The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  The red book was his indispensable aid to creative report writing. In its hugely secret pages, areas of Head Office’s outstanding ignorance, known otherwise as the analysts’ Black Holes, were obligingly listed for the convenience of intelligence gatherers. And what analysts didn’t know, in Osnard’s simple logic, analysts couldn’t check. And what they couldn’t check they couldn’t bloody well carp about. Osnard, like many new writers, had discovered he was unexpectedly sensitive to criticism. For two hours without a break, Osnard reshaped, polished, honed, and rewrote until BUCHAN’s latest intelligence material fitted like perfectly turned pegs into the analysts’ Black Holes. A lapidary tone, an everwatchful scepticism, an extra doubt raised here and there added to the air of authenticity. Till at last, confident of his handiwork, he telephoned his cypher clerk, Shepherd, summoned him to the embassy immediately and, on the principle that messages dispatched at unsociable hours are more impressive than their daytime fellows, presented him with a hand-coded TOP SECRET BUCHAN telegram for immediate transmission.

  “Only wish I could share it with you, Shep,” said Osnard in his We Dive at Dawn voice, observing how Shepherd gazed wistfully at the unintelligible groups of numbers.

  “Me too, Andy, but when it’s need-to-know, it’s need-to-know, isn’t it?”

  “Suppose it is,” Osnard conceded.

  We’ll send out old Shep, Personnel had said. Keep young Osnard on the straight and narrow.

  Osnard drove but not to his apartment. He drove with purpose but the purpose lay out ahead of him, undefined. A fat wad of dollar bills was nudging against his left nipple. What will I have? Darting lights, colour photographs of naked black girls in illuminated frames, multilingual signs proclaiming LIVE EROTIC SEX. Respect it but not my mood tonight. He kept driving. Pimps, pushers, cops, bunch o’ nancy boys, all looking for a buck. Uniformed GIs in threes. He passed the Club Costa Brava, young Chinese whores a speciality. Thanks, darlings, prefer ’em older and more grateful. Still he kept driving, his senses leading, which was what he liked his senses to do. The old Adam stirring. Taste everything, only way. Hell can you know whether you want a thing till you’ve bought it? His mind flitted back to Luxmore. The greatest opinion maker in the world believes in it. . . . Must be Ben Hatry. Luxmore had dropped his name a couple o’ times in London. Punned with it. Our Benefit Fund, ha ha. The Benison of a certain patriotic media baron. You didn’t hear that, young Mr. Osnard. The name of Hatry will never cross my lips. Suck o’ the teeth. What an arsehole.

  Osnard swung his car across the road, hit the curb, mounted it and parked on the pavement. I’m a diplomat, so screw the lot o’ you. CASINO AND CLUB, said the sign, and on the door All Handguns to Be Checked. Two nine-foot bouncers in capes and peaked hats guarded the entrance. Girls in miniskirts and net stockings undulated at the foot of a red staircase. Looks my kind o’ place.

  It was six in the morning.

  “Damn you, Andy Osnard, you had me scared,” Fran confessed with feeling as he climbed into bed beside her. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “She wore me out,” he said.

  But his revival was already apparent.

  14

  The rage that had swept over Pendel with his departure from the pushbutton house of love did not subside as he climbed into the four-track or drove home badly through red mist or lay with a thumping heart on his side of the bed in Bethania, or woke next morning or the morning after. “I’ll need some days,” he had mumbled to Osnard. But it was not the days he was counting. It was the years. It was every wrong turning he had taken to oblige. It was every insult he had swallowed for the sake of the greater good, preferring to drucken himself rather than cause what Benny called a gewalt. It was every scream that had stopped in his throat before it reached the open air. It was a lifetime’s worth of frustrated fury arriving uninvited among the host of characters who, for want of closer definition, traded under the name of Harry Pendel.

  And it woke him like a bugle call, reviving and reproaching him in one huge blast, rallying his other emotions to its flag. Love, fear, outrage and revenge were among the first volunteers. It swept away the puny wall that had separated fact from fiction in Pendel’s soul. It said “Enough!” and “Attack!” and tolerated no deserters. But attack what? And what with?

  We want to buy your friend, Osnard is saying. And if we can’t, we’ll send him back to prison. Ever been to prison, Pendel?

  Yes. And so’s Mickie. And I saw him there. And he’d hardly got the wind to say “hullo.”

  We want to buy your wife, Osnard is saying. And if we can’t, we’ll throw her onto the street and your kids with her. Ever been on the street, Pendel?

  It’s where I came from.

  And these threats were pistols, not dreams. Held to his head by Osnard. All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place and the truth was in another. To ride with the pressure until he could hop off and go home.

  But Osnard’s pressure hadn’t let him hop off.

