‘That was Ana,’ he said. ‘Mickie’s killed himself.’
But of course she knew that. She’d had her face pressed against his face while they listened with the same ear, she’d recognised her friend’s voice from the first moment and it was only the strength of Pendel’s friendship with Mickie that had prevented her from snatching the receiver from his hand.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she said fervently. She repeated it several times in order to drive it into his thick skull. ‘He’d have done it anyway, whether you told him off or not, d’you hear? He didn’t need an excuse. He was killing himself every day. Listen to me.’
‘I am. I am.’
But he didn’t say: yes, it is my fault, because there seemed no point.
Then she began shivering like a malaria victim and if he hadn’t held her she’d have been on the floor like Mickie who was upside down.
‘I want you to go to Miami tomorrow,’ he said. He remembered a hotel that Rafi Domingo had told him about. ‘Stay at the Grand Bay. It’s in Coconut Grove. They do a marvellous buffet lunch,’ he added idiotically. And the fallback, the way Osnard had taught him: ‘If you can’t get in, ask the concierge if you can collect messages there. They’re nice people. Mention Rafi’s name.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ she repeated, weeping now. ‘They beat him too hard in prison. He was a child. Adults you can beat. Not children. He was fat. He had sensitive skin.’
‘I know,’ Pendel agreed. ‘We all have. We shouldn’t do it to each other. No one should.’
But his concentration had wandered to the row of suits awaiting the finishing hand, because the biggest and most prominent of them was Mickie’s houndstooth alpaca with a second pair of trousers, the ones he said made him look old before his time.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I can help you. I’ll look after Ana.’
He shook his head. Vehemently. He grabbed her arms and shook his head again. I betrayed him. You didn’t. I made him leader when you told me not to. He tried to say some of this, but his face must have been saying it already because she was recoiling from him, shaking herself free of him as if she didn’t care for what she saw.
‘Marta, are you listening? Listen and stop staring at me like that.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Thanks for the students and everything,’ he insisted. ‘Thanks for everything. Thanks. I’m sorry.’
‘You’ll need petrol,’ she said and gave him a hundred dollars back.
After which they stood there, two people swapping banknotes while their world was ending.
‘It was not necessary to thank me,’ she told him, slipping into a stern, retrospective tone. ‘I love you. Very little else is of consequence to me. Even Mickie.’
She seemed to have thought it through, for her body eased and the love had come back to her eyes.
It is the same night and the same hour exactly in the British Embassy in Calle 53 in Marbella, Panama City. The urgently convened meeting of the augmented Buchaneers has been running for an hour, though in Osnard’s cheerless, airless, windowless barrack in the east wing Francesca Deane has constantly to remind herself that nothing has changed in the ordinary procedures of the world, it is the same time outside the room as it is in here, whether or not, in the calmest and most reasonable way, we are plotting the arming and financing of a group of super-secret ruling-class Panamanian dissidents known as the Silent Opposition, and the raising and recruitment of militant students, and the overthrow of the legitimate government of Panama and the installation of a Provisional Committee of Administration pledged to wrest the Canal from the scheming dutches of an East-South conspiracy.
Men in secret conclave enter an altered state, thought Fran, as the only woman present, discreetly examining the faces squeezed round the too-small table. It’s in the shoulders, how they stiffen against the neck. It’s in the muscles round the jaw and the dirty shadows round the faster, lustful eyes. I’m the only black in a roomful of whites. Her eyes skimmed past Osnard without seeing him and she remembered the look in the face of the woman croupier in the third casino: So you’re his girl, it said. Well I’ll tell you something, darling. Your man and I get up to things you wouldn’t know about in your dirtiest dreams.