Having smashed the door, Louisa homed on her husband’s desk and smashed open the top drawer with the hammer and chisel – three good heaves before she realised the drawer wasn’t locked in the first place. She ransacked the contents. Bills. Architect’s drawings for the Sportsman’s Corner. Nobody’s lucky first time. Not me anyway. She tried the second drawer. Locked, but surrenders at the first assault. The contents immediately more uplifting. Unfinished essays on the Canal. Learned journals, press cuttings, notes in Harry’s flowery tailor’s hand summarising the above. Who is she? Who the fuck is he doing it all for? Harry, I am speaking to you. Listen to me, please. Who is this woman whom you have installed at my rice farm without my consent and whom you need to impress with your non-existent erudition? Who owns this dreamy, cowlike smile you have these days – I am chosen, I am blessed, I walk on water. Or the tears – oh shit, Harry, who owns those bloodcurdling tears that form in your eyes and never fall?
Rage and frustration welling in her again, she smashed open another drawer and froze. Holy shit! Money! Serious, real money! A whole drawer crammed full of fucking money. Hundreds, fifties, twenties. Lying loose in the drawer like old parking tickets. A thousand. Two, three thousand. He’s been robbing banks. Who for?
For his woman? She does it for money? For his woman, to take her out to meals without it going through the housekeeping account? To keep her in the style she isn’t accustomed to, at my rice farm, bought with my legacy? Louisa tried shouting his name several times, first to ask him politely, then to order him because he wouldn’t answer, then to curse him because he wasn’t there.
‘Fuck you, Harry Pendel! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! Wherever you are. You’re a fucking cheat!’
It was fuck everything from now on. It was her father’s language when he’d had a skinful, and Louisa felt a daughter’s pride that, having had a skinful herself or getting that way, she swore like her fucking father.
‘Hey, Lou, sweetheart, come over here. Where’s that Titan?’ – he calls his daughter Titan after the giant German crane in Gamboa harbour – ‘Don’t an old man deserve a little attention from his daughter? Ain’t you got a kiss for your old man? Call that a kiss? Fuck you! Fuck you, hear me? Fuck you!’
Notes, mostly about Delgado. Distorted versions of things Harry had pumped her about over the dinners he liked to cook her. My Delgado. My beloved father-figure, Ernesto himself, probity on wheels, and my husband makes dirty notes about him. Why? Because he’s jealous of him. He always was. He thinks I love Ernesto more than I love him. He thinks I want to fuck Ernesto. Headings: Delgado’s Women – what women? Ernesto doesn’t do that stuff! Delgado and the Pres – Mr Osnard’s Pres again. Delgado’s Views on Japanese – Ernesto’s scared of them. Thinks they want his Canal. He’s right. She exploded again. Aloud this time: ‘Fuck you, Harry Pendel, I never said that, you’re making it up! Who for? Why?’
A letter, not completed, not addressed. A scrap he must have meant to throw away:
I thought you would like to hear a rather interesting snippet Louisa overheard at work yesterday regarding our Ernie and saw fit to pass on to me –
Saw fit? I didn’t see fit. I told him a piece of office gossip! Why the fuck does a wife have to see fit before she tells her husband a piece of office gossip in their own home about a benign, upright man who wishes only to do right by Panama and the Canal? Fuck fit! Fuck you – you who would like to hear what we see fit to tell each other in our own home! You’re a bitch. A foul-eared bitch who’s stolen my husband and my rice farm.
You’re Sabina!
Louisa had found the bitch’s name at last. In trim tailor’s capitals, because capitals came easiest to him, sabina written small and loving with a balloon drawn round her. SABINA, followed by RAD STUD in brackets. You’re Sabina and you’re a rad stud and you know about other studs and you work for dollar signs from the US – or think you do, because works for US is between inverted commas and you get five hundred bucks a month plus a bonus when you put on a great performance. It was all there, laid out in one of Harry’s flow-charts that he’d learned about from Mark. Flow-chart ideas don’t have to be linear, Dad. They can float about like gas balloons on strings in any order you like. You can take them singly or together. They’re really neat. The string from Sabina’s gas balloon led straight as a die to H which was Harry’s Napoleonic signature for himself when he was being grandiose. Whereas Alpha’s string – because now she had discovered Alpha – led to Beta, then to Marco (Pres) and only then back to H. The Bear’s string led to H too, but the Bear’s balloon had tense wavy lines drawn round it as if it were about to explode at any moment.