The Panama Portrait

by Stanley Ellin

  “Yes, but how do you know the right one when she does come along?”

  “You’ll know. At twenty you can’t because then it’s a matter of hormones. There’s nothing more misleading than doing what your glands tell you to do. But you’re well past that stage. At your age now it’s a matter of intelligence, of judgment. At least, I hope it is. I’d hate to be disappointed.”

  Ben laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Fair enough.” O’Harragh set down his empty glass; it was refilled immediately. “What do you know about Santo Stefano?”

  “About what?”

  “Santo Stefano. The country. What do you know about it?”

  “Hardly anything.” Ben desperately cast about in his mind for information. “All I know is it seems to be tied in with the Galápagos Islands and Juan Fernández. I can’t even say why.”

  “Because you must have seen it on your research maps along with them. They’re all islands off the Pacific coast of South America, but the Galápagos are farther north and Juan Fernández is a long way south. Santo Stefano itself is about two hundred miles off the coast of Peru, due west of Callao.”

  “Does Seaways have an interest in it?”

  “And that,” said O’Harragh, “is the jackpot question. The answer to it depends entirely on you.”

  “It does?”

  “It does. Do you remember a report you helped draw up last year about our marketing problem with rock lobster tails?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the gist of the report?”

  “Well,” said Ben, “rock lobsters had been built up to big sales, and then the bottom dropped out. It was all red ink. According to research the trouble was political. Our main sources of supply had been South Africa and Cuba. But there seemed to be growing consumer resistance to South African merchandise because of that apartheid business there, and, of course, since Castro took over in Cuba, our trade there is just about washed up.”

  “And what conclusions did research come to?”

  “There were two possibilities. Either find a new source of supply or drop the product altogether.”

  “And now I can tell you,” said O’Harragh, “we don’t intend to drop the product.”

  “You mean we’ve got a new source of supply? In Santo Stefano?”

  “Not quite. The supply is there, but we don’t have it yet.” O’Harragh’s food had been set before him, but it remained untouched on his plate. This playing of the business game, Ben saw, meant far more to him than food. “The question is,” said O’Harragh, “can you get it for us? Are you the man to do it? I’ve been through your résumé and records, I’ve talked to Mark Hough and some others about you, and it’s my guess that you’re the one. Not only that, but there are unique qualifications required for handling this deal, and you’re one of the very few men in your division who meet them all. In fact, I set up those qualifications myself and matched every candidate against them personally, so you might say that you’re my hand-picked choice.”

  “That’s highly complimentary,” said Ben.

  “It’s more than that. It’s a matter of dollars and cents, of seeing that a worth-while product reaches a pre-sold market. I’m the one who got your division to handle this product in the first place, and I’m not going to see them take a licking on it. Call me an arrogant bastard, I say there’s no marketing problem that can’t be licked if you apply yourself to it. Your division gave up on it? All right, I won’t. And you’re going to see that I don’t have to.”

  “How?”

  “By going to Santo Stefano and arranging for the purchase and processing of all the rock lobsters they can deliver. It won’t be easy. We want to set up our own processing and freezing plant there, and we insist on absolute control of it. The trouble is that the country is one tight little isle. The commercial interests are in the hands of a few families—they’ve got all the riparian rights tied up—and no one has managed to move in from the outside so far.

  “Don’t let this give you the idea that the country is one of those typical Latin-American dictatorships. Actually, the government is republican and moderate. It was modeled after ours, and it still operates that way. Reason is that there’s as much good Yankee stock among the élite as Spanish. Before the Civil War our whalers used to tie up there and lose a lot of their crews ashore, and then when the war broke, and Confederate privateers were grabbing whaling ships, quite a few of them ran for cover at Santo Stefano and never came home again.

  “The results were, of course, that the Yankees and the Spanish intermarried, and it’s that mixture of Yankee common sense and Spanish emotionalism that makes them a hard people to deal with today. If anything, the common sense has the upper hand.”

  “That should make them easier to deal with,” said Ben. “It’s to their advantage to draw foreign investment, isn’t it?”

