'It's bulls.h.i.t. He makes it up. You're making it up. Everyone's jerking off.'

The phone was ringing, a different phone, one she hadn't noticed, although it was on her side of the bed, linked to a pocket tape recorder next to the reading light. Osnard rolled roughly over her and grabbed the receiver, and she was in time to hear him say 'Harry' before she clapped her hands over her ears, squeezed her eyes shut and yanked her face into a rigid grimace of refusal. But somehow one of her hands didn't do its job properly. And somehow one ear heard her husband's voice above the babel of screaming and rejecting that was going on inside her head: 'Mickie was murdered, Andy,' Harry was announcing. His voice was deliberate and forearmed, but pressed for time. 'A professional shooting, by the sound of it, which is all I can say at the present time. However, I'm told there's more of the same on the way and precautions should therefore be taken by all interested parties. Rafi has already left for Miami, plus I'm getting word to the others in accordance with laid-down procedure. I'm worried about the students. I don't know how we're going to stop them calling out the flotilla.'

'Where are you?' Osnard asked.

And there was a spare moment after that when Louisa might have asked Harry a question or two on her own account - something on the lines of: 'Do you still love me?' - or 'Will you forgive me?' - or 'Are you going to notice the difference in me if I don't tell you?' - or 'What time will you be home this evening and shall I get food in so that we can cook together?' But she was still trying to select one of these when the line went dead and there was Osnard on his elbows above her, with his fluid cheeks hanging down and his little wet mouth open, but otherwise not apparently with any intention of making love to her because for the first time in their brief acquaintance he seemed to be at a loss.

'h.e.l.l was that?' he demanded of her as if she were at least in part responsible.

'Harry,' she said stupidly.

'Which one?'

'Yours, I suppose.'

At which he puffed and flopped onto his back beside her with his hands behind his head as if he were taking a short break on a nudist beach. Then he picked up the phone again, not Harry's but the other one and, having dialled, asked for Senor Mellors in room something or other.

'It seems to have been murder,' he said without preamble, and she guessed he was speaking to the same Scottish man as before. 'Looks as though the students may break ranks... lot of emotion riding on the ball... much respected man... A professional wet job. Details still coming in. What do you mean, a peg, sir? Don't get you. Peg for what? No, of course. I understand. As soon as I can, sir. Straight away.'

Then for a while he seemed to go through a lot of things in his mind, because she heard him snorting and occasionally letting out a grim laugh, until he sat up sharply on the edge of the bed. Then stood up and walked to the dining room, to return with his rolled-up clothes. He fished out last night's shirt and pulled it on.

'Where are you going?' she demanded. And when he didn't answer, 'What are you doing? Andrew, I do not understand how you can get up, and dress, and walk out on me, and leave me here with no clothes and no place to go and no provision for my -'

She dried up.

'Well, sorry about that, ol' girl. Bit abrupt. Got to break camp, afraid. Both of us. Time to go home.'

'Home where?'

'Bethania for you. Merrie England for me. Rule one o' the house. Joe topped in the field, case officer gets out in his socks. Don't pa.s.s Go, don't collect two hundred quid. Hurry home to Mummy, shortest route.'

He was tying his tie in the mirror. Chin up, spirits revived. And for a pa.s.sing moment and no longer, Louisa thought she sensed a stoicism about him, an acceptance of defeat that in a poor light could have pa.s.sed for n.o.bility.

'Say goodbye to Harry for me, will you? Great artist. My successor will be in touch. Or not.' Still in his shirt-tails he pulled open a drawer and chucked a tracksuit at her. 'Better have this for the cab. When you get home, burn it, then break up the ash. And keep your head down for a few weeks. Chaps back home are getting out the war drums.'

Hatry the great press baron was at luncheon when the news came through. He was sitting at his usual table at the Connaught, eating kidneys and bacon and drinking house claret and refining his views on the new Russia, which were to the effect that the more the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds tore themselves apart, the more Hatry was pleased.

And his audience by a happy accident was Geoff Cavendish, and the bringer of the news was none other than young Johnson, Osnard's replacement in Luxmore's office, who twenty minutes earlier had fished the crucial British Emba.s.sy signal - penned by Amba.s.sador Maltby himself - from the pile of papers that had acc.u.mulated in Luxmore's in-tray during his dramatic dash to Panama. Johnson, as an ambitious intelligence officer, naturally made a point of sifting through Luxmore's in-tray whenever a suitable opportunity allowed.

