstly, they want them as their neighbours. After that they want them as buyers of Japanese goods. And after that again they want them as a source of cheap labour to manufacture the said goods. The Japs think the Chinks are a sub-species, you see, and the Chinese return the compliment. But for the time being, the Chinks and the Japs are blood brothers, and it is we, Olaf, the deluded round-eyes, who are destined to suck on the hind tit.’
The rest of what Jonah said that afternoon came to Pendel in garbled text. Not even the gardenia wall was equipped to repair the damage done to his memory by a combination of napalm and alcoholic substances. It took Benny’s ghost, standing at his elbow, to ad-lib the missing message:
…Harry boy, I’ll give it to you straight and haven’t I always? What we’ve got here is a very large con comparable to the boy who flogged the Eiffel Tower to interested buyers, a five-star plot big enough to send your friend Andy running to his bank manager, no wonder Mickie Abraxas has been keeping shtumm for his friends because it’s dynamite plus he owes them. Harry boy, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you’ve got more fluence in you than Paganini and Gigli together and all you ever needed was the right bus pulling up at the right stop on the right day and before you knew it you’d be on your way there, no waiting in the corridor like the rest of us, well this is the bus. We’re talking a quarter-mile wide, state-of-the-art, Japanese-built, sea-level canal from coast to coast, Harry boy, planned in deepest secrecy while the Yanks are bleating about new locks and having their heavy industrial mob muscling in on the action, just like the old days except they’re looking at the wrong canal. And the Top Pan lawyers and politicos and Club Unión as usual forming a tightly-knit group, up to their elbows in the till and thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam and milking the Japs rotten while they do it. Add in those wily Frogs Andy’s always on at you about, plus a nice touch of your Colombian drug money for sinister and Harry boy, the Gunpowder Plot isn’t in it, except who’s going to catch you with the matches in your hand this time? Answer – nobody. You’re asking me the price, Harry boy? “You’re telling me those Japs can’t afford it? The Japs can’t afford their own canal? How much did Osaka airport cost, then? Thirty billion used ones, Harry boy, is what I am reliably advised. A snip. Know how much a sea-level canal will cost? Three Osaka airports including legal fees and stamp duty. Harry, it’s the kind of money those boys leave under the plate. Treaties, you ask? Binding obligations on the Pans not to spoil the Canal for Uncle Sam? Harry boy, that was the old Canal. And that’s where the Pans will be depositing their binding obligations.