‘I’m going to buy your farm from you, Ramón. It’s too small to make money and you’re not there for the farming. You’re there to rip me off.’
Rudd examined himself in the mirror and was unmoved by what he saw.
‘Have you got another business going somewhere? Something I don’t know about?’
‘I only wish I had, Ramón.’
‘Something unofficial?’
‘Nothing unofficial either, Ramón.’
‘Because if you have, I need a piece of it. I lend you money, so you tell me what your business is. That’s morality. That’s fair.’
‘I’m not in a moral mood tonight, Ramón, to be frank.’
Rudd considered this and it seemed to make him unhappy.
‘You’ve got a mad millionaire so you pay me three thousand an acre,’ he said, citing another immutable moral law.
Pendel got him down to two thousand and went home.
Hannah had a temperature.
Mark wanted best of three at ping-pong.
The clothes-washing maid was pregnant again.
The floor-mopper was complaining that the gardener had propositioned her.
The gardener was insisting that at seventy he was entitled to proposition whomever he damn well chose.
The saintly Ernesto Delgado had arrived home from Tokyo.
Entering his shop next morning, Harry Pendel glumly inspects his lines, starting with his Cuna finishing hands, proceeding to his Italian trouser-makers, his Chinese coat-makers and ending with Señora Esmeralda, an elderly mulatto lady with red hair who does nothing but make waistcoats from dawn till dusk and is content. As a great commander on the eve of battle he exchanges a comforting word with each of them, except that the comfort is for Pendel because his troops are not in need of it. Today is payday and they are in jolly mood. Locking himself in his cutting room, Pendel unrolls two metres of brown paper onto the table, props his open notebook on its wooden stand and, to the melodious lament of Alfred Deller, begins delicately sketching the contours for the first of Andrew Osnard’s two alpaca suits by Messrs Pendel & Braithwaite Co., Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of Savile Row.
The Mature Man of Affairs, the Great Weigher of Arguments and Cool Assessor of Situations is voting with his shears.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ambassador Maltby’s mirthless announcement that a Mister Andrew Osnard – was that some sort of bird? he rather wondered – would shortly be added to the strength of the British Embassy in Panama struck disbelief then apprehension into the good heart of the Head of Chancery, Nigel Stormont.
Any normal Ambassador would have taken his Head of Chancery aside, of course. Courtesy alone required it: ‘Oh, Nigel, I thought you should be the first to know…’ But after a year of one another they had passed the stage where courtesy could be taken for granted. And anyway Maltby prided himself on his droll little surprises. So he held back the news until his Monday morning Ambassadorial meeting, which Stormont privately regarded as the low point of every working week.
His audience of one beautiful woman and three men including Stormont sat before his desk in a crescent of chrome chairs. Maltby faced them like the creature of a larger, poorer race. He was late forties and six feet three, with a mangy black forelock, a First Class Honours degree in something useless and a permanent smirk that should never be mistaken for a smile. Whenever his gaze settled on the beautiful woman, you knew it would like to be there all the time and didn’t dare, for no sooner had it settled than it darted shamefully away to the wall and only the smirk remained. The jacket of his suit hung over the back of his chair and the dandruff on it twinkled in the morning sun. His taste in shirts was flamboyant and this morning he was nineteen stripes wide. Or so reckoned Stormont, who hated the ground he loped on.
If Maltby did not conform with the imposing image of British officialdom abroad, neither did his Embassy. No wrought-iron gates, no gilded porticos or grand staircases to instil humility in lesser breeds without the law. No eighteenth-century portraits of great men in sashes. Maltby’s patch of Imperial Britain was suspended quarter of the way up a skyscraper owned by Panama’s biggest law firm and crowned with the insignia of a Swiss bank.