And the wonderful thing was, Johnson had no one to consult about the signal but himself. Not only was the entire top floor out to lunch, but with Luxmore on his way home there was no one in the building who was BUCHAN-cleared apart from Johnson. Spurred by excitement and aspiration, he at once telephoned Cavendish's office to be told that Cavendish was lunching with Hatry. He telephoned Hatty's office to be told that Hatry was lunching at the Connaught. Risking all, he slapped a pre-emptive requisition on the only car and driver available. For this act of hubris, as for others, Johnson was later called to account.

'I'm Scottie Luxmore's a.s.sistant, sir,' he told Cavendish breathlessly, selecting the more sympathetic of the two faces peering up at him from their table in the bay. 'I've a rather important message for you from Panama, I'm afraid, sir, and I don't think it will keep. I didn't feel I should read it to you over the telephone.'

'Sit down,' Hatry ordered. And to the waiter: 'Chair.'

So Johnson sat down and, having done so, was about to hand Cavendish the full decoded text of Maltby's signal when Hatry s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hand and wrenched it open, so vigorously that other diners turned to stare and guess. Hatry read the signal cursorily and pa.s.sed it to Cavendish. Cavendish read it, and so probably did at least one waiter, because by now there was a rush on to set a third place for Johnson and make him look more like an ordinary lunch guest and less like a perspiring young runner in a sports coat and grey flannels - attire that the Grill Room manager did not view with any favour, but it was a Friday after all and Johnson had been looking forward to a weekend in Gloucestershire with his mother.

'That's the one we want, isn't it?' Hatry asked Caven-dish, through half-masticated kidney. 'We can go.'

'That's it,' Cavendish confirmed with quiet relish. 'That's our peg.'

'What about pa.s.sing the word to Van?' said Hatry, wiping a piece of bread round his plate.

'Well, I think, Ben - the best thing in this case - is to let Brother Van read it in your newspapers,' said Caven-dish in a series of dancing little phrases. 'Do excuse me, I'm so sorry,' he added to Johnson, stepping over his feet. 'Must just telephone.'

He said sorry to the waiter too and took his double damask napkin with him in his haste. And Johnson not long afterwards was sacked, n.o.body was ever quite sure why. Ostensibly, it was for riding around London with a decoded text that was complete with all its symbols and operational codenames. Unofficially, he was held to be a little too excitable for secret work. But probably it was barging into the Connaught Grill Room in a sports coat that was held to be the most grave of these offences.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

To reach the firework festival at Guarare in the Panamanian province of Los Santos which forms part of a stunted peninsula on the south-west tip of the Gulf of Panama, Harry Pendel drove by way of Uncle Benny's house in Leman Street that smelt of burning coal, the Sisters of Charity orphanage, several East End synagogues and a succession of grossly overcrowded British penal inst.i.tutions under the generous patronage of Her Majesty the Queen. All these establishments and others lay in the jungle blackness either side of him and on the pitted winding road ahead of him, on hilltops cut against a star-strewn sky and on the steel-grey ironing-board of the Pacific under a very clean new moon.

The difficult drive was made harder for him by the clamour of his children demanding songs and funny voices from the back of the four-track and by the well-meant exhortations of his unhappy wife which rang in his ears even on the most desolate parts of his journey: go slower, watch out for that deer, monkey, buck, dead horse, metre-long green iguana or family of six Indians on one bicycle, Harry, I do not understand why you have to drive at seventy miles an hour to keep an appointment with a dead man, and if it's the fireworks you're afraid of missing, you should please to know that the festival continues for five nights and five days and this is the first night and if we don't get there till tomorrow the children will entirely understand.

To this was added Ana's unbroken monologue of grief, the terrible forbearance of Marta asking him for nothing he wasn't able to give, and the presence of Mickie, slumped huge and morose in the pa.s.senger seat beside him, riding up against him with his spongy shoulder whenever they negotiated a bend or bounced over a pot-hole, and asking him in a glum refrain why he didn't make suits the way Armani did.

