“That’s eight days from now,” Stormont protested.
The ambassador craned his long neck towards a calendar portraying the Queen in a feathered hat. “Is it? Well, well. I suppose it is.”
“Is he married?” asked Simon Pitt.
“Not that one is aware of, Simon.”
“Meaning no?”—Stormont again.
“Meaning that I have not been informed that he is, and since he has asked for bachelor accommodation, I assume that, whatever he has, he will come without it.”
Flinging out his arms to either side of him, Maltby folded them carefully in half until his hands came to rest behind his head. His gestures, though bizarre, were seldom without meaning. This one denoted that the meeting was about to close for golf.
“It’s a full-term appointment, by the way, Nigel, not a temporary thing. Unless he gets thrown out, of course,” he added, brightening slightly. “Fran. Dear. The Office is becoming testy about that draft memorandum we discussed. Could you possibly burn some midnight oil, or is it all spoken for?”
And the wolfish smile again, as sad as old age.
“Ambassador.”
“Why, Nigel. How nice.”
It was quarter of an hour later. Maltby was putting papers into his safe. Stormont had caught him alone. Maltby was not pleased.
“What’s Osnard supposed to be covering? They must have told you. You can’t have given him a blank cheque.”
Maltby closed his safe, set the combination, cranked himself to his full height and glanced at his watch.
“Oh, I think I pretty much did. What’s the point of not? They’ll take what they want anyway. It isn’t the Foreign Office’s fault. Osnard’s sponsored by some grand interministerial body. One can’t possibly resist.”
“Called what?”
“Planning & Application. It never occurred to me we were capable of either function.”
“Who heads them?”
“Nobody. I asked the same question. Personnel gave me the same answer. I should take him and be grateful. So should you.”
Nigel Stormont sat in his room, sifting incoming correspondence. In his day he had earned himself a name for coolness under pressure. When scandal broke over him in Madrid, his deportment was grudgingly held to be exemplary. It also saved his skin, for when Stormont submitted his obligatory letter of resignation, the head of Personnel was all for accepting it until Higher Authority stayed his hand.
“Well, well. The cat with nine lives,” Personnel had murmured, from the depths of his great dark palace in the former India Office, not so much shaking Stormont’s hand as noting its particulars for future treatment. “So it’s not the dole for you after all. It’s Panama.
Poor you. Enjoy Maltby. I’m sure you will. And we’ll talk about you in a year or two, won’t we? Something to look forward to.”
When Personnel buried the hatchet, said the wits in the Third Room, he took compass bearings on the grave.
Andrew Osnard, Stormont repeated to himself. Bird. A brace of osnards flew over. Gully’s just shot an osnard. Very funny. A Friend. One of those friends. A bachelor. A Spanish speaker. A full-term sentence unless he gets remission for bad behaviour. Rank unknown, everything unknown. Our new political officer. Sponsored by a body that doesn’t exist. A done thing, arriving in one week with unsexed assistant. Arriving to do what? To whom? To replace whom? One Nigel Stormont? He was not being fanciful, he was being realistic, even if Paddy’s cough was stretching his nerves.
Five years ago it was unthinkable that some faceless upstart from the wrong side of the park, trained to hang around street corners and steam open mail, would be considered a suitable replacement for a purebred foreign servant of Stormont’s class. But that was before the days of Treasury streamlining and the trumpeted recruitment of outside managerial skills to drag the Foreign Service by the scruff of the neck into the twenty-first century.
God, how he loathed this government. Little England, PLC. Directed by a team of lying tenth-raters not fit to run an amusement arcade in Clacton-on-Sea. Conservatives who would strip the country of its last lightbulb to conserve their power. Who thought the Civil Service a luxury as expendable as world survival or the nation’s health, and the Foreign Service the most expendable luxury of the lot. No. In the present climate of quack remedies and quick fixes, it was not at all unthinkable that the post of Head of Chancery, Panama, should be voted redundant, and Nigel Stormont with it.
Why should we duplicate? he could hear the quangos of Planning & Application squawking from their one-day-a-week, thirty-five-thousand-a-year thrones. Why have one chap doing the posh work and another chap doing the dirty work? Why not put both jobs under one hat? Fly the Osnard bird in. And as soon as he’s got the lie of the land, fly the Stormont bird out. Save a job! Rationalise a post! And we’ll all go out to lunch on the taxpayer.
