Pendel grins in return. ‘Oh, well, there’s no problem then, is there? We’ll have it all packed and ready for your collection by lunchtime tomorrow. If it doesn’t fit, bring it back as often as you like.’
‘Plus a few things that aren’t on the menu,’ Osnard adds even more quietly. ‘Or not yet, shall we say.’
‘What are they then, Andy?’
A shrug. A long slow complicitous, insinuating, unnerving policeman’s shrug, expressing false ease, terrible powers and an immense store of superior knowledge.
‘Lot o’ different ways to skin a cat, this game. Can’t learn ’em all in a night. That a “yes” I heard, or you doing a Garbo?’
Astonishingly, if only to himself, Pendel still contrives to prevaricate. Perhaps he knows that indecision is the only freedom left to him. Perhaps Uncle Benny is once more plucking at his sleeve. Or perhaps he has some hazy notion that, according to prisoner’s rights, a man selling his soul is entitled to a period of reflection.
‘It’s not a Garbo I’m doing, Andy. It’s a Harry,’ he says, bravely rising to his feet and pulling back his shoulders. ‘I’m afraid that when it comes to life-altering decisions, you’ll find Harry Pendel somewhat of a highly calculating animal.’
It was after eleven when Pendel switched off the engine of his car and coasted to a halt twenty yards below the house in order not to wake the children. Then used both hands to open the front door, one to shove it and one to turn the key. Because if you shoved it first the lock worked smoothly, otherwise it went off like a pistol shot. He went to the kitchen and rinsed his mouth out with Coca-Cola in the hope that it would take away the brandy fumes. Then he undressed in the hall and laid his clothes on the chair before tiptoeing into the bedroom. Louisa had opened both windows which was how she liked to sleep. Sea air wafted in from the Pacific. Drawing back the sheet he saw to his surprise that she was naked like himself and wide awake and staring at him.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered, dreading a row that would wake the children.
Reaching out her long arms she clutched him fiercely against her, and he discovered that her face was sticky with tears.
‘Harry, I’m really sorry, I want you to know that. Really, really sorry.’ She was kissing him and not letting him kiss her in return. ‘You’re not to forgive me, Harry, not yet. You’re a good fine man and a fine husband, and you’re earning great, and my father was right, I’m a cold, mean-hearted bitch and I wouldn’t know a kind word if it got up and bit me in the butt.’
It’s too late, he thought as she took him. This is who we should have been before it was too late.
CHAPTER SIX
Harry Pendel loved his wife and children with an obedience that can only be understood by people who have never belonged to a family themselves, never known what it is to respect a decent father, love a happy mother, or accept them as the natural reward for being born into the world.
The Pendels lived on the top of a hill in a neighbourhood called Bethania in a fine, two-storey modern house with front and back lawns and Bougainvilia galore and lovely views down to the sea and the Old City and Punta Paitilla in the distance. Pendel had heard that the hills around were hollow, full of Yanqui atom bombs and war rooms, but Louisa said we should all feel safer for them and Pendel, not wishing to argue with her, said perhaps we should.
The Pendels had a maid to mop the tiled floors and a maid to do the washing and a maid to babysit and do the routine shopping, and a grizzled black man with white stubble and a straw hat who hacked at the garden, grew whatever came into his head, smoked illegal substances and cadged from the kitchen. For this small army of servants they paid a hundred and forty dollars a week.
When Pendel lay in bed at night it was his secret pleasure to enter the troubled sleep of prison, with his knees drawn up and his chin down and his hands cupped over his ears to keep out the groans of fellow prisoners, then wake himself and establish by cautious reconnaissance that he wasn’t in prison at all but here in Bethania under the charge of a loyal wife who needed and respected him and happy children sleeping just across the corridor, which was a blessing every time, what Uncle Benny called a mitzvah: Hannah his nine-year-old Catholic princess, Mark his eight-year-old rebel Jewish violinist. But while Pendel loved his family with dutiful energy and devotion, he also feared for it and trained himself to regard his happiness as fool’s gold.