The Night Manager (13 page)

"Did he go to university?"

"No. In too much of a hurry to screw up the world, most likely."

"Did his brother?"

"Yes. Are you being clever? The brother joined the family firm. It went down in the recession. Now he's pig-farming. So what?" He cast Jonathan an angry sideways look. "Don't you bloody start making excuses for him now, Jonathan," he warned. "If the Roper had gone to Eton and Oxford and had half a million a year of his own, he'd still be screwing up the world. He's a villain, and you'd better believe it. Evil exists."

"Oh, I know, I know," said Jonathan, placating him. Sophie had said the same.

"So what he's done is, he's done the lot," Burr resumed.

"We're talking high-tech, mid-tech, low-tech and bugger-all-tech. He hates tanks because they've a long shelf life, but at a price he'll bend his rules. We're talking boots, uniforms, poison gas, cluster bombs, chemicals, MREs--that's meals ready to eat--inertial navigation systems, fighter aeroplanes, signal pads, pencils, red phosphorus, grenades, torpedoes, custom-built submarines, motor torpedo boats, fly killer, guidance systems, leg irons, mobile kitchens, brass buttons, medals and regimental swords, Metz flashguns and spook laboratories got up as chicken batteries, tires, belts, bushings, ammo of all calibres, both U. S. and Sov compatible, Red Eyes and other shoulder-held launchers such as Stingers, and body bags. Or we were--because today we're talking glut and national bankruptcies and governments offering better terms than their own crooks. You should see his warehouses. Taipei, Panama, Port of Spain, Gdansk. He used to employ close to a thousand men, did our chum, just to polish the equipment he was storing while the price went up. Always up, never down. Now he's reduced to sixty men, and prices are through the floor."

"So what's his answer?"

It was Burr's turn to become evasive. "He's going for the big one. One last bite of the apple. The deal to end all deals. He wants to turn Ironbrand around and hang up his boots in a blaze of glory. Tell me something."

Jonathan was not yet accustomed to Burr's abrupt changes of direction.

"That morning in Cairo when you took Sophie for a drive. After Freddie had smacked her about."

"Well?"

"Do you think anyone tumbled you at all, spotted you with her, put two and two together?"

Jonathan had asked himself the same question a thousand times: at night when he roamed his darkened kingdom in order to escape his inner self, by day when he couldn't sleep but flung himself instead against the mountains, or sailed his boat to nowhere.

"No," he retorted.

"Certain?"

"Certain as I can be."

"Did you take any other risks with her? Go anywhere together where you could have been recognised?"

It gave Jonathan a mysterious pleasure, he discovered, to lie for Sophie's protection, even though it was too late.

"No," he repeated firmly.

"Well, you're clean then, aren't you?" Burr said, unconsciously echoing Sophie again.

Sharing a quiet spell, the two men sipped Scotch together in a coffeehouse in the old town, a place with no night or day, among rich ladies wearing trilby hats to eat cream cakes. Sometimes the catholicity of the Swiss enchanted Jonathan. This evening it seemed to him they had painted their entire country in different shades of grey.

Burr began telling an amusing story about Dr. Apostoll, the distinguished lawyer. It began jerkily, almost as a blurt, as if he had intruded upon his own thoughts. He should not have told it, which he knew as soon as he had embarked on it. But sometimes when we are nursing a great secret we can think of nothing else.

Apo's a voluptuary, he said. He had said it before. Apo's screwing everything in sight, he said, don't be fooled by that prissy demeanour; he's one of those little men who's got to prove he's got a bigger willie than all the big men put together.

The secretaries, other people's wives, strings of hookers from the agencies--Apo's into the whole thing.

"Then one day, up gets his daughter and kills herself. Not nicely either, if there is a nicely. A real murder job on herself. Fifty aspirin washed down with half a bottle of pure bleach."

"Whatever did she do that for?" Jonathan exclaimed in horror.

"Apo had given her this gold watch for her eighteenth birthday. Ninety thousand dollars' worth from Cartier's in Bal Harbour. You couldn't find a better watch than that one anywhere."

"But what's wrong with giving her a gold watch?"

"Nothing, except he'd given her the same watch on her seventeenth and forgotten. The girl wanted to feel rejected, I suppose, and the watch tipped the scales for her." He made no pause. He did not raise his voice or change his tone. He wanted to get away from the story as fast as possible. "Have you said 'yes' yet? I didn't hear."

