The Night Manager (31 page)

He learned that his room, however elegant, was not excused the battle against tropical decay. As he began to use the bathroom he noticed how the towel rail, though polished daily by the maids, grew salt sweat spots overnight. And how the brackets holding the glass shelves oxidised, as did the rivets fastening the brackets to the tiled wall. There were hours when the air was so heavy it defied the punkah and hung on him like a wet shirt, draining him of will.

And he knew that the question mark was still hanging over him.

One evening Dr. Marti paid a visit to the island by air taxi. He asked Jonathan whether he spoke French, and Jonathan said yes. So while Marti explored Jonathan's head and his groin, and hit his knees and arms with a little rubber hammer, and peered into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, Jonathan answered a string of not very casual questions about himself in French and knew he was being examined about other things than his health.

"But you speak French like a European, Monsieur Lamont!"

"It's how they taught it to us at school."

"In Europe?"

"Toronto."

"But which school was that? My God, they must have been geniuses!"

And more of the same.

Rest, Dr. Marti prescribed. Rest and wait. For what? Until you catch me out?

"Feeling a bit more like ourselves, are we, Thomas?" Tabby asked solicitously, from the seat beside the door.

"A bit."

"That's the way, then," said Tabby.

As Jonathan grew stronger, the guards grew more watchful.

But of the house where they were keeping him Jonathan learned nothing, stretch his senses as he might: no doorbells, telephones, fax machines, cooking smells, no scraps of conversation.

He smelled honey-scented furniture polish, insecticide, fresh flowers, potpourri and, when the breeze was in the right direction, horses. He smelled frangipani and mown grass, and chlorine from the swimming pool.

Nevertheless, the orphan, soldier and hotelier was soon aware of something familiar to him from his homeless past: the rhythm of an efficient institution, even when the high command was not there to enforce it. The gardeners began work at seven-thirty, and Jonathan could have set his clock by them.

The single chime of a tocsin sounded the eleven o'clock break, and for twenty minutes nothing stirred, not a mower or a cut-lash, as they dozed. At one o'clock the tocsin sounded twice, and if Jonathan strained his ears he could hear the murmur of native chatter from the staff canteen.

A knock on his door. Frisky opened it and grinned. Corkoran's as degenerate as Caligula, Burr had warned, and as clever as a box of monkeys.

"Old love, " breathed a husky, upper-class English voice through the fumes of last night's alcohol and this morning's vile-smelling French cigarettes. "How are we today? Not stuck for variety, I must say, heart. We kick off Garibaldi scarlet, then we go blue-based baboon, and today we're a sort of livery, rather stale donkey-piss yellow. Dare one hope we're on the mend?"

The pockets of Major Corkoran's bush jacket were stuffed with pens and male junk. Huge sweat patches reached from his armpits across his gut.

"I'd like to go soon, actually," said Jonathan.

"Absolutely, heart, whenever you like. Talk to the Chief. Soon as they're back. Due season and all that. And we're eating all right and so forth, are we? Sleep the great healer. See you tomorrow. Chtiss."

And when tomorrow came, there was Corkoran again peering down at him, puffing at his cigarette.

"Fuck off. will you please, Frisky, old love?"

"Will do, Major," said Frisky with a grin, and he obediently slipped from the room while Corkoran paddled through the gloom to the rocking chair, into which he lowered himself with a grateful grunt. Then for a while he drew on his cigarette without saying a thing.

"Don't mind the fag, do we, old love? Can't do the brainwork if I haven't got a fag between my fingers. It's not the sucking and puffing that I'm hooked on. It's physically holding the little sod."

His regiment couldn't stomach him, so he did five unlikely years in Army Intelligence, said Burr, which is a misnomer, as we know, but Corky served them proud. The Roper doesn't love him for his looks alone.

"Smoke ourselves, do we, heart? In better times?"

"A bit."

"What times are they, old love?"

"Cooking."

"Can't hear us."

"Cooking. When I'm taking a break from hoteling."

Major Corkoran became all enthusiasm. "I must say, not a word of a lie. Bloody good grub you ran us up at Mama's before you saved the side that night. Were those sauced-up mussels all our own work?"

"Yes."

"Finger-lickin" good. How about the carrot cake? We scored a bull's-eye there, I can tell you. Chief's favourite. Flown in, was it?"

"I made it."

"Come again, old boy?"

"I made it."

