The Tailor of Panama (39 page)

I obey, said the Colonel's spaniel eyes, but his jaw said get out of my damn way. His hair was cropped short. It was hard to remember as he sat to attention that he was not in uniform. It was hard not to wonder whether he was a little mad. Or whether they all were. The formalities were suddenly over. Elliot looked at his watch, raised his eyebrows rudely at Tug Kirby. The Colonel removed his napkin from his throat, primly dabbed his lips with it, then laid it on the table like an unwanted posy for Cavendish to clear away. Kirby was lighting a cigar.

“Do you mind putting that fucking thing out, please, Tug?” Hatry enquired politely.

Kirby stubbed it out. Sometimes he forgot that Hatry owned his secrets. Cavendish was asking who took sweetener in his coffee and
would anyone care for creamer? Now at last it was a meeting, not a feast. It was five men who cordially detested each other, seated round a well-polished eighteenth-century table and united by a great ideal.

“You boys going in or not?” said Ben Hatry, who was not famous for preamble.

“We'd sure as hell
like
to, Ben,” said Elliot, his face closed tight as a sea door.

“So what's stopping you, for fuck's sake? You've got the evidence. You run the country. What are you waiting for?”

“Van would like to go in. So would Dirk here. Right, Dirk? All bands playing? Right, Dirk?”

“Sure would,” the Colonel breathed, and shook his head at his linked hands.

“Then
do
it, for Christ's sake!” Tug Kirby cried.

Elliot affected not to hear this. “The American
people
would like us to go in,” he said. “They may not know it yet, but they soon will. The American people will want back what is rightfully theirs and shouldn't have been given away in the first place. Nobody is
stopping
us, Ben. We have the Pentagon, we have the will, the trained men, the technology. We have the Senate, we have Congress. We have the Republican party. We write foreign policy. We have a firm hold on the media in battle conditions. Last time round it was absolute, this time it will be more absolute than that. Nobody is stopping us except ourselves, Ben. Nobody, and that's a fact.”

A moment's common silence descended. Kirby was the first to break it.

“Always takes a bit of courage to jump,” he said gruffly. “Thatcher never wavered. Other chaps waver all the time.”

The silence returned.

“Which is how canals get lost, I suppose,” Cavendish suggested, but nobody laughed and the silence came back yet again.

“You know something Van said to me just the other day, Geoff?” said Elliot.

“What's that, old boy?” said Cavendish.

“Everybody who is not American has a role for America. Mostly they are people who have no role for themselves. Mostly they're jerking off.”

“General Van's deep,” said the Colonel.

“Get on with it,” said Hatry.

But Elliot took his time, resting his hands thoughtfully on his chest as if he were wearing a waistcoat and smoking a cheroot on his plantation.

“Ben, we have no damn
peg
for this thing,” he confessed, as one journalist to another. “No
hook.
We have a
condition.
We do not have a smoking gun. No raped American nuns. No dead American babies. We have rumours. We have maybes. We have
your
spook reports, unsubstantiated by
our
spook agencies at this time, because that's the way we say it has to be. This is not the moment to turn out the State Department's bleeding hearts, or put billboards screaming Hands off Panama! at the White House railings. This is a moment for decisive action and having the national conscience adapt retrospectively. The national conscience will do that. We can help it. You can help it, Ben.”

“I said I would. I will.”

“But what you cannot give us is a
peg
,” Elliot said. “You cannot rape nuns. You cannot massacre babies for us.”

Kirby let out a misplaced guffaw of laughter. “Don't you be so sure about that, Elliot,” he cried. “You don't know our Ben the way we do. What? What?”

But all he got for applause was a pained frown from the Colonel.

“Of course you've got a fucking peg,” Ben Hatry retorted caustically.

“Name it,” Elliot said.

“The denials, for fuck's sake.”

“What denials?” said Elliot.

“Everyone's. The Panamanians will deny it, the Frogs will deny it, the Japs will deny it. So they're liars, the same as Castro was a liar. Castro denies his Russian rockets, so you go in. The Canal conspirators deny their conspiracy, so in you go again.”

“Ben, those rockets were
there
,” said Elliot. “We had
pictures
of those rockets. We had a smoking gun. We have no smoking gun for this scenario. The American people got to see justice done. Talk doesn't do it. Never did. We need a smoking gun. The President will need a smoking gun. If he doesn't get one, he won't swing.”

