The Night Manager (60 page)

Everyone is in the past, thought Strelski. Including me. "I don’t know what that means," he lied. "Lacking in candour? Insincere? Morally fraudulent in some way? No."

"Just no?"

"Burr's a good operator and a good man." Prescott took another tour round the room. As a good man himself, he seemed to have difficulty wrestling with the facts of life.

"Joe, we have a couple of problems with the Brits right now. I'm speaking at the Enforcement level. What your Mr. Burr and his confederates promised us here was a squeaky-clean witness in the form of Mr. Pine, a sophisticated operation, some big heads on a platter. We went along with that. We had fine expectations of Mr. Burr, and of Mr. Pine. I have to tell you that at the Enforcement level the British have not lived up to their promises. In their dealings with us, they have shown a duplicity which some of us might not have expected of them. Others, with longer memories, on the other hand, might."

Strelski supposed he should join Prescott in some general damnation of the British, but he didn't feel inclined. He liked Burr. Burr was the kind of fellow you could rustle horses with.

He'd learned to like Rooke, although he was a tight-ass. They were a pair of nice guys, and they had run a good operation.

"Joe, this class act of yours--forgive me, of Mr. Burr's--this honourable guy, this Mr. Pine, has a criminal record going back for years. Barbara Vandon in London and friends of hers up in Langley have dug up some very unsettling background material on Mr. Pine. It seems he is a closet psychopath. Unfortunately, the British pandered to his appetites. There was a quite bad killing in Ireland, something with a semiautomatic. We haven't gotten to the bottom of it, because they hushed it up." Prescott gave a sigh. The ways of men were devious indeed.

"Mr. Pine kills, Joe. He kills and he steals and he runs dope, and it's a mystery to me that he never used that knife he pulled on your agent. Mr. Pine is also a cook, a night owl, a close-combat expert and a painter. Joe, that is the classic pattern of a psychopathic fantasist. I do not like Mr. Pine. I would not trust him with my daughter. Mr. Pine had a psychopathic relationship with a doper's hooker in Cairo, and ended up beating her to death. I would not trust Mr. Pine on the stand as my witness, and I have the gravest, and I mean the gravest, reservations about the intelligence he has hitherto supplied. I've seen it, Joe. I've studied it at the many points where his testimony stands alone and uncorroborated yet indispensable to the credibility of our case. Men like Mr. Pine are the secret liars of society. They will sell their own mothers and believe themselves to be Jesus Christ while they do it. Your friend Burr may be capable, but he was an ambitious man who was breaking his ass to get his own outfit off the ground and have it compete with the big players. Such men are the natural prey of the fabricator. I do not believe that Mr. Burr and Mr. Pine made a wholesome pair. I don't say they consciously conspired, but men in secret conclave can psych one another up in ways that make them cavalier with the truth. If Dr. Apostoll; were still with us--well, he was a lawyer, and even if he was I a little crazy, it was my belief that he would hold up pretty, well in the stand. Juries always have a place in their hearts for a man who has returned to God. However, that is not to be. Dr. Apostoll's no longer available as a witness."

Strelski was trying to help Prescott off the hook. "It never happened, right, Ed? How's about we agree the whole case was a piece of horseshit? There's no dope, no guns, Mr. Onslow Roper never broke bread with the cartels, mistaken identity, you name it."

Prescott pulled a rueful smile as if to say he did not think that he would go that far. "We are talking about what's demonstrable, Joe. That's a lawyer's job. The lay citizen has the luxury of believing in the truth. A lawyer has to be content with the demonstrable. Put it that way."

"Sure." Strelski was smiling too. "Ed, may I say something?"

Strelski leaned forward in his leather chair and opened his hands in a gesture of magnanimity.

"Go right ahead, Joe."

"Ed, relax, please. Don't strain yourself. Operation Limpet. It's dead. Langley killed it. You're just the mortician. I understand that. Operation Flagship lives, but I'm not Flagship cleared. My guess is, you are. You want to screw me, Ed? Listen, I’ve been screwed before; you don't have to take me to dinner first. I've been screwed so many times, with so many variations, I'm a veteran. This time it's Langley and some bad Brits. Not to mention a few Colombians. Last time it was Langley and some bad somebody else, maybe they were Brazilians---no, dammit, they were Cubans, and they'd done us a few favours in the dark days. Time before that it was Langley and some very, very rich Venezuelans, but I think there were also some Israelis besides--to be honest, I forget--and the files got lost. And I think there was an Operation Surefire, but I wasn't Surefire cleared."

