Free The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré Page A

gone bust yet. Why should they care?”
    â€œThought they might have dug up your record. Invited you to fork out a little hush money. Wouldn’t want ’em chucking you out because you couldn’t pay your bribes, would we?”
    Pendel shook his head, then laid his palm on the top of it, either to pray or to make sure it was still on his body. After that he took on the posture dinned into him by his Uncle Benny before he went to gaol.
    â€œYou’ve got to drucken yourself, Harry boy,” Benny had insisted, using an expression Pendel never heard before or since from anyone but Benny. “Press yourself in. Go small. Don’t be anybody, don’t look at anybody. It bothers them, same as being pathetic. You’re not even a fly on the wall. You’re part of the wall.”
    But quite soon he grew tired of being a wall. He lifted his head and blinked round the fitting room, waking up in it after his first night. He remembered one of Benny’s more mystifying confessions and decided that he finally understood it:
    Harry boy, my trouble is, everywhere I go, I come too and spoil it.
    â€œWhat are you, then?” Pendel demanded of Osnard with a stirring of truculence.
    â€œI’m a spy. Spy for Merrie England. We’re reopening Panama.”
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œTell you over dinner. What time d’you close the shop on Fridays?”
    â€œNow, if I want. Surprised you had to ask.”
    â€œWhat about home? Candles. Kiddush. Whatever you do?”
    â€œWe don’t. We’re Christian. Where it hurts.”
    â€œYou’re a member of the Club Unión, right?”
    â€œJust.”
    â€œJust what?”
    â€œI had to buy the rice farm before they’d make me a member. They don’t take Turco tailors, but Mick farmers are all right. Long as they’ve got twenty-five grand for the membership.”
    â€œWhy did you join?”
    To his amazement, Pendel found he was smiling beyond what was normal to him. A crazy smile, forced out of him by astonishment and terror maybe, but a smile for all that, and the relief it brought him was like discovering he still had the use of his limbs.
    â€œI’ll tell you something, Mr. Osnard,” he said with a rush of companionability. “It’s a mystery to me yet to be resolved. I’m impetuous and sometimes I’m grandiose with it. It’s my failing. My Uncle Benjamin you mentioned just now always dreamed of owning a villa in Italy. Perhaps I did it to please Benny. Or it could have been to give two fingers to Mrs. Porter.”
    â€œDon’t know her.”
    â€œThe probation officer. A very serious lady who thought I was destined for the bad.”
    â€œGo to the Club Unión for dinner ever? Take a guest?”
    â€œVery rarely. Not in my present state of economic health—I’ll put it that way.”
    â€œIf I’d ordered ten suits instead o’ two and I was free for dinner, would you take me there?”
    Osnard was pulling on his jacket. Best to let him do it for himself, thought Pendel, restraining his eternal impulse to be of service.
    â€œI might. It depends,” he replied cautiously.
    â€œAnd you’d ring Louisa. ‘Darling, great news, I’ve flogged ten suits to a mad Brit and I’m buying him dinner at the Club Unión.’ ”
    â€œI might.”
    â€œHow would she take it?”
    â€œShe varies.”
    Osnard slipped a hand into his jacket, drew out the brown envelope that Pendel had already glimpsed, and handed it to him.
    â€œFive grand on account o’ two suits. No need for a receipt. More where it came from. Plus a couple o’ hundred extra for the nose bag.”
    Pendel was still wearing his fly-fronted waistcoat, so he slipped the envelope into the hip pocket of his trousers where his notebook was.
    â€œIn Panama everyone knows Harry Pendel,” Osnard was saying. “Hide somewhere, they’ll see