The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

Twice he enquired after the way. Each time he was sent in a different direction. The first time a group of angels earnestly pointed him across the middle of the square, where he became the moving target for salvos of multi-warhead rockets fired at head height from windows and doorways on all four sides of him. And though he laughed and grinned and covered up and gave every sign of taking the joke in good part, it was actually a miracle that he reached the opposite bank with both eyes, ears and balls in place and not a burn on him, because the rockets were not a joke at all and there was no laughter to say they were. They were red-hot, high velocity missiles spewing molten flame, fired at short range under the guidance of a knobbly-knee’d, freckled, red-haired Amazon in frayed shorts who was the self-appointed mistress-gunner of a well-armed unit, and she was trailing her lethal rockets in a string like a tail behind her back while she lewdly pranced and gesticulated. She was smoking – what substance was anybody’s guess -and between puffs she was screaming orders to her troops around the square: ‘Cut his cock off, bring the gringo to his knees-‘ then another drag of cigarette smoke and the next command. But Pendel was a good chap and these were angels.

And the second time he asked the way he was shown a row of houses that lined one side of the square, with verandahs occupied by overdressed rabiblancos slumming it with their shiny BMWs parked alongside, and Pendel as he walked past one noisy verandah after another kept thinking: I know you, you’re so-and-so’s son, or daughter, my goodness how time passes. But their presence, when he thought about it more, did not concern him, neither did he care whether they spotted him in return, because the house where Mickie had shot himself was just a few doors along on his left, which was a very good reason to concentrate his thoughts exclusively on a sex-driven fellow-prisoner called Spider who’d hanged himself in his cell while Pendel was sleeping three feet away from him, Spider’s being the only dead body Pendel had had to handle at close quarters. So it was Spider’s fault in a way that Pendel in his distraction found that he had wandered into the middle of an informal police cordon consisting of a police car, a ring of bystanders and about twenty policemen who couldn’t possibly have all fitted into the car but, as policemen are wont to in Panama, had collected like gulls around a fishing boat the moment there was a smell of profit or excitement in the air.

The point of attraction was a dazed old peasant seated on the kerb with his straw hat between his knees and his face in his hands, and he was roaring a lament in gorilla-like gusts of rage. Gathered round him were some dozen advisors and spectators and consultants, including several drunks who needed one another’s support to remain upright, and an old woman presumably his wife who was loudly agreeing with the old man whenever he let her get a word in. And since the police were disinclined to clear a path through the group, and certainly not through their own ranks, Pendel had no option but to become a bystander himself though not an active participant in the debate. The old man was quite badly burned. Every time he took his hands from his face to make a point or rebut one it was easy to see he had been burned. A large patch of skin was missing from his left cheek and the wound extended southward into the open neck of his collarless shirt. And because he was burned, the police were proposing to take him to the local hospital where he would receive an injection which, as everyone agreed, was the appropriate remedy for a burn.

But the old man didn’t want an injection and he didn’t want the remedy. He would rather have the pain than the injection, he would rather get blood poisoning and any other evil after-effect, than go with the police to the hospital. And the reason was, he was an old drunk and this was probably the last festival of his life and everyone knew that when you had an injection you couldn’t drink for the rest of the festival. He had therefore taken the conscious decision, of which his Maker and his wife were witness, to tell the police to shove the injection up their arses because he preferred to drink himself into a stupor, which would anyway take care of the pain. So he would be obliged if everyone got the hell out of his way please, including the police, and if they really wanted to do him a good turn, the best thing they could do was bring him a drink and another for his wife, a bottle of seco would be particularly welcome.

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