The Tailor of Panama Part 22

Now Luxmore made the silence.

'Did I hear if and when? What am I hearing there exactly, Andrew?'

'I'm sorry, sir. I just can't help wondering whether Abraxas isn't stringing us along. Or Pendel is. Forgive me. It's late.'

'Andrew.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Listen to me, Andrew. That's an order. There is a conspiracy. Don't lose heart merely because you're tired. Of course there is a conspiracy. You believe it, I believe it. One of the greatest opinion-makers in the world believes it. Personally. Profoundly. The best brains in Fleet Street believe it, or they very soon will. A conspiracy is out there, it is being cobbled together by an evil inner circle of the Panamanian elite, it centres on the Ca.n.a.l and we shall find it! Andrew?' Alarm, suddenly. 'Andrew!'

'Sir?'

'Scottie, if you don't mind. We've done with sir. Are you at peace in your heart, Andrew? Are you under strain? Are you comfortable? My goodness me I feel an ogre, never enquiring after your personal wellbeing amid all this. I am not without influence in the upper corridors these days, nor yet across the river. It saddens me when a diligent and loyal young man asks nothing for himself in these materialist times,'

Osnard gave the kind of embarra.s.sed laugh that loyal and diligent young men give when they are embarra.s.sed.

'I could do with some sleep if you've got any to spare.'

'Get some, Andrew. Now. As long as you like. That's an order. We need you.'

'Will do, sir. Good night,'

'Good morning, Andrew. I mean it now. And when you wake up, you'll hear that conspiracy loud and clear again, resounding like a hunting horn in your ears, and you'll spring from your bed and ride out in search of it, I know you will. I've been there. I've heard it too. We went to war for it.'

'Good night, sir.'

But the diligent young spymaster's day was far from over. File while your memory is hot the trainers had dinned into him ad nauseam. Returning to the strongroom he unlocked a bizarre metal casket to which he alone possessed the combination and extracted from it a red hand-bound volume similar in weight and portent to a s.h.i.+p's log, and encompa.s.sed by a kind of iron chast.i.ty belt, the two ends of which met in a second lock which Osnard also opened. Returning to his office he set the book on his desk beside his reading light, next to the bottle of Scotch, and his notes and tape recorder from the shabby briefcase.

The red book was his indispensable aid to creative report-writing. In its hugely secret pages, areas of Head Office's outstanding ignorance, known otherwise as the a.n.a.lysts' Black Holes, were obligingly listed for the convenience of intelligence gatherers. And what a.n.a.lysts didn't know, in Osnard's simple logic, a.n.a.lysts couldn't check. And what they couldn't check they couldn't b.l.o.o.d.y well carp about. Osnard, like many new writers, had discovered he was unexpectedly sensitive to criticism. For two hours without a break Osnard reshaped, polished, honed and rewrote until BUCHAN's latest intelligence material fitted like perfectly-turned pegs into the a.n.a.lysts' Black Holes. A lapidary tone, an ever-watchful scepticism, an extra doubt raised here and there added to the air of authenticity. Till at last, confident of his handiwork, he telephoned his cypher clerk Shepherd, summoned him to the Emba.s.sy immediately and, on the principle that messages dispatched at unsociable hours are more impressive than their daytime fellows, presented him with a hand-coded TOPSECRET & BUCHAN telegram for immediate transmission.

'Only wish I could share it with you, Shep,' said Osnard in his We-Dive-At-Dawn voice, observing how Shepherd gazed wistfully at the unintelligible groups of numbers.

'Me too, Andy, but when it's need-to-know, it's need-to-know, isn't it?'

'Suppose it is,' Osnard conceded.

We'll send out old Shep, Personnel had said. Keep young Osnard on the straight and narrow.

