The Tailor of Panama Read Online Free PDF

go home to their wives. At five o’clock I shall be delighted to offer you my full attention.”
    â€œYou personally? In the flesh? Lot o’ you posh tailors hire flunkeys to do their hard work for ’em.”
    â€œI’m your old-fashioned sort, I’m afraid, Mr. Osnard. Every customer is a challenge to me. I measure, I cut, I fit, and I never mind how many fittings it takes me to produce the best. No part of any suit leaves these premises while it’s being made, and I supervise every stage of the making as it goes along.”
    â€œOkay. How much?” Osnard demanded. But playfully, not offensively.
    Pendel’s good smile widened. If he had been speaking Spanish, which had become his second soul and his preferred one, he would have had no difficulty answering the question. Nobody in Panama is embarrassed about money unless he has run out of it. But your English upper classes were notoriously unpredictable where money was concerned, the richest often being the thriftiest.
    â€œI provide the best, Mr. Osnard. Rolls-Royces don’t come free, I always say, and nor does a Pendel & Braithwaite.”
    â€œSo how much?”
    â€œWell, sir, two and a half thousand dollars for your standard twopiece is about normal, though it could be more, depending on clothand style. A jacket or blazer fifteen hundred, waistcoat six hundred. And since we tend to use the lighter materials, and accordingly recommend a second pair of trousers to match, a special price of eight hundred for the second pair. Is this a shocked silence I’m hearing, Mr. Osnard?”
    â€œThought the going rate was two grand a pop.”
    â€œAnd so it was, sir, until three years ago. Since then, alas, the dollar’s gone through the floor, while we at P & B have been obliged to continue buying the very finest materials, which I need hardly tell you is what we use throughout, irregardless of cost, many of them from Europe, and all of them—” He was going to come out with something fancy, like “hard-currency-related,” but changed his mind. “Though I am told, sir, that your top-class off-the-peg these days—I’ll take Ralph Lauren as a benchmark— is pushing the two thousand and in some cases going beyond even that. May I also point out that we provide aftercare, sir? I don’t think you can go back to your average haberdasher and tell him you’re a bit tight round the shoulders, can you? Not for free you can’t. What was it we were thinking of having made exactly?”
    â€œMe? Oh, usual sort of thing. Start with a couple o’ lounge suits, see how they go. After that it’s the full Monty.”
    â€œ ‘The full Monty,’ ” Pendel repeated in awe, as memories of Uncle Benny nearly drowned him. “It must be twenty years since I heard that expression, Mr. Osnard. Bless my soul. The full Monty. My goodness me.”
    Here again, any other tailor might reasonably have contained his enthusiasm and returned to his naval uniform. And so on any other day might Pendel. An appointment had been made, the price acknowledged, social preliminaries exchanged. But Pendel was enjoying himself. His visit to the bank had left him feeling lonely. He had few English customers and fewer English friends. Louisa, guided by her late father’s ghost, did not encourage them.
    â€œAnd P & B are still the only show in town, that right?” Osnard was asking. “Tailors to Panama’s best and brightest fat cats and so forth?”
    Pendel smiled at fat cat. “We like to think so, sir. We’re not complacent, but we’re proud of our achievements. It wasn’t all roses these last ten years, I can assure you. There’s not a lot of taste in Panama, to be frank. Or there wasn’t until we came along. We had to educate them before we could sell to them. All that money for a suit? They thought we were mad or worse. Then gradually it took on, till