The Embassy’s front door was of bulletproof steel lined with a veneer of English oak. You attained it by touching a button in a silent lift. The royal crest, in this air-conditioned stillness, suggested silicone and funeral parlours. The windows like the doors had been toughened to frustrate the Irish and tinted to frustrate the sun. Not a whisper of the real world penetrated. The silent traffic, cranes, shipping, old town and new town, the brigade of women in orange tunics gathering leaves along the central reservation of the Avenida Balboa, were mere specimens in Her Majesty’s inspection chamber. From the moment you set foot in British extra-territorial air-space, you were looking in, not out.
The meeting had discussed, in short order, Panama’s chances of becoming a signatory to the North American Free Trade Agreement (negligible in Stormont’s view), Panama’s relations with Cuba (seedy trade alliances, Stormont reckoned, mostly drug-related) and the impact of the Guatemalan elections on the Panamanian political psyche (nil, as Stormont had already advised Department). Maltby had dwelt – as he invariably did – on the rebarbative topic of the Canal; on the omnipresence of the Japanese; and of Mainland Chinese disguised as representatives of Hong Kong; and on certain bizarre rumours in the Panamanian press of a Franco-Peruvian consortium that proposed to buy up the Canal with the aid of French know-how and Colombian drug money. And it was somewhere around this point, most likely, that Stormont, partly out of boredom and partly in self-defence, drifted off into a troubled review of his life till now:
Stormont, Nigel, born too long ago, educated not very well at Shrewsbury and Jesus, Oxford. Second in History like everybody else, divorced like everybody else: except that my little escapade happened to make the Sunday newspapers. Married finally to Paddy, short for Patricia, peerless ex-wife of cher collègue at British Embassy, Madrid, after he tried to immolate me with a silver wassail bowl at the All Ranks Christmas party; and currently serving a three-year sentence in Sing Sing, Panama, local population 2.6 million, quarter of it unemployed, half of it below the poverty line. Personnel undecided what to do with me after this, if anything at all apart from chuck me on the scrap heap, see their crabbed reply of yesterday to mine of six weeks ago. And Paddy’s cough a continuing anxiety – when will those bloody doctors find a cure for it?
‘Why can’t it be a wicked British consortium for a change?’ Maltby was complaining in a thin voice delivered mostly through the nose. ‘I’d adore to be at the centre of a fiendish British plot. I never have. Have you, Fran?’
The beautiful Francesca Deane smiled blandly and said, ‘Alas.’
‘Alas yes?’
‘Alas no.’
Maltby was not the only man Francesca drove mad. Half Panama was after her. A body to kill for, the brains to go with it. One of those creamy blond English complexions that Latin men go crazy over. Stormont would catch sight of her at parties, surrounded by Panama’s most eligible studs, every one of them begging for a date with her. But by eleven she’d be home in bed with a book, and next morning at nine sitting at her desk wearing her legal black powersuit and no make-up, all set for another day in Paradise.
‘Don’t you think a terrifically secret British bid to turn the Canal into a trout farm would be fun, Gully?’ Maltby asked with elephantine facetiousness of the tiny, immaculately rigged Lieutenant Gulliver RN, retired, the Embassy’s Procurement Officer. ‘Baby fish in the Miraflores locks, bigger chaps in the Pedro Miguel, grown-ups in Gatún Lake? I think it’s a marvellous idea.’
Gully let out a boisterous laugh. Procurement was the last of his concerns. His job was to offload as many British weapons as he could on anybody with enough drug money to pay for them, landmines a speciality.
‘Marvellous idea, Ambass, marvellous,’ he boomed with his habitual messroom heartiness, pulling a spotted handkerchief from his sleeve and vigorously dusting his nose with it. ‘Bagged a jolly good salmon over the week-end, by the by. Twenty-two pounder. Had to drive two hours to catch the bugger, but worth every mile.’