  “Naturally it is. It’s to the advantage of any tinpot little country to draw foreign investment, especially when it’s backed by the kind of enlightened policy Seaways practices. We’re not colonialists out to exploit anybody. We’re out to develop untapped resources, to raise the local standard of living, to share and share alike with the native administration and business interests. And this is good business for us, too, not philanthropy. Help develop a country, and you help develop a market. Let them sell to you, and they’ll be in a position to buy from you.

  “The trouble is that Santo Stefano is a special case. Oh, they’ll let us invest all right; they’ll let us build our plant and operate it, but only if they are given the controlling interest. The fact is, the big men there are hidebound traditionalists. They’re asleep on their feet, and they’re afraid that foreign capital moving in might wake them up. I suppose that’s the Spanish part of their make-up.”

  “And the Yankee part?”

  “That’s the part that helps them run their present operations at a profit. Santo Stefano is the only small country down there that can show a favorable trade balance. Has showed it for the past fifty years and expects to keep doing it.”

  “How?”

  O’Harragh cleared the table before him with one sweeping motion of his arm. He pulled a pencil from his pocket and drew the outline of a plump beanpod on the tablecloth. “That’s Santo Stefano,” he said, and then slashed a black stroke across the middle of it, bisecting it. “And that’s a range of mountains—the Sierra Xares—that runs east and west. On the western coast it bends north and runs as sea cliffs for thirty miles. And those thirty miles happen to be one of the greatest storehouses of guano in the world.”

  “Fertilizer?”

  “At sixteen percent nitrogen it’s worth its weight in gold. Anyhow, silver. Some tinpot countries have oil; Santo Stefano has guano. And their own processing plants in a town below those cliffs. Huanu Blanco it’s called. The only other big town in the place is the capital, Port Buchanan, on the east coast. You can imagine the profit margin when I tell you that all the work of collecting and processing this high-grade export item is done by a mob of illiterate, underpaid Indians.”

  O’Harragh dreamily contemplated this thought for a moment. “Anyhow, the rest of the country is farming and fishing, some small business, and, of course, an inflated bureaucracy. And an inflated military when it comes to that. The population of the whole country is only half a million, and the army has about twenty thousand, which ought to give you the idea. Not that they’ve ever been in a war.”

  “Then why an army that size?”

  “Can you think of a better works relief program? Or a better way of making sure that the status quo remains quo? But they can afford it. The guano pays for everything.”

  “It’ll be hard to argue against,” said Ben.

  “But not impossible.” O’Harragh drew a forked line through the beanpod outline of Santo Stefano. “We’ve got one big man on our side to start with. His name’s Kipp—Ian Kipp—and he’s manager of their railroad, the Port Buchanan, Huanu Blanco and Córdoba, which is j
ust about all the heavy transportation they have. He represents the British outfit that built it and maintains it. They hold a minority interest only, but Kipp swings weight. When the railroad doesn’t run, the guano doesn’t move down to Port Buchanan for shipment, and I don’t have to tell you that accidents can happen.”

  “Why would he be on our side?”

  “Because the only traffic he handles is the guano and whatever small passenger and freight service there is along the eastern coast where the fishing towns are. The local people may be satisfied with that, but he isn’t. His company wants increased profits, and if Seaways moves in there, he’s sure of them.

  “For the rest, you’ll be dealing with people who’ll need a lot of convincing. Victor Bambas-Quincy is top man, the guano king and big landowner. That name is hyphenated, by the way, and when you meet a hyphenated name like that you know you’re in for trouble. It’s the trademark of vanity. It loves the past and dreads the future, and you, Ben, happen to be the future. How does that feel?”

  “Highly stimulating. Do we have detailed reports about these people—about the whole deal? I’d like to see them.”

  “Mark Hough has about a hundred pages of detailed report for you, and the legal department is drafting contracts down to the smallest of small print. You’ll be briefed thoroughly before you leave. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Only one worry,” said Ben. “Language. Three years of high-school Spanish doesn’t help much.”