  Berating himself, Pendel went through his usual material. As a practised self-accuser, he tore his hair and called on God to witness his remorse. I’m ruined! It’s a judgment! I’m back in prison! All life is a prison! It doesn’t matter whether I’m inside or out! And I brought it all on myself! But his anger didn’t go away. Eschewing Louisa’s Cooperative Christianity, he resorted to the fearful language of Benny’s half-remembered efforts at atonement as chanted into his empty tankard at the Wink & Nod: We have harmed, corrupted, and ruined. . . . We are guilty, we have betrayed. . . . We have robbed, we have slandered. . . . We have perverted and led astray. . . . We have been false. . . . We cut ourselves off from truth, and reality exists to entertain us. We hide behind distractions and toys. The anger still refused to budge. It went wherever Pendel went, like a cat in a sick pantomime. Even when he embarked on a merciless historical analysis of his despicable behaviour from the beginning of time until the present day, his anger turned the sword away from his own breast and outward at the perverters of his humanity.

  In the Beginning was the Hard Word, he told himself. It was applied by Andy when he barged into my shop, and there was no resisting it because it was pressure, not only regarding the summer frocks but also one Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.

  And in consequence of the above, there was me undertaking to be a listening post. So I listened. And I heard a few things. And what wasn’t heard as such was heard in my head, which was only natural, given the degree of pressure exerted. I’m a service industry, so I served. What’s so wrong about that? And after that there was what I would call a flowering at a certain level, which was hearing a lot more and getting better at it, because a thing you learn about spying is, it’s like trade, it’s like sex: it has to get better or it won’t get anywhere.

  So I entered what we might call the area of positive hearing, in which certain words are put into people’s mouths that they would have said if they’d thought of them at the time. Which is what everyone does anyway. Plus I photographed a few bits and pieces from Louisa’s briefcase, which I did not like doing but Andy would have it and, bless him, he loves his photographs. But it wasn’t stealing. It was looking. And anyone can look, is what I say. With or without a cigarette lighter in his pocket.

  And what happened after that was Andy’s fault completely. I never encouraged him, I never even thought of it till he did. Andy required me to obtain subsources, your subsource being a bird of a very different feather from your unaware informant, and necessit
ating what I call a quantum leap, plus substantial retuning as regards the purveyor’s mental attitude. But I’ll tell you something about subsources. Subsources, once you get into the way of them, are very nice people, a lot nicer than some I could name who have a somewhat larger place in reality, subsources being a secret family that don’t answer back or have problems unless you tell them to. Subsources are about turning your friends into what they nearly were already, or would like to be, but strictly speaking never will be. Or what they wouldn’t like to be at all but rationally might have been, given what they are.

  Take Sabina—whom Marta based loosely on herself, but not entirely—for example. Take your average fiery bomb-making student waiting to do his worst. Take Alpha and Beta and certain others who for reasons of security must remain nameless. Take Mickie with his Silent Opposition and his Conspiracy That Nobody Can Put His Finger On, which in my personal judgment was an idea of pure genius except that sooner rather than later I’m going to have to put my finger on it in a manner that will satisfy all parties, owing to Andy’s highly remorseless pressure. Take the People Who Live the Other Side of the Bridge and the Real Heart of Panama that nobody can find except Mickie and a few students with a stethoscope. Take Marco, who wouldn’t say yes until I’d had his wife speak to him severely about the new deep freeze she wanted and the second car and getting their kid into the Einstein, which I just may be able to arrange for them if Marco comes through on certain other fronts, and maybe she ought to have another word with him in that regard?

  All fluence. Loose threads, plucked from the air, woven and cut to measure.

  So you build up your subsources and do their listening for them, and their worrying, and you research for them and read for them and listen to Marta about them, and you put them in the right places at the right times and generally set them off to their best advantage with all their ideals and problems and little ways, the same as I do in the shop. And you pay them, which is only proper. Part cash in their pockets and the rest put aside for a rainy day so that they don’t flash it around and make themselves look silly and conspicuous and expose themselves to the full rigour of the law. The only trouble being that my subsources can’t have the cash in their pockets because they don’t know they’ve earned it and some don’t have the pockets as such, so I have to have it in mine. But that’s only fair when you think about it because they haven’t earned it, have they? I have. So I take the cash. Or Andy banks it for me in his widows and orphans. And the subsources are none the wiser, which is what Benny would have called a bloodless con. And what’s life if it isn’t invention? Starting with inventing yourself.

  Prisoners, it is well known, have their own morality. Such was Pendel’s.

  And having duly flailed himself and exonerated himself, he was at peace, except that the black cat was still glowering at him and the peace he felt was of the armed variety, a constructive outrage stronger and more lucid than any he had known in a lifetime peppered with injustices. He felt it in his hands, the way they tingled and muscled up. In his back, mostly across his shoulders. In his hips and heels as he strode about the house and shop. Thus exalted, he was able to clench his fists and hammer on the wooden walls of the prisoner’s dock that always mentally surrounded him and roar out his innocence, or innocence as near as made no odds:

  Because I’ll tell you something else, Your Honour, while we’re about it, if you’ll wipe that Top Sheep’s smile off your face: it takes two to tango. And Mr. Andrew Osnard of Her Majesty’s celestial whatnot tangos. I can feel it. Whether he can feel it is another matter, but I think he can. Sometimes people don’t know they’re doing things. But Andy’s egging me on. He’s making more of me than what I am, counting everything twice and pretending it’s only the once, plus he’s bent, because I know bent, and London’s worse than he is.

