The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

‘Harry, they have it all worked out. Everything is pin-point. Everything is high-tech. The new weaponry can select a single window from a distance of many miles. They do not bomb civilians any more. Kindly come indoors.’

But Pendel could not have gone indoors although in many ways he wanted to because once again his legs wouldn’t work. Each time he set fire to the world, or killed a friend, he now realised, they ceased to function. And there was a big blaze forming over El Chorrillo, with black smoke coming out of the top of the blaze – though, like the cats, the smoke wasn’t black all over, being red underneath from the flames and silver on the top from the magnesium flares in the sky. This gathering blaze held Pendel fixed in its stare and he couldn’t move his eyes or legs an inch in any other direction. He had to stare it back and think of Mickie.

‘Harry, I wish to know where you are going, please!’

So do I. Nevertheless her question puzzled him until he realised that he was after all walking, not towards Louisa or the children but away from her, and away from the shame of them, that he was on a hard road going downhill in long strides following the path that Pete’s Mercedes pram had taken when it set off on its own, although with the back of his head he was longing to turn round, run up the hill and embrace his children and his wife.

‘Harry, I love you. Whatever you’ve done wrong, I’ve done worse. Harry, I do not mind what you are or who you are or what you’ve done or who to. Harry, stay here.’

He was walking in long steps. The steep hill was hitting the heels of his shoes, making him jolt, and it’s a thing about going downhill and losing height that it gets harder and harder and harder to turn back. Going downhill was so seductive. And he had the road to himself because generally during an invasion those who aren’t out looting stay indoors and try to telephone their friends, which was what the people were doing in their lighted windows as he strode past. And sometimes they got through to them because their friends, like themselves, inhabited areas where normal services are not disturbed in time of war. But Marta couldn’t telephone anybody. Marta lived among people who, if only spiritually, came from the other side of the bridge, and for them war was a serious and even fatal obstruction to the conduct of their daily lives.

He kept walking and wanting to turn back but not doing it. He was distracted in his head and needed to find a way of turning exhaustion into sleep, and maybe that was what death was useful for. He would have liked to do something that would last, like have Marta’s head in his neck again, and her other breast in his hand, but his trouble was, he felt unsuited to companionship and preferred his own society to anybody else’s on the grounds that he caused less havoc when he was safely isolated, which was what the judge had told him and it was true, and was what Mickie had also told him and it was even truer.

Definitely he no longer cared about suits, his own or anyone else’s. The line, the form, the rock of eye, the silhouette, were of no concern to him any more. People must wear what they liked and the best people didn’t have a choice, he noticed. A lot of them got by perfectly well with a pair of jeans and a white shirt or a flowered dress that they washed and rotated all their lives. A lot of them had not the least idea of what rock of eye meant. Like these people running past him, for instance, with bleeding feet and wide-open mouths, shoving him out of the way and shouting ‘Fire!’ and screaming like their own children. Screaming ‘Mickie!’ and ‘You bastard, Pendel.’ He looked for Marta among them but didn’t see her, and probably she had decided he was too sullied for her, too disgusting. He looked for the Mendozas’ metallic blue Mercedes in case it had decided to change sides and join the terrified mob, but he saw no sign of it. He saw a fire hydrant that had been amputated at the waist. It was gushing black blood all over the street. He saw Mickie a couple of times but didn’t get so much as a nod of recognition out of him.

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