‘This sort of blue?’
‘Darker. Double-breasted. Brass buttons. Scottish ones.’
So Pendel in another gush of gratitude told him about this fabulous new line of buttons he’d got hold of from the London Badge & Button Company.
‘They could do your family coat-of-arms for you, Ramón. I’m seeing a thistle. They could do you the cufflinks too.’
Ramón said he’d think about it. The day being Friday, they wished each other a nice weekend. And why not? It was still an ordinary day in tropical Panama. A few clouds on his personal horizon perhaps but nothing Pendel hadn’t coped with in his time. A fancy London bank had telephoned Ramón – or there again, maybe it hadn’t. Ramón was a nice enough fellow in his way, a valued customer when he paid, and they’d downed a few jars together. But you’d have to have a doctorate in extra-sensory perception to know what was going on inside that Spanish-Scottish head of his.
To arrive in his little side street is for Harry Pendel a coming into harbour every time. On some days he may tease himself with the notion that the shop has vanished, been stolen, wiped out by a bomb. Or it was never there in the first place, it was one of his fantasies, something put in his imagination by his late Uncle Benny. But today his visit to the bank has unsettled him and his eye hunts out the shop and fixes on it the moment he enters the shadow of the tall trees. You’re a real house, he tells the rusty-pink Spanish roof-tiles winking at him through the foliage. You’re not a shop at all. You’re the kind of house an orphan dreams of all his life. If only Uncle Benny could see you now:
‘Notice the flower-strewn porch there?’ Pendel asks Benny with a nudge, ‘inviting you to come inside where it’s nice and cool and you’ll be looked after like a pasha?’
‘Harry boy, it’s the maximum,’ Uncle Benny replies, touching the brim of his black Homburg hat with both his palms at once which was what he did when he had something cooking. ‘A shop like that, you can charge a pound for coming through the door.’
‘And the painted sign, Benny? P&B scrolled together in a crest, which is what gives the shop its name up and down the town, whether you’re in the Club Unión or the Legislative Assembly or the Palace of Herons itself? “Been to P&B lately? – There goes old so-and-so in his P&B suit.” That’s the way they talk round here, Benny!’
‘I’ve said it before, Harry boy, I’ll say it again. You’ve got the fluence. You’ve got the rock of eye. Who gave it you I’ll always wonder.’
His courage near enough restored, and Ramón Rudd near enough forgotten, Harry Pendel mounts the steps to start his working day.
CHAPTER TWO
Osnard’s phone call, when it came around ten-thirty, caused not a ripple. He was a new customer and new customers by definition must be put through to Señor Harry or, if he was tied up, invited to leave their number so that Señor Harry could call them back immediately.
Pendel was in his cutting room, shaping patterns out of brown paper for a naval uniform to the strains of Gustav Mahler. The cutting room was his sanctuary and he shared it with no man. The key lived in his waistcoat pocket. Sometimes for the luxury of what the key meant to him he would slip it in the lock and turn it against the world as proof he was his own master. And sometimes before unlocking the door again he would stand for a second with his head bowed and his feet together in an attitude of submission before resuming his good day. Nobody saw him do this except the part of him that played spectator to his more theatrical actions.
Behind him in rooms equally tall, under bright new lighting and electric punkahs, his pampered workers of all races sewed and ironed and chattered with a liberty not customarily granted to Panama’s toiling dasses. But none toiled with more dedication than their employer Pendel as he paused to catch a wave of Mahler then deftly closed the shears along the yellow chalk-curve that defined the back and shoulders of a Colombian Admiral of the Fleet who wished only to exceed in fineness his disgraced predecessor.