The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

‘Sure would,’ the Colonel breathed and shook his head at his linked hands.

‘Then do it, for Christ’s sake!’ Tug Kirby cried.

Elliot affected not to hear this. ‘The American people would like us to go in,’ he said. ‘They may not know it yet, but they soon will. The American people will want back what is rightfully theirs, and shouldn’t have been given away in the first place. Nobody is stopping us, Ben. We have the Pentagon, we have the will, the trained men, the technology. We have the Senate, we have Congress. We have the Republican party. We write foreign policy. We have a firm hold on the media in battle conditions. Last time round it was absolute, this time it will be more absolute than that. Nobody is stopping us except ourselves, Ben. Nobody, and that’s a fact.’

A moment’s common silence descended. Kirby was the first to break it.

‘Always takes a bit of courage to jump,’ he said gruffly. ‘Thatcher never wavered. Other chaps waver all the time.’

The silence returned.

‘Which is how canals get lost, I suppose,’ Cavendish suggested, but nobody laughed and the silence came back yet again.

‘You know something Van said to me just the other day, Geoff?’ said Elliot.

‘What’s that, old boy?’ said Cavendish.

‘Everybody who is not North American has a role for North America. Mostly they are people who have no role for themselves. Mostly they’re jerking off.’

‘General Van’s deep,’ said the Colonel.

‘Get on with it,’ said Hatry.

But Elliot took his time, resting his hands thoughtfully on his chest as if he were wearing a waistcoat and smoking a cheroot on his plantation.

‘Ben, we have no damn peg for this thing,’ he confessed, as one journalist to another. ‘No hook. We have a condition. We do not have a smoking gun. No raped US nuns. No dead US babies. We have rumours. We have maybes. We have your spook reports, unsubstantiated by our spook agencies at this time, because that’s the way we say it has to be. This is not the moment to turn out the State Department’s bleeding hearts, or put billboards screaming Hands Off Panama! at the White House railings. This is a moment for decisive action and having the national conscience adapt retrospectively. The national conscience will do that. We can help it. You can help it, Ben.’

‘I said I would. I will.’

‘But what you cannot give us is a peg,’ Elliot said. ‘You cannot rape nuns. You cannot massacre babies for us.’

Kirby let out a misplaced guffaw of laughter. ‘Don’t you be so sure about that, Elliot,’ he cried. ‘You don’t know our Ben the way we do. What? What?’

But all he got for applause was a pained frown from the Colonel.

‘Of course you’ve got a fucking peg,’ Ben Hatry retorted caustically.

‘Name it,’ Elliot said.

‘The denials, for fuck’s sake.’

‘What denials?’ said Elliot.

‘Everyone’s. The Panamanians will deny it, the Frogs will deny it, the Japs will deny it. So they’re liars, the same as Castro was a liar. Castro denies his Russian rockets, so you go in. The Canal conspirators deny their conspiracy, so in you go again.’

‘Ben, those rockets were there,’ said Elliot. ‘We had pictures of those rockets. We had a smoking gun. We have no smoking gun for this scenario. The American people got to see justice done. Talk doesn’t do it. Never did. We need a smoking gun. The President will need a smoking gun. If he doesn’t get one, he won’t swing.’

‘We don’t happen to have a few happy snaps of Jap engineers in false beards digging a second canal by flash-light, do we, Ben?’ Cavendish asked facetiously.

‘No, we fucking don’t,’ Hatry retorted, never raising his voice but never needing to. ‘So what are you going to do, Elliot? Wait till the Japs give you a photo call at lunchtime on the 31st of December in the year of Our Lord nineteen fucking ninety-nine?’

Elliot was unmoved. ‘Ben, we don’t have one emotive argument that will play on our television screens. Last time round we got lucky. Noriega’s Dignity Battalions mishandled decent North American women in the streets of Panama City. Until then we were grounded. We had drugs. So we wrote drugs big. We had Noriega’s attitude problem. We wrote that big. We had his ugliness, and we wrote that big. Lot of people think ugly is immoral. We worked on that. We had his sexuality and his voodoo. We played the Castro card. But it wasn’t till decent North American women were harassed by disrespectful Hispanic soldiers in the name of dignity that the President felt obliged to send our boys in to teach them a little manners.’