The Night Manager (5 page)

The invisible radio is playing Alfred Brendel playing Mozart. Offstage, Corkoran is once more talking, this time in Italian, which is less assured than his French.

But Jonathan cannot run for cover. The enraging woman is coming down the ornamental staircase. He does not hear her at first, because she is barefooted and dressed in Herr Meister's complimentary bathrobe, and when he does, he can hardly bear to look at her. Her long legs are baby pink from the bath, her chestnut hair is brushed out like a good girl's over her shoulders.

A smell of warm mousse de bain has replaced the Commemoration Day carnations. Jonathan is nearly ill with desire.

"And for additional refreshment, allow me to recommend your private bar," he advises Roper's back. "Malt whisky, personally selected by Herr Meister, the vodkas of six nations."

What else? "Oh, and twenty-four-hour room service for you and yours, naturally."

"Well, I'm ravenous" says the girl, refusing to be ignored.

Jonathan allows her his hotelier's passionless smile. "Well now, do please ask them for anything you want. The menu is merely a compass, and they adore being made to work." He returns to Roper, and a devil drives him one step further. "And English-language cable news in case you want to watch the war. Just touch the green knob on the little box, then nine."

"Been there. Seen the movie, thanks. Know anything about statuary?"

"Not much."

"Me neither. Makes two of us. Hullo, darling. Good bath?"

"Gorgeous."

Crossing the room to a low armchair, the woman Jed folds herself into it, picks up the room service menu and pulls on a pair of completely circular, very small and, Jonathan is angrily convinced, totally unnecessary gold-framed reading spectacles.

Sophie would have worn them in her hair. Brendel's perfect river has reached the sea. The hidden quadraphonic radio is announcing that Fischer-Dieskau will sing a selection of songs by Schubert. Roper's shoulder is nudging against him. Out of focus, Jed crosses her baby-pink legs and absentmindedly pulls the skirt of her bathrobe over them while she continues to study the menu. Whore! screams a voice inside Jonathan.

Tramp! Angel! Why am I suddenly prey to these adolescent fantasies? Roper's sculpted index finger is resting on a full-page illustration.

Lot 236, Venus and Adonis in marble, seventy inches high excluding pediment. Venus with her fingers touching Adonis's face in adoration, contemporary copy of Canova, unsigned, original at the Villa La Grange, Geneva, estimated price £60,000-£100,000.

A fifty-year-old Apollo wishes to buy Venus and Adonis.

"What's roasty, anyway?" says Jed.

"I think you're looking at rosti," Jonathan replies in a tone laced with superior knowledge. "It's a Swiss potato delicacy. Sort of bubble and squeak without the squeak, made with lots of butter and fried. If one's ravenous, perfectly delicious. And they do it awfully well."

"How do they grab you?" Roper demands. "Likee? No likee? Don't be lukewarm--no good to anyone.... Hash browns, darling; had 'em in Miami.... What do you say, Mr. Pine?"

"I think it would rather depend where they were going to live," Jonathan replies cautiously.

"End of a floral walk. Pergola over the top, view of the sea at the end. West-facing, so you get the sunset."

"Most beautiful place on earth," says Jed.

Jonathan is at once furious with her. Why don't you shut up? Why is your blah-blah voice so near when you are speaking from across the room? Why does she have to interrupt all the time instead of reading the bloody menu?

"Sunshine guaranteed?" asks Jonathan, with his most patronising smile.

"Three hundred and sixty days a year," says Jed proudly.

"Go on," Roper urges. "Not made of glass. What's your verdict?"

"I'm afraid they're not me at all," Jonathan replies tautly, before he has given himself time to think. Why on earth does he say this? Probably it is Jed's fault.

Jonathan himself would be the last to know. He has no opinion of statues; he has never bought one, sold one, scarcely paused to consider one, unless it was the awful bronze of Earl Haig looking at God through binoculars from the side of the saluting base on one of the parade grounds of his military childhood.

All he was trying to do was tell Jed to keep her distance.

Roper's fine features do not alter, but for a moment Jonathan does wonder whether after all he is made of glass. "You laughing at me, Jemima?" he asks, with a perfectly pleasant smile.

