The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  “No,” she said.

  “No what?”

  “No, there is no Silent Opposition. There is profit. There is corruption. There is power. There are rich people and desperate people. There are apathetic people.” Her learned voice again. The meticulous, bookish tone. The pedantry of the self-educated. “There are people so poor they can’t get poorer without dying. And there’s politics. And politics is the biggest swindle of them all. Is this for Mr. Osnard?”

  “It would be if it was what he wanted to hear.”

  Her hand found his and guided it to her lips and for a while she kissed it, finger by finger, saying nothing.

  “Does he pay you a lot?” she asked.

  “I can’t supply him with what he wants. I don’t know enough.” “Nobody knows enough. Thirty people decide what will happen in Panama. The other two and a half million guess.”

  “So what would your old student friends be doing if they hadn’t joined the Chase Manhattan and weren’t driving shiny cars?” Pendel insisted. “What would they be doing if they’d stayed militant? What’s logical? Given it’s today, and they still wanted what they used to want for Panama?”

  She pondered, coming slowly to what he was saying. “You mean, to put pressure on the government? Bring it to its knees?”

  “Yes.”

  “First we produce chaos. You want chaos?”

  “I might. If it’s necessary.”

  “It is. Chaos is a precondition of democratic awareness. Once the workers discover they are unled, they will elect leaders from their own ranks and the government will be scared of revolution and resign. You wish the workers to elect their own leaders?”

  “I’d like them to elect Mickie,” said Pendel, but she shook her head.

  “Not Mickie.”

  “All right, without Mickie.”

  “We would go first to the fishermen. It was what we always planned but never did.”

  “Why would you go to the fishermen?”

  “We were students opposed to nuclear weapons. We were indignant that nuclear materials were passing through the Panama Canal.

  We believed such cargoes were dangerous to Panama and an insult to our national sovereignty.”

  “What could the fishermen do about it?”

  “We would go to their unions and their gang bosses. If they refused us, we would go to the criminal elements on the waterfront who are willing to do anything for money. Some of our students were rich in those days. Rich students with a conscience.”

  “Like Mickie,” Pendel reminded her, but again she shook her head.

  “We would say to them: ‘Get out every trawler and smack and dinghy that you can lay your hands on, load them up with food and water, and take them to the Bridge of the Americas. Anchor them under the bridge and announce to the world that you mean to stay there. Many of the big cargo ships need a mile to slow down. After three days there will be two hundred ships waiting to pass through the Canal. After two weeks, a thousand. Thousands more will be turned away before they reach Panama, ordered to take different routes or go back to where they came from. There will be a crisis, the stock exchanges of the world will panic, the Yanquis will go crazy, the shipping industry will demand action, the balboa will collapse, the government will fall and no nuclear materials will ever again pass through the Canal.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about nuclear materials, to be honest, Marta.”

  She raised herself on one elbow, her smashed face close to his.

  “Listen. Panama today is already trying to prove to the world that it can run the Canal as well as the gringos. Nothing must interfere with the Canal. No strikes, no interruptions, no inefficiencies, no screw-ups. If the Panamanian government can’t keep the Canal working properly, how can it steal the revenue, raise tariffs, sell off the concessions? The moment the international banking community starts to take fright, the rabiblancos will give us everything we ask. And we shall ask for everything. For our schools, our roads, our hospitals, our farmers and our poor. If they try to clear away our boats or shoot us or bribe us, we shall appeal to the nine thousand Panamanian workmen that it takes to run the Canal each day. And we shall ask them: which side of the bridge do you stand? Are you Panamanian men, or are you Yanqui slaves? Strikes are a sacred right in Panama. Those who oppose them are pariahs. There are people in government today who argue that the labour laws of Panama should not apply to the Canal. Let them see.”

  She was lying flat upon him, her brown eyes so close to his that they were all he saw.

  “Thank you,” he said, kissing her.

  “My pleasure.”

  9

  Louisa Pendel loved her husband with an intensity understood only by women who have known what it is like to have been born into the pampered captivity of bigoted parents and to have a beautiful elder sister four inches shorter than you who does everything right two years before you do it wrong, who seduces your boyfriends even if she doesn’t go to bed with them, though usually she does, and obliges you to take the path of Noble Puritanism as the only available response.