But Jonathan, to Burr's discomfort, preferred to stay with Apostoll. "So what did he do?" he asked.

"Apo? What they all do. Had himself born again. Came to Jesus. Burst into tears at cocktail parties. Do we sign you up or write you off, Jonathan? I never was one for long courtships."

The boy's face again, green for red as it split and spread with each fresh wave of shot. Sophie's face, smashed a second time when they killed her. His mother's face, tilted with her jaw wide open, before the night nurse pushed it shut and bound it with a piece of cheesecloth. Roper's face, coming too close as it leaned into Jonathan's private space.

But Burr too was having his own thoughts. He was berating himself for painting Apostoll so large in Jonathan's mind. He was wondering whether he would ever learn to guard his stupid tongue.

They were in Jonathan's tiny flat in the Klosbachstrasse, drinking Scotch and Henniez water, and the drink was doing neither of them good. Jonathan sat in the only armchair, while Burr roamed the room in search of clues. He had fingered the climbing gear and studied a couple of Jonathan's cautious watercolours of the Bernese Oberland. Now he stood in the alcove, working his way through Jonathan's books. He was tired, and his patience was beginning to run out, with himself as well as Jonathan.

"You're a Hardy man, then," he remarked. "What's that about?"

"Exile from England, I suppose. My shot of nostalgia."

"Nostalgia? Hardy? Bollocks. Man as mouse and God as uncaring bastard, that's Hardy. Hullo. Who've we got here? Colonel T. E. Lawrence of Arabia himself." He held up a slim volume in a yellow dust jacket, waving it like a captured flag.

"The lonely genius who wished only to be a number. Forsaken by his country. Now we're getting warm. Written by the lady who fell in love with him after he was dead. Your hero. Well, he would be. All that abstinence and flawed endeavour, beans out of the can; he's a natural. No wonder you took that job in Egypt." He looked at the flyleaf. "Whose initials are these? Not yours." But by the time he asked, he knew.

"My father's, actually. It was his book. Will you put it back, please?"

Noticing the edge to Jonathan's voice, Burr turned round.

"Have I touched a nerve? I believe I have. Never occurred to me that sergeants read books." He was probing the wound deliberately. "Officers only, I'd have thought books were."

Jonathan was standing in Burr's path, blocking him in the alcove. His face was stone pale, and his hands, instinctively freed for action, had risen from his sides.

"If you could put it back on the shelf, please. It's private."

Taking his time, Burr replaced the book on the shelf among its companions. "Tell us something," he suggested, announcing another change of topic as he ambled past Jonathan to the centre of the room. It was as if their conversation of a moment ago had never taken place. "Do you handle hard cash at all at that hotel of yours?"

"Sometimes."

"Which times?"

"If we get a late-night departure and somebody pays cash, we handle it. The reception desk is closed between midnight and five a. m., so the night manager stands in."

"So you'd take the cash off them, would you, and you'd put it in the safe?"

Jonathan lowered himself into the armchair and folded his hands behind his head. "I might."

"Suppose you stole it. How long before anybody noticed?"

"End of the month."

"You could always put it back for accounting day and take it out after, I dare say," said Burr thoughtfully.

"Meister's pretty watchful. Nothing if not Swiss."

"I'm building up a legend for you, you see."

"I know what you're doing."

"No, you don't. I want to get you inside Roper's head, Jonathan. I believe you can do it. I want you to lead him to me. I'll never nail him else. He may be desperate, but he doesn't drop his guard. I can have microphones up his arse, overfly him with satellites, read his mail and listen to his telephones. I can smell him, hear him and watch him. I can send Corkoran to jail for five hundred years, but I can't touch the Roper. You've four more days before you're due back at Meister's. I want you to come to London with me in the morning, meet my friend Rooke and hear the deal. I want to rewrite your life from day one and make you love yourself at the end of it."

Tossing an air ticket onto the bed, Burr placed himself at the dormer window, parted the curtains and stared out at the dawn. There was more snow in the air. The sky was dark and low.

"You don't need time to think about it. You've had nothing but time since you jacked in the army and your country. There's a case for saying no, same as there's a case for digging a deep shelter for yourself and living in it for the rest of your life."

"How long would it take?"

"I don't know. If you don't want to do it, a week's too long. Do you want another sermon?"

"No."