Corkoran was robbed of words. "You mean you made the carrot cake? Our own tiny hands? Old love. Heart." He drew on his cigarette, beaming admiration at Jonathan through the smoke. "Pinched the recipe from Meister's, no doubt." He shook his head. "Sheer genius." Another enormous draught of cigarette smoke. "And did we pinch anything else at all from Meister's while we were about it, old love?"

Motionless on his down pillow, Jonathan affected to be motionless in his mind as well. Get me Dr. Marti. Get me Burr.

Get me out.

"Bit of a dilemma, frankly, you see, heart. I was filling in these forms for us at the hospital. That's my job in this shop. For as long as I've got one. Official form-filler. Us military types, about all we know how to do, isn't it? Well, well, I thought. Ho, ho. This is a bit rum. Is he a Pine or is he a Lamont? He's a hero, well we know that, but you can't put hero when you've got to put a chap's name. So I put Lamont, Thomas Alexander--I say, old love, I do hope I did right? Born whatnot in Toronto? See page thirty-two for next of kin, except you hadn't got any? Case closed, I thought. Chap wants to call himself Pine when he's a Lamont, or Lamont when he's a Pine, far as I'm concerned, his good right."

He waited for Jonathan to speak. And waited. And drew more cigarette smoke. And still waited, because Corkoran possessed the interrogator's advantage of having all the time in the world to kill.

"But the Chief, you see, heart," he resumed at last, "is hewn of a different tree, as you might say. The Chief, among his many talents, is a stickler for detail. Always has been. Gets on the electric blower to Meister in Zürich. From a call box, actually. Down on Deep Bay. Doesn't always care for an audience. 'How's your nice man Pine these days?' says the Chief. Well, old Meister pops his garters. 'Pine, Pine? Gott in Himmel! That bugger robbed me blind! Sixty-one thousand four hundred and two francs, nineteen centimes and two waistcoat buttons, stolen from my night safe.' Lucky he hadn't heard about the carrot cake, or he'd have done you for industrial espionage as well. You with us in there, old love? Not boring you, am I?"

Wait, Jonathan was telling himself. Eyes closed. Body flat.

Your head hurts, you're going to be sick. The rhythmic rocking of Corkoran's chair gained speed, then stopped. Jonathan smelled cigarette smoke very close and saw Corkoran's bulk leaning over him.

"Old love? Are you receiving my signals? I don't think we're quite as poorly as we're making out, to be harsh. The leech says we've made a rather impressive recovery."

"I didn't ask to come here. You're not the Gestapo. I did you a favour. Just get me back to Low's."

"But, darling, you did us an enormous favour! Chief's totally on your side! Me too. We owe you one. Owe you lots. Chief's not a fellow to walk away from a debt. Very hung up on you, the way these men of vision get when they're grateful. Hates owing. Always prefers to be owed. His nature, you see. How great men are. So he needs to pay you off." He ambled down the room, hands in pockets, reasoning the thing out. "But he's also a tinsy bit exercised. In his noddle. Well, you can't blame him, can you?"

"Get out. Leave me alone."

"Seems old Meister pitched him some story to the effect that after busting his safe, you ran away to England and topped a fellow. Codswallop, says the Chief, must be some other Linden; mine's a hero. But then the Chief goes and puts out a few feelers of his own, which is his way. And it turns out old Meister's bang on target." Another life-saving drag of the cigarette while Jonathan played dead. "Chief hasn't told anyone, of course, apart from yours faithfully. Lot of chaps change their names in life, some do it all the time. But topping a chap, well, that's a bit more private. So the Chief keeps it to himself. Doesn't want to nurse a viper, naturally. Family man. On the other hand, there are vipers and vipers, if you follow me. You could be the non-poisonous variety. So he's deputed me to suss you out while he and Jed do whatever they do. Jed's his virtue," he explained, for information. "Nature's child. You've met her. Tall girl. Ethereal." He was shaking Jonathan's shoulder.

"Wake up, do you mind, old love? I'm rooting for you. So's the Chief. This isn't England. Men of the world, all that. Come on, Mr. Pine."

His appeal, though roughly made, had fallen on deaf ears. Jonathan had willed himself into the deep, escaper's sleep of the orphanage.

FIFTEEN

Goodhew had told nobody except his wife.

He had nobody else to tell. On the other hand, such a monstrous story required a monstrous audience, and his dear Hester, alas, was by common consent the least monstrous person on earth.

"Now, darling, are you sure you heard right?" she asked him doubtfully. "You know how you are. You hear a lot of things perfectly clearly, but the children do have to interpret the television for you. There must have been an awful lot of traffic on a Friday in the rush hour."