“We don't happen to have a few happy snaps of Jap engineers in false beards digging a second canal by flashlight, do we, Ben?” Cavendish asked facetiously.

“No, we fucking don't,” Hatry retorted, never raising his voice but never needing to. “So what are you going to do, Elliot? Wait till the Japs give you a photo call at lunchtime on the thirty-first of December in the year of Our Lord nineteen fucking ninety-nine?”

Elliot was unmoved. “Ben, we don't have one emotive argument that will play on our television screens. Last time round we got lucky. Noriega's Dignity Battalions mishandled American women in the streets of Panama City. Until then we were grounded. We had drugs. So we wrote drugs big. We had Noriega's attitude problem. We wrote that big. We had his ugliness, and we wrote that big. Lot of people think ugly is immoral. We worked on that. We had his sexuality and his voodoo. We played the Castro card. But it wasn't till decent American women were harassed by disrespectful Hispanic soldiers in the name of dignity that the President felt obliged to send our boys in to teach them a little manners.”

“I heard you arranged that,” Hatry said.

“Wouldn't play twice, either way,” Elliot replied, brushing aside the suggestion as irrelevant.

Ben Hatry imploded. An underground test. There was no bang, he was fully tamped. Just a high-pressured hiss as he expelled air, frustration and fury in one burst.

“Jesus bloody Christ. That fucking Canal is
yours,
Elliot.”

“India was yours once, Ben.”

Hatry didn't bother to respond. He was staring through the curtained window at nothing that was worth his time.

“We need a peg,” Elliot repeated. “No peg, no war. President won't swing. Final.”

It took Geoff Cavendish, with his polish and good robust looks, to bring light and happiness back to the meeting.

“Well, gentlemen, it seems to me we have a great deal of common ground. We must leave the timing to General Van's judgment. Nobody disputes that. Can we talk around that a little? Tug, you're straining at the leash, I see.”

Hatry had made the curtained window his own. The prospect of listening to Kirby had only deepened his despondency.

“This Silent Opposition,” Kirby said. “The Abraxas Group. Do you have a read on that, Elliot?”

“Should I?”

“Does Van?”

“He likes them.”

“Rather odd of him, isn't it?” said Kirby. “Considering the fellow is anti-American?”

“Abraxas is not a puppet, he's not a client,” Elliot replied equably. “If we're fielding a provisional Panamanian government till the country's safe for elections again, Abraxas is worth a lot of Brownie points. The libs can't scream colonial at us. Neither can the Pans.”

“And if he's no good you can always crash his plane, can't you,” said Hatry nastily.

Kirby again: “My point being, Elliot, Abraxas is our man. Not yours.
Our
man by
his
choice. That makes his opposition ours too. Ours to control, ours to equip and advise. I think we should all remember that. Van should remember it particularly. It would look very bad for General Van if it were ever to turn out that Abraxas
had been taking Uncle Sam's dollar. Or his chaps were equipped with American arms. Don't want to stigmatise the poor fellow as a Yankee quisling from the start, do we?”

The Colonel had an idea. His eyes opened wide and shone. His smile was heavenly.

“Listen: we can do it false flag, Tug! We got
assets
out there! We can make it like Abraxas is getting stuff from Peru, Guatemala, Castro Cuba. We can make it
anything
. It's not any kind of problem!”

Tug Kirby only ever made one point at a time. “We found Abraxas, we equip him,” he said stonily. “We've got a first-class procurement man on the spot. You want to put up money, all offers gratefully received. But you put it up to
us
. Nothing local. Nothing direct. We run Abraxas, we supply him. He's ours. And his students and his fishermen and anybody else he's got. We supply the whole home side,” he ended, and rapped his huge knuckles on the eighteenth-century table in case they hadn't got the point.

“All that's if,” said Elliot after a while.

“If what?” Kirby demanded.

“If we go in,” said Elliot.

Abruptly Hatry unlocked his gaze from the window and swung round to face Elliot.

“I want exclusive first bite,” he said. “My cameras and my scribes go in the first wave, my boys to run with the students and the fishermen, exclusive. Everyone else rides in the guard's van with the spares.”

