The Night Manager (27 page)

Then Corkoran's voice, obediently passing on the same message in decent Spanish.

Jonathan glanced at the cash desk. Miss Amelia's till stood open. Half-counted piles of money lay strewn across the counter. He stared down the zigzag path that led from the dance floor to the kitchen. It was steep and crudely paved.

Only a lunatic would try to push a loaded perambulator up it.

It was also floodlit, which meant that anyone stepping into the darkened kitchen would be unsighted. Jonathan slipped the carving knife under his waistband and wiped his sweated palm on the seat of his shorts.

The raiding party was starting up the path. The way in which the captor held his hostage was a matter of crucial interest to Jonathan, because his plan of action depended on it: what Burr had called his plan of plausibility. Listen like a blind man, Johnny, watch like a deaf one. But nobody, so far as he remembered, had thought to offer him advice on how one man with a carving knife prizes an eight-year-old hostage from two armed gunmen and survives.

They had made the first leg of the path. Below them the motionless crowd, their faces brilliant under the arc lights, stared after them, not a movement among them, Jed still apart from them, her hair copper in the glow. He was beginning not to know himself again. Bad images of his childhood flooded his vision. Answered insults, unanswered prayers.

First came the bagman, then twenty yards behind him his accomplice, dragging Daniel up the path by his arm. Daniel wasn't joking anymore. The bagman was striding out hungrily, the stuffed briefcase hanging at his side. But Daniel's kidnapper moved in awkward, twisted strides, his upper body turning repeatedly while he menaced the crowd, then the boy, with his automatic pistol. Right-handed, Jonathan recorded, bare-armed.

The safety catch at "on."

"Don't you want to negotiate with me?" Roper was shouting up at them from the dance floor. "I'm his father. Why won't you talk to me? Let's do a deal."

Jed's voice, frightened but defiant, with a note of the equestrienne's command: "Why don't you take an adult? You bloody bullies. Take one of us. Take me if you like." And then, much louder, as her fear and anger joined, "Bring him back, you bastards!"

Hearing Jed's challenge, Daniel's captor yanked Daniel round to face her, while he held the pistol to his temple and did the baddy's lines in a sawing Bronx snarl: "Anybody comes after us, anybody comes up the path, anybody tries to cut us off, I kill the kid, okay? Then I kill whoever. I don't give a shit. I'll kill anybody. So stay down there and shut up."

The blood was pulsing in Jonathan's hands; they were out in front of him, each fingertip throbbing. Sometimes his hands wanted to do the job on their own and pull him after them.

Busy footsteps thumped across the wooden deck of the balcony.

The kitchen door burst open, a man's fist groped for the light switch and flicked it, to no effect. A hoarse voice panted, "The fuck, Jesus Christ, where the fuck? Shit!" A bulky figure stumbled toward the cash desk, and stopped midway.

"Anyone in here? Who's in here? Where's the fucking light, for fuck's sake? The fuck!"

Bronx, Jonathan recorded again, flattened behind the door to the balcony. A genuine Bronx accent, even when he's out of earshot. The man advanced again, holding the bag out in front of him while he groped with his other hand.

"Anyone in here, get the fuck out, hear me? That's a warning. We got the kid. Anyone makes trouble, the kid gets fucked. Don't mess with us."

But by now he had found the piles of bank notes and was sweeping them into the briefcase. When he had finished he went back to the doorway, and with only the opened door to separate him from Jonathan, he shouted down to his accomplice.

"I'm going on down, Mike! I'll go start the boat, hear me? Jesus fuck," he complained, as if the world were being too hard on him. Then he hurried through the kitchen to the scullery door, which he kicked open, before heading down the path toward Goose Neck. In the same moment Jonathan heard the man called Mike approaching with his hostage, Daniel. Jonathan dried his palm once more on his shorts, drew the knife from his waistband and passed it to his left hand, the sharp edge upward as if to rip a belly from below. As he did so, he heard Daniel sob. One choked or muffled sob, so brief the boy must have caught himself almost before he began it. One half-sob of tiredness, impatience, boredom or frustration, the kind you might hear from any child, whether dirt poor or super-rich, who has a bit of earache or doesn't want to go upstairs to bed until you've promised to come and tuck him up.

Yet for Jonathan it was the cry of his childhood. It echoed in every vile corridor and barrack hut and orphanage and every auntie's spare back room. He restrained himself a moment longer, knowing that attacking blows are better for this moment of delay. He felt his heartbeat slow. He saw the red mist gather across his eyes, and he became weightless and invulnerable.

He saw Sophie, her face intact and smiling. He heard the clump of adult feet, followed by the reluctant scuffle of smaller ones, as Daniel's captor came down the two steps from the wooden balcony and reached the tiled floor of the kitchen, dragging Daniel after him. As the man's foot hit the tiles, Jonathan stepped from behind the door and with his right hand seized the arm that held the pistol and gave it a ferocious, breaking twist. Simultaneously, Jonathan screamed: one prolonged cathartic scream, to ventilate, to summon help, to terrorise, to put an end to too much patience for too long. The pistol clattered on the tiles, and he kicked it out of reach. Hauling the man and his damaged arm into the doorway, he grabbed the door, threw his body weight upon it and crushed the arm between the door and jamb. The man called Mike screamed too, but stopped as Jonathan laid the knife blade against his sweating neck.

"Shit, man!" Mike whispered, somewhere between pain and shock. "Fuck you doing to me? Holy shit. You some crazy man or something? Jesus!"

"Run back down the hill to your mother," Jonathan told Daniel. "Off you go. Quick now."

