‘You know what they say, dear,’ Pendel replied, hold-ing up an earlobe and shaving beneath it. He shaved as others might paint, loving his bottles and brushes. ‘Panama’s not a country, it’s a casino. And we know the boys who run it. You work for one of them, don’t you?’
He had done it again. When his conscience was bad he couldn’t help himself any more than Louisa could help rising.
‘No, Harry, I do not. I work for Ernesto Delgado and Ernesto is not one of them. Ernesto is a straight arrow, he has ideals, he cherishes Panama’s future as a free and sovereign state in the community of nations. Unlike them he is not on the take, he is not carpetbagging his country’s inheritance. That makes him very special and very, very rare.’
Secretly ashamed of himself, Pendel turned on the shower and tested the water with his hand.
‘Pressure’s down again,’ he said brightly. ‘Serves us right for living on a hill.’
Louisa got out of bed and yanked her nightdress over her head. She was tall and long-waisted, with dark tough hair and the high breasts of a sportswoman. When she forgot herself she was beautiful. But when she remembered herself again, she stooped her shoulders and looked glum.
‘Just one good man, Harry,’ she persisted as she rammed her hair inside her showercap. ‘That’s all it takes to make this country work. One good man of Ernesto’s calibre. Not another orator, not another egomaniac, just one good Christian ethical man is all it takes. One decent capable administrator who is not corrupt, who can fix the roads and the drains and the poverty and the crime and the drugs and preserve the Canal and not sell it to the highest bidder. Ernesto sincerely wishes to be that person. It does not behove you or anybody else to speak ill of him,’
Dressing quickly, though with his customary care, Pendel hastened to the kitchen. The Pendels, like everyone else who was middle-class in Panama, kept a string of servants, but an unspoken puritanism dictated that the master of the family make breakfast. Poached egg on toast for Mark, bagel and cream cheese for Hannah. And passages by heart from The Mikado quite pleasantly sung because Pendel loved his music. Mark was dressed and doing his homework at the kitchen table. Hannah had to be coaxed from the bathroom where she was worrying about a blemish on her nose.
Then a helter-skelter of recrimination and farewells as Louisa, dressed but late for work at the Panama Canal Commission Administration Building, leaps for her Peugeot and Pendel and the kids take to the Toyota and set off on the school rat-run, left, right, left down the steep hillside to the main road, Hannah eating her bagel and Mark wrestling with homework in the bouncing four-track and Pendel saying sorry about the rush today, gang, I’ve got a bit of an early pow-wow with the money-boys, and privately wishing he hadn’t been cheap about Delgado.
Then a spurt on the wrong carriageway, courtesy of the morning operativo that allows city-bound commuters to use both lanes. Then a life-and-death scramble through charging traffic into small roads again, past North American-style houses very like their own to the glass-and-plastic village with its Charlie Pops and McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and the funfair where Mark had his arm broken by an enemy bumper car last Fourth of July, and when they got to the hospital it was full of kids with firework burns.
Then pandemonium while Pendel rummages for a spare quarter to give the black boy selling roses at the lights, then wild waving from all three of them for the old man who’s been standing at the same street corner for the last six months offering the same rocking-chair at two hundred and fifty dollars written on a placard round his neck. Side roads again, it’s Mark’s turn to be dropped first, join the stinking inferno of Manuel Espinosa Batista, pass the National University, sneak a wistful glance at leggy girls with white shirts and books under their arms, acknowledge the wedding-cake glory of the del Carmen Church – good morning, God – take your life in your hands across the Vía España, duck into the Avenida Federico Boyd with a sigh of relief, duck again into Vía Israel onto San Francisco, go with the flow to Paitilla airport, good morning again to the ladies and gentlemen of the drugs trade who account largely for the rows of pretty private aeroplanes parked among the trash, crumbling buildings, stray dogs and chickens, but rein back now, a little caution, please, breathe out, the rash of anti-Jewish bombings in Latin America has not passed unnoticed: those hard-faced young men at the gate of the Albert Einstein mean business, so watch your manners. Mark hops out, early for once, Hannah yells, ‘Forgot this, goofy!’ and chucks his satchel after him. Mark strides off, no demonstrations of affection allowed, not even a flap of the hand lest it be misinterpreted by his peers as wistful longing.