Then he backed the car a short distance away from Mickie and wasn’t at all sure why he did that except that he didn’t want such a bright glare on what he was about to do, he wanted Mickie to have some privacy for the occasion and some kind of natural sanctity, even if it was of a primitive, you could say primeval kind, here in the centre of an eleven-thousand-year-old Indian encamp-ment strewn with arrowheads and cutting flints that Louisa said the children could collect but then put back, because there’d be none left if everybody who came here took one; here in a desert made by man and mangrove trees, so salinated that even the earth itself was dead.
Having moved the car he walked back to the body, knelt to it and tenderly unwound the bandages until Mickie’s face looked much as it had looked on the kitchen floor except a little older, a little cleaner and, in Pendel’s imagination at least, more heroic.
Mickie, boy, that face of yours is going to hang where it deserves, in the hall of martyrs in the Presidential Palace once Panama is freed of all the things you didn’t like, he told Mickie in his heart. Plus I’m very sorry, Mickie, that you ever met me, because no one should.
He’d have liked to say something aloud but all his voices were internal. So he took a last look round and, seeing nobody who might object, he fired two shots as lovingly as if he were firing a humane killer into a sick pet, one shot below the left shoulder blade and one below the right. Lead poisoning, Andy, he was thinking, remembering his dinner with Osnard at the Club Unión. The professional three shots. One to the head, two to the body, and what was left of him all over the front pages.
With the first shot he was thinking: this is for you, Mickie.
And with the second he was thinking: this is for me.
Mickie had done the third for him already, so for a while Pendel just stood still with the gun in his hand, listening to the sea and the silence of Mickie’s opposition.
Then he took Mickie’s jacket off and returned to the car with it and drove about twenty yards before chucking the jacket out of the window, in the way any professional killer might when he finds to his irritation that, having bound his man and killed him and dumped him in your requisite deserted spot, he’s still got his damned jacket in the car, the one he was wearing when I shot him, so he dumps that too.
Returning to Chitré, he drove the empty streets searching for a telephone box that wasn’t occupied by drunks or lovers. He wanted his friend Andy to be the first to know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The enigmatic depletion of the staff of the British Embassy in Panama in the days leading up to Operation Safe Passage raised a small storm in the British and international press and became an excuse for more general debate about Britain’s behind-the-scenes role in the US invasion. Latin American opinion was unanimous. YANQUI STOOGE! screamed Panama’s doughty La Prensa, over a year-old photograph of Ambassador Maltby sheepishly shaking hands with the General in charge of US Southern Command at some forgotten reception or other. Back in England opinion at first divided on predictable lines. While the Hatry press described the diplomatic exodus as a ‘brilliantly masterminded Pimpernel operation in the best tradition of the Great Game’ and ‘a secret subtext we must never be allowed to know’, its competitors cried COWARDS! and accused the government of base collusion with the worst elements of the North American Right, of exploiting ‘presidential frailties’ in an election year, of pandering to anti-Japanese hysteria and aiding and abetting US colonial ambitions at the expense of Britain’s ties with Europe, all in the cause of bolstering a pitiful and discredited Prime Minister in the run-up to the general election and appealing to the most discreditable elements of the British national character.
While the Harry press favoured front page colour photographs of the Prime Minister shuttling his way to glory in Washington – MODEST BRITISH LION SHOWS TEETH – its competitors challenged Britain’s ‘vicarious imperial fantasies’ under the double banner of THE FACTS AND THE FALLACY and WHILE THE REST OF EUROPE BLUSHES and compared the ‘trumped-up charges against the Panamanian and Japanese governments’ with deliberate contrivances published by the Hearst press in order to justify an aggressive US posture in what became the Spanish-American war.