Personnel would love it. So would Maltby.
Stormont drifted round his room, poking at shelves. Who’s Who contained not a single Osnard. Neither did Debrett’s. Neither, he assumed, did Birds of Britain. The London telephone directory passed from Osmotherly to Osner without drawing breath. But it was four years old. He flipped through a couple of old Foreign Office redbooks, searching the Spanish-speaking embassies for a sign of former Osnard incarnations. None spotted. Not settled, not in flight. He looked up Planning & Application in the Whitehall directory. Maltby was right. No such body existed. He called Reg the administration officer to discuss the vexed issue of the leak in the roof of his hiring.
“Poor Paddy’s having to chase round the spare bedroom with pudding basins every time it rains, Reg,” he complained. “And it rains a hell of a lot.”
Reg was locally employed and lived with a Panamanian hairdresser called Gladys. Nobody had met Gladys, and Stormont suspected she was a boy. For the fifteenth time they went over the history of the bankrupt contractor, the pending lawsuit and the unhelpful attitude of the Panamanian Protocol Department.
“Reg, what are we doing about office space for Mr. Osnard? Should we be discussing it?”
“I don’t know what we should be discussing and what we shouldn’t, Nigel. I’ve been taking my orders from the ambassador, haven’t I?”
“And what orders has His Excellency been pleased to issue?”
“It’s the east corridor, Nigel. All of it. It’s brand-new locks for his steel door; they came by courier yesterday, Mr. Osnard to bring his own keys. It’s steel cupboards in the old visitors’ waiting room for his papers, combinations to be set by Mr. Osnard on arrival, no record to be taken, as if we would. And I’m to make sure he’s got lots and lots of points for his electronics. He’s not a cook, is he?”
“I don’t know what he is, Reg, but I’ll bet you do.”
“Well, he sounds very nice on the telephone, Nigel, I will say. Like the BBC but human.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Number one was his car. He wants a hire car till he gets his own, so I’m to hire him one, and he’s sent me a fax of his driver’s licence.”
“Say what sort?”
Reg giggled. “Not a Lamborghini, he said, and not a three-wheeler. Something he could wear a bowler hat in if he wore a bowler hat, because he’s tall.”
“What else?”
“His flat, how soon we’d have it ready for him. We found him ever such a nice one, if I can get those decorators out in time. High up above the Club Unión, I told him. You can spit on their blue rinses and their toupees any time you like. It’s only a lick of paint I’m asking. White, I said to him, broken to the colour of your choice, so what’s your choice? Not pink, thank you, he says, and not daffodil. How about a nice warm camel-turd brown? I had to laugh.”
“How old is he, Reg?”
“My goodness, I’ve not a notion. He could be anything, really.”
“Still, you’ve got his driving licence there, haven’t you?”
“ ‘Andrew Julian Osnard,’ ” Reg read aloud, very excited. “ ‘Dat
e of Birth 01 10 1970 Watford.’ Well I never, that’s where my mum and dad got married.”
Stormont was standing in the corridor, drawing himself a coffee from the machine, when young Simon Pitt sidled up to him and offered him a spy’s eyeline of a passport photograph cupped into the hollow of his palm.
“What do you say, Nigel? Carruthers of the Great Game or an overweight Mata Hari in drag?”
The photograph was of a well-nourished Osnard with both ears showing, sent in advance so that Simon could arrange to have his diplomatic pass prepared by Panamanian Protocol in time for his arrival. Stormont stared at it, and for a moment his whole private world seemed to slide out of his control: his ex-wife’s alimony, too large but he’d insisted that she have it; Claire’s university maintenance; Adrian’s ambition to read for the bar; his secret dream of finding a stone farmhouse on a hillside in the Algarve, with its own olives and winter sun and dry air for Paddy’s cough. And a full pension to make the fantasy come true.
“Looks a nice enough chap,” he conceded, as his innate decency asserted itself. “Quite a lot behind the eyes. Could be fun.”
