And Mr Blüthner’s kindness didn’t stop in the home, because when Pendel took his first steps into bespoke tailoring it was Blüthner Compania Limitada who gave him six months’ credit on their huge textile warehouse in Colón, and the Blüthner word that sent him his first customers and opened early doors for him. And when Pendel tried to thank Mr Blüthner, who was small and wrinkled and shiny, he only shook his head and said, “Thank your Uncle Benny,’ adding his habitual advice: ‘Find yourself a good Jewish girl, Harry. Don’t leave us.’
Even when Pendel married Louisa, his visits to Mr Blüthner did not cease but they acquired a necessary furtiveness. The Blüthner household became his secret paradise, a shrine that he could only ever visit alone and under a pretext. And Mr Blüthner, by way of reciprocation, preferred to ignore Louisa’s existence.
‘I’ve got a bit of a liquidity problem, Mr Blüthner,’ Pendel confessed, as they sat over chess on the north verandah. There was a verandah on each side of the headland so that Mr Blüthner could always be protected from the wind.
‘Liquidity at the rice farm?’ Mr Blüthner asked.
His little jaw was made of rock until he smiled, and he wasn’t smiling. His old eyes spent a lot of time asleep. They were sleeping now.
‘Plus the shop,’ said Pendel, blushing.
‘You have mortgaged the shop to finance the rice farm, Harry?’
‘Only in a manner of speaking, Mr Blüthner.’ He tried humour. ‘So naturally I’m looking for a mad millionaire.’
Mr Blüthner always spent a long time thinking, whether he was playing chess or being asked for money. He sat quite still while he thought, and seemed not to breathe. Pendel remembered old lags who were the same.
‘Either a man is mad or he’s a millionaire,’ Mr Blüthner replied at last. ‘Harry boy, it’s a law. A man’s got to pay for his own dreams.’
He drove to her nervously, as he always did, by way of 4th July Avenue that had once formed the boundary of the Canal Zone. Low to his left, the bay. High to his right, Ancon Hill. Between them lay the reconstructed El Chorrillo with its patch of too-green grassland marking the spot where the comandancia had stood. A cluster of gimcrack highrises had been built by way of reparation and painted in pastel bars. Marta lived in the middle one. He climbed the filthy staircase cautiously, remembering how the last time he had come here he had been pissed on from the pitch darkness above him while the building convulsed itself with prison catcalls and wild laughter.
‘You are welcome,’ she said solemnly, having unlocked the door to him, four locks.
They lay on the bed where they always lay, dressed and separated from each other, Marta’s small dry fingers curled in Pendel’s palm. There were no chairs, there was very little floor. The flat consisted of one tiny room divided by brown curtains: a cubicle to wash in, another to cook in and this one to lie in. At Pendel’s left ear stood a glass case crammed with china animals that had belonged to Marta’s mother, and at his stockinged feet a three-foot-high ceramic tiger that her father had given to her mother for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary three days before they were blown to smithereens. And if Marta had gone with her parents to visit her married sister that night instead of lying in bed nursing her smashed face and beaten body, she would have been blown to smithereens as well, because her sister had lived in the first street to be hit, though today you wouldn’t find it: any more than you would find Marta’s parents, sister, brother-in-law or six-month-old baby niece or their orange cat called Hemingway. Bodies, rubble and the whole street had been swept into official oblivion.
‘I just wish you’d move back to your old place,’ he said to her as usual.
‘I can’t.’
Can’t because her parents had lived where this building now stood.
Can’t because this was her Panama.
Can’t because her heart was with the dead.
They spoke little, preferring to contemplate the monstrous secret history that joined them: