‘Did they say what sort of spy?’
‘What other sorts are there?’
‘Real ones.’
The phone was ringing.
It rang above their heads, which telephones in Pendel’s life didn’t normally do, on an instrument that he always thought of as internal until he remembered that his Cuna women lived on the telephone, rejoiced in it, wept into it, hung on its every word as they listened to husbands, lovers, fathers, chiefs, children, headmen and an infinite number of relations with insoluble personal problems. And after the telephone had rung a while – for ever, in the arbitrary measurements of his personal existence, but in the rest of the world four times – he noticed that Marta was no longer in his arms but standing, buttoning her blouse for decency while she prepared to take the call. And that she wished to know whether he was here or somewhere else, a thing she always asked if a call appeared inconvenient. Then a stubbornness took hold of him and he stood up also, with the result that they were close again, as they had been when they were lying down.
‘I am here and you are not,’ he said emphatically into her ear.
Not a trick, not an affectation: just the protector in him speaking from the heart. As a precaution he then interposed himself between Marta and the telephone and by the pink glow of the skylight directly above him – a few stars had made it through the haze – he considered the instrument while it went on ringing, and tried to fathom its purpose. Think the worst threats first, Osnard had said in their training sessions. So he thought them and the worst threat seemed to be Osnard himself, so he thought Osnard. Then he thought the Bear. Then he thought the police. And then, because he had been thinking of her all along, he thought Louisa.
But Louisa wasn’t a threat. She was a casualty he had created long ago, in collaboration with her mother and father and Braithwaite and Uncle Benny and the Sisters of Charity and all the other people who made up the person he himself had become. And she didn’t threaten him so much as remind him of the mistaken nature of their relationship, and how it had gone so wrong in spite of all the care he had put into composing it, which was the mistake he had been thinking of: we shouldn’t compose relationships, but if we don’t, what else do we do?
So finally, when there was nothing much left to think about, Pendel reached for the telephone and picked it up at much the same moment that Marta picked up his other hand and held its knuckles to her lips and bared teeth, investing them with light, swift, reassuring bites. And her gesture roused him in some way for, with the phone to his ear he straightened instead of druckening himself, and spoke in a bold, clear, not to say playful Spanish voice designed to show that there was fight in him yet, not just an endless submission to circumstance.
‘Pendel & Braithwaite here! Good evening and how can we be of service to you?’
But if his gay humour was subconsciously intended to draw his attacker’s sting, it failed miserably because the shooting had already begun. The first incoming rounds reached him before he had finished speaking: a pattern of deliberate, ascending single explosions interspersed with the chatter of light machineguns, grenades and the short triumphant whine of ricochets. So for a second or two Pendel assumed it was the invasion all over again; except that this time he had agreed to keep Marta company in El Chorrillo, which was why she was kissing his hand. Then over the sounds of shooting came the predictable whimpering of victims, echoing in a make-shift shelter of some kind, accusing and protesting and cursing and demanding, choked with horror and outrage, begging for everything from compensation to God’s forgiveness, until gradually all these voices became one voice, and it belonged to Ana, chiquilla to Mickie Abraxas, childhood friend to Marta and the one woman left in Panama who would put up with him, and clean him when he was sick from too much of whatever he had been taking, and listen to his ramblings.