He was furious but wonderfully comfortable. Prescott's deep leather armchair was a dream; he could lounge in it forever, just breathing in the luxury of a nice penthouse office without the unpleasantness of a lot of people getting in his way or a naked snitch kneeling on the bed with his tongue pulled down his chest.

"The other thing you want to tell me, Ed, is I can kiss but I can't tell," Strelski resumed. "Because if I tell, somebody will have my ass and take away my pension. Or if I really tell, somebody may feel obliged reluctantly to shoot my fucking head off. I understand those things, Ed. I have learned the rules. Ed, will you do me a favour?"

Prescott was not accustomed to listening without interrupting, and he never did anyone a favour unless he could count on one in return. But he knew anger when he saw it, and he knew that anger given time subsides, whether in people or in animals, so he regarded his role as essentially a waiting one and kept his smile going and answered rationally, as he would if he were in the presence of a raving lunatic. He knew also that it was essential not to show alarm. There was always the red button on the inside of his desk.

"If I can, Joe, for you, anything," he replied handsomely.

"Don't change, Ed. America needs you as you are. Don't give up any of your friends in high places or your connections with the Agency or your wife's arm's-length lucrative directorships of certain companies. Keep fixing things for us. The decent citizen knows too much already, Ed. Any more knowledge could seriously endanger his health. Think television. Five seconds of any subject is enough for anybody. People have to be normalised, Ed, not destabilised. And you're the man to do it for us."

Strelski drove home carefully through the winter sunlight. Anger brought its own vividness. Pretty white houses along the waterfront. White sailing yachts at the end of emerald lawns. The postman on his midday round. A red Ford Mustang was parked in his drive, and he recognised it as Amato's. He found him sitting on the deck wearing a funereal black tie and drinking Coke from the icebox. Stretched beside him on Strelski's rattan sofa, dressed in a Bogside black suit complete with waistcoat and black derby, lay a comatose Pat Flynn, an empty bottle of Bushmills single malt whiskey, ten years old, clutched to his bosom.

"Pat's been socialising with his former boss again," Amato explained, with a glance at his recumbent comrade. "They had like early breakfast. Leonard's snitch is aboard the Iron Pasha. Two guys helped him off the Roper jet at Antigua, two more guys helped him onto the seaplane. Pat's friend is quoting from reports compiled by very pure persons in Intelligence who have the honour to be Flagship cleared. Pat says maybe you'd like to pass the word of this to your friend Lenny Burr. Pat says to give Lenny his best respects. He enjoyed the experience of Mr. Burr despite the subsequent difficulties, tell him."

Strelski glanced at his watch and went quickly indoors. Speech on this phone was not secure. Burr picked up his end at once, as if he were waiting for it to ring.

"Your boy's gone sailing with his rich friends," Strelski said.

Burr was thankful for the pelting rain. A couple of times he had pulled onto the grass verge and sat in the car with the torrent booming on the roof while he waited till it eased. The downpour bestowed a temporary pardon. It restored the handloom weaver to his attic.

He was running later than he had meant to.

"Take care," he had said meaninglessly, as he consigned the abject Palfrey to Rooke's custody. Take care of Palfrey, perhaps he was thinking. Or perhaps: Dear God, take care of Jonathan.

He's on the Pasha, he kept thinking as he drove. He's alive, even if he'd rather not be. For a while, that was all Burr's brain could do for him: Jonathan's alive, Jonathan's in torment, they're doing it to him now. Only after this period of due anguish, it seemed to Burr, was he able to apply his considerable powers of reasoning and, little by little, count up what crumbs of consolation he could find.

He's alive. Therefore Roper must want to keep him that way. Otherwise he would have had Jonathan killed as soon as he had signed his last piece of paper: another unexplained corpse on the Panamanian roadside, who cares?

He's alive. A crook of Roper's stamp does not bring a man to his a cruise yacht in order to kill him. He brings him because he needs to ask him things, and if he needs to kill him afterwards, he does it at a decent distance from the boat, with a proper respect for the local hygiene and the sensitivities of his guests.

