The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

‘Welcome back, sir, after your arduous tour,’ Pendel murmurs through a chicane of glottal obstructions.

But it is uncertain whether the World’s Greatest Leader receives the full force of this strangled greeting because Marco has handed him a cordless red telephone and he is already speaking into it.

‘Franco? Don’t bother me with that stuff. Tell her she needs a lawyer. See you at the reception tonight. Catch my ear.’

Marco removes the red telephone. Pendel opens his suitcase. Not a Bo-Peep costume but a half-made tail suit with discreetly reinforced breast panels to bear the weight of twenty orders sleeps safely in its scented tissue coffin. The virgin makes a silent exit as the Master of the Earth takes up his post behind the gold screen with its mirrored interior. It is an ancient artefact of the Palace. The silver head so beloved of its people vanishes and reappears as the presidential trousers are removed.

‘If His Excellency would be so kind,’ Pendel murmurs.

A presidential hand appears round the side of the gold screen. Pendel lays the basted black trousers over the presidential forearm. Arm and trousers disappear. More phones ring. Ask about his missing hours.

‘It’s the Spanish Ambassador, Excellency,’ Marco calls from the desk. ‘Wants a private audience.’

‘Tell him tomorrow night after the Taiwanese.’

Pendel stands face to face with the Lord of the Universe: the Grand Master of Panama’s political chessboard, the man who holds the keys to one of the world’s two greatest gateways, determines the future of world trade and the balance of global power in the twenty-first century. Pendel inserts two fingers inside the presidential waistband while Marco announces another caller, one Manuel.

‘Tell him Wednesday,’ the President retorts over the top of the screen.

‘Morning or afternoon?’

‘Afternoon,’ the President replies.

The presidential waistline is elusive. If the crotch is right, the trouser-length is wrong. Pendel raises the waist. The trousers rise above the presidential silk sockline, so that for a moment he looks like Charlie Chaplin.

‘Manuel says afternoon is okay as long as it’s only nine holes,’ Marco warns his master severely.

Suddenly nothing stirs. What Pendel described to Osnard as a blessed truce amid the fray has descended over the sanctum. Nobody speaks. Not Marco, not the President nor his many telephones. The great spy is kneeling, pinning the presidential left trouser leg, but his wits do not desert him.

‘And may I enquire of His Excellency with respect whether we were able to relax during our highly triumphant Far Eastern tour at all, sir? Some sport perhaps? A walk? A little shopping, if I may make so bold?’

And still no phone rings, nothing disturbs the blessed truce while the Keeper of the Keys to Global Power considers his reply.

‘Too tight,’ he announces. ‘You make me too tight, Mr Braithwaite. Why won’t you let your President breathe, you tailors?’

‘”Harry,” he says to me, “those parks they’ve got in Paris, I’d do the same for Panama tomorrow if it wasn’t for the property developers and the Communists.”‘

‘Wait.’ Osnard turned a page of his notebook, writing hard.

They were on the fourth floor of a three-hour hotel called the Paraiso in a bustling part of town. Across the road, an illuminated Coca-Cola sign turned off and on, now flooding the room with red flames, now leaving it in darkness. From the corridor came the stampede of arriving and departing couples. Through the adjoining walls, groans of chagrin or delight and the accelerating thump of eager bodies.

‘He didn’t say,’ said Pendel cautiously. ‘Not in as many words.’

‘Don’t paraphrase, mind? Just give it me the way he said it.’ Osnard licked a thumb and turned a page.

Pendel was seeing Dr Johnson’s summerhouse on Hampstead Heath, the day he went there with Auntie Ruth for the azaleas.

‘ “Harry,” he says to me, “that park in Paris, I wish I could remember its name. There was a little hut there with a wood roof, just us and the bodyguards and the ducks.” The President loves his Nature. “And it was there in that hut that history was made. And one day, if all goes according to plan, there’ll be a plaque on the wooden wall telling the world that on this very spot the future prosperity, wellbeing and independence of the fledgling state of Panama was determined, plus the date.” ‘

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