The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  “But Mr. B., you were so happy in there!”

  Mr. Blüthner gives a rascally smile. “Harry, I’ll tell you. All the time I was listening to Jonah, I was hearing your Uncle Benny and thinking how he loved a con. Now then. How about you join our little Brotherhood?”

  But Pendel for once cannot find it in him to say what Mr. Blüthner wants to hear.

  “I’m not ready for it, Mr. B.,” he replies earnestly. “I’ve got to grow. I’m working on it, and it will come. And when it does, and I’m ready, I’ll be back to you like a hotcake.”

  But he was ready now. His conspiracy was up and running, with or without the orimulsion. The black cat of anger was washing his paws for battle.

  16

  Days, Pendel had told Osnard. I’ll need some days. Days of mutual thoughtfulness and marital renewal, in which Pendel the husband and lover rebuilds the fallen bridges to his spouse and, concealing nothing, takes her with him into his most private realms, appointing her his confidante, helpmeet and fellow spy in the service of his grand vision.

  As Pendel remade himself for Louisa, so he now remakes Louisa for the world. There are no more secrets between them. All is known, all is shared, they are together at last, head joe and subsource, conscious to one another and to Osnard, frank and bonded partners in a great endeavour. They have so much in common. Delgado their common source of intelligence on the destiny of gallant little Panama. London their common and exacting taskmaster. Anglo-Saxon civilisation at stake, children to protect, a network of brilliant subsources to nourish, a dastardly Japanese conspiracy to thwart, a common canal to save. What woman worth her salt, what mother, what inheritor of her parents’ wars, would not rally to the call, put on the cloak, take up the dagger, and spy the daylights out of the Canal’s usurpers? From now on, the grand vision shall rule their lives entirely. Everything will be subordinated to it, every chance word and casual incident will be woven into the celestial tapestry. Perceived by Jonah, restored by Pendel, but with Louisa henceforth as its vestal. It is Louisa, with Delgado to assist her, who shall stand before it, bravely holding up the lamp.

  And if Louisa is not in as many words aware of her new status, at least she cannot fail to be impressed by the harvest of little considerations that attends it.

  Cancelling nonessential engagements and closing down the clubroom in the evenings, Pendel hastens home to nurture and observe his agent-in-waiting, study her behaviour patterns and assemble the minutiae of her everyday existence in the workplace, most notably her relations with her revered, high-minded, adored, and—to Pendel’s jealous eye—grossly overvalued boss, Ernesto Delgado.

  Till now, he fears, he has loved his wife as a concept only, as some standard of straightness that complemented his own complexity. Very well, from today he will put conceptual love aside and know her for herself. Till now when he was rattling at the bars of marriage he was trying to get out. Now he is trying to get in. No detail of her daily life is too slight for him: every comment about her peerless employer, his comings and goings, phone calls, engagements, conferences, fads and little ways. The smallest aberration in his daily routine, the name and standing of the most casual visitor to pass through Louisa’s office on his way to an audience with the great man—all the trivia which till now Pendel has listened to politely with one ear—become matters of such close concern to him that he has actually to damp down his curiosity for fear of arousing her concern. For the same reason, his constant notemaking takes place under operational conditions: crouched in his den—a few bills to deal with, dear—or in the lavatory—I don’t know what I must have eaten, do you think it was the fish?

  And a hand-delivered bill to Osnard in the morning.

  Her own social life fascinates him almost as much as Delgado’s. The lame get-togethers with other Zonians, now exiles in their own land, her membership of a Radical Forum that till now has seemed to Pendel about as radical as warm beer, a Cooperative Christian Fellowship Group that she attends out of loyalty to her late mother, become subjects of vast interest to him and to his tailoring notebook, where they are recorded in an impenetrable code of his own invention, a mixture of abbreviations, initials and deliberate bad writing comprehensible only to the trained eye. For unknown to Louisa, her life is now inseparably entwined with Mickie’s. In Pendel’s head if nowhere else, wife and friend link destinies as the Silent Opposition extends its secret frontiers to embrace dissident students, the Christian conscience and good-spirited Panamanians who live beyond the bridge. A lodge of former Zonians establishes itself in greatest secrecy, assembling by twos and threes in Balboa after dark.