  She loved him for his steady devotion to herself and to the children, for being a striver like her father, and for rebuilding a fine old English firm that everyone had given up for dead, and for making chicken soup and lockshen on Sundays in his striped apron, and for his kibbitzing, which meant his joking around, and for setting the table for their special meals together, the best silver and china, cloth napkins, never paper. And for putting up with the tantrums which ran in her like conflicting impulses of hereditary electricity; there was nothing she could do about them till they were safely over, or he had made love to her, which was by far the best solution, since she had all her sister’s appetites, even if she lacked the looks and amorality to indulge them. And she was deeply ashamed that she could never match his jokes or give him the freed laughter he craved, because even with Harry to liberate it, her laughter still sounded like her mother’s and so did her prayers, and her anger felt like her father’s.

  She loved the victim in Harry, and the determined survivor who had endured any privation rather than fall in with his wicked Uncle Benny and his criminal ways until the great Mr. Braithwaite came along to save him, just as Harry himself had later come along to save her from her parents and the Zone, and provide her with a new, free, decent life away from everything that till then had held her down. And she loved him as the lonely decider, struggling with conflicting beliefs until Braithwaite’s wise counsel led him to a nondenominational morality so like the Cooperative Christianity championed by her mother and preached throughout Louisa’s childhood from the pulpit of the Union Church in Balboa.

  For all these mercies she thanked God and Harry Pendel, and cursed her sister, Emily. Louisa honestly believed she loved her husband in all his moods and varieties, but she had never known him like this, and she was sick with terror.

  If he would only hit her, if that was what he needed to do. If he would lash out, bawl at her, drag her into the garden where the children couldn’t hear and say: “Louisa, we’re all washed up, I’m leaving you, I’ve got someone else.” If that was what he had. Anything, absolutely anything, was better than the bland pretence that their life together was fine, nothing had changed, except that he just had to pop out and measure a valued customer at nine o’clock at night and come back three hours later, saying wasn’t it time they had the Delgados to dinner? And why not have the Oakleys and Rafi Domingo as well? Which, as any fool in the world could have seen at a glance, was a recipe for catastrophe, but somehow the gap that had recently formed between herself and Harry didn’t let her say this to him.

  So Louisa held her tongue and duly invited Ernesto. One evening as he was on the point of going home she pressed the envelope into his hand and he took it cursorily, thinking it must be a reminder of some sort, Ernesto was such a dreamer and schemer, so wrapped up in his daily struggle against the lobbyists and intriguers, that sometimes he hardly knew which hemisphere he was in, let alone wha
t time of day it was. But next morning when he arrived he was courtesy itself, a real Spanish gentleman as always, and yes, he and his wife would be delighted, so long as Louisa would not be offended if they left early; Isabel, his wife, was concerned about their small son Jorge and his eye infection; sometimes he didn’t seem to sleep at all.

  After that she sent a card to Rafi Domingo, knowing that his wife wouldn’t come because she never did, it was that sort of lousy marriage. And next day sure enough a huge bouquet of roses arrived, like fifty dollars’ worth, with a racehorse on the card and Rafi saying in his own handwriting that he would be thrilled and enchanted, darling Louisa, but alas, his wife would be somewhere or other. And Louisa knew exactly what the flowers meant, because no woman under eighty was safe from Rafi’s advances; the gossip said he had given up underpants in order to improve his time-andmotion ratio. And the shameful thing was, if Louisa was truthful with herself, which largely after a couple or three vodkas she was, she found him disconcertingly attractive. So finally she called Donna Oakley, a chore she had deliberately left till last, and Donna said, “Oh shit, Louisa, we’d love to,” which was Donna’s level exactly. What a group!

