At what point would the Embassy get a sight of Osnard’s product? Stormont asked. Before it went to London? After? Never?
‘My boss says no local sharing unless he gives the nod,’ Osnard replied with his mouth full. ‘Scared stiff o’ Washington. Handling the distribution personally.’
‘Are you comfortable with that?’
Osnard took a pull of red and shook his head. ‘Fight it, my advice. Form an internal Embassy working-party. You, Ambass, Fran, me. Gully’s Defence so he’s not family, Pitt’s on probation. Put together an indoctrination list, everyone signs off on it, meet out of hours.’
‘Will your boss wear it, whoever he is?’
‘You push, I’ll pull. Name o’ Luxmore, supposed to be a secret except everybody knows. Tell Ambass to beat the table. “Canal’s a time bomb. Instant local response essential.” That crap. He’ll cave.’
‘Ambass doesn’t beat tables,’ Stormont said.
But Maltby must have beaten something because after a stream of obstructive telegrams from their respective services, usually to be hand-decoded at dead of night, Osnard and Stormont were grudgingly permitted to make common cause. An Embassy working-party was set up with the harmless-sounding title of the Isthmus Study Group. A trio of morose technicians flew down from Washington and, after three days of listening to walls, pronounced them deaf. And at seven o’clock one turbulent Friday evening the four conspirators duly assembled round the Embassy rainforest-teak conference table and under the low light of a Ministry of Works lamp acknowledged by signature that they were privy to special material BUCHAN, provided by source BUCHAN under an operation codenamed BUCHAN. The solemnity of the moment was offset by a burst of humour from Maltby, afterwards ascribed to the temporary absence of his wife in England:
‘From now on BUCHAN’s likely to be an on-going thing, sir,’ Osnard declared airily as he collected the signed forms like a croupier raking in the chips. ‘His stuff’s coming in at quite a rate. Meeting once a week may not be enough.’
‘A what thing, Andrew?’ Maltby enquired, setting his pen down with a dick.
‘On-going.’
‘On-going?’
‘What I said, Ambass. On-going.’
‘Yes. Quite so. Thank you. Well, from now on, if you please, Andrew, the thing – to use your parlance – is on-gone. BUCHAN may prevail. He may endure. He may persist, or at a pinch continue or resume. But he will never, as long as I am Ambassador, on-go, if you don’t mind. It would be too distressing.’
After which, wonder of wonders, Maltby invited the whole team for bacon and eggs and swimming back at the Residence where, having raised a droll toast to ‘the Buchaneers’, he marched the guests into the garden to admire his toads, whose names he belted out above the din of passing traffic: ‘Come on, Hercules, hop, hop! -don’t gawp at her like that, Galileo, haven’t you seen a pretty gal before?’ And when they swam, deliriously in the half darkness, Maltby astonished everyone yet again by letting out a great glad cry of ‘Christ, she’s beautiful!’ in celebration of Fran. And finally, to round the night off, he insisted on playing dance music, and had his houseboys roll back the rugs, though Stormont couldn’t help remarking that Fran danced with every man but Osnard, who ostentatiously preferred the Ambassador’s books, which he patrolled with his hands behind his back in the manner of an English princeling inspecting a guard of honour.
‘You don’t think Andy’s a bit left-handed, do you?’ he asked Paddy over a nightcap. ‘You never hear of him going out with girls. And he treats Fran as if she had the plague.’
He thought she was going to cough again, but she was laughing.
‘Darling,’ Paddy murmured, lifting her eyes to Heaven. ‘Andy Osnard?’
It was a view that Francesca Deane, had she heard it from her recumbent position in Osnard’s bed in his apartment in Paitilla, would have happily endorsed.
How she had got there was a mystery to her, though it was a mystery now ten weeks old.
‘Only two ways to play this situation, girl,’ Osnard had explained to her with the assurance he brought to everything, over lavish helpings of barbecued chicken and cold beer beside the pool of the El Panama. ‘Method A. Sweat it out for six tense months then fall into each other’s arms in a sticky coil. “Darling, why ever didn’t we do this before, puff, puff ?” Method B, the preferred one, bang away now, observe total omertà all round, see how we like it. If we do, have a ball. If we don’t, chuck it and no one’s the wiser. “Been there, didn’t care for it, glad o’ the information. Life moves on. Basta.”‘