And what great alchemy did Andy get up to when an ordinary-looking brown envelope was delivered to the door and he disappeared to the bathroom with it and locked himself in for half an hour, leaving a stink of camphor behind or was it formaldehyde? What did Andy see when he reappeared from the broom cupboard with a strip of wet film no wider than a tapeworm, then sat at his desk coaxing it through a miniature editor?
‘Shouldn’t you be doing that at the Embassy?’ she asked him.
‘No dark room, no you,’ he replied in the brown, dismissive voice she found so irresistible. What a perfect slob he was after Edgar! – so shifty, so unfettered, so brave!
She would observe him at the BUCHAN meetings: our chief Buchaneer, lounging potently at the long table, a dreamy forelock drifting over his right eye as he passed out his garishly-striped folders, then peered into the void while everybody except himself read them, BUCHAN’s Panama, caught in flagrante:
Antonio So-and-so of the Foreign Ministry recently declared himself so infatuated by his Cuban mistress that he intends to use his best offices to improve Panama-Cuban relations in defiance of US objections…
Declared himself to whom? To his Cuban mistress? And she dedared it to BUCHAN? Or declared it direct to Andy, perhaps – in bed? She remembered the perfume again and imagined it rubbed against him by bare bodies. Is Andy BUCHAN? Nothing was impossible.
So-and-so’s other loyalty is to the Lebanese mafia in Colón, who are said to have paid twenty million dollars for ‘favoured nation status’ within Colón’s criminal community…
And after Cuban mistresses and Lebanese crooks, BUCHAN takes a leap into the Canal:
The chaos inside the newly constituted Authority of the Canal is increasing on a daily basis as old hands are replaced by unqualified staff appointed solely on nepotist lines, to the despair of Ernesto Delgado, the most blatant example being the appointment of José-María Fernandez as director of General Services after he acquired a thirty per cent holding in the Mainland Chinese fast-food chain Lee Lotus, Lee Lotus being forty per cent owned by companies belonging to the Rodriguez cocaine cartel of Brazil…
‘Is that the Fernandez who made a pass at me at the National Day jamboree?’ Fran asked Andy, deadpan, at a late evening session of the Buchaneers in Maltby’s office.
She had lunched with him at his flat and made love to him all afternoon. Her question was inspired as much by afterglow as curiosity.
‘Bandy-legged bald bloke,’ Andy replied carelessly. ‘Specs, spots, armpits and bad breath.’
‘That’s him. He wanted to fly me up to a festival in David.’
‘When do you leave?’
‘Andy, you’re out of court,’ said Nigel Stormont without looking up from his folder, and Fran had her work cut out not to burst out giggling.
And when the sessions ended, she would watch out of the corner of her eye as Andy piled together the folders and padded with them to his secret kingdom behind the new steel door in the east corridor, trailed by that creepy clerk of his who wore Fair Isle knitted waistcoats and slicked hair – Shepherd he called himself, always something in his hand like a spanner or a screwdriver or a bit of flex.
‘What on earth does Shepherd do for you?’
‘Cleans the windows.’
‘He’s not tall enough.’
‘I lift him up.’
It was with a similarly low expectation that she now asked Osnard why he was once more getting dressed when everybody else was trying to sleep.
‘See a chap about a dog,’ he replied tersely. He had been on edge all evening.
‘A greyhound?’
No answer.
‘It’s a very late dog,’ she said, hoping to tease him from his introspection.
No answer.
‘I suppose it’s the same dog that featured so dramatically in the urgent decipher-yourself telegram you received this afternoon.’
In the act of pulling his shirt over his head, Osnard froze. ‘Hell did you get that from?’ he demanded, not at all pleasantly.
‘I walked into Shepherd as I was getting in the lift to come home. He asked me whether you were still around so I naturally asked him why. He said he’d got a hot one for you but you were going to have to unbutton it yourself. I blushed for you, then realised he was talking about an urgent signal. Aren’t you packing your pearl-handled Beretta?’