"You filthy bugger," said Tabby.
Making signs with his hands and yelling "Pedro," Frisky induced the driver to flash his headlights at the car ahead, which stopped again. Langbourne leaned his head out of his window to shout what the fuck's the matter now? A lighted petrol station winked across the road.
"Tommy here's got his tummy again," Frisky said.
Langbourne turned back into the car to consult Roper, then reappeared. "Go with him, Frisky. Don't let him out of your sight. Move it."
It was a new petrol station, but the plumbing was not up to the standard of the rest. One tiny stinking unisex cubicle with no seat was the best it could offer. While Frisky waited outside the door, Jonathan made energetic noises of distress and, once more using his bare knee as a rest, wrote his last message.
* * *
The Wurlitzer bar at the Riande Continental Hotel in Panama City is very small and pitch dark, and on Sunday nights it is presided over by a matronly round-faced woman who, when Rooke was able to make her out in the gloom, bore an odd similarity to his wife. And when she saw that he was not the kind who needed to talk, she filled a second saucer of nuts and left him to sip his Perrier in peace while she resumed her horoscope.
In the lobby, American soldiers in fatigues dawdled in glum groups amid the colourful bustle of nocturnal Panama. A short staircase led to the door of the hotel casino, with its courteous notice forbidding the carrying of arms. Rooke could make out ghostly figures playing baccarat and yanking at one-armed bandits. In the bar, not six feet from where he sat, reposed the magnificent white Wurlitzer organ itself, reminding him of cinemas in the days of his childhood, when an organist in a radiant jacket emerged from the dungeons on his white dreamboat, playing songs an audience could hum.
Rooke took little real interest in these things, but a man who is waiting without hope must have something to distract him, or he becomes too morbid for his health.
At first he had sat in his room, keeping close to the telephone because he was afraid the clatter of the air conditioner would drown its ring. Then he switched off the air conditioner and tried opening the French windows to his balcony, but the din from the Via España was so frightful that he quickly closed them again and lay on the bed and stewed for an hour without air from either the balcony or the air conditioner, but he became so drowsy that he nearly nodded off. So he phoned the switchboard and said he was going down to the poolside now and they should hold any call that came for him till he got there. And as soon as he reached the poolside he gave the maître d' ten dollars and asked him to alert the concierge and the telephone exchange and the doorman to the fact that Mr. Robinson of room 409 was dining at the poolside, table 6, should anyone enquire.
Then he sat and stared at the illuminated blue water of the empty pool, and at the empty tables, and upward at the windows of the surrounding high-rise buildings, and across to the house telephone on the poolside bar, and at the boys at the barbecue who were cooking his steak, and at the band that was playing rumbas just for him.
And when his steak came he washed it down with a bottle of Perrier water because, although he reckoned he had as good a bead as the next man, he would as soon have gone to sleep on sentry duty as drink alcohol while he was playing the thousand-to-one chance that a blown joe would somehow get through the lines.
Then around ten o'clock, as the tables began to fill, he feared that the effect of his ten dollars might be wearing off.
So, having called the switchboard on the house line, he took himself to the bar, where he now sat. And that was where he was when the barmaid who looked like his wife put down the phone and smiled sadly at him.
"You Mr. Robinson, 409?"
Rooke was.
"You got a visitor, darling. He very personal, very urgent. But he a man."
* * *
He was a man, he was a Panamanian, he was small and Asian and silk-skinned, with heavy eyelids and a black suit and an air of sanctity. His suit was polished to a regimental brightness, like the suits worn by office messengers and undertakers. His hair was waved, his dimpled white shirt was spotless and his visiting card, which was made in the form of a sticky label to be fixed beside your telephone, announced him in Spanish and English as Sanchez Jesus-Maria Romarez II, driver of limousines day and night, English spoken but not, alas, as well as he would wish, señor; his English, he would say, was of the people but not of the scholar ― a deprecating smile to heaven ― and had been acquired mostly from his American and British clients, though fortified, it was true, by his early attendances at school, though these, alas, had been fewer than he would have wished, for his father was not a rich man, señor, and neither was Sanchez.
At which sad admission, Sanchez fixed his gaze dotingly on Rooke and got down to business.
