‘My question being, Mr Osnard, what are the current uses of your tagua today?’ he demanded with even more than his customary vigour. ‘Ornamental chess sets? I’ll give you chess sets. Carved artefacts? Right, again. Our earrings, our costume jewellery, we’re getting warm – but what else? What possible other use is there which is traditional, which is totally forgotten in our modern age, and which we here at P&B have at some cost to ourselves revived for the benefit of our valued clients and the posterity of future generations?’
‘Buttons,’ Osnard suggested.
‘Answer, of course, our buttons. Thank you,’ said Pendel, drawing to a halt before another door. ‘Indian ladies,’ he warned, dropping his voice. ‘Cunas. Very sensitive, if you don’t mind.’
He knocked, opened the door, stepped reverently inside and beckoned his guest to follow. Three Indian women of indeterminate age sat stitching jackets under the beam of angled lamps.
‘Meet our finishing hands, Mr Osnard,’ he murmured, as if fearful of disturbing their concentration.
But the women did not seem half as sensitive as Pendel was, for they at once looked up cheerfully from their work and gave Osnard broad, appraising grins.
‘Our buttonhole to our tailormade suit, Mr Osnard, is as our ruby to our turban, sir,’ Pendel pronounced, still at a murmur. ‘It’s where the eye falls, it’s the detail that speaks for the whole. A good buttonhole doesn’t make a good suit. But a bad buttonhole makes a bad suit.’
‘To quote dear old Arthur Braithwaite,’ Osnard suggested, copying Pendel’s low tone.
‘Indeed, sir, yes. And your tagua button, which prior to the regrettable invention of plastic was in wide use across the continents of America and Europe and never bettered in my opinion is, thanks to P&B, back in service as the crowning glory of our fully tailored suit.’
‘That Braithwaite’s idea too?’
‘The concept was Braithwaite’s, Mr Osnard,’ said Pendel, passing the closed door of the Chinese jacket-makers and deciding for no reason except panic to leave them undisturbed. ‘The putting it into effect, there I claim the credit.’
But while Pendel was at pains to keep the movement going, Osnard evidently preferred a slower pace for he had leaned a bulky arm against the wall, blocking Pendel’s progress.
‘Heard you dressed Noriega in his day. True?’
Pendel hesitated, and his gaze slipped instinctively down the corridor towards the door to Marta’s kitchen.
‘What if I did?’ he said. And for a moment his face stiffened with mistrust, and his voice became sullen and toneless. ‘What was I supposed to do? Put up the shutters? Go home?’
‘What did you make for him?’
‘The General was never what I call a natural suit-wearer, Mr Osnard. Uniforms, he could fritter away whole days pondering his variations. Boots and caps the same. But resist it how he would, there were times when he couldn’t escape a suit.’
He turned, trying to will Osnard into continuing their progress down the corridor. But Osnard did not remove his arm.
‘What sort o’ times?’
‘Well, sir, there was the occasion when the General was invited to deliver a celebrated speech at Harvard University, you may remember, even if Harvard would prefer you didn’t. Quite a challenge he was. Very restless when it came to his fittings.’
‘Won’t be needing suits where he is now, I dare say, will he?’
‘Indeed not, Mr Osnard. It’s all provided, I’m told. There was also the occasion when France awarded him its highest honour and appointed him a Legionnaire.’
‘Hell did they give him that for?’
The lighting in the corridor was all overhead, making bullet holes of Osnard’s eyes.
‘A number of explanations come to mind, Mr Osnard. The most favoured is that, for a cash consideration, the General permitted the French Airforce to use Panama as a staging point when they were causing their unpopular nuclear explosions in the South Pacific.’
‘Who says?’
‘There was a lot of loose talk around the General sometimes. Not all his hangers-on were as discreet as he was.’
‘Dress the hangers-on too?’
‘And still do, sir, still do,’ Pendel replied, once more his cheerful self. ‘We did endure what you might call a slight low directly after the US invasion when some of the General’s higher officials felt obliged to take the air abroad for a time, but they soon came back. Nobody loses his reputation in Panama, not for long, and Panamanian gentlemen don’t care to spend their own money in exile. The tendency is more to recycle your politician rather than disgrace him. That way, nobody gets left out too long.’