The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  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 rain-forestteak 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 code-named 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 ongoing 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 click.

  “Ongoing.”

  “Ongoing?”

  “What I said, Ambass. Ongoing.”

  “Yes. Quite so. Thank you. Well, from now on, if you please, Andrew, the thing—to use your parlance—is ongone. 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, ongo, 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 his 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, deliciously, 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 a plump 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.’ ”

  “There’s also method C, thank you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Abstention, for one thing.”

  “You mean me tie a knot in it and you take the veil?” He waved a well-cushioned hand at the poolside, where sumptuous girls of all sorts flirted with their swains to the music of a live band. “Desert island out here, girl. Nearest white man thousands o’ miles away. Just you and me and our duty to Mother England, till my wife comes out next month.”

  Francesca was halfway to her feet. She actually yelled out, “Your wife!”

  “Haven’t got one. Never did, never will,” Osnard said, rising with her. “So now that obstacle to our happiness has been removed, hell’s to say no?”

  They danced very well while she struggled for an answer. She had never supposed that someone so generously built could move so lightly. Or that such small eyes could be so compelling. She had never supposed, if she was honest, that she could be attracted to a man who, to say the least, was several points short of a Greek god.

  “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you I might hugely prefer someone else, has it?” she demanded.

  “In Panama? No way, girl. Checked you out. Local lads call you the English iceberg.”

  They were dancing very close. It seemed the obvious thing to do.

  “They call me nothing of the sort!”

  “Want a bet?”

  They were dancing even closer.

  “What about at home?” she insisted. “How do you know I haven’t got a soul mate in Shropshire? Or London for that matter?”

  He was kissing her temple, but it could have been any part of her. His hand was perfectly still on her back, and her back was bare.

  “Not much good to you out here, girl. Don’t get much satisfaction at five thousand miles, not in my book. Do you?”

  It wasn’t that Fran had been persuaded by Osnard’s arguments, she told herself as she contemplated his replete and dozing figure beside her in the bed. Or that he was the best dancer in the world. Or that he made her laugh louder and longer than any man she had known. It was just that she couldn’t imagine herself withstanding him for one more day, let alone three years.

  She had arrived in Panama six months ago. In London she had spent her weekends with a frightfully handsome hunting stockbroker named Edgar. Their affair was mutually agreed to have run its course by the time she got her posting. With Edgar, everything was mutually agreed.

  But who was Andy?

  A believer in solidly sourced material, Fran had never before slept with anyone she had not researched.

  She knew he had been at Eton but only because Miles had told her. Osnard, who appeared to hate his old school, referred to it only as “the nick” or “Slough Grammar,” and otherwise disdained all reference to his education. His intellect was widely based but arbitrary, as you would expect from someone whose school career had been abruptly curtailed. When he was drunk, he was fond of quoting Pasteur: “Chance favours only the prepared mind.”

  He was rich, or if he wasn’t, he was spendthrift or extremely generous. Almost every pocket of his expensive locally made suits—trust Andy to find himself the best tailor in town as soon as he arrived—seemed to be stuffed with twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. But when she pointed this out to him, he shrugged and told her it came with the job. If he took her to dinner or they stole a secret weekend in the country, he spent money like water.

/>   He had owned a greyhound and raced it at the White City until—in his words—a bunch o’ the boys invited him to take his doggie somewhere else. An ambitious project to open a go-carting stadium in Oman had met with similar frustrations. He had run a silver stall in Shepherd Market. None of these interludes could have lasted long, for he was only twenty-six.

  Of his parentage he declined to say anything at all, maintaining that he owed his immense charm and fortune to a distant aunt. He never referred to his previous conquests, though she had excellent reason to believe they were many and varied. True to his promise of omertà, he never made the smallest claim on her in public, a thing she found arousing: to be one minute at the highest pitch of ecstasy in his extremely capable arms, the next sitting primly opposite him at a chancery meeting and behaving as if they barely recognised each other.

  And he was a spy. And his job was running another spy called BUCHAN. Or spies, since BUCHAN product seemed more diverse and exciting than anything one person could encompass.

  And BUCHAN had the ear of the President and of the U.S. General in charge of Southern Command. BUCHAN knew crooks and wheeler-dealers: just as Andy must have known them when he had his greyhound, whose name she had recently learned was Retribution. She attached significance to this: Andy had an agenda.

