“Hey, Lou, sweetheart, come over here. Where’s that Titan?”—he calls his daughter Titan, after the giant German crane in Gamboa harbour—“Don’t an old man deserve a little attention from his daughter? Ain’t you got a kiss for your old man? Call that a kiss? Fuck you! Fuck you, hear me? Fuck you!”
Notes, mostly about Delgado. Distorted versions of things Harry had pumped her about over the dinners he liked to cook her. My Delgado. My beloved father figure, Ernesto himself, probity on wheels, and my husband makes dirty notes about him. Why? Because he’s jealous of him. He always was. He thinks I love Ernesto more than I love him. He thinks I want to fuck Ernesto. Headings: Delgado’s Women—what women? Ernesto doesn’t do that stuff! Delgado and the Pres—Mr. Osnard’s Pres again. Delgado’s Views on Japanese—Ernesto’s scared of them. Thinks they want his Canal. He’s right. She exploded again. Aloud this time: “Fuck you, Harry Pendel, I never said that, you’re making it up! Who for? Why?” A letter, not completed, not addressed. A scrap he must have meant to throw away:
I thought you would like to hear a rather interesting snippet Louisa overheard at work yesterday regarding our Ernie and saw fit to pass on to me—
Saw fit? I didn’t see fit. I told him a piece of office gossip! Why the fuck does a wife have to see fit before she tells her husband a piece of office gossip in their own home about a benign, upright man who wishes only to do right by Panama and the Canal? Fuck fit! Fuck you—you who would like to hear what we see fit to tell each other in our own home! You’re a bitch. A foul-eared bitch who’s stolen my husband and my rice farm.
You’re Sabina!
Louisa had found the bitch’s name at last. In trim tailor’s capitals, because capitals came easiest to him, SABINA written small and loving, with a balloon drawn round her. SABINA, followed by RAD STUD in brackets. You’re Sabina and you’re a rad stud and you know about other studs and you work for dollar signs from the U.S.—or think you do, because “works for U.S.” is between inverted commas and you get five hundred bucks a month plus a bonus when you put on a great performance. It was all there, laid out in one of Harry’s flow-charts that he’d learned about from Mark. Flow-chart ideas don’t have to be linear, Dad. They can float about like gas balloons on strings in any order you like. You can take them singly or together. They’re really neat. The string from Sabina’s gas balloon led straight as a die to H, which was Harry’s Napoleonic signature for himself when he was being grandiose. Whereas Alpha’s string— because now she had discovered Alpha—led to Beta, then to Marco (Pres), and only then back to H. The Bear’s string led to H too, but the Bear’s balloon had tense wavy lines drawn round it as if it were about to explode at any moment.
And Mickie had a balloon all for himself, and he was described as the “supremo of SO,” and his string linked him to Rafi’s balloon in eternity. Our Mickie? Our Mickie is the supremo of SO? And has a total of six strings leading out of him, to Arms, Informants, Bribes, Communications, Cash, Rafi? Our Rafi? Our Mickie, who calls once a week in the middle of the night to announce his umpteenth suicide?
She began rummaging again. She wanted that bitch Sabina’s letters to Harry. If she’d written letters, Harry would have kept them. Harry couldn’t throw away an empty matchbox or a spare egg yolk. It was his poor childhood again. She was turning everything over, hunting for Sabina’s letters. Under her money? Under a floorboard? In a book?
Holy God, Delgado’s diary. Kept by Harry, not Delgado. Not the real one, but a mock-up with the lines ruled in hard pencil; he must have copied it from my papers. Delgado’s real engagements entered correctly. Unreal engagements entered in the spaces where he had none:
Midnight meeting with Jap “harbourmasters,” secretly attended by Pres . . . secret car ride with Fr. Ambassador, suitcase of money changes hands . . . meets emissary from Colombian drug cartels 11 p.m., Ramón’s new casino . . . hosts private out-oftown dinner Jap “harbourmasters” and Pan officials and Pres . . .
My Delgado does all this? My Ernesto Delgado is on the take from the French ambassador? Is fooling with the Colombian drug cartels? Harry, are you fucking mad? What filthy libels are you inventing about my boss? What dreadful lies are you telling? Who to? Who pays you for this filth?
