‘You’re Andrew, right?’ he called into the open doorway, making a new friend.
‘Andy Osnard, single, Brit Embassy boffin on the political treadmill, recently arrived. Old Braithwaite made suits for m’dad and you used to come along and hold the tape. Cover. Nothing like it.’
And that tie I always fancied, he thought. With the blue zigzags and a touch of Leander pink. Osnard looked on with a creator’s pride while Pendel set the alarm.
CHAPTER FIVE
The rain had stopped. The fairy-lit buses that bounced past them over the pot-holes were empty. A hot blue evening sky was disappearing into night but its heat remained behind because in Panama City it always does. There is dry heat, there is wet heat. But there is always heat, just as there is always noise: of traffic, power drills, of scaffolding going up or down, of aeroplanes, air-conditioners, canned music, bulldozers, helicopters and – if you are very lucky – birds. Osnard was trailing his bookie’s umbrella. Pendel, though alert, was unarmed. His feelings were a mystery to him. He had been tested, he had come out stronger and wiser. But tested for what? Stronger and wiser how? And if he had survived, why didn’t he feel safer? Nevertheless re-entering the world’s atmosphere he appeared to himself reborn if apprehensive.
‘Fifty thousand bucks!’ he yelled to Osnard, unlocking his car.
‘What for?’
‘What it costs to hand-paint those buses! They hire real artists! Takes two years!’
It was not something Pendel had known till this moment, if he knew it now, but something inside him required him to be an authority. Settling into his driving seat he had an uncomfortable feeling that the figure was nearer fifteen hundred, and it was two months, not two years.
‘Want me to drive?’ Osnard asked with a sideways glance up and down the road.
But Pendel was his own master. Ten minutes ago he had persuaded himself he would never walk free again. Now he was sitting at his own steering wheel with his jailer at his side and wearing his own powder blue suit instead of a stinking jute tunic with Pendel on the pocket.
‘And no pitfalls?’ Osnard asked.
Pendel didn’t understand.
‘People you don’t want to meet – owe money to – screwed their wives – whatever?’
‘I don’t owe anyone except the bank, Andy. I don’t do the other either, though it’s not something I confess to my customers, Latin gentlemen being what they are. They’d think I was a capon or a poofter.’ He laughed a little wildly for both of them while Osnard checked the driving mirrors. ‘Where are you from, Andy? Where’s home then? Your dad features large in your life unless he’s a figment. Was he a famous person at all? I’m sure he was.’
‘Doctor,’ said Osnard, without a second’s hesitation.
‘What sort? Major brain surgeon? Heart-lung?’
‘GP,’
‘Where did he practise then? Somewhere exotic?’
‘Birmingham.’
‘And the mother, if I may ask?’
‘South o’ France.’
But Pendel couldn’t help wondering whether Osnard had consigned his late father to Birmingham and his mother to the French Riviera with the same abandon with which Pendel had consigned the late Braithwaite to Pinner.
The Club Unión is where the super-rich of Panama have their presence here on earth. With appropriate deference, Pendel drove under a red pagoda arch, braking almost to a halt in his anxiety to assure the two uniformed guards that he and his guest were white and middle class. Fridays are disco-nights for the children of gentile millionaires. At the brightly lit entrance glistening four-tracks disgorge scowling seventeen-year-old princesses and thick-necked swains with gold bracelets and dead eyes. The porch was bordered with heavy crimson ropes and guarded by big-shouldered men wearing chauffeurs’ suits and identity tags for buttonholes. Bestowing a confiding smile on Osnard, they glowered at Pendel but let him pass. Inside, the hall was wide and cool and open to the sea. A green-carpeted slipway descended to a balconied terrace. Beyond it lay the bay with its perpetual line of ships pressed like men-of-war under banks of black stormcloud. The day’s last light was quickly vanishing. Cigarette smoke, costly scent and beat music filled the air.