  And BUCHAN was in touch with a secret democratic opposition that was waiting for the old fascists in Panama to show their true colours. He talked to militants in the students’ movement and fishermen and secret activists inside the unions. He plotted with them, waiting for the day. He referred to them—rather glamorously, she thought—as people from the other side of the bridge. BUCHAN was on terms with Ernie Delgado too, the grey eminence of the Canal. And with Rafi Domingo, who laundered money for the cartels. BUCHAN knew Legislative Assembly members, lots of them. He knew lawyers and bankers. There seemed to be no one worth knowing in Panama that BUCHAN didn’t know, and it was extraordinary to Fran, eerie, in fact, that Andy in such a short time had succeeded in getting to the very heart of a Panama she never knew existed. But then he’d got to her heart pretty sharpish too.

  And BUCHAN was sniffing a great plot, though nobody could quite work out what the plot consisted of: except that the French and possibly the Japanese and Chinese and the Tigers of Southeast Asia were part of it or might be, and perhaps the drug cartels of Central and South America. And the plot involved selling the Canal out of the back door, as Andy called it. But how? And how without the Americans knowing? After all, the Americans had effectively been running the country for most of the century, and they had the most amazingly sophisticated listening and monitoring systems all over the isthmus and Central America.

  Yet the Americans mystifyingly knew nothing about it at all, which added hugely to the excitement. Or if they did, they weren’t telling us. Or they knew but weren’t telling one another, because these days when you talked about American foreign policy you had to ask which one, and which ambassador: the one at the U.S. Embassy or the one up on Ancón Hill, because the U.S. military still hadn’t got used to the idea that it couldn’t bang heads in Panama anymore.

  And London was extremely excited, and was digging up collateral from all sorts of odd places, sometimes from years ago, and making amazing deductions to do with whose ambitions for world power would dominate everybody else’s, because, as BUCHAN put it, all the world’s vultures were gathering over poor little Panama and the game was guessing who was going to get the prize. And London kept pressing for more, more, all the time, which made Andy furious because overworking a network was like overworking a greyhound, he said: in the end you both pay for it, the dog and you. But that was all he told her. Otherwise he was secrecy itself, which she admired.

  And all this in ten short weeks from a standing start, just like their love affair. Andy was a magician, touching things that had been around for years and making them thrilling and alive. Touching Fran that way too. But who was BUCHAN? If Andy was defined by BUCHAN, who defined BUCHAN?

  Why did BUCHAN’s friends speak so frankly to him or her? Was BUCHAN a shrink, a doctor? Or a scheming bitch, worming secrets out of her lovers with lascivious skills? Who was it who telephoned Andy in fifteen-second bursts, ringing off almost before he could say, “I’ll be there”? Was it BUCHAN himself or an intermediary, a student, a fisherman, a cutout, some special link person in the network? Where did Andy go when, like a man commanded by a supernatural voice, he rose at dead of night, threw on his clothes, removed a wad of dollar bills from the wall safe behind the bed and left her lying there without so much as a goodbye, to creep back again at dawn, chagrined or wildly elated, stinking of cigar smoke and women’s perfume? And then to take her, still without a word, endlessly, wonderfully, tirelessly, hours, years on end, his thick body skimming weightlessly over her and round her, one peak after another, something that till now had happened to Fran only in her schoolgirl imagination?

  And what great alchemy did Andy get up to when an ordinarylooking 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 darkroom, 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 U.S. objections. . . .

  Declared himself to whom? To his Cuban mistress? And she declared 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 30 percent holding in the Mainland Chinese fast-food chain Lee Lotus, Lee Lotus being 40 percent owned by companies belonging to the Rodríguez 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—Shepher
d he called himself, always something in his hand like a wrench or a screwdriver or a bit of electric wire.

  “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?”

  No answer.

  “Where are you meeting her?”

  “In a whorehouse,” he snapped, heading for the door.

  “Have I offended you somehow?”

  “Not yet. But you’re getting there.”

  “Perhaps you’ve offended me. I may go back to my flat. I need some serious sleep.”

  But she stayed, with the smell of his round clever body still on her and the print of him in the bedclothes at her side and the memory of his watcher’s eyes smouldering down at her in the half-light. Even his tantrums excited her. So did his black side, in the rare moments when he let it show: in their lovemaking, when they were playing games and she brought him to the brink of violence, and his wet head would lift as if to strike, before he just, but only just, pulled back. Or at BUCHAN meetings, when Maltby with customary perversity decided to needle him about a report— “Is your source illiterate as well as omniscient, Andrew, or do we have you to thank for his split infinitives?”—and little by little the lines of his fluid face hardened and the danger light kindled in the depths of his eyes and she understood why he had christened his greyhound Retribution.