Osnard drove but not to his apartment. He drove with purpose but the purpose lay out ahead of him, undefined. A fat wad of dollar bills was nudging against his left nipple. What will I have? Darting lights, colour photographs of naked black girls in illuminated frames, multi-lingual signs proclaiming live erotic s.e.x. Respect it but not my mood tonight. He kept driving. Pimps, pushers, cops, bunch o' nancy boys, all looking for a buck. Uniformed GIs in threes. He pa.s.sed the Costa Brava Club, young Chinese wh.o.r.es a speciality. Thanks, darlings, prefer 'em older and more grateful. Still he kept driving, his senses leading, which was what he liked his senses to do. The old Adam stirring. Taste everything, only way. h.e.l.l can you know whether you want a thing till you've bought it? His mind flitted back to Luxmore. The greatest opinion-maker in the world believes in it... Must be Ben Hatry. Luxmore had dropped his name a couple o' times in London. Punned with it. Our Benefit Fund, ha ha. The Benison of a certain patriotic media baron. You didn't hear that, young Mr Osnard. The name of Hatry will never cross my lips. Suck o' the teeth. What an a.r.s.ehole.

Osnard swung his car across the road, hit the kerb, mounted it and parked on the pavement. I'm a diplomat so screw the lot o' you. Casino and Club, said the sign, and on the door all handguns to be checked. Two nine-foot bouncers in capes and peaked hats guarded the entrance. Girls in mini-skirts and net stockings undulated at the foot of a red staircase. Looks my kind o' place.

It was six in the morning.

'd.a.m.n you, Andy Osnard, you had me scared,' Fran confessed with feeling as he climbed into bed beside her. 'What the h.e.l.l happened to you?'

'She wore me out,' he said.

But his revival was already apparent.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The rage that had swept over Pendel with his departure from the pushb.u.t.ton house of love did not subside as he climbed into the four-track or drove home badly through red mist or lay with a thumping heart on his side of the bed in Bethania, or woke next morning or the morning after. 'I'll need some days,' he had mumbled to Osnard. But it was not the days he was counting. It was the years. It was every wrong turning he had taken to oblige. It was every insult he had swallowed for the sake of the greater good, preferring to drucken himself rather than cause what Benny called a gewalt. It was every scream that had stopped in his throat before it reached the open air. It was a lifetime's worth of frustrated fury arriving uninvited among the host of characters who, for want of closer definition, traded under the name of Harry Pendel.

And it woke him like a bugle call, reviving and reproaching him in one huge blast, rallying his other emotions to its flag. Love, fear, outrage and revenge were among the first volunteers. It swept away the puny wall that had separated fact from fiction in Pendel's soul. It said 'Enough!' and 'Attack!' and tolerated no deserters. But attack what? And what with?

We want to buy your friend, Osnard is saying. And if we can't, we'll send him back to prison. Ever been to prison, Pendel?

Yes. And so's Mickie. And I saw him there. And he's hardly got the wind to say hullo.

We want to buy your wife, Osnard is saying. And if we can't, we'll throw her onto the street and your kids with her. Ever been on the street, Pendel?

It's where I came from.

And these threats were pistols, not dreams. Held to his head by Osnard. All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place and the truth was in another. To ride with the pressure until he could hop off and go home.

But Osnard's pressure hadn't let him hop off.

Berating himself, Pendel went through his usual materiel. As a practised self-accuser he tore his hair and called on G.o.d to witness his remorse. I'm ruined! It's a judgment! I'm back in prison! All life is a prison! It doesn't matter whether I'm inside or out! And I brought it all on myself! But his anger didn't go away. Eschewing Louisa's Cooperative Christianity, he resorted to the fearful language of Benny's half-remembered efforts at atonement, as chanted into his empty tankard at the Wink & Nod: we have harmed, corrupted and ruined... We are guilty, we have betrayed... We have robbed, we have slandered... We have perverted and led astray... We have been false... We cut ourselves off from truth, and reality exists to entertain us. We hide behind distractions and toys. The anger still refused to budge. It went wherever Pendel went, like a cat in a sick pantomime. Even when he embarked on a merciless historical a.n.a.lysis of his despicable behaviour from the beginning of time until the present day, his anger turned the sword away from his own breast and outward at the perverters of his humanity.

