The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  “The people in my home town have got a real problem,” Ana confided to him, evidently feeling a need for intimacy. “Their priest is a homo and they hate him, the priest in the next town fucks all the girls and they love him. Small towns, you get these human problems.” She paused to catch her breath before renewing her exertions. “My old aunt is very strict. She wrote to the bishop complaining that priests who fuck aren’t proper priests.” She laughed engagingly. “The bishop told her, ‘Try saying that to my flock and see what they do to you.’ ”

  Pendel laughed too. “Sounds like a good bishop,” he said.

  “Could you be a priest?” she asked, shoving again. “My brother, he’s really religious. ‘Ana,’ he says, ‘I think I’ll be a priest.’ ‘You’re crazy,’ I tell him. He’s never had a girl, that’s his problem. Maybe he’s homo.”

  “Lock the door after me and don’t open it till I come back,” Pendel said. “Okay?”

  “Okay. I lock the door.”

  “I’ll give three light knocks, then a loud one. Got it?”

  “Am I going to remember that?”

  “Of course you are.”

  Then, because she was so much happier, he thought he would complete the cure by turning her round and making her admire their great achievement: nice clean walls and floor and furniture and, instead of a dead lover, just another Guararé fireworks casualty in an improvised bandage, sitting stoically by the door with his good eye open while he waited for his old pal to bring up the four-track.

  Pendel had driven the four-track at a snail’s pace through the angels and the angels had slapped it as if it were a horse’s rump, and shouted Gee-up, gringo! and thrown fireworks under it, and a couple of lads had jumped on the rear bumper, and there had been an unsuccessful effort to get a beauty princess to sit on the bonnet, but she was scared to get her white skirt dirty and Pendel did not encourage her because it wasn’t a time to be giving lifts. Otherwise it had been an uneventful journey which gave him a chance to finetune his plan because, as Osnard had drummed into him in the training sessions, time spent in preparation is never time wasted, the great trick being to look at a clandestine operation from the point of view of everybody who was going to take part in it and ask yourself: what does he do? what does she do? where does everyone go when it’s over? and so on.

  He gave three light knocks and one loud one but nothing happened. He did it again and there was a gay call of “Coming!” and when Ana opened the door—halfway because of Mickie being behind it—he saw by the glow from the square that she had brushed her hair down her back and put on a clean blouse that left her shoulders bare like the other angels, and that the verandah doors were open to encourage the smells of cordite and get rid of the smells of blood and disinfectant.

  “There’s a desk in your bedroom,” he told her.

  “So?”

  “See if there’s a sheet of writing paper in it. And a pencil or a pen. Make me a card saying Ambulance that I can put on the dashboard of the four-track.”

  “You’re going to pretend you’re an ambulance? That’s really cool.”

  Like a girl at a party she skipped away to the bedroom while he took Mickie’s gun from its drawer and put it in his trousers pocket. He knew nothing about guns and this was not a big one, but it was fat for its size, as the hole in Mickie’s head had testified. Then as an afterthought he selected from a drawer in the kitchen a knife with a serrated edge and wrapped it in paper towelling before hiding it. Ana came back triumphant: she had found a child’s drawing book and some crayons and the only problem was that in her enthusiasm she had left out the I at the end, so the sign read AMBULANCA. But it was otherwise a good sign so he took it from her and went down the steps to the parked four-track and laid the sign on the dash and switched on the winking emergency lights to quell the people who were stuck in the street behind him, hooting at him to get out of the way.

  Here humour also came to Pendel’s aid, for as he started to go back up the steps he turned to his critics and with a smile for all of them put his hands together in a praying gesture for their indulgence, then raised one finger to crave one minute, then pushed the door open and switched on the hall light to reveal Mickie with his bandaged head and one eye. At which most of the hooting and yelling subsided.

  “Put his jacket over his shoulders when I lift him up,” he told Ana. “Not yet. Wait.”