The menu descends, and the puckish, totally undamaged face peers comically over the top of it. "Why on earth should I be?"

"Seem to remember you didn't much care for them either, when I showed 'em to you in the plane."

She sets the menu on her lap and with both hands removes her useless glasses. As she does so, the short sleeve of Herr Meister's bathrobe gapes, and Jonathan to his total outrage is offered a view of one perfect breast, its slightly erect nipple lifted to him by the action of her arms, the upper half golden-lit by the reading lamp above her.

"Darling," she says sweetly. "That's utter, total, unadulterated balls. I said her bum was too big. If you like big bums, have her. Your money. Your bum."

Roper grins, reaches out and grabs hold of the neck of Herr Meister's complimentary bottle of Dom Perignon, and wrenches.

"Corky!"

"Right here, Chief!"

The moment's hesitation. The corrected voice. "Give Danby and Mac Arthur a bell. Shampoo."

"Will do, Chief."

"Sandy! Caroline! Shampoo! Hell are those two? Fighting again. Bores. Give me the queers every time," he adds, in an aside to Jonathan. "Don't go, Pine--party's just warming up. Corks, order up another couple of bottles!"

But Jonathan goes. Somehow semaphoring his regrets, he gains the landing, and as he looks back, Jed is flapping a zany goodbye at him over her champagne glass. He responds with his most glacial smile.

"Night night, old love," Corkoran murmurs as they brush past each other on their separate ways. "Thanks for the tender loving care."

"Good night, Major."

Frisky, the ash-blond OBG has installed himself on a tapestried throne beside the lift and is studying a paperback of Victorian erotica. "Play golf, do we, sweetheart?" he asks as Jonathan flits by.

"No."

"Me neither."

I shoot the snipe with ease, Fischer-Dieskau is singing. I shoot the snipe with ease.

The half-dozen dinner guests sat bowed over their candlelit tables like worshipers in a cathedral. Jonathan sat among them, basking in a determined euphoria. This is what I live for, he told himself: this half-bottle of Pommard, this foie de veau glace with vegetables of three colours, this hotel silver with its bruised old face, twinkling wisely up at me from the damask cloth.

Dining alone had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war's depletion, Maitre Berri had promoted him from his single-seater by the service door to one of the high altars at the window. Gazing down over the snow-clad golf links to the city lights prickling along the lakeside, Jonathan doggedly congratulated himself on the satisfying completeness of his life till now, the early uglinesses he had left behind.

That wasn't easy for you up there with the egregious Roper, Jonathan my boy, the school's grey-jawed commandant told his best cadet approvingly. And that Major Corkoran is a real piece of work. So was the girl, in my opinion. Never mind. You were firm, you fought your comer. Well played. And Jonathan actually managed to bestow a congratulatory smile on his reflection in the candlelit window as he recalled his every fawning phrase and lustful thought in the order of its shameful appearance.

Suddenly the foie de veau turned to ash in his mouth and the Pommard tasted of gunmetal. His bowels writhed, his vision blurred. Rising from the table in a flurry, he mumbled something to Maitre Berri about a forgotten duty, and made it just in time to the men's room.

THREE

Jonathan Pine, orphaned only son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British sergeant of infantry killed in one of his country's many postcolonial wars, graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes, half-mothers, cadet units and training camps, sometime army wolf-child with a special unit in even rainier Northern Ireland, caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people's languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination, sat in his sanitary Swiss office behind reception, smoking his third unusual cigarette and pondering the sage words of the hotel's revered founder that hung framed alongside his imposing sepia photograph.

Several times in the last months Jonathan had taken up his pen in an effort to free the great man's wisdom from its tortuous German syntax, but his efforts had always foundered against some immovable dependent clause. "True hospitality gives to life what true cooking gives to eating," he began, believing for a moment that he had it. "It is the expression of our respect for the essential basic value of every individual creature entrusted to our care in the course of his travail through life, regardless of his condition, of mutual responsibility in the spirit of humanity invested in the--" Then he lost it again, as he always did. Some things were best left in the original.