“Harry!” she screamed, in outrage and despair. But his name came out as a whisper as the phone started ringing again.
Cunning this time, Louisa lifted the receiver, listened, said nothing, not even Get out of my fucking life.
“Harry?” A woman’s voice, strangled, dragging, pleading. It’s her. Long-distance. Calling from the rice farm. Banging in the background. They must be breaking up the mill.
“Harry? Speak to me!” the woman’s voice screams.
A Spanish bitch. Daddy always said don’t trust them.
Whimpering. It’s her. Sabina. Needing Harry. Who doesn’t?
“Harry, help me, I need you!”
Wait. Don’t speak. Don’t tell her you’re not Harry. Hear what she says next. Lips pressed together. Receiver armlocked to right ear. Speak, you bitch! Declare yourself! The bitch is breathing. Rasping breaths. Come on, Sabina, honey, speak. Say, “Come and fuck me, Harry.” Say, “I love you, Harry.” Say, “Where’s my fucking money, why do you keep it in a drawer, it’s me, Sabina, rad stud, calling from the fucking rice farm, and I’m lonely.”
More bangs. Crackle pop, like motorbikes backfiring. Wallop. Slap. Put down vodka glass. Holler at the top of my voice in my father’s classical American Spanish.
“Who is this? Answer me!”
Wait. Zero. Whimpering but no words. Louisa changes to English.
“Get out of my husband’s life, you hear me, Sabina, you fucking bitch! Fuck you, Sabina! Get out of my rice farm too!”
Still no words.
“I’m in his den, Sabina. I’m looking for your fucking letters to him, right now! Ernesto Delgado is not corrupt. Hear me? It’s a lie. I work for him. It’s other people who are corrupt, not Ernesto. Speak to me!”
More bangs and thumps in the earpiece. Jesus, what is this? The next invasion? Bitch sobs pitifully, hangs up. Vision of self, smashing receiver on cradle, as in any good movie. Sit down. Stare at phone, waiting for it to ring again. It doesn’t. So I finally bashed my sister’s head in. Or somebody else did. Poor little Emily. Fuck you. Louisa stands up. Steadily. Takes sobering swig of vodka. Head clear as a bell. Tough shit, Sabina. My husband’s mad. Guess you’re having a bad time too. Serves you right. Rice farms can be lonely places.
Bookshelves. Mind food. Just the thing for bewildered intellects. Look in books for bitch’s letters to Harry. New books in old places. Old books in new places. Explain. Harry, for the love of God, explain. Tell me, Harry. Talk to me. Who’s Sabina? Who’s Marco? Why are you making up stories about Rafi and Mickie? Why are you shitting on Ernesto?
A pause for study and reflection while Louisa Pendel in her red three-buttoned wrapper and nothing underneath patrols her husband’s bookshelves, pushing out her breasts and buttocks. She is feeling extremely naked. Better than naked. Hot naked. She would like another baby. She would like to have all of Hannah’s Seven Sisters, as long as none of them turns out to be an Emily. Her father’s books on the Canal march past her, starting with the days when the Scots tried to form a colony in the Darién and lost half their country’s wealth. She opens them one by one, shakes them so vigorously that the bindings creak, flings them carelessly aside. No love letters.
Books about Captain Morgan and his pirates, who sacked Panama City and burned it to the ground except for the ruins where we take the kids picnicking. But no love letters from Sabina or anybody else. None from Alpha, Beta, Marco or the Bear. Nor from some cutearsed little rad stud with funny money from America. Books about the time when Panama belonged to Colombia. But no love letters, however hard she flings them at the wall.
Louisa Pendel, mother-to-be of Hannah’s Seven Sisters, squats naked inside the wrapper he never fucked me in, calves to thighs and all the way back agai
n, browsing through the construction of the Canal and wishing she hadn’t screamed at that poor woman whose love letters she can’t find and probably wasn’t Sabina anyway and wasn’t calling from the rice farm. Accounts of real men like George Goethals and William Crawford Gorgas, men who were solid and methodical as well as mad, men who were loyal to their wives instead of writing letters about seeing fit or blackening the reputation of her employer or hiding wads of banknotes in their locked desks, and wads of letters I can’t find. Books that her father made her read, in the hope that she would one day build her own fucking canal.