In the Beginning was the Hard Word, he told himself. It was applied by Andy when he barged into my shop and there was no resisting it because it was pressure, not only regarding the summer frocks but also one Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as G.o.d. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every G.o.d has to exist in order to do his job.

And in consequence of the above, there was me undertaking to be a listening post. So I listened. And I heard a few things. And what wasn't heard as such was heard in my head, which was only natural, given the degree of pressure exerted. I'm a service industry so I served. What's so wrong about that? And after that there was what I would call a flowering at a certain level, which was hearing a lot more and getting better at it, because a thing you learn about spying is, it's like trade, it's like s.e.x, it has to get better or it won't get anywhere.

So I entered what we might call the area of positive hearing in which certain words are put into people's mouths that they would have said if they'd thought of them at the time. Which is what everyone does anyway. Plus I photographed a few bits and pieces from Louisa's briefcase, which I did not like doing but Andy would have it and, bless him, he loves his photographs. But it wasn't stealing. It was looking. And anyone can look, is what I say. With or without a cigarette lighter in his pocket.

And what happened after that was Andy's fault completely. I never encouraged him, I never even thought of it till he did. Andy required me to obtain subsources, your subsource being a bird of a very different feather from your unaware informant, and necessitating what I call a quantum leap, plus substantial returning as regards the purveyor's mental att.i.tude. But I'll tell you something about subsources. Subsources, once you get into the way of them, are very nice people, a lot nicer than some I could name who had a somewhat larger place in reality, subsources being a secret family that doesn't answer back or have problems unless you tell them to. Subsources are about turning your friends into what they nearly were already, or would like to be, but strictly speaking never will be. Or what they wouldn't like to be at all, but rationally might have been, given what they are.

Take Sabina - whom Marta based loosely on herself, but not entirely - for example. Take your average fiery bomb-making student waiting to do his worst. Take Alpha and Beta and certain others who for reasons of security must remain nameless. Take Mickie with his Silent Opposition and his Conspiracy That n.o.body Can Put His Finger On, which in my personal judgment was an idea of pure genius except that sooner rather than later I'm going to have to put my finger on it in a manner that will satisfy all parties, owing to Andy's highly remorseless pressure. Take the People Who Live the Other Side of the Bridge and the Real Heart of Panama that n.o.body can find except Mickie and a few students with a stethoscope. Take Marco who wouldn't say yes until I'd had his wife speak to him severely about the new deep freeze she wanted and the second car and getting their kid into the Einstein which I just may be able to arrange for them if Marco comes through on certain other fronts and maybe she ought to have another word with him in that regard?

All fluence. Loose threads, plucked from the air, woven and cut to measure.

So you build up your subsources and do their listening for them, and their worrying, and you research for them and read for them and listen to Marta about them, and you put them in the right places at the right times and generally set them off to their best advantage with all their ideals and problems and little ways, the same as I do in the shop. And you pay them, which is only proper. Part cash in their pockets and the rest put aside for a rainy day so that they don't flash it around and make themselves look silly and conspicuous and expose themselves to the full rigour of the Law. The only trouble being that my subsources can't have the cash in their pockets because they don't know they've earned it and some don't have the pockets as such, so I have to have it in mine. But that's only fair when you think about it because they haven't earned it, have they? I have. So I take the cash. Or Andy banks it for me in his widows and orphans. And the subsources are none the wiser, which is what Benny would have called a bloodless con. And What's life, if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.

Prisoners, it is well known, have their own morality. Such was Pendel's.