  “It won’t have to. The Spanish used in Port Buchanan is like the French used in Montreal. It’s there, but not essential. English is the basic language of the people you’ll be dealing with. And you won’t have any trouble with the monetary system either. It’s the same as ours, although the Santo Stefano dollar is worth only about one-fifth of ours on the present market.”

  “Very convenient.”

  “It is. But you’ll find inconveniences, too. Fred Burleson who was down there last year making up our reports said that the hardest thing to get used to was the smell at night. No, he wasn’t joking. He said that during the day there’s an easterly wind blowing from the Peru coast which is very pleasant, but at sundown the wind shifts to the west, and you get that guano perfume right down to the bottom of your lungs. That’s why you’ll meet very few tourists there, if any. The natives themselves must be used to it. When Burleson mentioned it once, they seemed more surprised than insulted.”

  “Why not?” said Ben. “It smells like money to them.”

  O’Harragh snorted in amusement. “Out of nature’s mint,” he said, and then he sobered abruptly. “Well, that’s the story. What we want, Ben, is a nonpolitical rock lobster. How you get it for us is your own business, as long as you stay on this side of the law. If you do it—” he leaned back in his chair, took his time about it—“if you do it, you’ll be in full charge of the whole operation, once it’s set up. It’ll mean a divisional vice-presidency at twice the money you’re getting now, and headquarters in San Francisco. It’s the most civilized town in the whole world. I’m not trying to sell it to you, either. You’ll see for yourself—if you can deliver the goods.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  O’Harragh again took his time. “Let me put it his way,” he said at last. “I picked you for this deal myself. If you let me down you’ll make me look like a fool, not only to myself, but to some other people around here whose respect I must have. I am a normal, healthy, vengeful citizen. The only way I could salvage my self-esteem would be by sacrificing you to it—severance pay, lukewarm letter of recommendation and all. You can’t object to that. It’s like throwing the dice for all or nothing.”

  “Suppose I didn’t want to throw the dice. Do I have any choice?”

  “You have, but the same thing applies. I was sure you’d jump at this opportunity. If you don’t, you’ll be making my judgment look bad. We don’t want that, do we?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Anyhow, there’s no reason to be defeatist. None at all.” O’Harragh thrust his plate still further away. He rested his arms on the table and leaned forward intently. “What you have to do, Ben, is play it by ear. Brief yourself thoroughly, but when you’re on the scene don’t try too hard to play it by the book. There are certain aspects of Santo Stefano—of what goes on there—that are out of the ordinary. I was told about them in strictest confidence, and I’m not going to pass them on to you. No, don’t look so surprised, I have my good reasons for that. There are certain matters which you must discover for yourself and use to your own advantage. Call it opportunism if you will, but if it pays off, it’s the right thing to do. Remember that. I know that this must sound terribly cryptic, but it isn’t intended to be. It applies to actual situations, although I don’t want to describe them to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when you anticipate a situation you color it falsely. Wait until you meet it. A little foresight is a good thing, but too much of it can be paralyzing. That’s what I want to guard against.”

  “Still and all,” Ben said, “Fred Burleson was working on the deal cold, but he couldn’t close it. And Fred’s an old-timer. What he doesn’t know about my division isn’t worth knowing.”

  “For certain reasons you can handle matters in Santo Stefano better than Fred.”

  Ben laughed. “I wish I knew those reasons. I’d feel better armed for battle.”

  “You couldn’t be better armed than you are. How or why doesn’t matter. All you have to remember is that you and Seaways are bound together in this, and when you act in your own self-interest down there, you’re benefiting us as well. You’ll understand how and why soon enough.”

  That was O’Harragh’s last word on the subject. Mark Hough and the legal department took over from there while Miss Gordon made the flight arrangements, and O’Harragh, having passed his miracle, retired once more to Olympus. Ben was sorry about that. What he had to go on was largely O’Harragh’s confidence in him, and some further reassurance of that confidence might have eased the knot in his stomach whenever he considered the doubtful future. Besides, he found on reflection that he liked O’Harragh. The man was devious, ruthless, uncompromising, but he was entirely human and not afraid to show it. Who else in his position would have admitted personal pride as a motive for this deal? Words like pride and self-interest weren’t in the lexicon of Seaways. You behaved yourself there. You never cut through the smooth, fleshy surface to expose the pulsing heart. But O’Harragh did, and was all the more admirable for it.