His feelings about Mickie were terrible and overwhelming. He knew that in all of Panama and in all his life he had only ever had one friend, and now he had killed him. He saw no difference any more between the Mickie he had loved and the Mickie he had invented, except that the Mickie he had loved was better, and the Mickie he had invented was some sort of mistaken homage, an act of vanity on Pendel's part: to create a champion out of his best friend, to show Osnard what grand company he kept. Because Mickie had been a hero in his own right. He had never needed Pendel's fluence. Mickie had stood up and been counted when it mattered as a reckless opponent of the tyranny. He had richly earned his beatings and imprisonment, and his right to be drunk for ever after. And to buy however many fine suits he needed to take away the scratch and stink of prison uniform. It was not Mickie's fault that he was weak where Pendel had painted him strong, or that he had given up the struggle where Pendel's fictions had painted him continuing it. If only I'd left him alone, he thought. If only I'd never fiddled with him, then chewed his head off because I had the guilts.

Somewhere at the foot of Ancon Hill he had filled the four-track with enough petrol to last him the rest of his life and given a dollar to a black beggar with white hair and one ear eaten off by leprosy or a wild animal or a disenchanted wife. At Chame, through sheer inattention, he shot a Customs roadblock, and at Penonome he became aware of a pair of lynxes riding on his left tail-light - lynxes being young, very slim US-trained policemen in black leather who ride two to a motorcycle, carry submachine-guns and are famous for being polite to tourists and killing muggers, dopers and a.s.sa.s.sins - but tonight, it seemed, also murderous British spies. The lynx in front does the driving, the lynx on the pillion does the killing, Marta had explained to him, and he remembered this as they pulled alongside and he saw the fish-eye reflection of his own face floating among the streetlights in the liquid blackness of their visors. Then he remembered that lynxes only operated in Panama City and he fell to wondering whether they were on a jaunt of some kind or whether they had followed him out here in order to shoot him in privacy. But he never had an answer to his question because when he looked again they had returned to the blackness they had sprung from, leaving him the pitted, twisting road, the dead dogs in his headlights and the bush that was so dense to either side you saw no tree trunks, just black walls and eyes of animals and, through the open sunroof, heard the exchange of insults between species. Once he saw an owl that had been crucified to an electricity pole and its breast and the inside of its wings were white as a martyr's and its eyes were open. But whether it belonged to a recurring nightmare he had, or was the ultimate incarnation of it, remained a mystery.

After that Pendel must have dozed for a time and probably he took a wrong turning as well, because when he looked again he was on family holiday in Parita two years ago, picnicking with Louisa and the children on a gra.s.s square surrounded by one-storey houses with raised verandahs and stone mounting blocks for getting on and off your horse without spoiling your nice dean shoes. In Parita an old witch in a black hood had told Hannah that the people of the town put young boa constrictors under their roof tiles to catch mice, at which Hannah refused to enter any house in town, not for an ice cream, not for a pee. She was so scared that instead of attending Ma.s.s as they had planned they had to stand outside the church and wave at an old man in the white belltower who tolled the big bell with one hand while he waved back at them with the other, which they all afterwards agreed was better than going to Ma.s.s. And when he had finished with his bell he gave them an amazing slow-motion performance of an orang-utan, first swinging from an iron crossbar, then fleaing himself, armpits, head and crotch and eating the fleas between searches.

Pa.s.sing Chitre Pendel remembered the shrimp farm where shrimps laid their eggs in the trunks of mangrove trees and Hannah had asked whether they got pregnant first. And after the shrimps he remembered a kind Swedish horticulturist lady who told them about the orchid called Little Prost.i.tute of the Night, because by day it smelt of nothing but at night no decent person would let it into the house.

'Harry, it will not be necessary for you to explain this to our children. They are exposed to quite enough explicit material as it is,'

But Louisa's strictures made no difference because all week long Mark had called Hannah his put.i.ta de noche till Pendel told him to shut up.

And after Chitre came the battle zone: first the approaching red sky, then the rumble of ordnance, then the glow of flares as he was waved through one police checkpoint after another on his road to Guarare.

Pendel was walking, and people in white were walking beside him, leading him to the gallows. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself so reconciled to death. If he ever lived his life again, he decided, he would insist on a brand new actor in the leading role. He was walking to the gallows and there were angels at his side, and they were Marta's angels, he recognised them at once, the true heart of Panama, the people who lived the other side of the bridge, didn't take bribes or give them, made love to the people they loved, got pregnant and didn't have abortions, and come to think of it Louisa would admire them too, if only she could jump over the fences that confined her - but who can? We're born into prison, every one of us, sentenced to life from the moment we open our eyes, which was what made him so sad when he looked at his own children. But these children were different and they were angels and he was very glad to be meeting them in the last hours of his life. He had never doubted that Panama had more angels per acre, more white crinolines and flowered head-dresses, perfect shoulders, cooking-smells, music, dancing, laughter, more drunks, malign policemen and lethal fireworks than any comparable Paradise twenty times its size, and here they were a.s.sembled to escort him. And he was very gratified to discover bands playing, and competing folkdance teams with gangly romantic-eyed black men in cricket blazers and white shoes and flat hands that lovingly moulded the air round their partners' gyrating haunches. And to see that the double doors of the church were pulled open to give the Holy Virgin a grandstand view of the Baccha.n.a.lia outside, whether She wanted it or not. The angels were evidently determined She should not lose touch with ordinary life, warts and all.