  The dreaded day arrived and Harry came home early for once, armed with a pair of three-hundred-dollar porcelain candlesticks from Ludwig’s, and French champagne from Motta’s and a whole side of smoked salmon from somewhere else. And an hour later a team of fancy caterers showed up, led by a cocksure Argentine gigolo, and took over Louisa’s kitchen because Harry said their own servants weren’t reliable. Then Hannah raised a god-awful stink for no reason Louisa could fathom—aren’t you going to be nice to Mr. Delgado, darling? After all he’s Mummy’s boss and a close friend of the President of Panama. And he’s going to save the Canal for us and, yes, Anytime Island too. And no, Mark, thank you, this is not an occasion for you to play “Lazy Sheep” on your violin; Mr. and Mrs. Delgado might appreciate it but the other guests would not.

  Then in walks Harry and says, Oh, Louisa, go on, let him play it, but Louisa is adamant and gets into one of her monologues, they just pour out of her, she can’t control them, she can only listen to them and groan: Harry, I do not understand why every time I give an instruction to my children you have to march in here and countermand it just to show you are master of the house. At which Hannah throws another screaming fit and Mark locks himself in his room and plays “Lazy Sheep” nonstop till Louisa beats on his door and says, “Mark, they’ll be here any minute,” which was true, because the doorbell rang just at that moment and in marches Rafi Domingo, with his body lotion and his insinuating leer and sideburns and crocodile shoes—not all of Harry’s tailoring wiles could save him from looking like the worst kind of stage dago, her father would have ordered him round to the back door on the strength of his hair oil alone.

  And immediately after Rafi, enter the Delgados and the Oakleys all in short order, which proved just how unnatural the occasion was, because in Panama nobody shows up on time unless it’s a stiff occasion, and suddenly it was all happening, with Ernesto sitting on her right side, looking like the wise, good mandarin he was: just water, thank you, Louisa dear, I’m afraid I’m not much of a drinker; to which Louisa, who is by now the better for a couple of large ones taken in the privacy of her bathroom, says to be truthful neither is she, she always thinks drink spoils a nice evening. But Mrs. Delgado, down the table on Harry’s right, overhears this and gives an odd, disbelieving smile as if she has heard better.

  Meanwhile Rafi Domingo on Louisa’s left is dividing his time between clamping his stockinged foot on Louisa’s whenever she lets him—he has slipped off one crocodile shoe for the purpose— and squinting down the front of Donna Oakley’s dress which is cut on the lines of Emily’s dresses, breasts pushed up like tennis balls and the cleavage pointing due southward to what her father when he was drunk had called the industrial area.

  “You know what she means to me, your wife, Harry?” Rafi asks in mouthfuls of execrable Spanish-English, down the table to Harry. Lingua franca is English tonight, for the Oakleys’ benefit.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Louisa orders.

  “She’s my conscience!” Huge laugh with all his teeth and food showing. “And I didn’t know I got one till Louisa come along!”

  And finds this so wonderfully funny that everybody has to toast his conscience while he cranes his neck for another helping of Donna’s décolleté and wiggles his toes up and down Louisa’s calf, which makes her furious and randy at the same time, Emily I hate you, Rafi leave me alone you sleazeball and take your eyes off Donna, and Jesus, Harry, are you finally going to fuck me tonight?

  Why Harry had invited the Oakleys was another mystery to Louisa, until she remembered that Kevin was floating some sort of speculation to do with the Canal, Kevin being something in commodities and otherwise what her father used to call a damned Yankee hustler, while his wife, Donna, worked out to Jane Fonda videos and jogged in vinyl shorts and wiggled her ass at every pretty Panamanian boy who pushed her trolley for her in the supermarket, and from all she heard not just her trolley.

  And Harry from the first moment they sat down had been determined to talk about the Canal, first picking on Delgado, who responded with dignified patrician platitudes, then pressing everybody else into the discussion, whether or not they had anything to contribute. His questions of Delgado were so crude she was embarrassed. Only Rafi’s roaming foot and the recognition that she was a tad oversedated prevented her from telling him: Harry, Mr. Delgado is my fucking boss, not yours. So why are you making such a horse’s ass of yourself, you prick? But that was Whore Emily talking, not Virtuous Louisa who never swore, or not in front of the children and never when she was sober.

