“You’ve forgotten his moustache,” Osnard objected.
“Moustache?”
“Bloody great big bushy job, soup all over it. Must’ve shaved it off by the time they took that picture of him downstairs. Frightened the daylights out o’ me. Only five at the time.”
“There was no moustache in my day, Mr. Osnard.”
“Course there was. I can see it as if it was yesterday.”
But either stubbornness or instinct told Pendel to give no ground.
“I think your memory is playing tricks on you there, Mr. Osnard. You’re remembering a different gentleman and awarding his moustache to Arthur Braithwaite.”
“Bravo,” said Osnard softly.
But Pendel refused to believe that he had heard this, or that Osnard had tipped him the shadow of a wink. He ploughed on:
“ ‘Pendel,’ he says to me, ‘I want you to be my son. As soon as you’ve got the Queen’s English, I propose to call you Harry, promote you to the front of shop and appoint you my heir and partner—’ ”
“You said it took him nine years.”
“What did?”
“To call you Harry.”
“I started as an apprentice, didn’t I?”
“My mistake. On you go.”
“ ‘—and that’s all I’ve got to say to you, so now get back to your trousers and sign yourself into night school for the elocution.’ ”
He had stopped. Dried up. His throat was sore, his eyes hurt, and there was a singing in his ears. But somewhere in him there was also a sense of accomplishment. I did it. My leg was broken, I had a temperature of a hundred and five, but the show went on.
“Fabulous,” Osnard breathed.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Most beautiful bullshit I’ve ever listened to in my life, and you socked it to me like a hero.”
Pendel was hearing Osnard from a long way off, among a lot of other voices. The Sisters of Charity at his North London orphanage telling him Jesus would be angry with him. The laughter of his children in the four-track. Ramón’s voice telling him that a London merchant bank had been enquiring about his status and offering inducements for the information. Louisa’s voice telling him that one good man was all it took. After that he heard the rushhour traffic heading out of town and dreamed of being stuck in it and free.
“Thing is, old boy, I know who you are, you see.” But Pendel saw nothing at all, not even Osnard’s black gaze boring into him. He had put up a screen in his mind, and Osnard was on the other side of it. “Put more accurately, I know who you aren’t. No cause for panic or alarm. I love it. Every bit of it. Wouldn’t be without it for the world.”
“I’m not anybody,” Pendel heard himself whisper from his side of the screen and, after that, the sound of the fitting room curtain being swept aside.
And he saw with deliberately fogged eyes that Osnard was peering through the opening, making a precautionary survey of the Sportsman’s Corner. He heard Osnard speaking again, but so close to his ear that the murmur made it buzz.
“You’re 906017 Pendel, convict and ex–juvenile delinquent, six years for arson, two and a half served. Taught himself his tailoring in the slammer. Left the country three days after he had paid his debt to society, staked by his paternal Uncle Benjamin, now deceased. Married to Louisa, daughter of Zonian roughneck and Bible-punching schoolteacher, who dogsbodies five days a week for the great and good Ernie Delgado over at the Panama Canal Commission. Two kids: Mark eight, Hannah ten. Insolvent, courtesy o’ the rice farm. Pendel & Braithwaite a load o’ bollocks. No such firm existed in Savile Row. There was never a liquidation because there was nothing to liquidate. Arthur Braithwaite one of the great characters o’ fiction. Adore a con. What life’s about. Don’t give me that swivel-eyed look. I’m bonus. Answer to your prayers. You hearing me?”
Pendel heard nothing at all. He stood head down and feet together, numb all over, ears included. Rousing himself, he lifted Osnard’s arm until it was level with the shoulder. Folded it so that the hand rested flat against the chest. Pressed the end of the tape to the centre point of Osnard’s back. Led it round the elbow to the wristbone.
“I asked you who else is in on it,” Osnard was saying.
“In on what?”
“The con. Mantle o’ Saint Arthur falling on the infant Pendel’s shoulders. P & B, tailor to the royals. Thousand years o’ history. All that crap. Apart from your wife, of course.”