Paddy’s right, he thought. I shouldn’t have sat up the night with her. I should have got some sleep of my own.
On Mondays, by way of consolation after morning prayers, Stormont lunched at the Pavo Real with Yves Legrand, his opposite number at the French Embassy, because they both loved a duel and good food.
“Oh, and by the way, we’re getting a new man at last, I’m pleased to say,” said Stormont, after Legrand had entrusted him with a couple of confidences that were nothing of the kind. “Young chap. Your sort of age. On the political side.”
“Will I like him?”
“Everyone will,” said Stormont firmly.
Stormont was scarcely back at his desk when Fran rang him on the internal telephone.
“Nigel. The most amazing thing. Can you guess what?”
“I don’t expect so.”
“You know my weird half-brother Miles?”
“Not personally, but he is a concept to me.”
“Well, you know Miles was at Eton, obviously.”
“No, but I know now.”
“Well, it’s Miles’ birthday today, so I rang him. Can you believe, he was in the same house as Andy Osnard! He says he’s absolutely sweet, a bit tubby, a bit murky, but frightfully good in the school play. And he was sacked for venery.”
“For what?”
“Girls, Nigel. Remember? Venus. It can’t have been boys, or that would be Adonery. Miles says it may have been for not paying his fees as well. He can’t remember who got him first, whether it was Venus or the bursar.”
In the lift, Stormont met Gulliver carrying a briefcase and looking grave.
“Serious matters afoot tonight, Gully?”
“A mite tricky, this one, Nigel. A mite softly-softly-catchee-monkey, frankly.”
“Well, watch yourself,” Stormont advised him, with appropriate gravity.
Gulliver had recently been sighted by one of Phoebe Maltby’s bridge wives on the arm of a gorgeous Panamanian girl. She was twenty if a day, said the bridge wife, and, darling, black as your hat. Phoebe proposed to warn her husband at an appropriate moment.
Paddy had gone to bed. Stormont could hear her coughing as he went upstairs.
Sounds as though I’ll be going to the Schoenbergs’ alone, he thought. The Schoenbergs were American and civilised. Elsie was a heavy-duty lawyer who kept flying back to Miami to fight dramatic court cases. Paul was CIA and one of the people who mustn’t know that Andrew Osnard was a Friend.
8
“Pendel. To see the President.”
“Who?”
“His tailor. Me.”
The Palace of Herons stands at the heart of the Old City, on a spit of land across the bay from Punta Paitilla. To drive to it from the other side of the bay is to be whisked from a developers’ inferno to the filth and elegance of seventeenth-century colonial Spain. It is surrounded by appalling slums, but a careful selection of the route eliminates their existence. This morning, in front of the ancient porch, a ceremonial brass band played Strauss to a row of empty diplomatic cars and parked police motorcycles. The bandsmen wore white helmets and white uniforms, white gloves. Their instruments glistened like white gold. Torrents of rain flowed down their necks from the inadequate awning stretched above them. The double doors were guarded by bad charcoal suits.
Other white-gloved hands took Pendel’s suitcase and passed it through an electronic scanner. He was beckoned to a scaffold. Standing on it, he wondered whether spies in Panama were shot or hanged. The gloved hands returned the suitcase. The scaffold declared him harmless. The great secret agent had been admitted to the citadel.
“This way, please,” said a tall black god.
“I know,” said Pendel proudly.
A marble fountain played at the centre of a marble floor. Milkwhite herons strutted in the spray, pecking at whatever caught their fancy. From floor-level cages in the wall more herons scowled at passersby. And well they might, thought Pendel, remembering the story that Hannah insisted on hearing several times a week. In 1977, when Jimmy Carter came to Panama to ratify the new Canal Treaties, secret service men sprayed the palace with a disinfectant that preserved presidents but killed herons. In a top-secret emergency operation, the corpses were removed and live lookalikes flown down from Chitré under cover of darkness.
“Your name, please.”
“Pendel.”
“Your business, please?”
He waited, remembering railway stations when he was a child: too many big people hurrying past him in too many directions, and his suitcase always in the way. A kind lady was addressing him. Turning to her, he thought it must be Marta because of her beautiful voice. Then light fell across her face and it wasn’t smashed, and he saw by the label on her Brownie suit that she was a presidential virgin named Helen.