  Pendel has never been so close to her when they are apart, or so estranged from her when they are together. Sometimes he is shocked to feel himself superior to her, until he realises this is only natural, since he knows so much more about her life than she does, is indeed the sole observer of her other, magical persona as intrepid secret agent inside the enemy’s headquarters, targeted at the Monstrous Conspiracy to which the Silent Opposition with its network of devoted agents holds the key.

  Sometimes, it is true, Pendel’s mask slips and artistic vanity gets the better of him. He tells himself he is performing her a favour by touching everything she does with the want of his secret creativity. Saving her. Shouldering her burden. Protecting her physically and morally from deceit and all its dire consequences. Keeping her out of jail. Sparing her the daily grind of many-stranded thinking. Leaving her thoughts and actions free to connect in a combined and healthy life together, instead of toiling in separate locked-off chambers like his own, never talking to each other except in whispers. But when the mask is replaced, there she is: his intrepid agent, his comrade-in-arms, desperately committed to the preservation of civilisation as we know it, if necessary by unlawful, not to say bent, means.

  Seized with an overwhelming sense of his indebtedness towards Louisa, Pendel prevails on her to ask Delgado for a weekday off and takes her on an early-morning picnic: alone, just us, Lou, one-to-one, like before we had the kids. He arranges for the Oakleys to do the school run in place of him and drives her to Gamboa, to a beloved hilltop called Plantation Loop that dates back to their days in Calidonia, up a metalled U.S. Army snake road through dense forest to a ridge that is part of the Continental Divide between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The symbolism of his choice does not escape him: the isthmus, ours to watch over, little Panama in our sacred care. It is an unearthly, changeful spot, buffeted by contrary winds and closer to the Garden of Eden than to the twenty-first century, despite the grimy sixty-foot-high cream-coloured golf ball aerial that is the reason for the road in the first place: put there to listen to the Chinese or the Russians or the Japanese or the Nicaraguans or the Colombians, but now officially deaf—unless, that is, out of some surviving instinct for intrigue, it is able to recover its hearing in the presence of two English spies seeking solace from the tension of their daily sacrifice.

  Above them, vultures and eagles swim in shoals through colourless, unmoving skies. Through a cleft in the trees, they can trace a valley of green hillsides all the way to the Bay of Panama. It is still only eight in the morning, but the sweat pours off them as they return to the four-track for iced tea from a thermos and mince pies that Pendel has made the night before, her favourite.

  “It’s the best life, Lou,” he assures her gallantly as they sit side by side holding hands in the front of the four-track, with the engine running and the air-conditioning on full.

  “What is?”

  “This one. Ours. Everything we’ve done has paid off. The children. Us. We’re hunky-dory.”

  “As long as you’re happy, Harry.”

  Pendel decides that the moment is ripe to approach his great design.

  “I heard a funny story in the shop the other day,” he says in a tone of amused reminiscence. “About the Canal. That old Japanese plan that used to be talked about is back on the table, they tell me. I don’t know if it’s come your way at the Commission a
t all.”

  “What Japanese plan?”

  “A new cut. At sea level. Using the Caimito estuary. A figure of a hundred billion dollars is being bandied about, I don’t know if I’m right.”

  Louisa is not pleased. “Harry, I do not understand why you bring me to the top of a hill in order to repeat rumours about a new Japanese canal. It’s an immoral, ecologically destructive plan, it is anti-American and anti-Treaty. So I hope very much that you will go back to whoever told you this nonsense and advise them not to propagate rumours designed to make the future of our Canal even more difficult to adjust to.”

  For a second a terrible sense of failure overtakes Pendel and he almost weeps. It is followed by indignation. I was trying to take her with me and she wouldn’t come. She preferred her little rut. Doesn’t she realise marriage is a two-way thing? Either you support someone or you fall over. He adopts a haughty tone.