“She isn’t in on it at all,” Pendel exclaimed in naked alarm. “Doesn’t know?”
Pendel shook his head, mute again.
“Louisa doesn’t? You’re conning her too?”
Keep shtum, Harry boy. Shtum’s the word.
“How about your little local difficulty?”
“Which one?”
“Prison.”
Pendel whispered something he himself could barely hear.
“Is that another no?”
“Yes. No.”
“She doesn’t know you did time? She doesn’t know about Uncle Arthur?
Does she know the rice farm’s going down the tube?”
The same measurement again. Centre back to wristbone, but with Osnard’s arms straight down. Passing the tape over his shoulder with wooden gestures.
“No again?”
“Yes.”
“Thought it was joint ownership.”
“It is.”
“But she still doesn’t know.”
“I look after the money matters, don’t I?”
“I’ll say you do. How much are you in for?”
“Pushing a hundred grand.”
“I heard it was nearer two hundred and rising.”
“It is.”
“Interest?”
“Two.”
“Two percent quarterly?”
“Monthly.”
“Compound?”
“Could be.”
“Set against this place. Hell d’you do that for?”
“We had something called the recession, I don’t know if it ever came your way,” said Pendel, incongruously recalling the days when, if he only had three customers, he would book them back-to-back at half-hour intervals in order to create an air of flurry.
“What were you doing? Playing the stock exchange?”
“With the advice of my expert banker, yes.”
“Your expert banker specialise in bankruptcy sales or something?”
“I expect so.”
“And it was Louisa’s lolly, right?”
“Her dad’s. Half her dad’s. She’s got a sister, hasn’t she.”
“What about the police?”
“What police?”
“Pans. Local whoosies.”
“What’s it to them?” Pendel’s voice had finally unlocked itself and was running free. “I pay my taxes. Social Security. I do my worksheets. I haven’t gone bust yet. Why should they care?”
“Thought they might have dug up your record. Invited you to fork out a little hush money. Wouldn’t want ’em chucking you out because you couldn’t pay your bribes, would we?”
Pendel shook his head, then laid his palm on the top of it, either to pray or to make sure it was still on his body. After that he took on the posture dinned into him by his Uncle Benny before he went to gaol.
“You’ve got to drucken yourself, Harry boy,” Benny had insisted, using an expression Pendel never heard before or since from anyone but Benny. “Press yourself in. Go small. Don’t be anybody, don’t look at anybody. It bothers them, same as being pathetic. You’re not even a fly on the wall. You’re part of the wall.”
But quite soon he grew tired of being a wall. He lifted his head and blinked round the fitting room, waking up in it after his first night. He remembered one of Benny’s more mystifying confessions and decided that he finally understood it:
Harry boy, my trouble is, everywhere I go, I come too and spoil it.
“What are you, then?” Pendel demanded of Osnard with a stirring of tr
uculence.
“I’m a spy. Spy for Merrie England. We’re reopening Panama.”
“What for?”
“Tell you over dinner. What time d’you close the shop on Fridays?”
“Now, if I want. Surprised you had to ask.”
“What about home? Candles. Kiddush. Whatever you do?”
“We don’t. We’re Christian. Where it hurts.”
“You’re a member of the Club Unión, right?”
“Just.”
“Just what?”
“I had to buy the rice farm before they’d make me a member. They don’t take Turco tailors, but Mick farmers are all right. Long as they’ve got twenty-five grand for the membership.”
“Why did you join?”
To his amazement, Pendel found he was smiling beyond what was normal to him. A crazy smile, forced out of him by astonishment and terror maybe, but a smile for all that, and the relief it brought him was like discovering he still had the use of his limbs.
“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Osnard,” he said with a rush of companionability. “It’s a mystery to me yet to be resolved. I’m impetuous and sometimes I’m grandiose with it. It’s my failing. My Uncle Benjamin you mentioned just now always dreamed of owning a villa in Italy. Perhaps I did it to please Benny. Or it could have been to give two fingers to Mrs. Porter.”
