The Tailor of Panama (25 page)

It was a view that Francesca Deane, had she heard it from her recumbent position in Osnard's bed in his apartment in Paitilla, would have happily endorsed.

How she had got there was a mystery to her, though it was a mystery now ten weeks old.

“Only two ways to play this situation, girl,” Osnard had explained to her with the assurance he brought to everything, over lavish helpings of barbecued chicken and cold beer beside the pool of the El Panama. “Method A. Sweat it out for six tense months, then fall into each other's arms in a sticky coil. ‘Darling, why ever didn't we do this before, puff, puff?' Method B, the preferred one. Bang away now, observe total
omertà
all round, see how we like it. If we do, have a ball. If we don't, chuck it and no one's the wiser. ‘Been there, didn't care for it, glad o' the information. Life moves on.
Basta.
' ”

“There's also method C, thank you.”

“What's that?”

“Abstention, for one thing.”

“You mean me tie a knot in it and you take the veil?” He waved a well-cushioned hand at the poolside, where sumptuous girls of all sorts flirted with their swains to the music of a live band. “Desert island out here, girl. Nearest white man thousands o' miles away. Just you and me and our duty to Mother England, till my wife comes out next month.”

Francesca was halfway to her feet. She actually yelled out, “Your wife!”

“Haven't got one. Never did, never will,” Osnard said, rising with her. “So now that obstacle to our happiness has been removed, hell's to say no?”

They danced very well while she struggled for an answer. She had never supposed that someone so generously built could move so
lightly. Or that such small eyes could be so compelling. She had never supposed, if she was honest, that she could be attracted to a man who, to say the least, was several points short of a Greek god.

“I don't suppose it's occurred to you I might
hugely
prefer someone else, has it?” she demanded.

“In Panama? No way, girl. Checked you out. Local lads call you the English iceberg.”

They were dancing very close. It seemed the obvious thing to do.

“They call me nothing of the sort!”

“Want a bet?”

They were dancing even closer.

“What about at home?” she insisted. “How do you know I haven't got a soul mate in Shropshire? Or London for that matter?”

He was kissing her temple, but it could have been any part of her. His hand was perfectly still on her back, and her back was bare.

“Not much good to you out here, girl. Don't get much satisfaction at five thousand miles, not in my book. Do you?”

It wasn't that Fran had been persuaded by Osnard's arguments, she told herself as she contemplated his replete and dozing figure beside her in the bed. Or that he was the best dancer in the world. Or that he made her laugh louder and longer than any man she had known. It was just that she couldn't imagine herself withstanding him for one more day, let alone three years.

She had arrived in Panama six months ago. In London she had spent her weekends with a frightfully handsome hunting stockbroker named Edgar. Their affair was mutually agreed to have run its course by the time she got her posting. With Edgar, everything was mutually agreed.

But who
was
Andy?

A believer in solidly sourced material, Fran had never before slept with anyone she had not researched.

She knew he had been at Eton but only because Miles had told her. Osnard, who appeared to hate his old school, referred to it only as “the
nick” or “Slough Grammar,” and otherwise disdained all reference to his education. His intellect was widely based but arbitrary, as you would expect from someone whose school career had been abruptly curtailed. When he was drunk, he was fond of quoting Pasteur: “
Chance favours only the prepared mind.
”

He was rich, or if he wasn't, he was spendthrift or extremely generous. Almost every pocket of his expensive locally made suits—trust Andy to find himself the best tailor in town as soon as he arrived—seemed to be stuffed with twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. But when she pointed this out to him, he shrugged and told her it came with the job. If he took her to dinner or they stole a secret weekend in the country, he spent money like water.

He had owned a greyhound and raced it at the White City until—in his words—a bunch o' the boys invited him to take his doggie somewhere else. An ambitious project to open a go-carting stadium in Oman had met with similar frustrations. He had run a silver stall in Shepherd Market. None of these interludes could have lasted long, for he was only twenty-six.