His eye returned to Herr Strippli's tarty television set, squatting before him like a man's handbag. It had been playing the same electronic game for the last fifteen minutes. The aerial bomber's sights centre on a grey fleck of building far below.

The camera zooms closer. A missile speeds toward the target, enters and descends several floors. The base of the building pops like a paper bag, to the unctuous satisfaction of the news caster. A bull's-eye. Two more shots for no extra money. Nobody talks about the casualties. From that height there aren't any. Iraq is not Belfast.

The image changed. Sophie and Jonathan are taking their drive.

Jonathan is driving, and Sophie's pulped face is partly hidden by a headscarf and dark glasses. Cairo is not yet awake. The red of dawn is colouring the dusty sky. To smuggle her out of the hotel and into his car, the undercover soldier has taken every precaution. He set out for the pyramids, not knowing she had a different spectacle in mind. "No," she says. "Go that way." A foetid oozing pillow of filth hangs over the crumbling tombs of Cairo's city cemetery. On a moonscape of smoking cinders amid shanties of plastic bags and tin cans, the wretched of the earth are crouched like Technicolor vultures, picking through the garbage. He parks the car on a sand verge. Lorries thunder past them on their way to and from the rubbish dump, leaving stink in their wake.

"This is where I brought him," she says. One side of her mouth is ridiculously swollen. She speaks through a hole in the other side.

"Why?" says Jonathan, meaning: Why are you now bringing me?

" 'Look at these people, Freddie,' I told him. 'Each time someone sells weapons to another tin-pot Arab tyrant, these people starve a little more. Do you know the reason? Listen to me, Freddie. Because it is more fun to have a pretty army than to feed the starving. You are an Arab, Freddie. Never mind that we Egyptians say we are not Arabs. We are Arabs. Is it right that your Arab brothers should be the flesh to pay for your dreams?' "

"I see," says Jonathan, with the embarrassment of an Englishman when faced with political emotion.

" 'We do not need leaders,' I said. 'The next great Arab will be a humble craftsman. He will make things work and give the people dignity instead of war. He will be an administrator, not a warrior. He will be like you, Freddie, as you could be if you grew up.' "

"What did Freddie say?" says Jonathan. Her smashed features accuse him every time he looks at them. The bruises round her eyes are turning to blue and yellow.

"He told me to mind my own business." He catches the choke of fury in her voice, and his heart sinks further. "I told him it was my business! Life and death are my business! Arabs are my business! He was my business!"

And you warned him, he thinks, sickened. You let him know you were a force to be reckoned with, not a weak woman to be discarded at his whim. You let him guess that you too had your secret weapon, and you threatened to do what I did, without knowing I'd done it already.

"The Egyptian authorities will not touch him," she says. "He bribes them, and they keep their distance."

"Leave town," Jonathan tells her. "You know what the Hamids are like. Get out."

"The Hamids can have me killed as easily in Paris as in Cairo."

"Tell Freddie he must help you. Make him stick up for you against his brothers."

"Freddie is frightened of me. When he is not being brave he is a coward. Why are you staring at the traffic?"

Because it's all there is to stare at apart from you and the wretched of the earth.

But she does not wait for an answer. Perhaps deep down this student of male weakness understands his shame.

"I should like some coffee, please. Egyptian." And the brave smile that hurts him more than all the recrimination in the world.

He gives her coffee in a street market and drives her back to the hotel car park. He telephones the Ogilveys' house and gets the maid. "Him out," she shouts. What about Mrs. Ogilvey? "Him not there." He telephones the embassy. Him not there either. Him gone to Alexandria for regatta.

He telephones the yacht club to leave a message. A drugged male voice says there is no regatta today.

Jonathan telephones an American friend named Larry Kermody in Luxor: Larry, is that guest suite of yours empty?

He telephones Sophie. "An archaeologist friend of mine in Luxor has a spare flat," he says. "It's in a place called the Chicago House. You're welcome to use it for a week or two." He searches for humour in the silence. "It's a kind of monk's cell for visiting academics, stuck onto the back of the house, with its own bit of rooftop. Nobody need even know you're there."

"Will you come also, Mr. Pine?"

Jonathan does not allow himself a moment's hesitation.

"Can you dump your bodyguard?"