The Tailor of Panama (6 page)

“Something wrong?” Osnard enquired.

“I think I was marvelling, Mr. Osnard. ‘A defining moment' I believe is the expression these days. I must have been having one.” “Great wheel o' time, eh?”

“Indeed, sir. The one that spins and grinds and tramples all before it, they say,” Pendel agreed, and turned back to the samples book like one who seeks consolation in labour.

But Osnard had first to eat another cucumber sandwich, which he did in one swallow, then brushed the crumbs off his palms by bringing them together in a slow slapping movement several times until he was satisfied.

There was a well-oiled procedure at P & B for the reception of new customers. Select cloth from samples book, admire same cloth in the piece—since Pendel was careful never to display a sample unless he had the cloth in stock—repair to fitting room for measurement, inspect Gentlemen's Boutique and Sportsman's Corner, tour rear corridor, say hullo to Marta, open account, pay deposit unless otherwise agreed, come back in ten days for first fitting. For Osnard, however, Pendel decided on a variation. From the samples desk he marched him to the rear corridor, somewhat to the consternation of Marta, who had retreated to the kitchen and was deep in a book called
Ecology on Loan
, being a history of the wholesale decimation of the jungles of South America with the hearty encouragement of the World Bank.

“Meet the real brains of P & B, Mr. Osnard, though she'll kill me for saying it. Marta, shake hands with Mr. Osnard. O-S-N, then A-R-D. Make a card for him, dear, and mark it ‘old customer,' because Mr. Braithwaite made for his father. And the first name, sir?”

“Andrew,” said Osnard, and Pendel saw Marta's eyes lift to him, and study him, as if she had heard something other than his name, then turn to Pendel in enquiry.

“
Andrew?
” she repeated.

Pendel hastened to explain: “Temporarily of the El Panama Hotel, Marta, but shortly to be moving, courtesy of our fabled Panamanian builders, to—?”

“Punta Paitilla.”

“Of course,” said Pendel with a pious smile, as if Osnard had ordered caviar.

And Marta, having very deliberately marked the place in her tome and pushed the tome aside, grimly noted these particulars from within the walls of her black hair.

“Hell happened to that woman?” Osnard demanded in a low voice as soon as they were safely back in the corridor.

“An accident, I'm afraid, sir. And some rather summary medical attention after it.”

“Surprised you keep her on. Must give your customers the willies.”

“Quite the reverse, I'm pleased to say, sir,” Pendel replied stoutly. “Marta is by way of being a favourite among my customers. And her sandwiches are to die for, as they say.”

After which, to head off further questioning about Marta, and expunge her disapproval, Pendel launched himself immediately upon his standard lecture on the tagua nut, grown in the rain forest and now, he assured Osnard earnestly, recognised throughout the feeling world as an acceptable substitute for ivory.

“My question being, Mr. Osnard, what are the current uses of your tagua today?” he demanded with even more than his customary vigour. “Ornamental chess sets? I'll give you chess sets. Carved artefacts? Right again. Our earrings, our costume jewellery, we're getting warm—but what else? What possible other use is there which is traditional, which is totally forgotten in our modern age, and which we here at P & B have at some cost to ourselves revived for the benefit of our valued clients and the posterity of future generations?”

“Buttons,” Osnard suggested.

“Answer, of course, our buttons. Thank you,” said Pendel, drawing to a halt before another door. “Indian ladies,” he warned, dropping his voice. “Cunas. Very sensitive, if you don't mind.”

He knocked, opened the door, stepped reverently inside and beckoned his guest to follow. Three Indian women of indeterminate age sat stitching jackets under the beam of angled lamps.

“Meet our finishing hands, Mr. Osnard,” he murmured, as if fearful of disturbing their concentration.

But the women did not seem half as sensitive as Pendel was, for they at once looked up cheerfully from their work and gave Osnard broad, appraising grins.

“Our buttonhole to our tailor-made suit, Mr. Osnard, is as our ruby to our turban, sir,” Pendel pronounced, still at a murmur. “It's where the eye falls, it's the detail that speaks for the whole. A good buttonhole doesn't make a good suit. But a
bad
buttonhole makes a
bad
suit.”