"Hester, he said exactly what I told you he said. He said it clearly, above the noise of the traffic, into my face. I caught every word. I saw his lips move while he spoke."

"You could go to the police, I suppose. If you're sure. Well, of course you are. It's just, I do think you should talk to Dr. Prendergast, even if you don't do anything."

In a rare fit of anger at the companion of his life, Goodhew took a stiff walk up Parliament Hill to clear his head. But it didn't clear it at all. He simply retold himself the story, as he had done a hundred times already: The Friday had dawned as any other. Goodhew had bicycled to work early because his master liked to put the week to bed before leaving for the country. At nine o'clock, he received a phone call from his master's private secretary, saying the proposed ten o'clock meeting was cancelled because the minister had received a summons to the U. S. Embassy. Goodhew had ceased to be surprised by his exclusion from his master's councils, so he used the morning to catch up on work and lunched on a sandwich at his desk.

At half past three the private secretary called down to ask whether he could step upstairs for a few minutes right away.

Goodhew obliged. Spread about his master's office in postprandial ease, amid coffee cups and the aroma of cigars, sat the survivors of a luncheon party to which Goodhew had not been invited.

"Rex. Well done," said his master expansively. "Sit you down. Who don't you know? Nobody. Jolly good."

His master was younger than Goodhew by twenty years, a rich brawler with a safe seat and a rugger blue, which so far as Goodhew could ascertain was the sum of his educational accomplishment.

His eyes were dull, but what he lacked in vision he made up for in ambition. Barbara Vandon from the American Embassy sat to one side of him, and on the other. Neal Marjoram of Procurement Studies, whom Goodhew had always rather taken to, perhaps because of his record in the navy, his trustworthy eyes and air of decent quiet. Indeed, it had always puzzled Goodhew how a man whose honesty was written on his sleeve could possibly survive as Geoffrey Darker's understudy. Gait, another Darker apparatchik, sat at Marjoram's elbow and was more in Darker's image: too well dressed, too much the estate agent in the boom. The third member of the River House delegation was a hard-jawed beauty called Hazel Bundy, rumoured to share Darker's bed as well as his work load. But Goodhew made a point of never listening to that sort of rumour.

His master was explaining the reason for their meeting, and there was altogether too much buoyancy in his tone. "A bunch of us have been touring the U. K. / U. S. liaison machinery, Rex," he said, waving his cigar in a vague arc. "We came up with a couple of rather bothersome conclusions, to be honest, and thought we'd try them out on you. Off the record. No minutes, no pack drill. Discussion about principles. Kicking the ball around. All right by you?"

"Why should it not be?"

"Barbara, darling."

Barbara Vandon was the Cousins' station chief in London.

She had studied at Vassar, wintered in Aspen and summered on the Vineyard. Yet her voice was like a shrill scream of deprival.

"Rex, this Limpet thing is right off the wall," she howled. "We're pygmies in this. Totally. The real game is right up there; it's orbital, and it's now."

Goodhew's confusion must have been legible at once. "Barbara feels we're out of step with Langley, Rex," Marjoram explained, aside.

"Who's we?"

"Well, us really. The River House."

Goodhew rounded sharply on his master. "You told me this was a discussion about principles--"

"Hang on, hang on!" His master flicked his cigar at Barbara Vandon. "Girl's hardly off the ground. Talk about short fuse. Christ."

But Goodhew would not be put off. "The River House out of step with Langley on the Limpet case?" he said incredulously to Marjoram. "The River House isn't even involved in the Limpet case, other than supplying support-in-aid. Limpet's an Enforcement case."

"Well, that's what Barbara feels we ought to be discussing," Marjoram explained, with enough distance in his voice to suggest that he didn't necessarily agree.

Barbara Vandon stormed back into the breach: "Rex, we have to do some major, major housecleaning, not just in Langley but right here in U. K.," she resumed, in what was sounding increasingly like a prepared speech. "We have to take this Limpet thing down to basics and begin again from the bottom up. Rex, Langley's been railroaded. Not so much railroaded as shunted into a siding." This time Marjoram did not offer his services as interpreter. "Rex, our pols are not going to buy this. Any day now they will go ballistic. What we have here, Rex. is something that has to be looked at very slowly and carefully from fifty-five ways up, and what do we find? It's a joint operational deal between, one, a very fringe, very new British agency--forgive me: fine, dedicated, but fringe--and, two, a bunch of Enforcement cowboys from Miami with no geopolitics. It's tail and dog, Rex. The dog is way up here"--her hand was already above her head--"and the tail is this. And right now the tail's winning."