“Harry?” Screaming at the top of her voice to scare him. “Harry? Where did you put that sad bitch’s letters? Harry, I wish to know.”
Books on the Canal treaties. Books on drugs and “Whither Latin America?” Whither my fucking husband is more like it. And whither poor Ernesto, if Harry has anything to do with it. Louisa sits down and addresses Harry quietly and reasonably, in a tone calculated not to dominate him. Shouting doesn’t do it anymore. She is speaking to him as one mature human being to another from a teak-framed armchair her father used when he was trying to get her to sit on his knee.
“Harry, I do not understand what you are doing in your den night after night irrespective of what time you come home from whatever you have been doing before. If you are writing a novel about corruption or an autobiography or a history of tailoring, I think you should come out with it and tell me, since after all we are married.”
Harry druckens himself, which is how he describes it when he’s joking about a tailor’s false humility.
“It’s the accounts, you see, Lou. You don’t get the fluence, not during the daytime, not with the doorbell going all the time.”
“The farm accounts?”
She is being a bitch again. The rice farm has become a nonsubject in the household and she is supposed to respect this: Ramón is restructuring the finances, Lou. Angel has got a bit of question mark over him, Lou.
“The shop,” Harry mumbles, like a penitent.
“Harry, I am not ungifted. I took excellent grades in math. I can help you anytime you wish.”
He is already shaking his head. “They’re not that sort of numbers, you see, Lou. It’s more the creative side. Numbers out of the air.”
“Is this why you have notes scribbled all over the margins of McCullough’s Path Between the Seas, so that no one will ever be able to read it except you?”
Harry brightens—artificially. “Oh well, yes, you’re right there, Lou, clever of you to notice it. I’m seriously thinking of having some of the old prints blown up, you see, giving more of a Canal tone to the clubroom, maybe get hold of a few artefacts for the atmosphere.”
“Harry, you have always told me, and I agree, that Panamanians with certain noble exceptions like Ernesto Delgado do not care for the Canal. They didn’t build it. We did. They did not even provide the labour. The labour came from China and Africa and Madagascar, it came from the Caribbean and India. And Ernesto is a good man.”
Jesus, she thought. Why do I speak like that? Why am I such a strident pious shrew? Easy. Because Emily is a whore.
She sat at his desk, head in hands, sorry she had split the drawers open, sorry she had bawled out that wretched weeping woman, sorry she had once more had wicked thoughts about her sister, Emily. I’m never going to talk to anyone like that again in my life, she decided. I’m never going to punish myself again by punishing other people. I’m not my fucking mother or my fucking father, and I am not a pious perfect God-fearing Zonian bitch. And I’m very sorry that in a stressful moment, under the influence of alcohol, I found it in me to abuse a fellow sinner, even if she’s Harry’s mistress, and if she is I’ll murder her. Rummaging in a drawer that she had till now neglected, she came upon another unfinished masterpiece:
Andy, you will be very pleased to hear that our new arrangement is highly popular with all parties, specially the ladies. Everything being down to me, L is not compromised in her conscience as regards naughty Ernie plus it’s safer regarding the family as a whole it being one-to-one.
Will continue this at shop.
And so will I, thought Louisa in the kitchen, giving herself one more for the road. Alcohol no longer affected her, she had discovered. What affected her was Andy alias Andrew Osnard, who with her reading of this fragment had abruptly supplanted Sabina as the object of her curiosity.
But this was not new.
She had been curious about Mr. Osnard ever since the trip to Anytime Island, when she had concluded that Harry wished her to go to bed with him to ease his conscience, though from what Louisa knew of Harry’s conscience, one fuck was unlikely to solve the problem.
She must have telephoned for a cab, because there was one standing outside the door and the bell was ringing.
Osnard turned his back on the eyehole and walked through the dining room to the balcony where Luxmore sat in the same near-foetal position, too scared to speak or act. His bloodshot eyes were opened wide, fear stretched his upper lip into a sneer, two yellowed front teeth had appeared between his beard and his moustache and they must have been the ones he sucked when he wished to signal a happy turn of phrase.