“To quote dear old Arthur Braithwaite,” Osnard suggested, copying Pendel's low tone.

“Indeed, sir, yes. And your tagua button, which prior to the regrettable invention of plastic was in wide use across the continents of America and Europe and never bettered in my opinion, is, thanks to P & B, back in service as the crowning glory of our fully tailored suit.”

“That Braithwaite's idea too?”

“The concept was Braithwaite's, Mr. Osnard,” said Pendel, passing the closed door of the Chinese jacket makers and deciding for no reason except panic to leave them undisturbed. “The putting it into effect, there I claim the credit.”

But while Pendel was at pains to keep the movement going, Osnard evidently preferred a slower pace, for he had leaned a bulky arm against the wall, blocking Pendel's progress.

“Heard you dressed Noriega in his day. True?”

Pendel hesitated, and his gaze slipped instinctively down the corridor towards the door to Marta's kitchen.

“What if I did?” he said. And for a moment his face stiffened with mistrust, and his voice became sullen and toneless. “What was I supposed to do? Put up the shutters? Go home?”

“What did you make for him?”

“The General was never what I call a natural suit-wearer, Mr. Osnard. Uniforms, he could fritter away whole days pondering his variations. Boots and caps the same. But resist it how he would, there were times when he couldn't escape a suit.”

He turned, trying to will Osnard into continuing their progress down the corridor. But Osnard did not remove his arm.

“What sort o' times?”

“Well, sir, there was the occasion when the General was invited to deliver a celebrated speech at Harvard University, you may remember, even if Harvard would prefer you didn't. Quite a challenge he was. Very restless when it came to his fittings.”

“Won't be needing suits where he is now, I dare say, will he?”

“Indeed not, Mr. Osnard. It's all provided, I'm told. There was also the occasion when France awarded him its highest honour and appointed him a
Légionnaire.
”

“Hell did they give him that for?”

The lighting in the corridor was all overhead, making bullet holes of Osnard's eyes.

“A number of explanations come to mind, Mr. Osnard. The most favoured is that, for a cash consideration, the General permitted the French air force to use Panama as a staging point when they were causing their unpopular nuclear explosions in the South Pacific.”

“Who says?”

“There was a lot of loose talk around the General sometimes. Not all his hangers-on were as discreet as he was.”

“Dress the hangers-on too?”

“And still do, sir, still do,” Pendel replied, once more his cheerful self. “We did endure what you might call a slight low directly
after the American invasion when some of the General's higher officials felt obliged to take the air abroad for a time, but they soon came back. Nobody loses his reputation in Panama, not for long, and Panamanian gentlemen don't care to spend their own money in exile. The tendency is more to recycle your politician rather than disgrace him. That way, nobody gets left out too long.”

“Weren't branded a collaborator or whatever?”

“There weren't a lot left to point the finger, frankly, Mr. Osnard. I dressed the General a few times, it's true. Most of my customers did slightly more than that, didn't they?”

“What about the protest strikes? Join in?”

Another nervous glance towards the kitchen, where Marta was by now presumably back at her studies.

“I'll put it this way, Mr. Osnard. We closed the front of the shop. We didn't always close the back.”

“Wise man.”

Pendel grabbed the nearest door handle and shoved it. Two elderly Italian trouser makers in white aprons and gold-rimmed spectacles peered up from their labours. Osnard bestowed a royal wave on them and stepped back into the corridor. Pendel followed him.

“Dress the new chap too, don't you?” Osnard asked carelessly.

“Yes, sir, I'm proud to say, the President of the Republic of Panama numbers today among our customers. And a more agreeable gentleman you couldn't wish to meet.”

“Where d'you do it?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“He come here, you go there?”

Pendel adopted a slightly superior manner. “The summons is always to the palace, Mr. Osnard. People go to the President. He doesn't go to them.”

“Know your way around up there, do you?”

“Well, sir, he's my third president. Bonds are formed.”

“With his flunkeys?”

“Yes. Them too.”

“How about Himself? Pres?”