“Don’t know her.”
“The probation officer. A very serious lady who thought I was destined for the bad.”
“Go to the Club Unión for dinner ever? Take a guest?”
“Very rarely. Not in my present state of economic health—I’ll put it that way.”
“If I’d ordered ten suits instead o’ two and I was free for dinner, would you take me there?”
Osnard was pulling on his jacket. Best to let him do it for himself, thought Pendel, restraining his eternal impulse to be of service.
“I might. It depends,” he replied cautiously.
“And you’d ring Louisa. ‘Darling, great news, I’ve flogged ten suits to a mad Brit and I’m buying him dinner at the Club Unión.’ ”
“I might.”
“How would she take it?”
“She varies.”
Osnard slipped a hand into his jacket, drew out the brown envelope that Pendel had already glimpsed, and handed it to him.
“Five grand on account o’ two suits. No need for a receipt. More where it came from. Plus a couple o’ hundred extra for the nose bag.”
Pendel was still wearing his fly-fronted waistcoat, so he slipped the envelope into the hip pocket of his trousers where his notebook was.
“In Panama everyone knows Harry Pendel,” Osnard was saying. “Hide somewhere, they’ll see us hiding. Go somewhere you’re known, they won’t think twice about us.”
They were face-to-face again. Seen closer, Osnard’s was lit with suppressed excitement. Pendel, always quick to empathise, felt himself brighten in its glow. They went downstairs so that he could call Louisa from his cutting room while Osnard tested his weight on a furled umbrella marked “as carried by the Queen’s Brigade of Guards.”
“You and you alone know, Harry,” Louisa said into Pendel’s hot left ear. Her mother’s voice. Socialism and Bible school.
“Know what, Lou? What am I supposed to know?”—jokey, always hoping for a laugh. “You know me, Lou. I don’t know anything. I’m dead ignorant.”
On the telephone she could hand out pauses like prison time.
“You alone, Harry, know what it is worth to you to desert your family for the night and go to your club and amuse yourself among other men and women instead of being a presence to those who love you, Harry.”
Her voice dropped into tenderness, and he nearly died for her. But as usual she couldn’t do the tender words.
“Harry?”—as if she were still waiting for him.
“Yes, darling?”
“You have no call to blandish me, Harry,” she retorted, which was her way of saying “darling” back. But whatever else she was proposing to say, she didn’t say it.
“We’ve got the whole weekend, Lou. It’s not as if I was doing a bunk or something.” A pause as wide as the Pacific. “How was old Ernie today? He’s a great man, Louisa. I don’t know why I tease you about him. He’s right up there with your father. I should be sitting at his feet.”
It’s her sister, he thought. Whenever she gets angry, it’s because she’s jealous of her sister for putting herself about.
“He’s given me five thousand dollars on account, Lou”— begging her approval—“cash in my pocket. He’s lonely. He wants a bit of company. What am I supposed to do? Shove him out into the night, tell him thank you for buying ten suits from me, now go out and find yourself a woman?”
“Harry, you don’t have to tell him anything of the kind. You are welcome to bring him home to us. If we are not acceptable, then please do what you must do and don’t punish yourself for it.”
And the same tenderness in her voice again, the Louisa that she longed to be rather than the one who spoke for her.
“No problems?” Osnard asked lightly.
He had found the hospitality whisky and two glasses. He handed one to Pendel.
“Everything’s hunky-dory, thank you. She’s a woman in a million.”
Pendel stood alone in the stockroom. He took off his day suit and out of blind habit hung it on its hanger, the trousers from the metal clips, the jacket nice and square. To replace it he chose a powder-blue mohair, single breasted, which he had cut for himself to Mozart six months ago and never worn, fearing it was flashy. His face in the mirror startled him with its normality. Why haven’t you changed colour, shape, size? What else has to happen to you before something happens to you? You get up in the morning. Your bank manager confirms the end of the world is at hand. You go to the shop, and in marches an English spy who mugs you with your past and tells you he wants to make you rich and keep you as you are.