And having duly flailed himself and exonerated himself, he was at peace, except that the black cat was still glowering at him and the peace he felt was of the armed variety, a constructive outrage stronger and more lucid than any he had known in a lifetime peppered with injustices. He felt it in his hands, the way they tingled and muscled up. In his back, mostly across his shoulders. In his hips and heels as he strode about the house and shop. Thus exalted, he was able to clench his fists and hammer on the wooden walls of the prisoner's dock that always mentally surrounded him and roar out his innocence, or innocence as near as made no odds: Because I'll tell you something else, Your Honour, while we're about it, if you'll wipe that Top Sheep's smile off your face: it takes two to tango. And Mr Andrew Osnard of Her Majesty's celestial whatnot tangos. I can feel it. Whether he can feel it is another matter, but I think he can. Sometimes people don't know they're doing things. But Andy's egging me on. He's making more of me than what I am, counting everything twice and pretending it's only the once, plus he's bent because I know bent, and London's worse than he is.

It was at this point in his deliberations that Pendel stopped addressing his Maker, His Honour or himself, and glared ahead of him at the wall of his workroom where he happened to be cutting yet another life-improving suit for Mickie Abraxas, the one that would win him back his wife. After so many of them, Pendel could have cut it with his eyes shut. But his eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. He seemed to be straining for oxygen, though his workroom, thanks to its high windows, had an adequate supply. He had been playing Mozart but Mozart was no longer his mood. With one hand he blindly switched him off. With the other he laid down his shears, but his gaze didn't flinch. It remained mooning at the same spot on the wall which, unlike other walls he had known, was painted neither millstone grey nor slime green but a soothing shade of gardenia that he and his decorator had taken pains to achieve.

Then he spoke. Aloud. One word.

Not as Archimedes might have spoken it. Not with any recognisable emotion. Rather in the tone of the I-speak-your-weight machines that had enlivened the railway stations of his childhood. Mechanically, but with a.s.sertion.

'Jonah,' he said.

Harry Pendel was having his grand vision at last. It floated before him at this very minute, intact, superb, fluorescent, complete. He'd had it from the start, he now realised, like a wad of money in his back pocket when all this time he'd been starving, thinking he was broke, struggling, aspiring, straining for knowledge he never quite possessed. Yet he possessed it! It had been sitting there, his very own to dispose of, his secret store! And he'd forgotten its existence until now! And here it was before him in glorious polychrome. My grand vision, pretending to be a wall. My conspiracy that has found its cause. The original uncut version. Brought to your screens by popular demand. And radiantly illuminated by anger.

And its name is Jonah.

It is a year ago but in Pendel's vaulting memory it is here and now and on the wall in front of him. It is a week after Benny's death. It is two days into Mark's first term at the Einstein and one day after Louisa has resumed gainful employment with the Ca.n.a.l. Pendel is driving his first-ever four-track. His destination is Colon, the purpose of his mission twofold: to pay his monthly visit to Mr Bluthner's textile warehouse, and to become a member of the Brotherhood at last.

He drives fast, as people do when they are driving to Colon, partly out of fear of highwaymen, partly in antic.i.p.ation of the riches of the Free Zone ahead of them down the road. He is wearing a black suit that he has put on in the shop in order not to cause aggravation in the home and he has six days' worth of stubble. While Benny grieved for a departed friend, he gave up shaving. Pendel can do no less for Benny. He has even brought a black Homburg, though he intends to leave it on the back seat.

'It's a rash,' he explains to Louisa, who for her comfort and safety has not been informed of Benny's death as such, having been led to believe some years ago that Benny had died in alcoholic obscurity and accordingly presented no further threat. 'I think it's that new Swedish aftershave I was testing for the boutique,' he adds, inviting her concern.

'Harry, you will write to those Swedes and you will tell them their lotion is dangerous. It is not appropriate for sensitive skins. It is life-threatening for our children, it is inconsistent with Swedish notions of hygiene and if the rash persists you will sue the daylights out of them.'

'I've already drafted it,' says Pendel.