"Want to call me in a couple of hours?"

"No."

"How far have you got, then?"

Nowhere, Jonathan thought as he opened the ticket and read the time of departure. There's no such thing as a decision.

There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over. There's movement or there's stagnation, there's the past that drives you, and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free, and the women who say you have no feelings but they can't live without you. There's a prison called England, there's Sophie whom I betrayed, there's an Irish boy without a gun who kept looking at me while I shot his face off, and there's a girl I've scarcely spoken to who puts equestrienne on her passport and annoyed me so much that weeks later I'm still raging at her. There's a hero I can never be worthy of who had to be put back into uniform to be buried. And a sweaty Yorkshire Pied Piper whispering in my ear to come and do it all again.

Rex Goodhew was in fighting fettle. He had spent the first half of the morning successfully arguing Burr's cause to his master, and the second half addressing a Whitehall seminar on the misuses of secrecy, ending with a pleasurable shoot-out with a young fogy from the River House, barely old enough to tell his first lie. Now it was lunchtime in Carlton Gardens, a low sun hit the white façades, and his beloved Athenaeum was a stroll away.

"Your chap Leonard Burr is putting himself about a bit, Rex," said Stanley Padstow of the Home Office with an anxious smile, falling in beside him. "I don't think I quite realised what you were letting us in for, to be honest."

"Oh dear," said Goodhew. "Poor you. What sort of putting about, exactly?"

Padstow had been up at Oxford at the same time as Goodhew, but the only thing Goodhew remembered about him was that he had seemed to have a mission to the plainer girl.

"Oh, nothing much," said Padstow, trying to sound light. "Using my staff to launder his file requests. Persuading the registrar to lie in her teeth for him. Taking senior police officers to three-hour lunches at Simpson's. Asking us to vouch for him when they get cold feet." He was glancing all the time at Goodhew but failing to catch his eye. "But it's all right, is it? It's just that, with these chaps, one never absolutely knows. Does one?"

There was a small delay while they negotiated themselves out of earshot of a flock of nuns.

"No, Stanley, one doesn't," said Goodhew. "But I did send you a detailed confirmation in writing, top secret for your very own file."

Padstow struggled yet more valiantly for the throwaway tone. "And devilish frolics in the West Country--I mean, that's all going to be covered, is it? Only your letter didn't seem to make that totally clear."

They had reached the Athenaeum steps.

"Sounds fine to me, Stanley," Goodhew said. "Para three of my letter, as I recall, covers West Country frolics to the hilt."

"Murder not excluded?" Padstow asked urgently below his breath, as they stepped inside.

"Oh, I don't think so. Not as long as nobody gets hurt, Stanley." Goodhew's voice changed tone. "And it's compartmentation, isn't it?" he said. "Nothing to the River boys, nothing to anyone except Leonard Burr and, when you're worried, me. That's all right for you, is it, Stanley? Not a strain?"

They ate at separate tables. Goodhew treated himself to steak-and-kidney pie and a glass of the club's claret. But Padstow ate very fast, as if he were counting his bites against the clock.

SEVEN

Jonathan arrived at Mrs. Trethewey's post office store on a bleak Friday, calling himself Linden, a name he had picked out of the air when Burr invited him to suggest one. He had never met a Linden in his life, unless he was unconsciously recalling something on his German mother's side, a song or poem she had recited to him on her seemingly eternal deathbed.

The day had been sullen and damp, an evening that began at breakfast. The village lay a few miles from Land's End. The blackthorn on Mrs. Trethewey's granite hedge was hunchbacked from the southwesterly gales. The bumper stickers in the church car park told strangers to go home.

There is larceny to returning covertly to your own country after you have abandoned it. There is larceny to using a brand-new alias and being a new version of yourself. You wonder whose clothes you have stolen, what shadow you are casting, whether you have been here before as someone else. There is a sense of occasion about your first day in the part after six years as your undefined self in exile. Some of this freshness may have shown in Jonathan's face, for Mrs. Trethewey has always afterwards maintained that she observed a cockiness about him, what she called a twinkle. And Mrs. Trethewey is not given to romancing. She is a clever woman, tall and stately, not country to look at at all. Sometimes she says things that make you wonder what she might have been if she'd had the education they get these days, or a husband with more under his hat than poor old Tom, who dropped dead of a stroke in Penzance last Christmastime after a touch too much charity at the Masonic Hall.