Of his parentage he declined to say anything at all, maintaining that he owed his immense charm and fortune to a distant aunt. He never referred to his previous conquests, though she had excellent reason to believe they were many and varied. True to his promise of
omertà
, he never made the smallest claim on her in public, a thing she found arousing: to be one minute at the highest pitch of ecstasy in his extremely capable arms, the next sitting primly opposite him at a chancery meeting and behaving as if they barely recognised each other.

And he was a spy. And his job was running another spy called
BUCHAN
. Or spies, since
BUCHAN
product seemed more diverse and exciting than anything one person could encompass.

And
BUCHAN
had the ear of the President and of the U.S. General in charge of Southern Command.
BUCHAN
knew crooks and wheeler-dealers: just as Andy must have known them when he
had his greyhound, whose name she had recently learned was Retribution. She attached significance to this: Andy had an agenda.

And
BUCHAN
was in touch with a secret democratic opposition that was waiting for the old fascists in Panama to show their true colours. He talked to militants in the students' movement and fishermen and secret activists inside the unions. He plotted with them, waiting for the day. He referred to them—rather glamorously, she thought—as people from the other side of the bridge.
BUCHAN
was on terms with Ernie Delgado too, the grey eminence of the Canal. And with Rafi Domingo, who laundered money for the cartels.
BUCHAN
knew Legislative Assembly members, lots of them. He knew lawyers and bankers. There seemed to be no one worth knowing in Panama that
BUCHAN
didn't know, and it was extraordinary to Fran,
eerie,
in fact, that Andy in such a short time had succeeded in getting to the very heart of a Panama she never knew existed. But then he'd got to
her
heart pretty sharpish too.

And
BUCHAN
was sniffing a great plot, though nobody could quite work out what the plot consisted of: except that the French and possibly the Japanese and Chinese and the Tigers of Southeast Asia were part of it or might be, and perhaps the drug cartels of Central and South America. And the plot involved selling the Canal out of the back door, as Andy called it. But how? And how without the Americans knowing? After all, the Americans had effectively been running the country for most of the century, and they had the most amazingly sophisticated listening and monitoring systems all over the isthmus and Central America.

Yet the Americans mystifyingly knew nothing about it at all, which added hugely to the excitement. Or if they did, they weren't telling us. Or they knew but weren't telling one another, because these days when you talked about American foreign policy you had to ask which one, and which ambassador: the one at the U.S. Embassy or the one up on Ancón Hill, because the U.S. military still hadn't got used to the idea that it couldn't bang heads in Panama anymore.

And London was extremely excited, and was digging up collateral from all sorts of odd places, sometimes from years ago, and making amazing deductions to do with whose ambitions for world power would dominate everybody else's, because, as
BUCHAN
put it, all the world's vultures were gathering over poor little Panama and the game was guessing who was going to get the prize. And London kept pressing for
more, more,
all the time, which made Andy furious because overworking a network was like overworking a greyhound, he said: in the end you both pay for it, the dog and you. But that was all he told her. Otherwise he was secrecy itself, which she admired.

And all this in ten short weeks from a standing start, just like their love affair. Andy was a magician, touching things that had been around for years and making them thrilling and alive. Touching Fran that way too. But who was
BUCHAN
? If Andy was defined by
BUCHAN
, who defined
BUCHAN
?

Why did
BUCHAN
's friends speak so frankly to him or her? Was
BUCHAN
a shrink, a doctor? Or a scheming bitch, worming secrets out of her lovers with lascivious skills? Who was it who telephoned Andy in fifteen-second bursts, ringing off almost before he could say, “I'll be there”? Was it
BUCHAN
himself or an intermediary, a student, a fisherman, a cutout, some special link person in the network? Where did Andy go when, like a man commanded by a supernatural voice, he rose at dead of night, threw on his clothes, removed a wad of dollar bills from the wall safe behind the bed and left her lying there without so much as a goodbye, to creep back again at dawn, chagrined or wildly elated, stinking of cigar smoke and women's perfume? And then to take her, still without a word, endlessly, wonderfully, tirelessly, hours, years on end, his thick body skimming weightlessly over her and round her, one peak after another, something that till now had happened to Fran only in her schoolgirl imagination?

