The Tailor of Panama (49 page)

To all of which Pendel listened studiously, sensing the presence of a message in everything, even if its meaning was not clear to him. And gradually the police faded away, the crowd also. The old woman sat down beside her husband and put her arm round his neck and Pendel walked up the steps of the only house in the street with its lights out, saying to himself: I'm dead already, I'm as dead as you are, Mickie, so don't think your death can frighten me.

He knocked and no one came, but his knocking caused heads to turn in the street because who on earth knocks on anyone's door at festival time? So he stopped knocking and kept his face in the shadow of the
porch. The door was closed but not locked. He turned the handle and stepped inside, and his first thought was that he was back in the orphanage and Christmas was coming up and he was a Wise Man in the Nativity play again, holding a lantern and a stick and wearing an old brown trilby that someone had given to the poor—except that the actors inside the house he was now entering were in the wrong places and somebody had snatched the Holy Infant.

There was a bare tiled room for a stable. There was an aura of flickering light from the fireworks in the square. And there was a woman in a shawl watching over a crib and praying with her hands to her chin, who was Ana apparently feeling a need to cover her head in the presence of death. But the crib was not a crib. It was Mickie, upside down as she had promised, Mickie with his face flat on the kitchen floor and his arse in the air and a map of Panama one side of his head, where one ear and one cheek should have been, and the gun he had done it with lying beside him pointing accusingly at the intruder, telling the world quite needlessly what the world already knew: that Harry Pendel, tailor, purveyor of dreams, inventor of people and places of escape, had murdered his own creation.

Gradually, as Pendel's eyes became used to the fickle light of fireworks, flares and streetlights from the square, he began to make out the rest of the mess that Mickie had left behind when he blew one side of his head off: the traces of him on the tiled floor and walls and in surprising places like a chest of drawers crudely daubed with rollicking pirates and their molls. And it was these that prompted his first words to Ana, which were of a practical rather than consoling kind.

“We ought to put something over the windows,” he said.

But she didn't answer, didn't stir, didn't turn her head, which suggested to him that in her way she was as dead as he was, Mickie had killed her too, she was contingent damage. She had tried to make Mickie happy, she had mopped him down and shared his bed, and now he had shot her: take this for all your trouble. So for
a moment Pendel was angry with Mickie, accusing him of an act of great brutality not just against his own body but against his wife and mistress and children, and his friend Harry Pendel as well.

Then of course he remembered his own responsibility in the matter and his depiction of Mickie as a great resister and spy; and he tried to imagine how Mickie must have felt when the police dropped by to tell him he was going to do more prison; and the truth of his own guilt at once swept away any convenient reflections upon Mickie's irrelevant shortcomings as a suicide.

He touched Ana's shoulder and when she still didn't budge, some residual sense of the responsibility of the entertainer sparked in him: this woman needs a bit of cheering up. So he put his hands under her armpits and hauled her to her feet and held her against him, and she was as stiff and cold as he imagined Mickie was. Clearly she had been stuck for so long in one position, keeping watch over him, that his stillness and placidity had got into her bones somehow. She was a flighty, funny, skittish girl by nature, judging from the couple of occasions when Pendel had met her, and probably she had never in her life watched anything so motionless for so long. First she had screamed and ranted and complained— Pendel reckoned, remembering their telephone conversation—and when she had got all that out of her system, she'd gone into a kind of watching decline. And as she had cooled, she had set, which was why she was so stiff to hold and why her teeth were chattering and why she couldn't answer his question about the windows.

He looked for drink to give her but all he could find was three empty whisky bottles and a half-drunk bottle of
seco,
and he decided on his own authority that
seco
was not the answer. So he led her to a wicker chair and sat her in it, found some matches, lit the gas and put a saucepan of water on the flames, and when he turned and looked at her he saw that her eyes had found Mickie again, so he went to the bedroom and took the coverlet from the bed and put it over Mickie's head, smelling for the first time the warm rusty smell of his blood above the cordite and cooking smells and
firesmoke that was rolling in from the verandah while the fireworks went on popping and whizzing in the square and the girls screamed at the bangers that the boys held on to till the absolute last moment before chucking them at their feet. It was all there for Pendel and Ana to watch anytime they wanted; they only had to lift their heads from Mickie and look out of the French windows to see the fun.

