‘Monsieur Guillaume, sir, greetings, slap on time as usual! Marta, a glass of the Scottish one for Monsieur.’
Guillaume comes from Lille. He is mousy and swift. By profession he is a consultant geologist who samples soil for prospectors. He has just returned from five weeks in Medellin in the course of which, he tells Pendel breathlessly, the city has played host to twelve reported kidnappings and twenty-one reported murders. Pendel is making him a fawn alpaca single-breasted with a waistcoat and the spare trousers. Artfully he steers the conversation towards the topic of Colombian politics.
‘I don’t see how that President of theirs dare show his face, quite frankly,’ he complains. ‘Not with all the scandals and the drugs.’
Guillaume takes a gulp of Scotch and blinks.
‘Harry, I thank God each day I live that I am a mere technician. I go in. I read the soil. I make my report. I get out. I go home. I have dinner. I make love to my wife. I exist.’
‘Plus you put in your very large fee,’ Pendel reminds him genially.
‘In advance,’ Guillaume agrees, nervously confirming his survival with the aid of the long mirror. ‘And first I bank it. If they want to shoot me, they know they waste their money.’
The only other participant to the meeting being the highly retiring top French geologist and freelance international consultant with close links to the Medellin cartel at the policy-making level, one Guillaume Delassus, esteemed in certain circles as a powerbroker without equal and the fifth most dangerous man in Panama.
And the other four prizes still to be awarded, he added to himself as he wrote.
Lunch-hour rush. Marta’s tuna sandwiches in heavy demand. Marta herself everywhere and nowhere, deliberately avoiding Pendel’s eye. Gusts of cigarette smoke and male laughter. Panamanians loving their fun, and doing it at P&B’s. Ramón Rudd has brought a handsome boy. Beer from the ice bucket, wine wrapped in frozen wadding, newspapers from home and abroad, portable telephones used for effect. Pendel in his triple element of tailor, host and master spy skipping between fitting room and clubroom, pausing in midflight to dash off innocent memoranda in the back of his notebook, hearing more than he listens to, remembering more than he hears. The old guard with new recruits in tow. Talk of scandal, horses, money. Talk of women and occasionally the Canal. Crash of the front door, noise level falls then rises, cries of ‘Rafi! Mickie!’ as the Abraxas-Domingo show sweeps in with its customary panache, the famous play-boy pair, reconciled once more, Rafi all gold chain, gold rings, gold teeth and Italian shoes, with a coat of many colours by P&B flung over his shoulders because Rafi hates dull, hates jackets unless they are outrageous, loves laughter, sunshine and Mickie’s wife.
And Mickie sullen and unhappy but hanging onto his friend Rafi for dear life, as if Rafi is the only bit left to him after he has drunk and squandered all the rest away. The two men enter the fray and separate, the crowd draws to Rafi while Mickie heads for the fitting room and his umpteenth new suit that has to be finer than Rafi’s, brighter than Rafi’s, costlier, cooler, more seductive – Rafi are you going to win the First Lady’s Gold Cup on Sunday?
Then suddenly the babel stops, whittled to one voice. It is Mickie’s, booming and hopeless emerging from the fitting room, announcing to the assembled company that his new suit is a piece of shit.
He says it one way, then repeats it another, straight into Pendel’s face, a challenge he would prefer to fling at Domingo but dare not, so he flings it at Pendel instead. Then he says it a third way because by now the gathering expects it of him. And Pendel not two feet from him, stone hard, waiting for him. On any other day Pendel would have side-stepped the onslaught, made a kindly joke, offered Mickie a drink, suggested he come back another time in a better mood, gentled him down the steps and poured him into a cab. The cellmates have played out such scenes before and Mickie has acknowledged them next day with expensive gifts of orchids, wine, precious huaca artefacts and craven hand-delivered notes of gratitude and apology.