And what great alchemy did Andy get up to when an ordinarylooking brown envelope was delivered to the door and he disappeared to the bathroom with it and locked himself in for half an hour, leaving a stink of camphor behind or was it formaldehyde? What did Andy see when he reappeared from the broom cupboard with a strip of wet film no wider than a tapeworm, then sat at his desk coaxing it through a miniature editor?

“Shouldn't you be doing that at the embassy?” she asked him.

“No darkroom, no you,” he replied in the brown, dismissive voice she found so irresistible. What a perfect slob he was after Edgar!— so shifty, so unfettered, so
brave
!

She would observe him at the
BUCHAN
meetings: our chief Buchaneer, lounging potently at the long table, a dreamy forelock drifting over his right eye as he passed out his garishly striped folders, then peered into the void while everybody except himself read them,
BUCHAN
's Panama, caught in flagrante:

Antonio So-and-so of the Foreign Ministry recently declared himself so infatuated by his Cuban mistress that he intends to use his best offices to improve Panama-Cuban relations in defiance of U.S. objections. . . .

Declared himself to whom? To his Cuban mistress? And she declared it to
BUCHAN
? Or declared it direct to Andy perhaps— in bed? She remembered the perfume again and imagined it rubbed against him by bare bodies. Is Andy
BUCHAN
?
Nothing
was impossible.

So-and-so's other loyalty is to the Lebanese mafia in Colón, who are said to have paid twenty million dollars for “favoured nation status” within Colón's criminal community. . . .

And after Cuban mistresses and Lebanese crooks,
BUCHAN
takes a leap into the Canal:

The chaos inside the newly constituted Authority of the Canal is increasing on a daily basis as old hands are replaced by unqualified staff appointed solely on nepotist lines, to the despair of Ernesto Delgado, the most blatant example being the appointment of José-María Fernandez as director of General Services after he acquired a 30 percent holding in the Mainland Chinese fast-food chain Lee Lotus, Lee Lotus being 40 percent owned by companies belonging to the Rodríguez cocaine cartel of Brazil. . . .

“Is that the Fernandez who made a pass at me at the National Day jamboree?” Fran asked Andy, deadpan, at a late-evening session of the Buchaneers in Maltby's office.

She had lunched with him at his flat and made love to him all afternoon. Her question was inspired as much by afterglow as curiosity.

“Bandy-legged bald bloke,” Andy replied carelessly. “Specs, spots, armpits and bad breath.”

“That's him. He wanted to fly me up to a festival in David.”

“When do you leave?”

“Andy, you're out of court,” said Nigel Stormont without looking up from his folder, and Fran had her work cut out not to burst out giggling.

And when the sessions ended, she would watch out of the corner of her eye as Andy piled together the folders and padded with them to his secret kingdom behind the new steel door in the east corridor, trailed by that creepy clerk of his who wore Fair Isle knitted waistcoats and slicked hair—Shepherd he called himself, always something in his hand like a wrench or a screwdriver or a bit of electric wire.

“What on earth does Shepherd
do
for you?”

“Cleans the windows.”

“He's not tall enough.”

“I lift him up.”

It was with a similarly low expectation that she now asked

Osnard why he was once more getting dressed when everybody else was trying to sleep.

“See a chap about a dog,” he replied tersely. He had been on edge all evening.

“A greyhound?”

No answer.

“It's a very
late
dog,” she said, hoping to tease him from his introspection.

No answer.

“I suppose it's the same dog that featured so dramatically in the urgent decipher-yourself telegram you received this afternoon.”

In the act of pulling his shirt over his head, Osnard froze. “Hell did you get that from?” he demanded, not at all pleasantly.