He was walking slowly, as condemned men will, keeping to the centre of the street and smiling. He was smiling because everybody else was smiling, and because one discourteous gringo who refuses to smile amid a crowd of ridiculously beautiful Spanish-Indian mestizo revellers is an endangered species. And Marta was right, these were the most beautiful and virtuous and unsullied people on earth, as Pendel had already observed. To die among them would be a privilege. He would ask to be buried the other side of the bridge.

Twice he enquired after the way. Each time he was sent in a different direction. The first time a group of angels earnestly pointed him across the middle of the square, where he became the moving target for salvos of multi-warhead rockets fired at head height from windows and doorways on all four sides of him. And though he laughed and grinned and covered up and gave every sign of taking the joke in good part, it was actually a miracle that he reached the opposite bank with both eyes, ears and b.a.l.l.s in place and not a burn on him, because the rockets were not a joke at all and there was no laughter to say they were. They were red-hot, high velocity missiles spewing molten flame, fired at short range under the guidance of a k.n.o.bbly-knee'd, freckled, red-haired Amazon in frayed shorts who was the self-appointed mistress-gunner of a well-armed unit, and she was trailing her lethal rockets in a string like a tail behind her back while she lewdly pranced and gesticulated. She was smoking - what substance was anybody's guess -and between puffs she was screaming orders to her troops around the square: 'Cut his c.o.c.k off, bring the gringo to his knees-' then another drag of cigarette smoke and the next command. But Pendel was a good chap and these were angels.

And the second time he asked the way he was shown a row of houses that lined one side of the square, with verandahs occupied by overdressed rabiblancos slumming it with their shiny BMWs parked alongside, and Pendel as he walked past one noisy verandah after another kept thinking: I know you, you're so-and-so's son, or daughter, my goodness how time pa.s.ses. But their presence, when he thought about it more, did not concern him, neither did he care whether they spotted him in return, because the house where Mickie had shot himself was just a few doors along on his left, which was a very good reason to concentrate his thoughts exclusively on a s.e.x-driven fellow-prisoner called Spider who'd hanged himself in his cell while Pendel was sleeping three feet away from him, Spider's being the only dead body Pendel had had to handle at close quarters. So it was Spider's fault in a way that Pendel in his distraction found that he had wandered into the middle of an informal police cordon consisting of a police car, a ring of bystanders and about twenty policemen who couldn't possibly have all fitted into the car but, as policemen are wont to in Panama, had collected like gulls around a fishing boat the moment there was a smell of profit or excitement in the air.

The point of attraction was a dazed old peasant seated on the kerb with his straw hat between his knees and his face in his hands, and he was roaring a lament in gorilla-like gusts of rage. Gathered round him were some dozen advisors and spectators and consultants, including several drunks who needed one another's support to remain upright, and an old woman presumably his wife who was loudly agreeing with the old man whenever he let her get a word in. And since the police were disinclined to clear a path through the group, and certainly not through their own ranks, Pendel had no option but to become a bystander himself though not an active partic.i.p.ant in the debate. The old man was quite badly burned. Every time he took his hands from his face to make a point or rebut one it was easy to see he had been burned. A large patch of skin was missing from his left cheek and the wound extended southward into the open neck of his collarless shirt. And because he was burned, the police were proposing to take him to the local hospital where he would receive an injection which, as everyone agreed, was the appropriate remedy for a burn.

But the old man didn't want an injection and he didn't want the remedy. He would rather have the pain than the injection, he would rather get blood poisoning and any other evil after-effect, than go with the police to the hospital. And the reason was, he was an old drunk and this was probably the last festival of his life and everyone knew that when you had an injection you couldn't drink for the rest of the festival. He had therefore taken the conscious decision, of which his Maker and his wife were witness, to tell the police to shove the injection up their a.r.s.es because he preferred to drink himself into a stupor, which would anyway take care of the pain. So he would be obliged if everyone got the h.e.l.l out of his way please, including the police, and if they really wanted to do him a good turn, the best thing they could do was bring him a drink and another for his wife, a bottle of seco would be particularly welcome.

