The Tailor of Panama Read online

  Then pandemonium while Pendel rummages for a spare quarter to give the black boy selling roses at the lights, then wild waving from all three of them for the old man who’s been standing at the same street corner for the last six months, offering the same rocking chair at two hundred and fifty dollars written on a placard round his neck. Side roads again, it’s Mark’s turn to be dropped first, join the stinking inferno of Manuel Espinosa Batista, pass the National University, sneak a wistful glance at leggy girls with white shirts and books under their arms, acknowledge the wedding-cake glory of the Del Carmen Church—Good morning, God—take your life in your hands across the Vía España, duck into the Avenida Federico Boyd with a sigh of relief, duck again into Vía Israel onto San Francisco, go with the flow to Paitilla airport, good morning again to the ladies and gentlemen of the drugs trade who account largely for the rows of pretty private aeroplanes parked among the trash, crumbling buildings, stray dogs and chickens, but rein back now, a little caution, please, breathe out, the rash of anti-Jewish bombings in Latin America has not passed unnoticed: those hard-faced young men at the gate of the Albert Einstein mean business, so watch your manners. Mark hops out, early for once, Hannah yells, “Forgot this, goofy!” and chucks his satchel after him. Mark strides off, no demonstrations of affection allowed, not even a flap of the hand lest it be misinterpreted by his peers as wistful longing.

  Then back into the fray, the frustrated shriek of police sirens, the grunt and grind of bulldozers and power drills, all the mindless hooting, farting and protesting of a third world tropical city that can’t wait to choke itself to death, back to the beggars and cripples and the sellers of hand towels, flowers, drinking mugs and cookies crowding you at every traffic light—Hannah, get your window down, and where’s that tin of half-balboas?—today it’s the turn of the legless white-haired senator paddling himself in his dog cart, and after him the beautiful black mother with her happy baby on her hip, fifty cents for the mother and a wave for the baby and here comes the weeping boy on crutches again, one leg bent under him like an overripe banana, does he weep all day or only in the rush hour? Hannah gives him a half-balboa as well.

  Then clear water for a moment as we race on up the hill at full speed to the María Inmaculada with its powdery-faced nuns fussing around the yellow school buses in the forecourt—Señor Pendel, buenos días! and buenos días to you, Sister Piedad! And to you too, Sister Imelda!—and has Hannah remembered her collection money for whichever saint it is today? No, she’s goofy too, so here’s five bucks, darling, you’ve got plenty of time and have a great day. Hannah, who is plump, gives her father a pulpy kiss and wanders off in search of Sarah, who is this week’s soul mate, while a smiling very fat policeman with a gold wristwatch looks on like Father Christmas.

  And nobody makes anything of it, Pendel thinks in near contentment as he watches her disappear into the crowd. Not the kids, not anyone. Not even me. One Jewish boy except he’s not, one Catholic girl except she’s not either, and for all of us it’s normal. And sorry I was rude about the peerless Ernesto Delgado, dear, but it’s not my day for being a good boy.

  After which, in the sweetness of his own company, Pendel rejoins the highway and switches on his Mozart. And at once his awareness sharpens, as it tends to do as soon as he is alone. Out of habit he makes sure his doors are locked and keeps half an eye for traffic muggers, cops and other dangerous characters. But he isn’t worried. For a few months after the U.S. invasion, gunmen ruled Panama in peace. Today if anybody pulled a gun in a traffic jam he would be met with a fusillade from every car but Pendel’s.

  A scorching sun leaps at him from behind yet another half-built high-rise, shadows blacken, the clatter of the city thickens. Rainbow washing appears amid the darkness of the rickety tenements of the narrow streets he must negotiate. The faces on the pavement are African, Indian, Chinese and every mixture in between. Panama boasts as many varieties of human being as birds, a thing that daily gladdens the hybrid Pendel’s heart. Some were descended from slaves, others might as well have been, for their forefathers had been shipped here in their tens of thousands to work and sometimes die for the Canal.

  The road opens. Low tide and low lighting on the Pacific. The dark grey islands across the bay are like far-off Chinese mountains suspended in the dusky mist. Pendel has a great wish to go to them. Perhaps that’s Louisa’s fault, because sometimes her strident insecurity wears him out. Or perhaps it’s because he can already see straight ahead of him the raw red tip of the bank’s skyscraper jostling for who’s longest among its equally hideous fellows. A dozen ships float in ghostly line above the invisible horizon, burning up dead time while they wait to enter the Canal. In a leap of empathy Pendel endures the tedium of life on board. He is sweltering on the motionless deck, he is lying in a stinking cabin full of foreign bodies and oil fumes. No more dead time for me, thank you, he promises himself with a shudder. Never again. For the rest of his natural life, Harry Pendel will relish every hour of every day, and that’s official. Ask Uncle Benny, alive or dead.

