Paddy had gone to bed. Stormont could hear her coughing as he went upstairs.
Sounds as though I’ll be going to the Schoenbergs alone, he thought. The Schoenbergs were Yankee and civilised. Elsie was a heavy-duty lawyer who kept flying back to Miami to fight dramatic court cases. Paul was CIA and one of the people who mustn’t know that Andrew Osnard was a Friend.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Pendel. To see the President.’
‘Who?’
‘His tailor. Me.’
The Palace of Herons stands at the heart of the Old City on a spit of land across the bay from Punta Paitilla. To drive to it from the other side of the bay is to be whisked from a developers’ inferno to the filth and elegance of seventeenth-century colonial Spain. It is surrounded by appalling slums, but a careful selection of the route eliminates their existence. This morning, in front of the ancient porch, a ceremonial brass band played Strauss to a row of empty diplomatic cars and parked police motorcycles. The bandsmen wore white helmets and white uniforms, white gloves. Their instruments glistened like white gold. Torrents of rain flowed down their necks from the inadequate awning stretched above them. The double doors were guarded by bad charcoal suits.
Other white-gloved hands took Pendel’s suitcase and passed it through an electronic scanner. He was beckoned to a scaffold. Standing on it he wondered whether spies in Panama were shot or hanged. The gloved hands returned the suitcase. The scaffold declared him harmless. The great secret agent had been admitted to the citadel.
‘This way, please,’ said a tall black god.
‘I know,’ said Pendel proudly.
A marble fountain played at the centre of a marble floor. Milk-white herons strutted in the spray, pecking at whatever caught their fancy. From floor-level cages in the wall more herons scowled at passers-by. And well they might, thought Pendel, remembering the story that Hannah insisted on hearing several times a week. In 1977 when Jimmy Carter came to Panama to ratify the new Canal Treaties, secret service men sprayed the Palace with a disinfectant that preserved presidents but killed herons. In a top-secret emergency operation the corpses were removed and live lookalikes flown down from Chitré under cover of darkness.
‘Your name, please?’
‘Pendel.’
‘Your business, please?’
He waited, remembering railway stations when he was a child: too many big people hurrying past him in too many directions, and his suitcase always in the way. A kind lady was addressing him. Turning to her, he thought it must be Marta because of her beautiful voice. Then light fell across her face and it wasn’t smashed, and he saw by the label on her Brownie suit that she was a presidential virgin named Helen.
‘It is heavy?’ she asked.
‘Light as a feather,’ he assured her courteously, rejecting her virginal hand.
Following her up the great stairs, Pendel exchanged the radiance of marble for the deep red dark of mahogany. More bad suits with earphones eyed him from pillared doorways. The virgin was telling him he had chosen a busy day.
‘Whenever the President comes back we are always busy,’ she said, raising her eyes to Heaven where she lived.
Ask about his missing hours in Hong Kong, Osnard had said. Hell d’he get up to in Paris? Man screwing or conspiring?
‘As far as here, we are under Colombian rule,’ the virgin was informing him, pointing her blameless hand at rows of early Panamanian governors. ‘From here on, we are under the United States. Soon we shall be under ourselves.’
‘Great,’ said Pendel enthusiastically. ‘High time too.’
They entered a panelled hall like a library without books. A honey smell of floor polish rose at him. A beeper sounded on the virgin’s belt. He was alone.
Whole gaps in his itinerary. Find out about his missing hours.
And remained alone, and upright, clutching his suitcase. The yellow-covered chairs round the walls were too flimsy for a mere convict to sit on. Imagine breaking one. Bang goes remission. Days turn to weeks but if there’s one thing Harry Pendel knows, it’s how to do time. He’ll stand here for the rest of his life if he must, suitcase in hand, waiting for them to call his name.