The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

Or they’d drive the four-track down cloudy yellow dust-tracks that stopped dead when they reached the forest’s edge, at which point to the huge delight of the kids Pendel would let out one of Uncle Benny’s wonderful wails of despair pretending they were lost. Which they were, until the silver towers of the mill rose out of the palm trees fifty yards ahead of them.

Or they’d go at reaping time, ride in pairs on huge tracked harvesters, the flails hanging out in front of them, beating the rice and raising clouds of bugs. Sticky hot air pressed under hard low sky. Table-flat fields fading into mangrove swamps. Mangrove swamps fading into sea.

But today as the Great Decider drove his solitary path everything he saw bothered him, everything was an omen: the I-hate-you razor wire of the US ammunition dumps, reminding him of Louisa’s father, the reproachful signs saying ‘Jesus is the Lord’, the squatters’ cardboard villages on every hillside: any day now and I’ll be joining you.

And after the squalor, the lost paradise of Pendel’s ten-minute childhood. Rolling tracts of red Devon earth from holiday school at Okehampton. English cows that stared at him from banana groves. Not even Haydn on the cassette player could save him from their melancholy. Entering the farm’s drive he demanded only to know how long it was since he had told Angel to get these bloody pot-holes fixed. The sight of Angel himself in boned riding boots, straw trilby and gold neck-chains only quickened his anger. They drove to the spot where the corporate neighbour from Miami had cut his trench into Pendel’s river.

‘You know something, Harry, my friend?’

‘What?’

‘What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty. You know what else we expect, my friend?’

‘No.’

‘We expect a deal to be a deal, Harry. No top-ups. No pressure. No comebacks. I say the guy is antisocial.’

‘So what do we do?’ Pendel said.

Angel gave the contented shrug of a man whose favourite news is bad.

‘You want my advice, Harry? Straight? As your friend?’

They had reached the river. On the opposite bank, the neighbour’s henchmen refused to notice Pendel’s presence. The trench had become a canal. Below it, the river bed was dry.

‘My advice, Harry, is negotiate. Cut your losses, do a deal. You want me to feel these guys out? Start a dialogue with them?’

‘No.’

‘So go to your banker. Ramón’s a tough guy. He’ll do the talking for you.’

‘How come you know Ramón Rudd?’

‘Everybody knows Ramón. Listen, I’m not just your manager, okay? I’m your friend.’

But Pendel has no friends, except for Marta and Mickie, and just possibly Mr Charlie Blüthner who lives ten miles up the coast and is expecting him for chess.

‘Blüthner like piano?’ Pendel asked the living Benny centuries ago as they stood on the rainswept dockside at Tilbury, studying the rusted freighter that will convey the released convict on the next stage of his life’s toil.

‘The same, Harry boy, and he owes me,’ Benny replied, adding his tears to the rain. ‘Charlie Blüthner is the shmatte king of Panama and he wouldn’t be where he is today if Benny hadn’t kept shtumm for him just like you did for me.’

‘Did you burn his summer frocks for him?’

‘Worse, Harry boy. And he’s never forgotten.’ For the first and last time in their lives, they embraced. Pendel wept too but wasn’t sure why, because all he could think as he trotted up the gangway was: I’m out and I’ll never come back.

And Mr Blüthner had been as good as Benny’s word. Pendel had scarcely set foot in Panama before the maroon chauffeur-driven Mercedes was whisking him from his pitiful lodgings in Calidonia to the stately Blüthner villa, set in its own manicured acres overlooking the Pacific, with its tiled floors and air-conditioned stables and paintings by Nolde and illuminated testimonials from impressive-sounding, non-existent North American universities appointing Mr Blüthner their well-beloved Professor, Doctor, Regent, etc. And an upright piano from the ghetto.

Within weeks Pendel had become in his own eyes Mr Blüthner’s cherished son, taking his natural place among the raucous, gingery children and grandchildren, the stately aunts and podgy uncles and the servants in their pastel-green tunics. At family festivals and Kiddush Pendel sang badly and nobody minded. He played lousy golf on their private golf course and didn’t bother to apologise. He splashed around on the beach with the children and rode the family buggies at breakneck speed over sand-black dunes. He fooled with the sloppy dogs and threw fallen mangoes for them, and watched the squadrons of pelicans crank themselves across the sea, and believed in all of it: their faith, the morality of their wealth, the Bougainvilia, the thousand different greens, and their respectability which far outglowed whatever little blazes Uncle Benny might have started in the days of Mr Blüthner’s struggle.

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