  “It’s all highly hush-hush this time round, according to what I’m told, so it doesn’t surprise me particularly that you haven’t heard about it. There’s top Panamanian brass involved, but they’re keeping shtum and meeting on the sly. Those Japs won’t listen to argument, not where the Canal is concerned. Your very own Ernie Delgado’s in on it too, they say, which doesn’t surprise me quite as much as it ought, I expect. I never did manage to warm to Ernie the way you do. And Pres is in it up to his elbows. It’s what his missing hours were all about on his Far Eastern tour.”

  A long pause. One of her longest. At first he presumes that she is contemplating the enormity of his information.

  “Pres?” she repeats.

  “The President.”

  “Of Panama?”

  “Well, it’s not the President of the United States, is it, dear?”

  “Why do you call him Pres? That’s what Mr. Osnard calls him. Harry, I do not understand why you are imitating Mr. Osnard.”

  “She’s on the brink,” Pendel reported by telephone the same night, speaking very quietly in case the line was tapped. “It’s big. She’s asking is she up to it? There’s things out there she doesn’t want to know.”

  “What sort o’ things?”

  “She’s not saying, Andy. She’s deciding. She’s worried about Ernie.”

  “Afraid he’ll rumble her?”

  “Afraid she’ll rumble him. Ernie’s got his hand out like the rest of them, Andy. That Mr. Clean image of his is all a façade. ‘There’s a side of me would rather not look,’ she told me. Her words. She’s getting up her courage.”

  The next night, in line with Osnard’s advice, he took her to Casa del Marisco for dinner, table by the window in the corner. She ordered lobster thermidor, which astonished him.

  “Harry, I am not made of stone. I have moods. I change. I am a sentient human being. Do you wish me to eat prawns and halibut?”

  “Lou, I wish you to expand in every way that’s comfortable for you.”

  She’s ready, he decided, watching her tuck into her lobster. She’s grown into the part.

  “Mr. Osnard, sir, I’m very pleased to say I’ve got that second suit you’ve been hankering after,” Pendel announced next morning, telephoning this time from his cutting room. “All folded and boxed up and wrapped in tissue paper, as long as it stays one-to-one. I shall be expecting your cheque shortly.”

  “Great. When can we all get together? Adore to try it on.”

  “We can’t, I’m afraid, sir. Or not all of us. It isn’t on offer. Like I said. I measure, I cut, I fit, I do it all myself, personally.”

  “Hell does that mean?”

  “It means I also deliver. No one else is involved. Not as such. It’s you and me and no direct involvement of third parties. I’ve talked and talked to them, but they won’t budge. It’s deal through me or there’s no deal. That’s their firm policy, complain how we may.”

  They met in Coco’s Bar at the El Panama. Pendel had to yell above the band.

  “It’s her morality, Andy, like I said. She’s adamant. She respects you, she likes you. But you’re where she draws the line. Honour and obey her husband is one thing, spy on her employers for a British diplomat when she’s American is another, never mind her employer is betraying a sacred trust. Call it hypocrisy, call it women. ‘Never mention Mr. Osnard again,’ she says, and it’s a breakpoint. ‘Don’t bring him here, don’t let him talk to my children, he’ll pollute them. Never tell him I’ve agreed to do the awful thing you ask of me, or that I’ve joined the Silent Opposition.’ I’m giving it you straight, Andy, painful though it may be. When Louisa digs her toes in, it takes a stealth bomber to shift her.”

  Osnard helped himself to a fistful of cashews, put back his head, yawned, and poured them into his mouth.

  “London isn’t going to like it.”

  “Then they’ll have to lump it, Andy, won’t they?”

  Osnard pondered this while he masticated. “Yes. They will,” he agreed.

  “And she’s not going to be giving anything in writing either,” Pendel added as an afterthought. “Nor’s Mickie.”

  “Wise girl,” said Osnard, still munching. “We’ll backdate her salary till the beginning of the month. And make sure you put in for her expenses. Car, heat, light, electricity, the date. Want another o’ these, or how about a short one?”