Pendel again paused, as he had done before when rules of professional confidence came under strain.

“Your great statesman of today, sir, he's under stress, he's a lonely man, cut off from what I call the common pleasures that make our lives worth living. A few minutes alone with his tailor can be a blessed truce amid the fray.”

“So you chat away?”

“I would prefer the term ‘soothing interlude.' He'll ask me what my customers are saying about him. I respond—not naming names, naturally. Occasionally, if he has something on his chest, he may favour me with a small confidence in return. I do have a certain reputation for discretion, as I have no doubt his highly vigilant advisors have informed him. Now, sir. If you please.”

“What does he call you?”

“One-to-one or in the presence of others?”

“Harry, then,” said Osnard.

“Correct.”

“And you?”

“I never presume, Mr. Osnard. I've had the chance, I've been invited. But it's Mr. President, and it always will be.”

“How about Fidel?”

Pendel laughed gaily. He had been wanting a laugh for some time. “Well, sir, the Comandante does
like
a suit these days, and so he should, given the advance of corpulence. There's not a tailor in the region wouldn't give his eye-teeth to dress him, whatever those Yanquis think of him. But he will adhere to his Cuban tailor, as I dare say you have noticed to your embarrassment on the television. Oh dear. I'll say no more. We're here, we're standing by. If the call comes, P & B will answer it.”

“Quite an intelligence service you run, then.”

“It's a cut-throat world, Mr. Osnard. There's a lot of competition out there. I'd be a fool if I didn't keep an ear to the ground, wouldn't I?”

“Sure would. Don't want to go old Braithwaite's route, do we?”

Pendel had climbed a stepladder. He was balanced on the folding platform that he normally stopped short of, and he was busying himself with a bolt of best grey alpaca that he had coaxed from the top shelf, brandishing it aloft for Osnard's inspection. How he had got up there, what had impelled him, were mysteries he was no more disposed to contemplate than a cat that finds itself at the top of a tree. What mattered was escape.

“The important thing, sir, I always say, is hang them while they're still warm and never fail to rotate them,” he announced in a loud voice to a shelf of midnight-blue worsteds six inches from his nose. “Now here's the one we thought might be to our liking, Mr. Osnard. An excellent choice if I may say so, and your grey suit in Panama is practically de rigger. I'll bring you down the bolt and you can have a look and a feel. Marta! Shop, please, dear.”

“Hell's rotate?” asked Osnard from below, where he was standing with his hands in his pockets, examining ties.

“No suit should be worn two days running, least of all your lightweight, Mr. Osnard. As I'm sure your good father will have told you many a time and oft.”

“Learned it from Arthur, did 'e?”

“It's your chemical dry cleaner that kills the real suit, I always say. Once you've got the grime and sweat embedded in it, which is what happens if you overwork it, you're on your way to the chemical cleaner, and that's the beginning of the end. A suit that isn't rotated is a suit halved, I say. Marta! Where
is
that girl?”

Osnard remained intent upon the ties.

“Mr. Braithwaite even went so far as to advise his customers to abstain from cleaners altogether,” Pendel ran on, his voice rising
slightly. “Brush their suits only, the sponge if necessary, and bring them to the shop once a year to be washed in the River Dee.”

Osnard had ceased to examine the ties and was staring up at him.

“Owing to that river's highly prized cleansing powers,” Pendel explained. “The Dee being to our suit somewhat of your true Jordan to the pilgrim.”

“Thought that was Huntsman's,” Osnard said, his eyes steadfastly on Pendel's.

Pendel did hesitate. And it did show. And Osnard did watch him while it showed.

“Mr. Huntsman is a very fine tailor, sir. One of the Row's greatest. But in this case, he followed in the footprints of Arthur Braithwaite.”

He probably meant footsteps, but under the intensity of Osnard's gaze he had formed a clear image of the great Mr. Huntsman, like King Wenceslas' page, obediently tracing Braithwaite's pugmarks across the black Scottish mud. Desperate to break the spell, he grabbed the bolt of cloth and, with one hand for the ship and the other clutching the bolt like a baby to his breast, he groped his way down the stepladder.