“It is heavy?” she asked.
“Light as a feather,” he assured her courteously, rejecting her virginal hand.
Following her up the great stairs, Pendel exchanged the radiance of marble for the deep-red dark of mahogany. More bad suits with earphones eyed him from pillared doorways. The virgin was telling him he had chosen a busy day.
“Whenever the President comes back we are always busy,” she said, raising her eyes to heaven, where she lived.
Ask about his missing hours in Hong Kong, Osnard had said. Hell d’he get up to in Paris? Man screwing or conspiring?
“As far as here, we are under Colombian rule,” the virgin was informing him, pointing her blameless hand at rows of early Panamanian governors. “From here on, we are under the United States. Soon we shall be under ourselves.”
“Great,” said Pendel enthusiastically. “High time too.”
They entered a panelled hall like a library without books. A honey smell of floor polish rose at him. A beeper sounded on the virgin’s belt. He was alone.
Whole gaps in his itinerary. Find out about his missing hours.
And remained alone, and upright, clutching his suitcase. The yellowcovered chairs round the walls were too flimsy for a mere convict to sit on. Imagine breaking one. Bang goes remission. Days turn to weeks, but if there’s one thing Harry Pendel knows, it’s how to do time. He’ll stand here for the rest of his life if he must, suitcase in hand, waiting for them to call his name.
A great pair of doors was flung open behind him. A shaft of sunlight burst into the room, accompanied by a tattoo of busy footsteps and male voices of authority. Careful to make no disrespectful movement, Pendel sidled beneath a fat-faced governor from our Colombian period and druckened himself until he became a wall encumbered by a suitcase.
The approaching posse was a dozen strong and polyglot. Excited snatches of Spanish, Japanese, and English resounded above the clatter of impatient shoes on parquet. The posse moved at politician speed: much bustle and circumstance, chattering like schoolkids freed from detention. Unifo
rm was dark suits, the tone self-congratulatory, the formation, Pendel noticed as it thundered closer, arrowhead. And at its point, elevated a foot or two above the ground, floated a larger-than-life-size embodiment of the Sun King himself, the All-Pervading, the Shining One, the Divine Misser of Hours, dressed in a P & B black jacket, striped trousers and a pair of Ducker’s black calf town with the toecaps.
A roseate glow, part sanctity and part gastronomy, suffused the presidential cheeks. The full head of hair was silvered, the lips were small and pink and moist, as if newly snatched from the maternal breast. The neat cornflower eyes were shining in the afterglow of conference achieved. Reaching Pendel, the posse pulled to a ragged halt, and there was business and a bit of shoving in the ranks as some kind of order was pragmatically arrived at. His Sublimity strode forward, turned on his heel and faced his guests. An aide labelled Marco placed himself at his master’s side. A virgin in Brownie costume joined them. Her name was not Helen but Juanita.
One by one the guests ventured forward to shake the Immortal One’s hand and take their leave. His Radiance had a word of encouragement for each. If there had been gift-wrapped favours to take home to their mummies, Pendel would not have been surprised. Meanwhile the great spy is torturing himself with fears about the contents of his suitcase. What if the finishing hands have packed the wrong suit? He sees himself drawing back the lid to reveal Hannah’s Bo-Peep costume that the Cuna women have run up for Carlita Rudd’s fancy-dress birthday party: flowered bell skirt, frilly hat, blue pantaloons. He longs to take a reassuring look, but dare not. The farewells continued. Two of the guests, being Japanese, were small. The President was not. Some handshakes took place on the slope.
“It’s a deal, then. Golf on Saturday,” His Supremacy promised, in the grey monotone so beloved of his children. A Japanese gentleman was promptly convulsed with laughter.
Other fortunates were singled out—“Marcel, thank you for your support, we shall meet again in Paris, then! Paris in the spring!— Don Pablo, be sure to give my greetings to your distinguished President and tell him I shall value the opinion of his National Bank”—until the last of the group had departed, the doors closed, the shaft of light vanished, and there was no one in the room but His Immensity, one suave aide named Marco and the virgin named Juanita. And one wall with a suitcase.