Using an alias, Osnard puts on the guise of a Foreign Office research officer and invites Hector Pride to lunch at Simpson’s and spends twice what Luxmore has allowed for the occasion. Pride, like many of his profession, speaks and eats and drinks a great deal, but does not care to listen. Osnard waits until the pudding to pop the question, then until the Gorgonzola, by which time Pride’s patience has evidently run out, for to Osnard’s dismay he abandons his monologue on the effect of Inca culture on contemporary Peruvian thought and explodes in ribald laughter.
‘Why don’t you make a pass at me?’ he booms, to the alarm of diners either side. ‘What’s wrong with me? Got the girl in the bloody taxi, haven’t you? So put your hand up her skirt!’
Pride, it transpires, is employed by a hated sister service of British Intelligence, which also owns his newspaper.
‘There’s this man Pendel I talked to you about,’ Osnard reminds Luxmore, taking advantage of his gloom. ‘The one with the wife in the Canal Commission. I can’t help thinking they’re ideal.’
He has been thinking it for days and nights, and thinking no one else. Chance favours only the prepared mind. He has drawn Pendel’s criminal record, pored over Pendel’s criminal photographs, full face and side view, studied his statements to the police though most were patently fabricated by his audience, read psychiatrists’ and almoners’ reports, records of his behaviour in prison, dug out whatever he could on Louisa and the tiny, inward world of the Zonian. Like an occult diviner, he has opened himself to Pendel’s psychic intimations and vibrations, studied him as intently as would a medium his map of the impenetrable jungle where the plane is believed to have disappeared: I am coming to find you, I know what you are, wait for me, chance favours only the prepared mind.
Luxmore reflects. Only a week ago he has ruled this same Pendel unworthy of the high mission he has in mind:
As my head joe, Andrew? As yours? In a red hot post? A tailor? We’d be the laughing stock of the Top Floor!
And when Osnard again presses him, this time after lunch when Luxmore’s mood tends to be more generous:
I am a stranger to prejudice, young Mr Osnard, and I respect your judgment. But those East End fellows end up stabbing you in the back. It’s in their blood. Good heavens, we are not yet reduced to recruiting jailbirds!
But that is a week ago, and the Panamanian clock is ticking louder.
‘You know I think we may be onto a winner here,’ Luxmore declares as he sucks his teeth and leafs through Pendel’s compendious file a second time. ‘It was prudent of us to test the ground elsewhere first, oh yes. The Top Floor will surely give us marks for that’ – the boy Pendel’s implausible confession to the police flits by him, owning up to everything, incriminating no one – ‘the man’s first-class material once you look under the surface, just the type we need for a small criminal nation’ – suck – ‘we’d a fellow not unlike him working in the docks in Buenos Aires during the Falklands difficulty.’ His eye settles for a moment on Osnard, but there is no suggestion in his glance that he considers his subordinate similarly qualified for criminal society. ‘You’ll have to ride him, Andrew. They’ve a hard mouth, these East End haberdashers, are you up to that?’
‘I think so, sir. If you give me the odd tip here and there.’
‘A villain is all to the good in this game provided he’s our villain’ – immigration papers of the father Pendel never knew – ‘And the wife indubitably an asset’ – suck – ‘one foot in the Canal Commission already, my God. Daughter of a Yankee engineer too, Andrew, I see a steadying hand here. Christian too. Our East End gentleman has done well for himself. No religious barriers to progress, we notice, eh-hem. Self-interest always firmly to the fore, as usual’ – suck – ‘Andrew, I begin to see shapes here forming before us in the sky. You’ll have to look at his accounts three times, I’ll tell you that for nothing. He’ll graft, he’ll have the nose, the cunning, but can you handle him? Who’s going to run who? that’ll be the problem’ – a glimpse of Pendel’s birth certificate bearing the name of the mother who ran away – ‘these fellows certainly know how to get into a man’s drawing room, too, no doubt of that, oh yes. And get their pound of flesh. We’ll be throwing you in at the deep end, I fear. Can you handle it?’