‘I asked you who else is in on it?’ Osnard was saying.
‘In on what?’
‘The con. Mantle o’ Saint Arthur falling on the infant Pendel’s shoulders. P&B, tailor to the royals. Thousand years o’ history. All that crap. Apart from your wife, of course.’
‘She isn’t in on it at all,’ Pendel exclaimed in naked alarm.
‘Doesn’t know?’
Pendel shook his head, mute again.
‘Louisa doesn’t? You’re conning her too?’
Keep shtumm, Harry boy. Shtumm’s the word.
‘How about your little local difficulty?’
‘Which one?’
‘Prison.’
Pendel whispered something he himself could barely hear.
‘Is that another no?’
‘Yes. No.’
‘She doesn’t know you did time? She doesn’t know about Uncle Arthur? Does she know the rice farm’s going down the tube?’
The same measurement again. Centre-back to wrist-bone, but with Osnard’s arms straight down. Passing the tape over his shoulder with wooden gestures.
‘No again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought it was joint-ownership.’
‘It is.’
‘But she still doesn’t know.’
‘I look after the money matters, don’t I?’
‘I’ll say you do. How much are you in for?’
‘Pushing a hundred grand.’
‘I heard it was nearer two hundred and rising.’
‘It is.’
‘Interest?’
‘Two.’
‘Two per cent quarterly?’
‘Monthly.’
‘Compound?’
‘Could be.’
‘Set against this place. Hell d’you do that for?’
‘We had something called the recession, I don’t know if it ever came your way,’ said Pendel, incongruously recalling the days when, if he only had three customers, he would book them back-to-back at half-hour intervals in order to create an air of flurry.
‘What were you doing? Playing the Stock Exchange?’
‘With the advice of my expert banker, yes.’
‘Your expert banker specialise in bankruptcy sales or something?’
‘I expect so.’
‘And it was Louisa’s lolly, right?’
‘Her dad’s. Half her dad’s. She’s got a sister, hasn’t she.’
‘What about the police?’
‘What police?’
‘Pans. Local whoosies.’
‘What’s it to them?’ Pendel’s voice had finally unlocked itself and was running free. ‘I pay my taxes. Social Security. I do my worksheets. I haven’t gone bust yet. Why should they care?’
‘Thought they might have dug up your record. Invited you to fork out a little hush-money. Wouldn’t want ’em chucking you out because you couldn’t pay your bribes, would we?’
Pendel shook his head, then laid his palm on the top of it, either to pray or to make sure it was still on his body. After that he took on the posture dinned into him by his Uncle Benny before he went to jail.
‘You’ve got to drucken yourself, Harry boy,’ Benny had insisted, using an expression Pendel never heard before or since from anyone but Benny. ‘Dress yourself in. Go small. Don’t be anybody, don’t look at anybody. It bothers them, same as being pathetic. You’re not even a fly on the wall. You’re part of the wall.’
But quite soon he grew tired of being a wall. He lifted his head and blinked round the fitting room, waking up in it after his first night. He remembered one of Benny’s more mystifying confessions and decided that he finally understood it:
Harry boy, my trouble is, everywhere I go, I come too and spoil it.
‘What are you, then?’ Pendel demanded of Osnard with a stirring of truculence.
‘I’m a spy. Spy for Merrie England. We’re reopening Panama.’
‘What for?’
‘Tell you over dinner. What time d’you close the shop on Fridays?’
‘Now, if I want. Surprised you had to ask.’
‘What about home? Candles. Kiddush. Whatever you do?’
‘We don’t. We’re Christian. Where it hurts.’
‘You’re a member of the Club Unión, right?’
‘Just.’
‘Just what?’
‘I had to buy the rice farm before they’d make me a member. They don’t take Turco tailors but Mick farmers are all right. Long as they’ve got twenty-five grand for the membership.’
‘Why did you join?’
To his amazement Pendel found he was smiling beyond what was normal to him. A crazy smile, forced out of him by astonishment and terror maybe, but a smile for all that, and the relief it brought him was like discovering he still had the use of his limbs.
‘I’ll tell you something, Mr Osnard,’ he said with a rush of companionability. ‘It’s a mystery to me yet to be resolved. I’m impetuous and sometimes I’m grandiose with it. It’s my failing. My Uncle Benjamin you mentioned just now always dreamed of owning a villa in Italy. Perhaps I did it to please Benny. Or it could have been to give two fingers to Mrs Porter.’