  Then Pendel stooped into the weight lifter’s crouch and remembered that he was strong as well as treacherous and murderous, and that the strength was in his thighs and buttocks and stomach and across his shoulders, and that there had been enough occasions in the past when he had had to carry Mickie home and this was no different, except that Mickie wasn’t sweating or threatening to be sick or asking to be taken back to prison, by which he meant his wife.

  With these thoughts in his mind Pendel took a great armful of Mickie’s back and drew him to his feet, but there was not a lot of strength in the legs, and worse, there was no balance because in the humid heat of the night Mickie had done very little in the way of stiffening up. So the stiffening had to be all Pendel’s as he helped his friend over the threshold and, with one arm on the iron balustrade and all the strength that his gods had ever given him, down the first of four steps to the four-track. Mickie’s head was on his shoulder now; he could smell the blood through the strips of bedsheet. Ana had draped the jacket over Mickie’s back, and Pendel wasn’t certain why he had told her to do that with the jacket except that it was a really good jacket and he couldn’t bear to think of Ana giving it to the first beggar in the street; he wanted it to play a part in Mickie’s glory, because that’s where we’re going, Mickie—third step—we’re going to our glory and you’re going to be the prettiest boy in the room, the best-dressed hero the girls have ever seen.

  “Go ahead, open the car door,” he told Ana, at which Mickie in one of his familiar, unpredictable assertions of free will decided to take over the proceedings, in this case by throwing himself towards the car in a free fall from the bottom step. But Pendel need not have worried. Two boys were waiting with their arms out, Ana had already mustered them: she was one of those girls who mustered boys automatically just by stepping into the street.

  “Be gentle,” she ordered them severely. “He may have passed out.”

  “He’s got his eyes open,” said a boy, making the classic false assumption that because you can see one eye you know the other one is there.

  “Lean his head back,” Pendel ordered.

  But he leaned it back himself, while they looked on uncomfortably. He lowered the headrest of the passenger seat and propped Mickie’s head against it, tugged the seat belt across his huge gut and fastened it, closed the door, thanked the boys, waved his gratitude at the waiting cars behind him and hopped into the driver’s seat.

  “Go back to the festival,” he told Ana.

  But he had ceased to command her. She was her own self again and she was crying her heart out and insisting that Mickie had never in his life done anything that merited persecution by the police.

  He drove slowly, which was his mood. And Mickie, as Uncle Benny would say, was deserving of respect. Mickie’s bandaged head was rolling with the curves and bouncing with the potholes and only the seat belt kept him from falling onto Pendel’s side of the car, which was very much the way Mickie had behaved on the journey up except that Pendel had not imagined him with one open eye. He was following the signs to the hospital, keeping his hazard lights winking and sitting bolt upright, the way the ambulance drivers sat when they sped down Leman Street. They didn’t even lean with the bends.

  So who are you exactly? Osnard was saying, testing Pendel’s cover. I’m a gringo doctor attached to the local hospital is what I am, he replied. I’ve got a highly sick patient in the car, so don’t mess me around.

  At checkpoints, the policemen stood back for him. One officer even stopped the opposing traffic in order to show deference to the injured. The gesture proved unnecessary ho
wever, because Pendel ignored the turning to the hospital and drove straight on, northward along the road he had come, back towards Chitré where the shrimps laid eggs in mangrove trunks, and Sarigua where orchids were little prostitutes. There had been a lot of traffic as he entered Guararé, he now remembered, but leaving it there was none. They rode alone under the new moon and a clear sky, just Mickie and himself. As he turned right towards Sarigua a running black woman with no shoes and a frantic expression on her face begged him for a lift and he felt lousy not taking her aboard. But spies on dangerous missions don’t give lifts, as he had already noted in Guararé, so he kept going, watching the ground turn white as he ascended.