  Entering the stately Avenida Balboa, he has the sensation of becoming airborne. To his right the United States Embassy rolls by, larger than the Presidential Palace, larger even than his bank. But not, at this moment, larger than Louisa. I’m too grandiose, he explains to her as he descends into the bank’s forecourt. If I wasn’t so grandiose in my head I’d never be in the mess I’m in now, I’d never have seen myself as a landed baron and I’d never be owing a mint I haven’t got and I’d stop sniping at Ernie Delgado and anybody else you happen to regard as Mister Morally Impeccable. Reluctantly he switches off his Mozart, reaches into the back of the car, removes his jacket from its hanger—he has selected dark blue—slips it on and adjusts his Denman & Goddard tie in the driving mirror. A stern boy in uniform guards the great glass entrance. He nurses a pump-action shotgun and salutes everyone who wears a suit.

  “Don Eduardo, Monseñor, how are we today, sir?” Pendel cries in English, flinging up an arm. The boy beams in delight.

  “Good morning, Mr. Pendel,” he replies. It’s all the English he knows.

  For a tailor, Harry Pendel is unexpectedly physical. Perhaps he is aware of this, because he walks with an air of power restrained. He is broad as well as tall, with grizzled hair cropped short. He has a heavy chest and the thick sloped shoulders of a boxer. Yet his walk is statesmanlike and disciplined. His hands, at first curled lightly at his sides, link themselves primly behind the sturdy back. It is a walk to inspect a guard of honour or face assassination with dignity. In his imagination Pendel has done both. One vent in the back of the jacket is all he allows. He calls it Braithwaite’s Law.

  But it was in the face which at forty he deserved that the zest and pleasure of the man were most apparent. An unrepentant innocence shone from his baby-blue eyes. His mouth, even in repose, gave out a warm and unobstructed smile. To catch sight of it unexpectedly was to feel a little better.

  Great Men in Panama have gorgeous black secretaries in prim blue bus-conductress uniforms. They have panelled, steel-lined bulletproof doors of rain-forest teak with brass handles you can’t turn because the doors are worked on buzzers from within so that Great Men can’t be kidnapped. Ramón Rudd’s room was huge and modern and sixteen floors up, with tinted windows from floor to ceiling looking onto the bay and a desk the size of a tennis court and Ramón Rudd clinging to the far end of it like a very small rat clinging to a very big raft. He was plump as well as short, with a dark-blue jaw and slicked-dark hair with blue-black sideburns and greedy bright eyes. For practice he insisted on speaking English, mainly through the nose. He had paid large sums to research his genealogy and claimed to be descended from Scottish adventurers left stranded by the Darién disaster. Six weeks ago he had ordered a kilt in the Rudd tartan so that he could take part in Scottish dancing at the Club Unión. Ramón Rudd owed Pendel ten thousand dollars for five suits. Pendel owed Rudd a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. As a gesture, Ramón was adding the
unpaid interest to the capital, which was why the capital was growing.

  “Peppermint?” Rudd enquired, pushing at a brass tray of wrapped green sweets.

  “Thank you, Ramón,” Pendel said, but didn’t take one. Ramón helped himself.

  “Why are you paying a lawyer so much money?” Rudd asked after a two-minute silence in which he sucked his peppermint and they separately grieved over the rice farm’s latest account sheets.

  “He said he was going to bribe the judge, Ramón,” Pendel explained with the humility of a culprit giving evidence. “He said they were friends. He said he’d rather keep me out of it.”

  “But why did the judge postpone the hearing if your lawyer bribed him?” Rudd reasoned. “Why did he not award the water to you as he promised?”

  “It was a different judge by then, Ramón. A new judge was appointed after the election, and the bribe wasn’t transferable from the old one to the new one, you see. Now the new judge is marking time to see which side comes up with the best offer. The clerk says the new judge has got more integrity than the old one, so naturally he’s more expensive. Scruples are expensive in Panama, he says. And it’s getting worse.”

