‘I can’t supply him with what he wants. I don’t know enough.’
‘Nobody knows enough. Thirty people decide what will happen in Panama. The other two and a half million guess.’
‘So what would your old student friends be doing if they hadn’t joined the Chase Manhattan and weren’t driving shiny cars?’ Pendel insisted. ‘What would they be doing if they’d stayed militant? What’s logical? Given it’s today, and they still wanted what they used to want for Panama?’
She pondered, coming slowly to what he was saying. ‘You mean, to put pressure on the government? Bring it to its knees?’
‘Yes.’
‘First we produce chaos. You want chaos?’
‘I might. If it’s necessary.’
‘It is. Chaos is a precondition of democratic awareness. Once the workers discover they are unled, they will elect leaders from their own ranks and the government will be scared of revolution and resign. You wish the workers to elect their own leaders?’
‘I’d like them to elect Mickie,’ said Pendel but she shook her head.
‘Not Mickie.’
‘All right, without Mickie.’
‘We would go first to the fishermen. It was what we always planned but never did.’
‘Why would you go to the fishermen?’
‘We were students opposed to nuclear weapons. We were indignant that nuclear materials were passing through the Panama Canal. We believed such cargoes were dangerous to Panama and an insult to our national sovereignty.’
‘What could the fishermen do about it?’
‘We would go to their unions and their gang bosses. If they refused us, we would go to the criminal elements on the waterfront who are willing to do anything for money. Some of our students were rich in those days. Rich students with a conscience.’
‘Like Mickie,’ Pendel reminded her, but again she shook her head.
‘We would say to them: “Get out every trawler and smack and dinghy that you can lay your hands on, load them up with food and water and take them to the Bridge of the Americas. Anchor them under the bridge and announce to the world that you mean to stay there. Many of the big cargo ships need a mile to slow down. After three days there will be two hundred ships waiting to pass through the Canal. After two weeks, a thousand. Thousands more will be turned away before they reach Panama, ordered to take different routes or go back to where they came from. There will be a crisis, the stock exchanges of the world will panic, the Yanquies will go crazy, the shipping industry will demand action, the balboa will collapse, the government will fail and no nuclear materials will ever again pass through the Canal.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about nuclear materials, to be honest, Marta.’
She raised herself on one elbow, her smashed face close to his.
‘Listen. Panama today is already trying to prove to the world that it can run the Canal as well as the gringos. Nothing must interfere with the Canal. No strikes, no interruptions, no inefficiencies, no screw-ups. If the Panamanian government can’t keep the Canal working properly, how can it steal the revenue, raise tariffs, sell off the concessions? The moment the international banking community starts to take fright, the rabiblancos will give us everything we ask. And we shall ask for everything. For our schools, our roads, our hospitals, our farmers and our poor. If they try to clear away our boats or shoot us or bribe us, we shall appeal to the nine thousand Panamanian workmen that it takes to run the Canal each day. And we shall ask them: which side of the bridge do you stand? Are you Panamanian men, or are you Yanqui slaves? Strikes are a sacred right in Panama. Those who oppose them are pariahs. There are people in government today who argue that the labour laws of Panama should not apply to the Canal. Let them see.’
She was lying flat upon him, her brown eyes so dose to his that they were all he saw.
‘Thank you,’ he said, kissing her.
‘My pleasure.’
CHAPTER NINE
Louisa Pendel loved her husband with an intensity understood only by women who have known what it is like to have been born into the pampered captivity of bigoted parents, and to have a beautiful elder sister four inches shorter than you who does everything right two years before you do it wrong, who seduces your boy-friends even if she doesn’t go to bed with them, though usually she does, and obliges you to take the path of Noble Puritanism as the only available response.