So what does Roper want to ask him that he doesn't already know?

Perhaps: How much has Jonathan betrayed of the fine detail of the operation?

Perhaps: What is now the precise risk to Roper--of prosecution, of the frustration of his grand scheme, of exposure, scandal, outcry?

Perhaps: How much protection do I still enjoy among those who are protecting me? Or will they be tiptoeing out of the back door as soon as the alarms begin to sound?

Perhaps: Who do you think you are, worming your way into my palace and stealing my woman from under me?

An arch of trees rose over the car, and Burr had a memory of Jonathan seated in the cottage at the Lanyon the night they dispatched him on his mission. He is holding Goodhew's letter to the oil lamp: I'm sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I'll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign?

You signed too bloody much, Burr told him gruffly in his mind. And it was me who egged you on.

Confess, he begged Jonathan. Betray me, betray us all. We've betrayed you, haven't we? Then do it back to us and save yourself. The enemy's not out there. He's here among us.

Betray us.

He was ten miles out of Newbury and forty miles out of London, but he was in the depths of rural England. He climbed a hill and entered an avenue of bare beech trees. The fields to either side were freshly ploughed. He smelled silage and remembered winter teas before the hob in his mother's kitchen in Yorkshire. We are honourable people, he thought, remembering Goodhew. Honourable English people with self-irony and a sense of decency, people with a street spirit and a good heart.

What the hell's gone wrong with us?

A broken bus shelter reminded him of the tin hut in Louisiana where he had met Apostoll, betrayed by Harry Palfrey to Darker, and by Darker to the Cousins, and by the Cousins to God knew whom. Strelski would have brought a pistol, he thought. Flynn would have waded ahead of us, cradling his machine gun in his arms. We would be gun people, feeling safer for our guns.

But guns aren't the answer, he thought. Guns are a bluff. I'm a bluff. I'm unlicensed and unloaded, an empty threat. But I'm all I've got to wave at Sir Anthony Bloody Joyston Bradshaw.

He thought of Rooke and Palfrey sitting silently together in Rooke's office and the telephone between them. For the first time he almost smiled.

He spotted a signpost, turned left into an unpaved drive and was assailed by the false conviction that he had been here before.

It's the conscious meeting the unconscious, he had read in some smart magazine: between them they give you the sense of déjà vu. He didn't believe that junk. Its language moved him to near violence, and he was feeling near violent now, just at the thought of it.

He stopped the car.

He was feeling too violent altogether. He waited for the feeling to subside. Christ almighty, what am I becoming? I could have strangled Palfrey. He lowered his window, put back his head and drank the country air. He closed his eyes and became Jonathan. Jonathan in agony, with his head back, unable to utter. Jonathan crucified, nearly dead and loved by Roper's woman.

A pair of stone gateposts loomed before him, but no notice saying Lanyon Rose. Burr stopped the car, took up the telephone, dialled Geoffrey Darker's direct line at the River House and heard Rooke's voice say "Hullo."

"Just checking," said Burr, and dialled the number of Darker's house in Chelsea. He heard Rooke again, grunted and rang off.

He dialled Darker's number in the country, with the same result. The intervention warrant was in operation.

Burr drove through the gates and entered a formal park run wild. Deer stared stupidly at him over the broken railing. The drive was thick with weeds. A grimy sign read JOYSTON BRADSHAW ASSOCIATES, BIRMINGHAM, With the BIRMINGHAM crossed out. Below it somebody had daubed the misspelled word Enquiries and an arrow. Burr passed a small lake. On the far side of it, the outlines of a great house appeared against the restless sky. Broken greenhouses and neglected stables clustered behind it in the dark. Some of the stables had once been offices. External iron staircases and gangways led to rows of padlocked doors. Of the main house, only the porch and two ground-floor windows were lit. He switched off the engine and took Goodhew's black briefcase from the passenger seat. He slammed the car shut and mounted the steps. An iron fist protruded from the stonework. He pulled it, then pushed it, but it didn't move. He grasped the door knocker and hammered on the door. The echoes were drowned in a tumult of howling dogs and a man's gravel voice lifted roughly against them: "Whisper, shut up! Get down, damn you! All right, Veronica, I'll take it. That you, Burr?"