The Brotherhood is Benny's last wish, expressed in a failing scrawl that arrived at the shop after his death: Harry boy, what you have been to me no question is a pearl of very great price except in one regard which is Charlie Bluthner's Brotherhood. A fine business you've got, two children and who knows what's in the pipeline. But the plum is still before you and why you wouldn't pick it all these years is beyond me. Who Charlie doesn't know in Panama is not worth knowing, plus good works and influence have always gone hand in hand, with the Brotherhood behind you you'll never want for business or necessities. Charlie says the door's still open plus he owes me. Though never as much as I'll owe you, my son, when I'm standing in the corridor waiting for my turn, which in my private opinion is a longshot but don't tell your Auntie Ruth. This place is all right if you like rabbis.

Blessings Benny Mr Bluthner in Colon rules over half-an-acre of open-plan offices full of computers and happy secretaries in high-necked blouses and black skirts and he is the second most respectable man in the world after Arthur Braithwaite. Each morning at seven he boards his company plane and has himself flown for twenty minutes to Colon's France Field airport where he is set down among the gaily-painted aircraft of Colombian import-export executives who have dropped by to do a little taxfree shopping or, being too busy, sent their womenfolk instead. Each evening at six he flies home again, except on Fridays when he flies home at three, and at Yom Kippur when the firm takes its annual holiday and Mr Bluthner atones for sins that no one knows about except himself and, until a week ago, Uncle Benny.

'Harry.'

'Mr Bluthner, sir, always a pleasure,'

It's the same every time. The enigmatic smile, the formal handshake, the waterproof respectability and no mention of Louisa. Except that on this day the smile is sadder and the handshake longer and Mr Bluthner is wearing a black tie from stock.

'Your Uncle Benjamin was a great man,' he says, patting Pendel's shoulder with his powdery little claw.

'A giant, Mr B.'

'Your business prospers, Harry?'

'I'm fortunate, Mr B.'

'You don't worry that the world gets warmer all the time? Soon n.o.body will buy your jackets?'

'When G.o.d invented the sun, Mr Bluthner, he was wise enough to invent air-conditioning.'

'And you would like to meet some friends of mine,' says Mr Bluthner, with a twinkly smile.

Mr Bluthner in Colon is several degrees racier than his familiar on the Pacific side.

'I don't know why I ever put it off,' says Pendel.

On other days they would have taken the back stairs to the textiles department for Pendel to admire the new alpacas. But today it's the crowded streets they take to, Mr Bluthner leading at a good snap until, sweating like stevedores, they arrive before an unmarked door. Mr Bluthner holds a key in his hand, but first he must give Pendel a roguish wink.

'You don't mind we sacrifice a virgin, Harry? Tarring and feathering a few schwartzers not going to be a problem to you?'

'Not if it's what Benny would have wanted for me, Mr Bluthner.'

Having darted a conspiratorial glance up and down the pavement, Mr Bluthner turns his key and gives the door a vigorous shove. It is a year ago or more, but it is here and now. On the gardenia wall in front of him Pendel sees the same door open, and the same pitch blackness beckon.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

From bouncing sunlight Pendel followed his host into darkest night, lost him and stood still, waiting for his eyes to make the change, smiling in case he could be seen. Whom would he meet, in what weird attire? He sniffed the air but, instead of incense or warm blood, smelt old tobacco smoke and beer. Then gradually the instruments of the torture chamber came floating forward to present themselves: bottles behind a bar, a mirror behind the bottles, an Asian barman of great age, a cream-coloured piano with cavorting girls daubed on its raised lid, wooden fans puttering from the ceiling, a high window and a cord to open it, broken off short. And last, because they gleamed the least, Pendel's fellow-searchers for the Light, dressed, not in zodiacal robes and conical hats, but in the drab fatigues of Panamanian commerce: white short-sleeved s.h.i.+rts, buckled trousers under brick-layer bellies, loosened neckties patterned in red cauliflower.