  So the miracle had been passed and now Ben Smith, one out of many, lay in bed in a darkened room overlooking the Avenida Hermanos, listening to the evening sounds from below and wondering why he had been picked as standard-bearer for Seaways. Wondering what O’Harragh knew about him that he didn’t know about himself. And why O’Harragh had refused to tell him about the unknown road ahead.

  Then Ben became aware of the smell. It was coming through the window on the night air, a warm pungency, a sour, acrid sensation in mouth and nose. He sat up tasting it, then quickly went to the window and closed it with a bang. But the smell remained. It was so palpable that he could imagine it swirling around him like a cloud of smoke.

  The window had provided the only ventilation for the room; in two minutes Ben found himself gasping for air, however ill-favored. He opened the window and resigned himself to the smell. He found that by not fighting it, by accepting it as part of life, it was tolerable.

  Someone knocked on the door. It was a youthful porter carrying two freshly pressed suits in one hand and a large spray gun in the other, the kind of spray that is operated by pumping a handle back and forth. Ben took the suits and switched on the light to find some coins on the dresser when he heard the sound of the spray being pumped furiously. He turned and saw the boy working it like a demon, aiming it high and low, filling the room with a perfumed mist. Ben sniffed at it. It was orange blossom, a lush, gaudy scent that almost, but not quite, defied the evening smell o
f Santo Stefano. You don’t defy a few thousand tons of bird droppings with a squirt of perfume that easily. The result, when the boy had pantingly finished his labors, was a reek of guano overlaid by orange blossoms.

  “Thanks,” said Ben. “That was kind of you.”

  The boy put away the tip with a smile. “It was nothing,” he said, and his Gioconda smile suggested that here was one crazy North American for sure. “I have been told to do it every night for you, please. Any time you want.”

  Which meant, Ben thought, that Fred Burleson’s complaint had hit home after all. He dressed and went to dinner. It was only when he was in the cramped elevator going down that he realized, from the expression of the passengers around him, that not only the bedroom, but his suit as well, had been liberally doused with scent.

  2

  “Our Axoyacs,” said Bambas-Quincy, “that is, our Indians of Santo Stefano have a saying that necks were made to be hanged by. Of course, this is hardly profound. I think you’ll find, Mr. Smith, that folk wisdom is rarely profound, coming as it does from a class of people too degraded for true wit or wisdom. Yet there is a certain coarse humor about that saying which amuses one. Don’t you think so?”

  “Well,” said Ben, “it does have a barbaric charm.”

  Standing there on one of the long marble steps of the Galería de Arte Santo Stefano, he had the feeling that he and his companions must look to anyone on the street below like figures posing for a group photograph. A study in contrasts, perhaps, because next to the burly, ramrod-stiff Bambas-Quincy stood the stringy, round-shouldered Martin Bolívar Adams, general manager of the Bambas-Quincy interests, and beside Adams was the small, moonfaced young clerk named Blas something-or-other who had met Ben at the airport the day before.

  And apart from the group, yet not so much apart as to disturb the composition of the picture, stood Jerome Bambas-Quincy, the youthful image of his father. He had the same long, straight nose and thin lips, the same pale gray eyes and dark hair as the older man, but underneath the physical resemblance Ben could scent a sharp difference between father and son. There was an aura of impatience about young Jerome, an air of wanting to get on with it, whatever it was, while Victor was the image of diamond-hard imperturbability, of cool self-possession. In the past hour Ben had seen sparks of that impatience rebound from that rock of self-possession more than once. No question about it, the heir apparent was restless, wanted, at the very least, to share the throne, if not occupy it solo, and that was something even the home office hadn’t taken into account.