“You’re Andrew, right?” he called into the open doorway, making a new friend.
“Andy Osnard, single, Brit Embassy boffin on the political treadmill, recently arrived. Old Braithwaite made suits for m’dad and you used to come along and hold the tape. Cover. Nothing like it.”
And that tie I always fancied, he thought. With the blue zigzags and a touch of Leander pink. Osnard looked on with a creator’s pride while Pendel set the alarm.
5
The rain had stopped. The fairy-lit buses that bounced past them over the potholes were empty. A hot blue evening sky was disappearing into night, but its heat remained behind because in Panama City it always does. There is dry heat, there is wet heat. But there is always heat, just as there is always noise: of traffic, power drills, of scaffolding going up or down, of aeroplanes, air conditioners, canned music, bulldozers, helicopters and—if you are very lucky—birds. Osnard was trailing his bookie’s umbrella. Pendel, though alert, was unarmed. His feelings were a mystery to him. He had been tested, he had come out stronger and wiser. But tested for what? Stronger and wiser how? And if he had survived, why didn’t he feel safer? Nevertheless, reentering the world’s atmosphere he appeared to himself reborn if apprehensive.
“Fifty thousand bucks!” he yelled to Osnard, unlocking his car. “What for?”
“What it costs to hand-paint those buses! They hire real artists! Takes two years!”
It was not something Pendel had known till this moment, if he knew it now, but something inside him required him to be an authority. Settling into his driving seat he had an uncomfortable feeling that the figure was nearer fifteen hundred, and it was two months, not two years.
“Want me to drive?” Osnard asked, with a sideways glance up and down the road.
But Pendel was his own master. Ten minutes ago he had persuaded himself he would never walk free again. Now he was sitting at his own steering wheel with his jailer at his side and wearing his own powder-blue suit instead of a stinking jute tunic with Pendel on the pocket.
“
And no pitfalls?” Osnard asked.
Pendel didn’t understand.
“People you don’t want to meet—owe money to, screwed their wives—whatever?”
“I don’t owe anyone except the bank, Andy. I don’t do the other either, though it’s not something I confess to my customers, Latin gentlemen being what they are. They’d think I was a capon or a poofter.” He laughed a little wildly for both of them, while Osnard checked the driving mirrors. “Where are you from, Andy? Where’s home, then? Your dad features large in your life, unless he’s a figment. Was he a famous person at all? I’m sure he was.”
“Doctor,” said Osnard, without a second’s hesitation.
“What sort? Major brain surgeon? Heart-lung?”
“GP.”
“Where did he practise, then? Somewhere exotic?”
“Birmingham.”
“And the mother, if I may ask?”
“South o’ France.”
But Pendel couldn’t help wondering whether Osnard had consigned his late father to Birmingham and his mother to the French Riviera with the same abandon with which Pendel had consigned the late Braithwaite to Pinner.
The Club Unión is where the superrich of Panama have their presence here on earth. With appropriate deference, Pendel drove under a red pagoda arch, braking almost to a halt in his anxiety to assure the two uniformed guards that he and his guest were white and middle class. Fridays are disco nights for the children of gentile millionaires. At the brightly lit entrance, glistening four-tracks disgorged scowling seventeen-year-old princesses and plumpnecked swains with gold bracelets and dead eyes. The porch was bordered with heavy crimson ropes and guarded by big-shouldered men wearing chauffeurs’ suits and identity tags for boutonnieres. Bestowing a confiding smile on Osnard, they glowered at Pendel but let him pass. Inside, the hall was wide and cool and open to the sea. A green-carpeted slipway descended to a balconied terrace. Beyond it lay the bay with its perpetual line of ships pressed like men-of-war under banks of black storm cloud. The day’s last light was quickly vanishing. Cigarette smoke, costly scent and beat music filled the air.