  No, Delgado replied politely to Harry’s bombardment, nothing had been agreed during the presidential tour, but some interesting ideas had been put forward, Harry, there was a general spirit of cooperation, goodwill was of the essence.

  Well done, Ernesto, thought Louisa, tell him where he gets off.

  “Still, I mean, everyone knows those Japs are after the Canal, don’t they, Ernie?” said Harry, branching into inane generalisations that he hadn’t the knowledge to sustain. “The only question is which way they’re going to come at us, I don’t know what you think, Rafi, at all?”

  Rafi’s silk stocking toes were jammed into the flesh of Louisa’s knee joint and Donna’s cleavage was opening like a barn door.

  “I tell you what I think about Japs, Harry. You want to know what I think about Japs?” said Rafi in his rattly, auctioneer’s voice, as he gathered in his audience.

  “I would indeed,” said Harry unctuously.

  But Rafi needed everyone.

  “Ernesto, you want to know what I think about Japs?”

  Delgado graciously expressed an interest in hearing what Rafi thought about the Japanese.

  “Donna, you want to hear what I think about the Japs?”

  “Just say it, for Christ’s sake, Rafi,” Oakley said irritably.

  But Rafi was still gathering them in.

  “Louisa?” he asked, wiggling his toes behind her knee.

  “I guess we’re all hanging on your words, Rafi,” said Louisa in her role of charming hostess and whore sister.

  So Rafi finally delivered himself of his opinion of the Japanese:

  “I think those Jap bastards inject my horse Dolce Vita a doubledose Valium before the big race last week!” he cried, and laughed so loudly at his own joke, to the glint of so many gold teeth, that his audience of necessity laughed with him, Louisa loudest and Donna after her by a short head.

  But Harry was not put off. Instead, he launched himself on the subject that he knew upset his wife more than any other: the disposal of the former Canal Zone itself.

  “I mean we’ve got to face it, Ernie, it’s a nice little piece of real estate that you boys are carving up. Five hundred square miles of garden America, mown and watered like Central Park, more swimming pools than in the whole of th
e rest of Panama—it does make you wonder, doesn’t it? I don’t know whether the City of Knowledge idea is still a starter, Ernie. Some of my customers seem to think it’s a bit of a dead duck, frankly, a university in the middle of a jungle. It’s hard to imagine a learned professor seeing that as the summit of his career, I don’t know if they’re right.”

  He was running low but nobody helped him out, so he forged on:

  “I suppose it all depends on how many U.S. military bases are going to be left vacant at the end of the day, doesn’t it? Which requires the assistance of a crystal ball, by all accounts. We’d have to tap the highly secret wires to the Pentagon, I dare say, to know the answer to that little conundrum.”

  “It’s bullshit,” said Kevin loudly. “The smart boys have had the land all carved up among themselves for years, right, Ernie?”

  A frightful emptiness set in. Delgado’s fine face turned pale and stony. Nobody could think of anything to say except for Rafi who, indifferent to all atmosphere, was cheerfully interrogating Donna about the makeup she was wearing so that he could have his wife buy some. He was also trying to get his foot between Louisa’s legs, which she had crossed in self-defence. Then suddenly Emily the Shrew found the words that Louisa the Immaculate was piously holding back, and they came spilling out of her, first in a series of jerky statements of record, then in an unstoppable, alcohol-induced rush.

  “Kevin. I do not understand what you are implying. Dr. Delgado is a champion of Canal conservation. If you are not aware of this, it is because Ernesto is too courteous and modest to tell you. You, on the other hand, are here in Panama with the sole intention of making money out of the Canal, a purpose for which it was not designed. The only way to make money out of the Canal is ruin it.” Her voice began sliding as she counted off the crimes that Kevin was contemplating. “By cutting down the forests, Kevin. By depriving it of fresh water. By failing to maintain its structure and machinery to the standards required by our forefathers.” Her voice became harsh and nasal. She could hear it but not stop it. “And so, Kevin, if you truly feel impelled to make money by selling off the achievements of great Americans, I suggest you go right back to San Francisco where you came from and sell the Golden Gate to the Japs. And Rafi, if you don’t take your hand off my thigh, I’m going to stick a fork in your knuckles.”