The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

‘Well, I think, Ben – the best thing in this case – is to let Brother Van read it in your newspapers,’ said Caven-dish in a series of dancing little phrases. ‘Do excuse me, I’m so sorry,’ he added to Johnson, stepping over his feet. ‘Must just telephone.’

He said sorry to the waiter too and took his double damask napkin with him in his haste. And Johnson not long afterwards was sacked, nobody was ever quite sure why. Ostensibly, it was for riding around London with a decoded text that was complete with all its symbols and operational codenames. Unofficially, he was held to be a little too excitable for secret work. But probably it was barging into the Connaught Grill Room in a sports coat that was held to be the most grave of these offences.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

To reach the firework festival at Guararé in the Panamanian province of Los Santos which forms part of a stunted peninsula on the south-west tip of the Gulf of Panama, Harry Pendel drove by way of Uncle Benny’s house in Leman Street that smelt of burning coal, the Sisters of Charity orphanage, several East End synagogues and a succession of grossly overcrowded British penal institutions under the generous patronage of Her Majesty the Queen. All these establishments and others lay in the jungle blackness either side of him and on the pitted winding road ahead of him, on hilltops cut against a star-strewn sky and on the steel-grey ironing-board of the Pacific under a very clean new moon.

The difficult drive was made harder for him by the clamour of his children demanding songs and funny voices from the back of the four-track and by the well-meant exhortations of his unhappy wife which rang in his ears even on the most desolate parts of his journey: go slower, watch out for that deer, monkey, buck, dead horse, metre-long green iguana or family of six Indians on one bicycle, Harry, I do not understand why you have to drive at seventy miles an hour to keep an appointment with a dead man, and if it’s the fireworks you’re afraid of missing, you should please to know that the festival continues for five nights and five days and this is the first night and if we don’t get there till tomorrow the children will entirely understand.

To this was added Ana’s unbroken monologue of grief, the terrible forbearance of Marta asking him for nothing he wasn’t able to give, and the presence of Mickie, slumped huge and morose in the passenger seat beside him, riding up against him with his spongy shoulder whenever they negotiated a bend or bounced over a pot-hole, and asking him in a glum refrain why he didn’t make suits the way Armani did.

His feelings about Mickie were terrible and overwhelming. He knew that in all of Panama and in all his life he had only ever had one friend, and now he had killed him. He saw no difference any more between the Mickie he had loved and the Mickie he had invented, except that the Mickie he had loved was better, and the Mickie he had invented was some sort of mistaken homage, an act of vanity on Pendel’s part: to create a champion out of his best friend, to show Osnard what grand company he kept. Because Mickie had been a hero in his own right. He had never needed Pendel’s fluence. Mickie had stood up and been counted when it mattered as a reckless opponent of the tyranny. He had richly earned his beatings and imprisonment, and his right to be drunk for ever after. And to buy however many fine suits he needed to take away the scratch and stink of prison uniform. It was not Mickie’s fault that he was weak where Pendel had painted him strong, or that he had given up the struggle where Pendel’s fictions had painted him continuing it. If only I’d left him alone, he thought. If only I’d never fiddled with him, then chewed his head off because I had the guilts.

Somewhere at the foot of Ancón Hill he had filled the four-track with enough petrol to last him the rest of his life and given a dollar to a black beggar with white hair and one ear eaten off by leprosy or a wild animal or a disenchanted wife. At Chame, through sheer inattention, he shot a Customs roadblock, and at Penonome he became aware of a pair of lynxes riding on his left tail-light – lynxes being young, very slim US-trained policemen in black leather who ride two to a motorcycle, carry submachine-guns and are famous for being polite to tourists and killing muggers, dopers and assassins – but tonight, it seemed, also murderous British spies. The lynx in front does the driving, the lynx on the pillion does the killing, Marta had explained to him, and he remembered this as they pulled alongside and he saw the fish-eye reflection of his own face floating among the streetlights in the liquid blackness of their visors. Then he remembered that lynxes only operated in Panama City and he fell to wondering whether they were on a jaunt of some kind or whether they had followed him out here in order to shoot him in privacy. But he never had an answer to his question because when he looked again they had returned to the blackness they had sprung from, leaving him the pitted, twisting road, the dead dogs in his headlights and the bush that was so dense to either side you saw no tree trunks, just black walls and eyes of animals and, through the open sunroof, heard the exchange of insults between species. Once he saw an owl that had been crucified to an electricity pole and its breast and the inside of its wings were white as a martyr’s and its eyes were open. But whether it belonged to a recurring nightmare he had, or was the ultimate incarnation of it, remained a mystery.

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