“Get him away from here,” she blurted from her wicker chair. And much, much louder: “My father will kill me. Get him out. He's a British spy. They said so. So are you.”

“Be quiet,” Pendel told her, surprising himself.

And suddenly Harry Pendel changed. He was not a different man but himself at last, a man possessed and filled with his own strength. In one glorious ray of revelation he saw beyond melancholy, death and passivity to a grand validation of his life as an artist, an act of symmetry and defiance, vengeance and reconciliation, a majestic leap into a realm where all the spoiling limitations of reality are swept away by the larger truth of the creator's dream.

And some intimation of Pendel's resurrection must have communicated itself to Ana, because after a few sips of coffee she put down her cup and joined him in his ministrations: first to fill the handbasin with water and pour disinfectant into it, then to track down a broom, a squeegee mop, rolls of paper towels, dishcloths, detergent and a scrubbing brush, then to light a candle and place it low down so that its flame would not be visible from the square, where a fresh display of fireworks, fired this time into the air and not at passing gringos, was announcing the successful selection of a beauty queen—and there she was on her float with her white
mantilla,
her white pearflower crown, her white shoulders and blazing proud eyes, a girl of such candescent beauty and excitement that first Ana and then Pendel paused in their labours to watch her pass with her retinue of princesses and prancing boys and enough flowers for a thousand funerals for Mickie.

Then back to work, scrubbing and slopping till the disinfected water in the handbasin was black in the half-light and had to be replaced and then replaced again, but Ana toiled with the goodwill Mickie always said she had—a good sport, he always said, as insatiable in bed as in a restaurant—and soon the scrubbing and the slopping became a catharsis for her and she was chattering away as blithely as if Mickie had just sidled out for a moment to fetch another bottle or have a quick Scotch with a neighbour on one of the lighted verandahs either side of them, where groups of revellers were this minute clapping and cheering at the beauty queen—and not lying facedown in the middle of the floor with the bedspread over him and his arse in the air, and his hand still stretched towards the gun that Pendel had, unnoticed by Ana, slipped into a drawer for later use.

“Look, look, it's the minister,” Ana said, all chat.

A group of grand men in white
panabrisas
had arrived at the centre of the square, surrounded by other men in black glasses. That's how I'll do it, Pendel was thinking. I'll be official like them.

“We'll need bandages. Look for a first-aid box,” he said.

There wasn't one, so they cut up a sheet.

“I'll have to buy a new bedspread as well,” she said.

Mickie's P & B magenta smoking jacket hung over a chair. Pendel delved, pulled out Mickie's wallet and handed Ana a bunch of notes, enough for a new bedspread and a good time.

“How's Marta?” Ana asked, secreting the money in her bodice.

“Just great,” said Pendel heartily.

“And your wife?”

“Thank you, well too.”

To put the bandages round Mickie's head, they had to sit him in the wicker chair where Ana had sat. First they put towels over the chair, then Pendel turned Mickie over and Ana just made it to the lavatory in time, retching with the door open and one hand up in the air behind her and her fingers splayed in a gesture of refinement. While
she was retching, Pendel stooped to Mickie and remembered Spider again and giving him the kiss of life knowing that no amount of kissing was going to enliven him in any way, however much the guilty warders shouted at Pendel to bloody try harder, son.