Elliot was drily amused. “Maybe you people should mount the invasion for us, Ben. Maybe that would solve your election problem for you. How about a rescue action to protect expatriate British citizens? Must be a couple of 'em down there in Panama.”

“Glad you raised that question, Elliot,” said Kirby.

A different axis. Kirby very tense and all eyes on him, even

Hatry's.

“Why's that, Tug?” said Elliot.

“Time we talked about just what our man
does
get out of this,” Kirby retorted, blushing. Our man meaning our leader. Our puppet. Our mascot.

“You want him sitting with Van in the Pentagon war room, Tug?” Elliot suggested playfully.

“Don't be bloody silly.”

“You want British troops on American gunships? Be my guest.”

“No, we don't, thank you. It's your back yard. But we shall want
credit
.”

“How much, Tug? I'm told you drive a hard bargain.”

“Not that kind of credit.
Moral
credit.”

Elliot smiled. So did Hatry. Morality, their expressions implied, was negotiable.

“Our man to be visibly and loudly at the forefront,” Tug Kirby announced, counting off terms on his enormous fingers. “Our man to wrap himself in the flag, your man to cheer him on while he does it, Rule Britannia and bugger Brussels. The special relationship seen to be up and running—right, Ben? Visits to Washington, handshakes, high profile, lot of kind words for our man. And your man to come to London as soon as you've swung him. He's overdue and it's been noticed. The role of British Intelligence to be leaked to the respectable press. We'll give you a text—right, Ben? The rest of Europe out of it and the Frogs in disgrace as usual.”

“Leave that shit to me,” Hatry said. “He doesn't sell newspapers. I do.”

They parted like unreconciled lovers, worried they had said the wrong things, failed to say the right ones, not been understood. We'll run it by Van as soon as we get back, said Elliot. See what his sense is. General Van is long term, said the Colonel. General Van is a true visionary. The General has his eyes on the Jerusalem. The General knows how to wait.

“Give me a fucking drink,” said Hatry.

They sat alone, three Englishmen in withdrawal with their whiskies.

“Nice little meeting,” said Cavendish.

“Shits,” said Kirby.

“Buy the Silent Opposition,” Hatry ordered. “Make sure it can speak and shoot. How real are the students?”

“They're iffy, Chief. Maoists, Trots, Peaceniks, a lot of 'em overage. They could jump either way.”

“Who the fuck cares which way they jump? Buy the sods and turn them loose. Van wants a peg. He's dreaming of it but doesn't dare to ask. Why d'you think the bastard sent his flunkies and stayed home? Maybe the students can supply the peg. Where's Luxmore's report?”

Cavendish handed it to him, and he read it for the third time before pushing it back at him.

“Who's the bitch who writes our doom and gloom shit?” he asked.

Cavendish said a name.

“Give it to her,” Hatry said. “Tell her I want the students larger. Link them with the poor and the oppressed, drop the Communism. And give us more about the Silent Opposition looking to Britain as a democratic role model for Panama in the twenty-first century. I want crisis. ‘As terror walks the streets of Panama,' that shit. First editions, Sunday. Get onto Luxmore. Tell him it's time to get his fucking students out of bed.”

Luxmore had never been on such a dangerous mission. He was exalted, he was terrified. But then abroad always terrified him. He was desperately, heroically alone. An impressive passport in the jacket he must not remove enjoined all foreigners to grant the Queen's well-beloved messenger Mellors safe conduct across their borders. Piled on the first-class seat beside him were two bulky black leather briefcases, sealed with wax, embossed with the royal crest and fitted with broad shoulder straps. The rules of his
assumed office allowed him neither sleep nor drink. The briefcases must remain at all times within his sight and reach. No profane hand was permitted to defile the pouches of a Queen's Messenger. He was to befriend nobody, though out of operational necessity he had exempted a matronly British Airways stewardess from this edict. Halfway across the South Atlantic, he had unexpectedly needed to relieve himself. Twice he had risen to stake his claim, only to see himself anticipated by an unladen passenger. Finally, in the extreme of need, he had prevailed on the stewardess to stand guard over a vacant lavatory for him while he struggled crablike down the aisle with his burdens banging wildly against dozing Arabs, lurching into drinks trolleys.