  He knew the very spot. Mickie, like Pendel, had loved the sea. Indeed, as Pendel surveyed his own life, it struck him belatedly that the sea had been the calming influence on his many warring gods, which was why Panama had been so peculiarly beneficial to him when he was living life before Osnard. “Harry boy, you can have your Hong Kong, your London or your Hamburg, I don’t care,” Benny had vowed, showing him the isthmus on a Philip’s Pocket Atlas one visiting day: “Where else in the world can you get on an eleven bus and see the Great Wall of China one way and the Eiffel Tower the other?” But Pendel from his cell window had seen neither. He had seen seas of different blues on either side of him, and escape in both directions.

  A cow stood in the road with its head down. Pendel braked. Mickie slid stupidly forward and caught his neck under the seat belt. Pendel released him and let him slide to the floor. Mickie, I’m talking to you. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? With an ill grace, the cow sidled out of the way. Green signs directed him to a nature reserve. There was the ancient tribal encampment, he remembered, there were the high dunes, there were the white rocks that Hannah said were stranded seashells. Then there was the beach. The road became a trail, the trail ran straight as a Roman road with high hedges like walls to either side. Sometimes the hedges put their hands together above him and prayed. Sometimes they fell away and showed him the special quiet sky you get above still seas. The new moon was trying hard to be larger than it really was. A chaste white haze had formed between its points. There were so many stars, they looked like powder.

  The trail ended but he kept driving. Marvellous what a fourwheel drive can do. Giant cactuses rose like blackened soldiers either side of him. Halt! Get out! Put your hands on the roof! Papers! He drove on, passing a notice telling him not to. He wondered about tyre prints. They’ll trace the four-track. How? By looking at the tyres of every four-track in Panama? He wondered about footprints. My shoes. They’ll trace my shoes. How? He remembered the lynxes. He remembered Marta. They said you were a spy. They said Mickie was another. So did I. He remembered the Bear. He remembered Louisa’s eyes, too scared to ask the only question left: Harry, have you gone mad? The sane are madder than we’ll ever know, he thought. And the mad are a lot more sane than some of us would like to think.

  He stopped the car slowly, looking at the ground as he drew up. He wanted iron hard. He had it. White, porous rock like lifeless coral that hadn’t shown a footprint for a million years. He got out, leaving the headlights on, went to the back of the four-track, where he kept his tow rope for wet weather. He hunted for the kitchen knife for long enough to panic, then remembered he had dropped it into the pocket of Mickie’s smoking jacket. He cut four feet of rope, went round to Mickie’s door, opened it, hauled him out and lowered him gently to the ground, upside down but no longer with his arse in the air because the journey had altered him; he preferred to lie more on his side and less on his great tummy.

  Pendel took Mickie’s arms and bent them behind his back and set to work tying his wrists together: a double granny but neater. Meanwhile for his sanity he was thinking only practical matters. The jacket. What would they have done with the jacket? He fetched the jacket from the four-track and laid it over Mickie’s back, capelike, the way he might have worn it. Then he took the gun out of his pocket and by the headlights established which position of the button was safe, and of course he had been carting it around all this time on “fire,” because that was how Mickie had left it, naturally enough. After blowing his brains out, he could hardly put the safety catch on.

  Then he backed the car a short distance away from Mickie and wasn’t at all sure why he did that except that he didn’t want such a bright glare on what he was about to do, he wanted Mickie to have some privacy for the occasion and some kind of natural sanctity, even if it was of a primitive, you could say primeval kind, here in the centre of an eleven-thousand-year-old Indian encampment strewn with arrowheads and cutting flints that Louisa said the children could collect but then put back, because there’d be none left if everybody who came here took one; here in a desert made by man and mangrove trees, so salinated that even the earth itself was dead.

  Having moved the car, he walked back to the body, knelt to it and tenderly unwound the bandages until Mickie’s face looked much as it had looked on the kitchen floor except a little older, a little cleaner and, in Pendel’s imagination at least, more heroic.

  Mickie boy, that face of yours is going to hang where it deserves, in the hall of martyrs in the Presidential Palace, once Panama is freed of all the things you didn’t like, he told Mickie in his heart. Plus I’m very sorry, Mickie, that you ever met me, because no one should.