“I am receiving an unscheduled visit from BUCHAN TWO,” Osnard told him quietly. “We have a situation on our hands. You’d better get out fast.”
“Andrew. I’m a senior officer. My God, what’s that hammering? She’ll awaken the dead.”
“I’m going to put you with the coats. When you hear me shut the dining-room door after her, take the lift to the lobby, give the concierge a dollar and tell him to get you a taxi to the El Panama.”
“My God, Andrew.”
“What is it?”
“Are you going to be all right? Listen to her. Is that a gun she’s using? We should call the police. Andrew. One word.”
“What is it?”
“Can I trust the taxi driver? Some of these fellows, you hear things. Bodies in the harbour. I don’t speak their Spanish, Andrew.”
Lifting Luxmore to his feet, Osnard led him to the hall, bundled him into the cloakroom and closed the door. He unchained the front door, slid the bolts, turned the key and opened it. The hammering stopped but the ringing continued.
“Louisa,” he said as he prised her finger from the bell button. “Marvellous. Where’s Harry? Why don’t you come on in?”
Transferring his grip to her wrist, he heaved her into the hall and closed the door but did not bolt it or turn the key. They stood face-to-face and close, while Osnard held her hand above their heads as if they were about to begin an old-fashioned waltz, and it was the hand that held the shoe. She let the shoe fall. No sound was coming out of her but he smelled her breath and it was like his mother’s breath whenever he had to accept a kiss from her. Her dress was very thin. He could feel her breasts and the bulge of her pubic triangle through the red fabric.
“What the fuck are you playing at with my husband?” she said. “What’s this crap he’s been telling you about Delgado taking bribes from the French and messing with the drug cartels? Who’s Sabina? Who’s Alpha?”
But despite the force of her words, she spoke uncertainly, in a voice neither loud enough nor convinced enough to penetrate the cloakroom door. And Osnard with his instinct for weakness sensed at once the fear in her: fear of himself, fear for Harry, fear of the forbidden, and the biggest fear of all, which was of hearing things so terrible she would never again be able not to hear them. But Osnard had heard them already. With her questions she had answered all his own, as they had gathered like unread signals in the secret rooms of his consciousness over recent weeks:
She knows nothing. Harry never recruited her. It’s a con.
She was about to repeat her question or enlarge upon it or ask another, but Osnard could not risk this happening within Luxmore’s hearing. Clamping one hand over her mouth, therefore, he lowered her arm, folded it behind her, turned her back to him and frog-marched her on one shoe into the dining room, at
the same time as he banged the dining-room door shut behind him with his foot. Halfway across the room he came to a halt, clutching her against him. In the flurry two of her buttons had come undone, leaving her breasts uncovered. He could feel her heart thumping under his wrist. Her breathing had slowed to longer, deeper gasps. He heard the front door close as Luxmore took his leave. He waited and heard the ping of the arriving lift and the asthmatic sigh of electric doors. He heard the lift descend. He took his hand from her mouth and felt saliva in his palm. He cupped her bare breast in his hand and felt the nipple harden and nestle into his palm. Still standing behind her, he released her arm and saw it fall languidly to her side. He heard her whisper something as she kicked off her other shoe.
“Where’s Harry?” he said, keeping his hold on her body.
“Gone to find Abraxas. He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Abraxas. Who the fuck else? If Harry was dead, he couldn’t have gone to see him, could he?”
“Where did he die?”
“Guararé. Ana says he shot himself.”
“Who’s Ana?”
“Mickie’s woman.”
He put his right hand over her other breast and was treated to a mouthful of her coarse brown hair as she shoved her head hard into his face and her rump into his groin. He turned her halfway to him and kissed her temple and cheekbone and licked the sweat that was pouring off her in rivulets, and he felt her trembling increase until her lips and teeth locked over his mouth in a grimace, her tongue searched his, and he had a glimpse of her squeezed-up eyes and the tears seeping from the corners and he heard her mutter “Emily.”
“Who’s Emily?” he asked.
“My sister. I told you about her on the island.”
“Hell does she know about all this?”
“She lives in Dayton, Ohio, and she fucked all my friends. Do you have any shame?”