But there was a third way and Pendel didn’t mention it. Perhaps he was not conscious of being in its thrall. It was tailoring. It was improving on people. It was cutting and shaping them until they became understandable members of his internal universe. It was fluence. It was running ahead of events and waiting for them to catch up. It was making people bigger or smaller according to whether they enhanced or threatened his existence. Downsize Delgado. Upsize Miguel. And Harry Pendel on the water like a cork. It was a system of survival that Pendel had developed in prison and perfected in marriage, and its purpose was to provide a hostile world with whatever made it feel at ease with itself. To make it tolerable. To befriend it. To draw its sting.
‘And of course, what old Miguel is doing now,’ Pendel ran on, deftly slipping loose of Osnard’s gaze and smiling across the room, ‘he’s having what I call his last spring. I see it all the time in my profession. One day they’re your normal nine-till-fivers, good fathers and husbands and a couple of suits a year. Next day they turn fifty, they’re coming in for the two-tone buckskins and canary jackets and their wives are ringing up asking whether I’ve seen them.’
But Osnard, for all Pendel’s efforts to divert his interest elsewhere, had not ceased his watch. The quick brown fox’s eyes were aimed at Pendel’s, and his expression, if anybody in that mayhem had troubled to study it, was of a man who had struck true gold and didn’t know whether to run for help or dig it alone.
A phalanx of revellers descended. Pendel loved every one of them:
Jules, my goodness, lovely to see you, sir! Meet Andy, chum of mine – French bondseller, Andy, problems with his bill.
Mordi, what a joy, sir! – young wheeler-dealer from Kiev, Andy, came in with the new wave of Ashkenazis, reminds me of my Uncle Benny – Mordi, say hullo to Andy!
Handsome young Kazuo and child bride from the Japanese Trade Centre, prettiest couple in town – Salaams, sir! Madam, my sincere respects! – three suits with extra trousers and I still can’t do his other name for you, Andy.
Pedro, young lawyer.
Fidel, young banker.
José-María, Antonio, Salvador, Paul, infant sharedealers, witless white-arse princelings known otherwise as rabiblancos, bug-eyed traders of twenty-three worrying about their manhood and drinking themselves impotent. And somewhere between handshakes and backslaps and see-you-Thursday-Harrys, Pendel’s murmured commentary, about who their fathers were and how much who was worth and how their brothers and sisters were tactically distributed among the political parties.
‘Jesus,’ Osnard marvelled devoutly, when they were finally alone again.
‘What’s Jesus got to do with it, then, Andy?’ Pendel demanded a little aggressively, for Louisa did not permit blaspheming in the house.
‘Not Jesus, Harry, old boy. You.’
With its teak thrones and scrolled silver cutlery the restaurant of the Club Unión was designed to be a feast of opulence, but the curiously low ceiling and emergency lighting make it more like a deep shelter for errant bankers on the run. Seated at a corner window, Pendel and Osnard drank Chilean wine and ate Pacific fish. From each candlelit encampment diners priced each other with discontented eyes: how many millions have you got – how did he get in here? – where does she think she’s going in those diamonds? Outside the window the sky was by now pitch black. In the lighted pool below them a four-year-old girl in a gold bikini was being walked gravely through the deep end on the shoulders of a brawny swimming instructor in a skullcap. Beside him waded an overweight bodyguard, hands tensely out-stretched to catch her if she fell. At the pool’s edge the girl’s bored mother, dressed in a designer trousersuit, painting her fingernails.
‘Louisa’s what I call the hub, Andy, not wishing to boast,’ Pendel was saying. Why was he talking about her? Osnard must have mentioned her. ‘Louisa is a one-in-a-million top secretary of incredible potential not yet fully realised in my opinion.’ It was a pleasure to him to make things right with her after their bad telephone conversation. ‘Dogsbody doesn’t cover it at all. Officially, as of three months ago, she’s PA to Ernie Delgado, previously of the law firm of Delgado & Woolf, but he’s given up his interests for the sake of the people. Unofficially, the Canal administration is in such a flux from the handover, what with your Yanquis going out one door and your Panamanians coming in tike other, that she’s one of the few with a clear head who can tell them the score. She greets, she covers, she papers over the cracks. She knows where to find it if it’s here, and who’s nicked it if it’s not.’