The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

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.
    â€œFifty thousand bucks!” he yelled to Osnard, unlocking his car. “What for?”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œWant 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.
    â€œAnd no pitfalls?” Osnard asked.
    Pendel didn’t understand.
    â€œPeople you don’t want to meet—owe money to, screwed their wives—whatever?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œDoctor,” said Osnard, without a second’s hesitation.
    â€œWhat sort? Major brain surgeon? Heart-lung?”
    â€œGP.”
    â€œWhere did he practise, then? Somewhere exotic?”
    â€œBirmingham.”
    â€œAnd the mother, if I may ask?”
    â€œSouth 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-tracksdisgorged 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.
    â€œSee the causeway there, Andy?”