  He’d have liked to say something aloud but all his voices were internal. So he took a last look round and, seeing nobody who might object, he fired two shots as lovingly as if he were firing a humane killer into a sick pet, one shot below the left shoulder blade and one below the right. Lead poisoning, Andy, he was thinking, remembering his dinner with Osnard at the Club Unión. The professional three shots. One to the head, two to the body, and what was left of him all over the front pages.

  With the first shot he was thinking: this is for you, Mickie.

  And with the second he was thinking: this is for me.

  Mickie had done the third for him already, so for a while Pendel just stood still with the gun in his hand, listening to the sea and the silence of Mickie’s opposition.

  Then he took Mickie’s jacket off and returned to the car with it and drove about twenty yards before chucking the jacket out of the window in the way any professional killer might when he finds to his irritation that, having bound his man and killed him and dumped him in your requisite deserted spot, he’s still got his damned jacket in the car, the one he was wearing when I shot him, so he dumps that too.

  Returning to Chitré, he drove the empty streets searching for a telephone box that wasn’t occupied by drunks or lovers. He wanted his friend Andy to be the first to know.

  23

  The enigmatic depletion of the staff of the British Embassy in Panama in the days leading up to Operation Safe Passage raised a small storm in the British and international press and became an excuse for more general debate about Britain’s behind-the-scenes role in the U.S. invasion. Latin American opinion was unanimous. YANQUI STOOGE! screamed Panama’s doughty La Prensa, over a year old photograph of Ambassador Maltby sheepishly shaking hands with the General in charge of U.S. Southern Command at some forgotten reception or other. Back in England opinion at first divided on predictable lines. While the Hatry press described the diplomatic exodus as a “brilliantly masterminded Pimpernel operation in the best tradition of the Great Game” and “a secret subtext we must never be allowed to know,” its competitors cried COWARDS! and accused the government of base collusion with the worst elements of the American Right, of exploiting “presidential frailties” in an election year, of pandering to anti-Japanese hysteria and aiding and abetting America’s colonial ambitions at the expense of Britain’s ties with Europe, all in the cause of bolstering a pitiful and discredited Prime Minister in the run-up to the general election and appealing to the most discreditable elements of the British national character.

  While the Hatry press favoured front-page colour photographs of the Prime Minister shuttling his way to glory in W
ashington— MODEST BRITISH LION SHOWS TEETH—its competitors challenged Britain’s “vicarious imperial fantasies” under the double banner of THE FACTS AND THE FALLACY and WHILE THE REST OF EUROPE BLUSHES and compared the “trumped-up charges against the Panamanian and Japanese governments” with deliberate contrivances published by the Hearst press in order to justify an aggressive American posture in what became the Spanish-American War.

  But what was Britain’s role? How, if at all—to quote a Times leader headed NO COLLUSION—had the British got their trotters in the American trough? Once again all eyes turned to the British Embassy in Panama, and its relationship or alleged lack of one with a sometime Oxford student, Noriega victim and noted scion of Panama’s political establishment, Mickie Abraxas, whose “mutilated” body was found dumped on wasteland outside the town of Parita after he had been “tortured and ritually assassinated,” purportedly by a special unit attached to the presidential staff. The Hatry press broke the story. The Hatry press gave it its spin. Hatry television networks spun it a bit harder. Soon every British newspaper across the spectrum had its own Abraxas story, from OUR MAN IN PANAMA to DID SECRET HERO SHAKE HANDS WITH QUEEN? and CHUBBY BOOZER WAS BRITAIN’S 007. A more sober and therefore largely unregarded report in a struggling independent broadsheet said that Abraxas’ widow had been spirited out of Panama within hours of the discovery of her husband’s body and was now purportedly recovering at a safe address in Miami under the protection of one Rafael Domingo, a close friend of the dead man and a prominent Panamanian.