  Louisa was recruited.

  Next morning Harry Pendel rose with a sense of his own diversity stronger than any he had experienced in all his years of striving and imagining. He had never been so many people. Some were strangers to him, others warders and old lags known to him from previous convictions. But all were at his side, marching with him in the same direction, sharers of his grand vision.

  “Heavy week coming up by the look of it, Lou,” he called to his wife through the shower curtain, firing the first shot of his new campaign. “Lot of house calls, new orders in the pipeline.” She was washing her hair. She had taken to washing it a lot, sometimes twice a day. And cleaning her teeth five times at least. “Playing squash tonight, dear?” he enquired with immense casualness.

  She turned off the shower.

  “Squash, dear. Are you playing tonight?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “It’s Thursday. Club night at the shop. I thought you always played squash on Thursdays. Standing date with Jo-Ann.”

  “Do you wish me to play squash with Jo-Ann?”

  “I was only asking, Lou. Not wishing. Asking. You like to keep fit, we know that. It shows, too.”

  Count to five. Twice.

  “Yes, Harry, tonight I intend to play squash with Jo-Ann.”

  “Right. Great.”

  “I shall come home from work. I shall change. I shall drive to the club and play squash with Jo-Ann. We have a court booked from seven to eight.”

  “Well, give her my love. She’s a nice woman.”

  “Jo-Ann likes two consecutive half-hour periods. One period to practise her backhand, one to practise her forehand. For her partner, that routine is naturally reversed. Unless the partner is left-handed, which I am not.”

  “Got you. Understood.”

  “And the children will be visiting with the Oakleys,” she added, in extension of her previous bulletin. “They will eat fattening crisps, drink tooth-corroding cola, absorb violent television and camp on the Oakleys’ insanitary floor in the interests of reconciliation between our two families.”

  “Okay, then. Thanks.”

  “Not at all.”

  The shower started again and she went back to soaping her hair. The shower stopped.

  “And after squash, it being Thursday, I shall devote myself to my work, planning and synthesising Señor Delgado’s engagements for the forthcoming week.”

  “So you said. And a very full schedule, I hear. I’m impressed.”

  Rip aside the curtain. Promise her to be completely real from now on. But reality was no longer Pendel’s subject, if it ever had been. On the way to school he sang the whole of “My object all sublime,” and the children though
t he was joyously mad. Entering his shop he became an enchanted stranger. The new blue rugs and smart furnishings amazed him; so did the sight of the Sportsman’s Corner in Marta’s glass box and the shiny new frame round Braithwaite’s portrait. Who on earth did that? I did. He was delighted by the aroma of Marta’s coffee issuing from the clubroom upstairs and the sight of a fresh bulletin on student protest in the drawer of his worktable. By ten o’clock the doorbell had already started ringing with promises of inspiration.

  First to require his attention were the American chargé and his pale aide, come to fit a new dinner jacket which the chargé called a tux. Parked outside the shop stood his armoured Lincoln Continental manned by a stern driver with a crew cut. The chargé was a droll, well-to-do Bostonian who had spent a lifetime reading Proust and playing croquet. His topic was the vexed matter of the American Families’ Thanksgiving Barbecue and Fireworks Display, a subject of perennial anxiety to Louisa.

  “We have no civilised alternative, Michael,” the chargé insisted in his Brahmin’s drawl while Pendel chalked the collar.

  “Right,” said the pale aide.

  “Either we treat them like house-trained adults or we say they’re bad kids we don’t trust.”

  “Right,” said the pale aide again.

  “People respond to respect. If I did not believe that, I would not have devoted my best years to the comedy of diplomacy.”

  “If we could kindly bend our arm to the halfway mark, sir,” Pendel murmured, laying the edge of his palm in the crook of the chargé’s elbow.

  “The military will hate us,” said the aide.

  “Are these lapels going to bulge, Harry? They look kind of busty to me. Don’t they to you, Michael?”

  “One pressing, you’ll never hear from them again, sir.”