A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL

By Paul Gray

During his more than 30 years of turning out literate, suspenseful, best-selling novels, John le Carre has played just about every imaginable variation on the themes of espionage and betrayal. But The Tailor of Panama (Knopf; 333 pages; $25) shows that he knows a few more tricks than he has so far revealed. How about, for example, a story of some eager beavers in British intelligence hot on the trail of a conspiracy that does not actually exist?

Harry Pendel, 40, is the outwardly prosperous proprietor of Pendel & Braithwaite, Limitada, a gentlemen's tailor shop that bears on its frosted-glass window the legend PANAMA AND SAVILE ROW SINCE 1921. Legend seems the right word because Harry thinks he is the only person in Panama City, including his wife Louisa, who knows the falsity of his front. There was no Braithwaite and no establishment on Savile Row. Harry is in truth an ex-con who did time for torching his Uncle Benny's London garment warehouse, at his uncle's request, for the insurance. His new life in Panama has been made possible by a wealthy friend of the grateful Benny.

Into Harry's shop one day walks Andrew Osnard, a presumed customer who slowly turns into a tormentor. Osnard reveals that he knows all about Harry's past and nearly as much about his present, especially his investment of Louisa's $200,000 inheritance in a money-losing rice farm. "I'm a spy," Osnard tells the stunned Harry. "Spy for Merrie England. We're reopening Panama."

Harry doesn't see what any of this has to do with him, so Osnard explains. Not only do Panama City's elite gather for fittings and gossip at Pendel & Braithwaite; Harry also personally tends to both the current Panamanian President and the general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command. "You're God's gift, Harry," Osnard says. "Classic, ultimate listening post." After the carrot comes the stick: "Why blow the whistle on old Braithwaite, make a fool o' you to your wife and kids, break up the happy home? We want you, Harry. You've got a hell of a lot to sell. All we want to do is buy it."

The trouble is that Harry, bribed and bludgeoned into cooperation, has no idea what he has to sell or what Osnard and his superiors back in London want to purchase. So Osnard drops clues that he picked up from his boss Scottie Luxmore before being posted, on his maiden spying mission, to Panama. He recalls Luxmore warming to the topic at hand: "Not only have the Americans signed a totally misbegotten treaty with the Panamanians--given away the shop, thank you very much Mr. Jimmy Carter!--they're also proposing to honour it." A frightful power vacuum will occur, Luxmore argues, when the U.S. cedes control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians on Dec. 31, 1999. "Our task--your task--will be to provide the grounds, young Mr. Osnard, the arguments, the evidence needful to bring our American allies to their senses."

Suitably prompted by Osnard--and understandably motivated to save his marriage, business and skin--Harry starts inventing the stories that his new benefactor wants to believe and to feed back to London. He doesn't have much to go on, only a couple of friends battered during the regime of Manuel Noriega. So Harry embroiders these unfortunates into a so-called Silent Opposition, "the decent part of Panama," he tells Osnard, "that you never get to see or hear about." Inventing conspiracies comes naturally to Harry; he is, after all, a tailor, used to dealing in "loose threads, plucked from the air, woven and cut to measure."

Le Carre is at the top of his form in setting up this spy story about the creation--out of whole cloth, perhaps--of a spy story, a looking-glass world where the dupers and the duped are hard to tell apart. Readers in thrall to his page-turning enticements have not always appreciated his comic skills and epigrammatic skewerings. How did someone as dubious as the amoral Osnard get into British intelligence? "This was the new slimline Service, free of the shackles of the past, classless in the great Tory tradition, with men and women democratically hand-picked from all walks of the white, privately educated, suburban classes." A junior member of the British embassy in Panama City looks at his tall boss, the ambassador, and realizes that he "hated the ground he loped on."

Such grace notes necessarily compose The Tailor of Panama, since the novel is manifestly about a series of events that do not happen until, near the end, the accumulated fabrications precipitate some harsh and punitive actions. More wheelspinning, in short, takes place here than actual traction on a plot line. Le Carre's detractors, those who want their spy fiction hard-boiled over a short fuse, have dismissed his books as offering more art than matter. This novel can be seen as the author's cheeky rebuttal to such complaints. Its artistry makes mere events seem ho-hum.