  Ramón Rudd took off his spectacles and breathed on them, then polished each lens in turn with a piece of chamois leather from the top pocket of his Pendel & Braithwaite suit. Then settled the gold loops behind his shiny little ears.

  “Why don’t you bribe someone at the Ministry of Agricultural Development?” he suggested, with a superior forbearance.

  “We did try, Ramón, but they’re high-minded, you see. They say the other side has already bribed them and it wouldn’t be ethical for them to switch allegiance.”

  “Couldn’t your farm manager arrange something? You pay him a big salary. Why doesn’t he involve himself?”

  “Well now, Angel’s a bit lapsadaisy, frankly, Ramón,” said Pendel, who sometimes chose unconsciously to improve on the English language. “I think he may be more use not being there, not to put too fine a point on it. I’m going to have to screw myself up to say something, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Ramón Rudd’s jacket was still pinching him under the armpits. They stood at the big window face-to-face while he folded his arms across his chest, then lowered them to his sides, then linked his hands behind his back, while Pendel attentively tugged with his fingertips at the seams, waiting like a doctor to know what hurt.

  “It’s only a tad, Ramón, if it’s anything at all,” he pronounced at last. “I’m not unpicking the sleeves unnecessarily, because it’s bad for the jacket. But if you drop it in next time, we’ll see.”

  They sat down again.

  “Is the farm producing any rice?” Rudd asked.

  “A little, Ramón, I’ll put it that way. We’re competing with the globalisation, I’m told, which is the cheap rice that’s imported from other countries where there’s subsidisation from the government. I was hasty. We both were.”

  “You and Louisa?”

  “Well, you and me, really, Ramón.”

  Ramón Rudd frowned and looked at his watch, which was what he did with clients who had no money.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t make the farm a separate company while you had the chance, Harry. Pledging a good shop as surety for a rice farm that has run out of water makes no sense at all.”

  “But Ramón—it was what you insisted on at the time,” Pendel objected. But his shame already undermined his indignation. “You said that unless we jointly accounted the businesses, you couldn’t take the risk on the rice farm. That was a condition of the loan. All right, it was my fault, I should never have listened to you. But I did. I think you were representing the bank that day, not Harry Pendel.”

  They talked racehorses. Ramón owned a couple. They talked property. Ramón owned a chunk of coast on the Atlantic side. Maybe Harry would drive out one weekend, buy a plot perhaps, even if he didn’t build on it for a year or two, Ramón’s bank would provide a mortgage. But Ramón didn’t say bring Louisa and the kids, although Ramón’s daughter went to the María Inmaculada and the two girls were friendly. Neither, to Pendel’s immense relief, did he find it appropriate to refer to the two hundred thousand dollars Louisa had inherited from her late father and handed to Pendel to invest in something sound.

  “Have you been trying to shift your account to a different bank?” Ramón Rudd asked, when everything unsayable had been left thoroughly unsaid.

  “I don’t think there’s a lot would have me at this particular moment, Ramón. Why?”

  “One of the merchant banks called me. Wanted to know all about you. Your credit standing, commitments, turnover. A lot of things I don’t tell anybody. Naturally.”

  “They’re daft. They’re talking about someone else. What merchant bank was that?”

  “A British one. From London.”

  “From London? They called you? About me? Who? Which one? I thought they were all broke.”

  Ramón Rudd regretted he could not be more precise. He had told them nothing, naturally. Inducements didn’t interest him.

  “What inducements, for heaven’s sake?” Pendel exclaimed.

  But Rudd seemed almost to have forgotten them. Introductions, he said vaguely. Recommendations. It was immaterial. Harry was a friend.

  “I’ve been thinking about a blazer,” Ramón Rudd said as they shook hands. “Navy blue.”

  “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 cuff links 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 extrasensory 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 ξ 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
.

  2

  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 classes. 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.

  The uniform Pendel had designed for him was particularly splendid. The white breeches, already entrusted to his Italian trouser makers ensconced a few doors down the corridor behind him, were to be fitted flush against the seat, suitable for standing but not sitting. The tailcoat, which Pendel was this minute cutting, was white and navy blue, with gold epaulettes and braid cuffs, gold frogging, and a high Nelsonian collar crusted with oak leaves round ships’ anchors—an imaginative touch of Pendel’s own, which had pleased the admiral’s private secretary when Pendel faxed the drawing to him. Pendel had never entirely understood what Benny meant by rock of eye, but when he looked at that drawing he knew he had it.