Several faces were known to him from the humbler fringes of the Club Union: Dutch Henk, whose wife had recently bolted to Jamaica with his savings and a Chinese drummer, tiptoeing gravely towards him with a frosted pewter tankard in each hand - 'Harry, our Brother, we are proud you have at last arrived among us' - as if Pendel had trekked across the polders to get to him. Olaf, Swedish s.h.i.+pping agent and drunk, with pebble spectacles and a wire-wool hairpiece, yelling in his cherished Oxford accent that wasn't one: 'I say, Brother Harry, old chap, good show, cheers.' Belgian Hugo, self-styled sc.r.a.p-metal merchant and former Congo hand, offering Pendel 'something very special from your old country' out of a shaking silver hip flask.

No tethered virgins, no bubbling tar barrels or terrified schwartzers: just all the other reasons why Pendel had never joined till now, the same old cast in the same old play, with 'What's your poison, Brother Harry?' and 'Let's fill that up for you, Brother,' and 'What took you so long to come to us, Harry?' Until Mr Bluthner himself, adorned in a Beefeater's cape and mayoral chain, sounded two hoa.r.s.e blasts on a dented English hunting horn, and a pair of double doors was kicked open to admit a column of Asian porters with trays above their heads marching into the room at punishment speed to a chant of 'Hold him down, you Zulu warrior' led by none other than Mr Bluthner himself who, as Pendel was beginning to understand, was retrieving certain elements that had gone missing from his early life, such as delinquency in adolescence.

For having summoned everyone to table, Mr Bluthner placed himself at the centre of it and Pendel at his side and remained standing happily at attention, as they all did, while Dutch Henk delivered himself of a long, incomprehensible grace, the drift of which being that the company would be even more virtuous than it already was if it ate the food before it - a premise Pendel was inclined to question as he took his first fatal mouthful of the most character-changing curry that had come his way since Benny last whisked him round the corner for a nice touch of Mr Khan's while your Auntie Ruth is doing her piety up the Daughters of Zion.

But no sooner had they sat than Mr Bluthner bounded to his feet again with two messages that were delightful to the company: our Brother Pendel making his first appearance among us here today - thunderous applause, interspersed with jocular obscenities, the company becoming by now mellow - and allow me to introduce a Brother who needs no introduction, so a big hand, please, for our wandering sage and longtime Servant of the Light, diver of the deep and explorer of the unknown, who has penetrated more dark places - dirty laughter - than any of us round this table today, the one and only, the irrepressible, the immortal Jonah, freshly returned from a triumphant wreck-raising expedition in the Dutch East Indies, of which some of you will have read. (Cries of 'Where?') And Pendel, peering into his gardenia wall, could discover Jonah now as he did a year ago: crouched and cantankerous, with a yellowed complexion and lizard eyes, methodically provisioning his plate with the best of everything before him - red-hot pickles, spiced poppadoms and chapattis, chopped chili, nan bread, and an oozing speckled, red-brown lumpy substance that Pendel had already privately identified as unrefined napalm. Pendel could hear him too. Jonah, our wandering sage. The gardenia wall's sound-system is faultless, even if Jonah has some difficulty making himself heard above the babel of s.m.u.tty stories and fatuous toasts.

The next world war, Jonah was telling them, in thick Australian accents, would be played in Panama, the date had already been set, and you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had better b.l.o.o.d.y believe it.

The first to challenge this a.s.sertion was an emaciated South African engineer named Piet.

'It's been done, Jonah, old boy. Little fellow we had here called Operation Just Cause. George Bush waved his wimp factor at us. Thousands dead.'

Which in turn provoked indistinct enquiries along the lines of 'What did you do in the invasion, Daddy?' and responses of an equally intellectual kind.

