The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

He knew the very spot. Mickie, like Pendel, had loved the sea. Indeed, as Pendel surveyed his own life, it struck him belatedly that the sea had been the calming influence on his many warring gods, which was why Panama had been so peculiarly beneficial to him when he was living life before Osnard. ‘Harry boy, you can have your Hong Kong, your London or your Hamburg, I don’t care,’ Benny had vowed, showing him the isthmus on a Philip’s Pocket Atlas one visiting day: ‘Where else in the world can you get on an eleven bus and see the Great Wall of China one way and the Eiffel Tower the other?’ But Pendel from his cell window had seen neither. He had seen seas of different blues on either side of him, and escape in both directions.

A cow stood in the road with its head down. Pendel braked. Mickie slid stupidly forward and caught his neck under the seat belt. Pendel released him and let him slide to the floor. Mickie, I’m talking to you. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? With an ill grace the cow sidled out of the way. Green signs directed him to a nature reserve. There was the ancient tribal encampment, he remembered, there were the high dunes, there were the white rocks that Hannah said were stranded seashells. Then there was the beach. The road became a trail, the trail ran straight as a Roman road with high hedges like walls to either side. Sometimes the hedges put their hands together above him and prayed. Sometimes they fell away and showed him the special quiet sky you get above still seas. The new moon was trying hard to be larger than it really was. A chaste white haze had formed between its points. There were so many stars, they looked like powder.

The trail ended but he kept driving. Marvellous what a four-wheel drive can do. Giant cactuses rose like blackened soldiers either side of him. Halt! Get out! Put your hands on the roof! Papers! He drove on, passing a notice telling him not to. He wondered about tyre prints. They’ll trace the four-track. How? By looking at the tyres of every four-track in Panama? He wondered about foot-prints. My shoes. They’ll trace my shoes. How? He remembered the lynxes. He remembered Marta. They said you were a spy. They said Mickie was another. So did I. He remembered the Bear. He remembered Louisa’s eyes, too scared to ask the only question left: Harry, have you gone mad? The sane are madder than we’ll ever know, he thought. And the mad are a lot more sane than some of us would like to think.

He stopped the car slowly, looking at the ground as he drew up. He wanted iron hard. He had it. White, porous rock like lifeless coral that hadn’t shown a foot-print for a million years. He got out, leaving the head-lights on, went to the back of the four-track where he kept his tow-rope for wet weather. He hunted for the kitchen knife for long enough to panic, then remembered he had dropped it into the pocket of Mickie’s smoking jacket. He cut four feet of rope, went round to Mickie’s door, opened it, hauled him out and lowered him gently to the ground, upside down but no longer with his arse in the air because the journey had altered him, he preferred to lie more on his side and less on his great tummy.

Pendel took Mickie’s arms and bent them behind his back and set to work tying his wrists together: a double granny but neater. Meanwhile for his sanity he was thinking only practical matters. The jacket. What would they have done with the jacket? He fetched the jacket from the four-track and laid it over Mickie’s back, cape-like, the way he might have worn it. Then he took the gun out of his pocket and by the headlights established which position of the button was safe, and of course he had been carting it around all this time on ‘fire’ because that was how Mickie had left it, naturally enough. After blowing his brains out, he could hardly put the safety catch on.

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