But Spider had never been a friend on Mickie's huge scale, or a first customer, or a prisoner of his father's past, or Noriega's prisoner of conscience, or had the conscience beaten out of him while he was inside. Spider had never been passed round the prison as new meat for the psychopaths to eat their fill of. Spider had gone loco because he was accustomed to screwing two girls a day and three on Sundays, and the prospect of five years without screwing a single girl looked like slow starvation to him. And Spider had strangled himself and messed himself and stuck his tongue out while he did it, which made the kiss of life even more ridiculous, whereas Mickie had obliterated himself, leaving one good side to him, if you ignored the blackened hole, and one really awful side that you couldn't ignore any part of.

But as a cellmate and victim of Pendel's betrayal, Mickie had all the stubbornness of his size. When Pendel got his hands under his armpits, Mickie just made himself heavier, and it took a huge heave on Pendel's part to get him going, and another to prevent him from collapsing again when he was already halfway up. And it needed a lot of padding and bandaging before the two sides of his head looked anything like even. But somehow Pendel managed all of it and when Ana returned he put her straight to work pinching Mickie's nose so that he could wind the bandage above it and below it and leave Mickie room to breathe, which was as futile in its way as trying to make Spider breathe, but at least in Mickie's case it had a purpose. And by running the bandages at a slant Pendel was also able to leave one eye clear for Mickie to see through, because Mickie, whatever he had done while he was pulling the trigger, had finished up with his remaining eye wide open and looking very startled indeed. So Pendel bandaged round it, and when he had done that he mustered Ana's help to haul Mickie and the chair as far as the front door.

“The people in my home town have got a real problem,” Ana confided to him, evidently feeling a need for intimacy. “Their priest is a homo and they hate him, the priest in the next town fucks all the girls and they love him. Small towns, you get these human problems.” She paused to catch her breath before renewing her exertions. “My old aunt is very strict. She wrote to the bishop complaining that priests who fuck aren't proper priests.” She laughed engagingly. “The bishop told her, ‘Try saying that to my flock and see what they do to you.' ”

Pendel laughed too. “Sounds like a good bishop,” he said.

“Could
you
be a priest?” she asked, shoving again. “My brother, he's
really
religious. ‘Ana,' he says, ‘I think I'll be a priest.' ‘You're crazy,' I tell him. He's never had a girl, that's his problem. Maybe he's homo.”

“Lock the door after me and don't open it till I come back,” Pendel said. “Okay?”

“Okay. I lock the door.”

“I'll give three light knocks, then a loud one. Got it?”

“Am I going to remember that?”

“Of course you are.”

Then, because she was so much happier, he thought he would complete the cure by turning her round and making her admire their great achievement: nice clean walls and floor and furniture and, instead of a dead lover, just another Guararé fireworks casualty in an improvised bandage, sitting stoically by the door with his good eye open while he waited for his old pal to bring up the four-track.

Pendel had driven the four-track at a snail's pace through the angels and the angels had slapped it as if it were a horse's rump, and shouted Gee-up, gringo! and thrown fireworks under it, and a couple of lads had jumped on the rear bumper, and there had been an unsuccessful effort to get a beauty princess to sit on the bonnet, but she was scared to get her white skirt dirty and Pendel did not encourage her because it wasn't a time to be giving lifts. Otherwise
it had been an uneventful journey which gave him a chance to finetune his plan because, as Osnard had drummed into him in the training sessions, time spent in preparation is never time wasted, the great trick being to look at a clandestine operation from the point of view of everybody who was going to take part in it and ask yourself: what does
he
do? what does
she
do? where does everyone go when it's over? and so on.

He gave three light knocks and one loud one but nothing happened. He did it again and there was a gay call of “Coming!” and when Ana opened the door—halfway because of Mickie being behind it—he saw by the glow from the square that she had brushed her hair down her back and put on a clean blouse that left her shoulders bare like the other angels, and that the verandah doors were open to encourage the smells of cordite and get rid of the smells of blood and disinfectant.

“There's a desk in your bedroom,” he told her.

“So?”

“See if there's a sheet of writing paper in it. And a pencil or a pen. Make me a card saying Ambulance that I can put on the dashboard of the four-track.”

“You're going to pretend you're an
ambulance
? That's really cool.”