Here a firefight of charge and countercharge burst from several quarters at once, to the innocent pleasure of Mr Bluthner whose smile switched from one speaker to the next as keenly as if he were following a great tennis match. But Pendel heard little above the clamour of his intestines, and by the time he was restored to partial consciousness, Jonah had turned his attention to the shortcomings of the Ca.n.a.l.

'Modern s.h.i.+pping can't use the f.u.c.ker. Ore containers, supertankers, container s.h.i.+ps are too big for it,' he p.r.o.nounced. 'It's a dinosaur,'

Olaf the Swede reminded the company that there was a plan to add more locks. Jonah treated this intelligence with the scorn it obviously deserved.

'Oh dead on, squire, great idea. More f.u.c.king locks. Fantastic. Incredible. What, I wonder, will science do next? Let's use the old French cut too, while we're about it. And take a slice through the Rodman Navy Base. And sometime around 2020, with G.o.d's grace and all the wonders of modernity, we'll have a very slightly wider Ca.n.a.l, and a much longer transit time. I drink to you, squire. I stand up and raise my gla.s.s to progress in the twenty-first f.u.c.king century.'

And probably beyond the smoke Jonah did exactly that, for Pendel, as he watches the replay on the gardenia wall, has a high-fidelity memory of Jonah leaping to his feet but remaining exactly the same height until, with exaggerated ceremony, he raises his tankard and ducks his yellowed face into it, lizard eyes and all, so that for a second Pendel wonders whether he will ever surface again, but these divers know their trade.

'Not that Uncle Sam gives a fart in a thunderstorm whether there's one f.u.c.king lock or six,' Jonah resumed in the same saw-edged tone of infinite contempt. 'The more the better as far as the Yanks are concerned. Our gallant Yankee friends have given up the Ca.n.a.l for dead long ago. I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of them were all for blowing the b.u.g.g.e.r up. Why should they want an efficient Ca.n.a.l? They've got their fast freightline from San Diego to New York, haven't they? Their dry ca.n.a.l, they're pleased to call it, run by decent moronic Yankees instead of a shower of dagos. The rest of the world can go screw itself. The Ca.n.a.l's an outdated symbol. Let the other b.u.g.g.e.rs use it - and bulls.h.i.+t to you, you dozy Kraut p.r.i.c.k,' he added, to the somnolent Dutch Henk who had presumed to doubt his wisdom.

But elsewhere round the table weary heads were lifting, fuddled faces turning towards Jonah's dubious sun. And Mr Bluthner, anxious not to miss one gem of repartee, was halfway out of his chair and across the table in his determination to catch Jonah's every word. The wandering sage was meanwhile rebuffing criticism: 'No, I am not talking through my fundament, you Mick nipple, I am talking oil, I am talking j.a.p oil. Oil that was once heavy and has now been made light. I am talking world domination by the Yellow Man, and the end of f.u.c.king civilisation as we know it, even in the Emerald f.u.c.king Isle.'

A wit asked whether Jonah meant the j.a.ps were going to flood the Ca.n.a.l with oil, but he ignored him.

'The j.a.panese, my fine friends, were drilling their heavy oil long before they discovered how to use the stuff. They filled up kingsized storage tanks all over the country while their top scientists hunted day and night for a f.u.c.king formula to break it down. Well, now they've found it, so look out. Slap your hands over your appendages if you can find them, gentlemen, is my advice, and turn your a.r.s.es to the rising sun before you kiss them goodbye. Because the Nips have found their magic emulsion. Which means that your tenure here in Paradise is scheduled to last about five minutes by the station clock. You pour it in, you shake it all about, and bingo, you've got oil like all the other boys. f.u.c.king oceans of it. And once they've built their own Panama Ca.n.a.l, which is going to happen in the flick of a very small mayfly's d.i.c.k, they will be in the happy position of being able to flood the f.u.c.king world with it. To the considerable rage of Uncle Sam.'

Pause. Growls of confused dissent from different corners of the table before the literal Olaf deputes himself to ask the obvious question.