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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pres-ence 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 a.r.s.e 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 conver-sation - 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 a 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 fire smoke 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 onto till the absolute last moment before chucking them at their feet. It was all there for Pendel and Ana to watch any time 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 pa.s.sivity 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 basin with water and pour disinfectant into it, then to track down a broom, a squeegee mop, rolls of kitchen paper, 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 pa.s.sing gringos, was announcing the successful selection of a beauty queen - and there she was on her float with her white mantilla, her white pear-flower 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 pa.s.s 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 clap-ping and cheering at the beauty queen - and not lying face down in the middle of the floor with the bedspread over him and his a.r.s.e 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 gla.s.ses. 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 bed-spread 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sed round the prison as new meat for the psychopaths to eat their fill of. Spider had gone loco because he was accustomed to s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g two girls a day and three on Sundays, and the prospect of five years without s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 h.o.m.o and they hate him, the priest in the next town f.u.c.ks 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 f.u.c.k 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 h.o.m.o.'

'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 Guarare firework 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 b.u.mper, 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 that gave him a chance to fine-tune 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 - half way 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 facia of the four-track.'

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

Like a girl at a party she skipped away to the bedroom while he took Mickie's gun from its drawer and put it in his trouser pocket. He knew nothing about guns and this was not a big one, but it was fat for its size, as the hole in Mickie's head had testified. Then as an afterthought he selected from a drawer in the kitchen a knife with a serrated edge and wrapped it in paper towelling before hiding it. Ana came back triumphant: she had found a child's drawing book and some crayons and the only problem was that in her enthusiasm she had left out the T at the end, so the sign read ambulanca. But it was otherwise a good sign so he took it from her and went down the steps to the parked four-track and laid the sign on the facia and switched on the winking emergency lights to quell the people who were stuck in the street behind him, hooting at him to get out of the way.

Here humour also came to Pendel's aid, for as he started to go back up the steps he turned to his critics and with a smile for all of them put his hands together in a praying gesture for their indulgence, then raised one finger to crave one minute, then pushed the door open and switched on the hall light to reveal Mickie with his bandaged head and one eye. At which most of the hooting and yelling subsided.

'Put his jacket over his shoulders when I lift him up,' he told Ana. 'Not yet. Wait.'

Then Pendel stooped into the weightlifter's crouch and remembered that he was strong, as well as treacherous and murderous, and that the strength was in his thighs and b.u.t.tocks and stomach and across his shoulders, and that there had been enough occasions in the past when he had had to carry Mickie home and this was no different, except that Mickie wasn't sweating or threatening to be sick or asking to be taken back to prison, by which he meant his wife.

With these thoughts in his mind Pendel took a great armful of Mickie's back and drew him to his feet, but there was not a lot of strength in the legs and worse there was no balance because in the humid heat of the night Mickie had done very little in the way of stiffening up. So the stiffening had to be all Pendel's as he helped his friend over the threshold and, with one arm on the iron bal.u.s.trade and all the strength that his G.o.ds had ever given him, down the first of four steps to the four-track. Mickie's head was on his shoulder now, he could smell the blood through the strips of bedsheet. Ana had draped the jacket over Mickie's back and Pendel wasn't certain why he had told her to do that with the jacket except that it was a really good jacket and he couldn't bear to think of Ana giving it to the first beggar in the street, he wanted it to play a part in Mickie's glory, because that's where we're going Mickie - third step - we're going to our glory and you're going to be the prettiest boy in the room, the best-dressed hero the girls have ever seen.

'Go ahead, open the car door,' he told Ana, at which Mickie in one of his familiar, unpredictable a.s.sertions of free will decided to take over the proceedings, in this case by throwing himself towards the car in a free fall from the bottom step. But Pendel need not have worried. Two boys were waiting with their arms out, Ana had already mustered them, she was one of those girls who mustered boys automatically just by stepping into the street.

'Be gentle,' she ordered them severely. 'He may have pa.s.sed out.'

'He's got his eyes open,' said a boy, making the cla.s.sic false a.s.sumption that, because you can see one eye you know the other one is there.

'Lean his head back,' Pendel ordered.