It is on his next visit that Benny in his guilt presents Pendel with a tin-framed icon of the Virgin Mary that he says reminds him of his childhood in Lvov on the days he crept out of the ghetto to watch the goyim pray. And she is with him now, next to the wake-up clock on the rattan table at his bedside in Bethania, watching with her vanished Irish smile as he drags off his sweat-drenched prison uniform and creeps into bed for a share of Louisa’s blameless sleep.
Tomorrow, he thought. I’ll tell her tomorrow.
‘Harry, that you?’
Mickie Abraxas, the great underground revolutionary and secret hero of the students, lucid drunk at two-fifty a.m., swearing to God that he would kill himself because his wife had thrown him out.
‘Where are you?’ Pendel said, smiling in the dark, because Mickie for all the trouble he caused was a cell-mate for life.
‘Nowhere. I’m a bum.’
‘Mickie.’
‘What?’
‘Where’s Ana?’
Ana was Mickie’s reigning chiquilla, a sturdy, practical-minded childhood friend of Marta’s from la Cordillera who seemed to accept Mickie as found. Marta had introduced them.
‘Hi, Harry,’ said Ana cheerfully, so Pendel said ‘Hi’ cheerfully too.
‘How much has he had, Ana?’
‘I don’t know. He says he went to a casino with Rafi Domingo. Did some vodka, lost some money. Maybe did a little coke, he forgets. He’s sweating all over. Do I call a doctor?’
Mickie was back on the line before Pendel could answer her.
‘Harry, I love you.’
‘I know that, Mickie, and I’m grateful, and I love you too.’
‘Did you do that horse?’
‘I did, Mickie, yes, I have to say I did that horse.’
‘I’m sorry, Harry. Okay? I’m sorry.’
‘No problem, Mickie. No bones broken. Not every good horse wins.’
‘I love you, Harry. You’re my good friend, hear me?’
‘Then you won’t need to kill yourself, will you, Mickie,’ said Pendel kindly. ‘Not if you’ve got Ana and a good friend.’
‘You know what we do, Harry? We make a weekend together. You, me, Ana, Marta. Go fishing. Fuck.’
‘So you have yourself a good night’s sleep, Mickie,’ said Pendel firmly, ‘and tomorrow in the morning you come round for your fitting and a sandwich and we’ll have a nice natter. Yes? Right, then.’
‘Who was it?’ Louisa said as he rang off.
‘Mickie. His wife’s locked him out of the house again.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s having an affair with Rafi Domingo,’ said Pendel, wrestling with life’s ineluctable logic.
‘Why doesn’t he punch her in the mouth?’
‘Who?’ said Pendel stupidly.
‘His wife, Harry. Who do you think?’
‘He’s tired,’ said Pendel. ‘Noriega beat the spirit out of him.’
Hannah climbed into their bed, to be followed by Mark and the giant teddy bear he had given up years ago.
It was tomorrow, so he told her.
I did it to be believed, he told her, when she was safely back to sleep.
To prop you up when you get wobbly.
To give you a real shoulder to lean on, instead of just me.
To make me someone better for a Zonian roughneck’s daughter who blurts a bit and goes ballistic when she’s threatened and forgets to take short steps after twenty years of being told by her mother that she’d never get married like Emily if she didn’t.
And thinks she’s too ugly and too tall while everyone around her is the right size and glamorous like Emily.
And who would never in a million years, not even in her most vulnerable and insecure moment, not even to spite Emily, set fire to Uncle Benny’s warehouse as a favour to him, starting with the summer frocks.
Pendel sits in the armchair, pulls a coverlet over him-self, leaves his bed to the pure in heart.
‘I’ll be out all day,’ he tells Marta, arriving in the shop next morning. ‘You’ll have to do front of shop.’
‘You’ve got the Bolivian Ambassador at eleven.’
‘Put him off. I need to see you.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
Until now they had gone as a family, picnicking in the shade of the mango trees, watching the hawks and ospreys and vultures lazing on the burning breeze and the riders on white horses looking like the last of Pancho Villa’s army. Or they’d haul the inflated rubber dinghy across the flooded paddies with Louisa at her happiest as she waded through the water in her shorts playing Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen to Pendel’s Bogart, and Mark pleading for caution and Hannah telling Mark not to be a drip.
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