And the birds! The animals! On this very hill – Pendel had learned from one of Louisa’s father’s books – more breeds existed than in all of Europe put together. In the branches of one great oak tree, full-grown iguanas basked and pondered in the mid-morning sun. From another, brown and white marmosets came spinning down a pole to grab themselves a bit of mango put there by the General’s jolly wife. Then up the pole again, hand over hand, trampling each other for the hell of it as they scampered back to safety. And on the perfect lawn, brown neques like great hamsters loped about their business. It was yet another house where Pendel had always wanted to live.
The sergeant was mounting the stairs, bearing Pendel’s suitcase at the port. Pendel followed him. Old prints of warriors in uniform brandishing their moustaches at him. Recruitment posters demanding his involvement in forgotten wars. In the General’s study a teak desk so brightly polished that Pendel swore he could see clean through it. But the summit of Pendel’s levitation was the dressing room. Ninety years ago the finest Yankee architectural and military minds had joined forces to create Panama’s first sartorial shrine. In those days the tropics were not kind to gentlemen’s clothes. The best-cut suits could gather mildew in a night. To confine them in small spaces compounded the humidity. Therefore the inventors of the General’s dressing room devised, in place of wardrobes, a tall and airy chapel with upper windows ingeniously positioned to catch each passing breeze. And within it they worked their magic in the form of a great mahogany bar slung from pulleys to raise it to the apex or lower it to ground level. The lightest touch of woman was enough. And to the bar they attached the many day suits, morning coats, dinner jackets, tail suits, ceremonial and dress uniforms of the first general to command the Heights. So that they might hang free and rotate, wafted by zephyrs captured by the windows. In the whole world Pendel knew no more rousing tribute to his art than this.
‘And you preserve it, General, sir! You use it!’ he cried with passion. ‘Which if I may say without disrespect is not what we British commonly associate with our respected friends across the Atlantic.’
‘Well, Harry, we’re none of us quite what we appear, are we?’ said the General with innocent contentment as he studied himself in the mirror.
‘No, sir, we are not. Though what will become of all this when it falls into the hands of our gallant Panamanian hosts, I suppose no man can determine,’ he added craftily in his role of listening post. ‘Anarchy and worse is what I hear from some of my more sensationally-minded customers.’
The General was young in spirit and liked frank speaking. ‘Harry, it’s a yo-yo. Yesterday they wanted us to go because we’re bad colonial bears and they can’t breathe while we’re sitting on their heads. Today they want us to stay because we’re the biggest employer in the country and if Uncle Sam walks out on them they’ll suffer a crisis of confidence on the international money markets. Pack and unpack. Unpack and pack. Feels great, Harry. How’s Louisa?’
‘Thank you, General, Louisa is in the pink and will be all the more so for hearing that you enquired after her.’
‘Milton Jenning was a fine engineer and a decent American. Sad loss to us all.’
They were trying a three-piece charcoal grey alpaca, single-breasted and priced at five hundred dollars, which was what Pendel had charged his first general a full nine years ago. He took a tuck in the waist. The General was fat-free and had the figure of an athletic god.
‘I expect we’ll be having a Japanese gentleman living up here next,’ the listening post lamented, bending the General’s arm at the elbow while they both watched the mirror. ‘Plus all his family and appendages and cook, I wouldn’t wonder. You wouldn’t think they’d heard of Pearl Harbor some of them. It depresses me, frankly, General, the way the old order changeth, if you’ll pardon me.’
The General’s answer, if he ever got as far as thinking of one, was drowned by the joyous intervention of his wife.