The participation of a minuscule British token force in the invasion, unnoticed outside the United Kingdom, was a cause for national rejoicing. The better churches flew the flag of St George and schoolchildren not already truant were awarded a day’s holiday. Regarding Pendel, the very mention of his name was the subject of a grand-slam gagging order observed by every patriotically-minded newspaper and television network in the land. Such is the fate of secret agents everywhere.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was night and they were sacking Panama again, setting fire to its towers and hovels, terrifying its animals and children and womenfolk with cannon fire, cutting down the men in the street and getting it all over by morning. Pendel stood on the balcony where he had stood the last time, watching without thinking, hearing but not feeling, druckening himself without stooping, atoning without moving his lips, just as his Uncle Benny had atoned into his empty tankard, word for sacred word:
Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee… Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us… We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within… We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
From inside the house Louisa was yelling again but Pendel wasn’t really bothered. He was listening to the shrieks of the bats that were wheeling and protesting in the darkness above him. He loved bats and Louisa hated them and it always scared him when people hated things unreasonably because you never knew where it would end. A bat is ugly, therefore I hate it. You are ugly, therefore I will kill you. Beauty, he decided, was a bully, and perhaps that was why, although he was by trade a beautifier, he had always regarded Marta’s disfigurement as a force for good.
‘Come inside,’ Louisa was screaming. ‘Come inside now, Harry, for the love of God. Do you think you’re invulnerable or something?’
Well, he would have liked to come inside, he was a family man at heart, but the love of God was not on Pendel’s mind tonight, neither did he consider himself invulnerable. Quite the reverse. He considered himself wounded without cure. As to God – He was as bad as anyone else at not being able to end what He had started. So instead of coming inside, Pendel preferred to hang around on the balcony, away from the accusing glances and too-much knowledge of his children and the scolding tongue of his wife, and the unleavable memory of Mickie’s suicide, and watch the neighbours’ cats charging in tight order from left to right across his lawn. Three were tabby, one was ginger and by the daylight of the magnesium flares that burned without getting any lower – you could see them in their natural colours instead of the black that cats should be at night.
There were other things that interested Pendel intensely amid the mayhem and the din. The way Mrs Costello in number twelve went on playing Uncle Benny’s piano, for example, which was what Pendel would have done if he could play and had inherited the piano. To be able to hold onto a piece of music with your fingers when you’re terrified out of your wits – that must be a truly wonderful way of keeping a grip on yourself. And her concentration was amazing. Even from this distance he could see how she closed her eyes and moved her lips like a rabbi to the notes she was playing on her keyboard, the way Uncle Benny used to while Auntie Ruth put her hands behind her back and pushed her chest out and sang.
Then there was the Mendozas’ enormously cherished metallic blue Mercedes from number seven, which was rolling down the hill because Pete Mendoza had been so glad to get home before the attack that he had left the car in neutral with the handbrake off, and the car had gradually woken up to this. I’m sprung, it said to itself. They’ve left the cell door open. All I have to do is walk. So it started walking, first lumbering like Mickie and, like Mickie perhaps, hoping very much for the chance collision that would change his life but, in its despair, running at full gallop, and Heaven alone knew where it would finish up or at what speed, or what collateral damage it might cause before it stopped, or whether by some freak of German over-engineering the pram sequence from some Russian film that Pendel had forgotten the name of had been programmed into one of its sealed units.