  It was at this point in his deliberations that Pendel stopped addressing his Maker, His Honour, or himself, and glared ahead of him at the wall of his workroom, where he happened to be cutting yet another life-improving suit for Mickie Abraxas, the one that would win him back his wife. After so many of them, Pendel could have cut it with his eyes shut. But his eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. He seemed to be straining for oxygen, though his workroom, thanks to its high windows, had an adequate supply. He had been playing Mozart, but Mozart was no longer his mood. With one hand he blindly switched him off. With the other he laid down his shears, but his gaze didn’t flinch. It remained mooning at the same spot on the wall which, unlike other walls he had known, was painted neither millstone grey nor slime green but a soothing shade of gardenia that he and his decorator had taken pains to achieve.

  Then he spoke. Aloud. One word.

  Not as Archimedes might have spoken it. Not with any recognisable emotion. Rather in the tone of the I-speak-your-weight machines that had enlivened the railway stations of his childhood. Mechanically, but with assertion.

  “Jonah,” he said.

  Harry Pendel was having his grand vision at last. It floated before him at this very minute, intact, superb, fluorescent, complete. He’d had it from the start, he now realised, like a wad of money in his back pocket when all this time he’d been starving, thinking he was broke, struggling, aspiring, straining for knowledge he never quite possessed. Yet he possessed it! It had been sitting there, his very own to dispose of, his secret store! And he’d forgotten its existence until now! And here it was before him in glorious polychrome. My grand vision, pretending to be a wall. My conspiracy that has found its cause. The original uncut version. Brought to your screens by popular demand. And radiantly illuminated by anger.

  And its name is Jonah.

  It is a year ago but in Pendel’s vaulting memory, it is here and now and on the wall in front of him. It is a week after Benny’s death. It is two days into Mark’s first term at the Einstein and one day after Louisa has resumed gainful employment with the Canal. Pendel is driving his four-track. His destination is Colón, the purpose of his mission twofold: to pay his monthly visit to Mr. Blüthner’s textile warehouse, and to become a member of the Brotherhood at last.

  He drives fast, as people do when they are driving to Colón, partly out of fear of highwaymen, partly in anticipation of the riches of the Free Zone ahead of them down the road. He is wearing a black suit that he has put on in the shop in order not to cause aggravation in the home, and he has six days’ worth of stubble. While Benny grieved for a departed friend, he gave up shaving. Pendel can do no less for Benny. He has even brought a black homburg, though he intends to leave it on the back seat.

  “It’s a rash,” he explains to Louisa, who for her comfort and safety has not been informed of Benny’s death as such, having been led to believe some years ago that Benny had died in alcoholic obscurity and accordingly presented no further threat. “I think it’s that new Swedish aftershave I was testing for the boutique,” he adds, inviting her concern.

  “Harry, you will write to those Swedes and you will tell them their lotion is dangerous. It is not appropriate for sensitive skins. It is life threatening for our children, it is inconsistent with Swedish notions of hygiene, and if the rash persists, you will sue the daylights out of them.”

  “I’ve already drafted it,” says Pendel.

  The Brotherhood is Benny’s last wish, expressed in a failing scrawl that arrived at the shop after his death:

  Harry boy, what you have been to me no question is a pearl of very great price except in one regard which is Charlie Blüthner’s Brotherhood. A fine business you’ve got, two children and who knows what’s in the pipeline. But the plum is still before you and why you wouldn’t pick it all these years is beyond me. Who Charlie doesn’t know in Panama is not worth knowing, plus good works and influence have always gone hand in hand, with the Brotherhood behind you you’ll never want for business or necessities. Charlie says the door’s still open plus he owes me. Though never as much as I’ll owe you, my son, when I’m standing in the corridor waiting for my turn, which in my p
rivate opinion is a longshot but don’t tell your Auntie Ruth. This place is all right if you like rabbis.

  Blessings, Benny

  Mr. Blüthner in Colón rules over half an acre of open-plan offices full of computers and happy secretaries in high-necked blouses and black skirts, and he is the second-most-respectable man in the world after Arthur Braithwaite. Each morning at seven he boards his company plane and has himself flown for twenty minutes to Colón’s France Field airport, where he is set down among the gaily painted aircraft of Colombian import-export executives who have dropped by to do a little tax-free shopping or, being too busy, sent their womenfolk instead. Each evening at six he flies home again, except on Fridays, when he flies home at three, and at Yom Kippur when the firm takes its annual holiday and Mr. Blüthner atones for sins that no one knows about except himself and, until a week ago, Uncle Benny.

  “Harry.”

  “Mr. Blüthner, sir, always a pleasure.”

  It’s the same every time. The enigmatic smile, the formal handshake, the waterproof respectability and no mention of Louisa. Except that on this day the smile is sadder and the handshake longer, and Mr. Blüthner is wearing a black tie from stock.

  “Your Uncle Benjamin was a great man,” he says, patting Pendel’s shoulder with his powdery little claw.

  “A giant, Mr. B.”

  “Your business prospers, Harry?”

  “I’m fortunate, Mr. B.”

  “You don’t worry that the world gets warmer all the time? Soon nobody will buy your jackets?”