And despite everything that was raging in him, he selected these words with elaborate care, knowing he might have to live with them later. For why should a mere cook know that Daniel's first name was Daniel, or that Jed was not his mother, or that Daniel's real mother was several thousand miles away in Dorset? As he spoke them, he realised that Daniel was no longer listening, but gazing past him toward the other door.

And that the bagman, having heard the screaming, had come back to lend assistance.

"Fucker's broken my fucking arm!" the man called Mike was yelling. "Let go my fucking arm, you mad shit! He's got a knife, Gerry. Don't fuck with him. My fucking arm's broke. He broke it two fucking times. He's not kidding. He's crazy!"

But Jonathan went on holding him by the arm that was probably broken, and he kept the knife pressed against the man's thick neck. The head was tipped right back on him with its mouth open, like a head at the dentist's, and the man's sweated hair stroked his face. And with the red mist there before his eyes, Jonathan would have done anything that he felt was necessary, without compunction.

"Walk back down the steps," he told Daniel, quietly so as not to scare him. "Go carefully. Off you go."

At which Daniel did at last consent to take his leave. He turned on his heel and began tripping unevenly down the steps toward the arc lights and the frozen crowd, flapping one hand above his head as if to acknowledge his accomplishment. And this was the consoling image that remained in Jonathan's mind as the man named Gerry hit him with his pistol butt, then hit him again over the right cheek and eye, then yet a third time as Jonathan floated to the ground in veils of Sophie's blood.

While he lay on the floor in the recovery position, Gerry dealt him a couple of kicks in the groin for good measure before grabbing his accomplice, Mike, by his remaining arm and--to renewed screams and imprecations--dragging him across the kitchen to the opposite door. And Jonathan was pleased to see the stuffed briefcase lying not too far away, because clearly Gerry couldn't manage a maimed Mike and the loot at the same time.

Then came fresh footsteps and voices, and for a bad moment Jonathan thought they had decided to come back and give him some more of the same, but in his confusion he had mistaken the origin of the sounds, because it was not his enemies who were now gathered round and staring down at him, but his friends, all the people he had fought for and nearly died for: Tabby and Frisky, Langbourne and the polo players, the old couple who touched each other's faces while they danced and the four young blacks from the bar, then Swats and Wet Eye, then Roper and Jed with little Daniel clutched between them. And Miss Amelia, crying, on and on, as if Jonathan had broken her arm too. And Mama Low, yelling at Miss Amelia to shut the fuck up and Miss Amelia screaming, "That poor Lamont." And Roper had noticed it and was taking exception.

"Hell's she calling him Lamont for?" Roper was complaining while he leaned his head this way and that to get a better look at Jonathan's face beneath the blood. "He's Pine from Meister's. The night flunky chap they had. Englishman. Recognise him, Tabby?"

"That's who it is, Chief," Tabby confirmed, kneeling at Jonathan's side and holding his pulse.

Somewhere at the edge of his screen, Jonathan saw Frisky pick up the abandoned briefcase and peer inside.

"It's all here, Chief," he was saying soothingly. "No harm except to life and limb."

But Roper was still crouching over Jonathan, and whatever he saw must have been more impressive than the jewellery, for he kept wrinkling his nose as if the wine were corked. Jed had decided Daniel had seen enough and was walking him sedately down the steps.

"You hear me all right. Pine?" Roper asked.

"Yes," said Jonathan.

"Can you feel my hand okay?"

"Yes."

"Here too?"

"Yes."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"How's his pulse, Tabby?"

"Quite sporting, considering, Chief."

"You still hearing me, Pine?"

"Yes."

"You're going to be okay. Help's on its way. We'll get you the best there is. You talking to the boat there, Corky?"

"On line, Chief."

In the back of his mind, Jonathan had a notion of Major Corkoran holding a portable telephone to his ear, one hand propped on his hip and his elbow raised for extra authority.

"We'll fly him to Nassau on the chopper now," Roper was saying, in the gruff voice he had for Corkoran. "Tell the pilot, then call the hospital. Not that lower-class place. T'other one. Ours."

"Doctors Hospital, Collins Avenue," said Corkoran.

"Book him in. Who's that pompous Swiss surgeon, got a house at Windermere Cay, always trying to put his money in our companies?"

"Marti," said Corkoran.

"Call Marti, get him up there."

"Will do."

"After that, call the coast guards, the police and all the usual idiots. Raise some serious hell. Got a stretcher, Low? Go and get it. You married or anything, Pine? Got a wife or anyone?"

"I'm fine, sir," said Jonathan.

But it was the equestrienne, typically, who had to have the last word. She must have done first aid at convent school.

"Move him as little as possible," she was telling someone, in a voice that seemed to float into his sleep.

THIRTEEN

Jonathan had vanished from their screens, missing believed killed by friendly fire. All their planning, all their listening and watching, all their supposed mastery of the game, lay like a trashed limousine at the roadside. They were deaf and blind and ridiculous. The windowless headquarters in Miami was a ghosthouse, and Burr walked its grim corridors like a haunted man.

Roper's yacht, planes, houses, helicopters and cars were on constant watch; so was the stylish colonial mansion in downtown Nassau where the Ironbrand Land, Ore & Precious Metals Company had its prestigious headquarters. So were the telephone and facsimile lines belonging to Roper's contacts round the globe: from Lord Langbourne in Tortola to Swiss bankers in Zug and semi-anonymous collaborators in Warsaw; from a mysterious "Rafi" in Rio de Janeiro to "Misha" in Prague and a firm of Dutch notaries in Curaçao and an as yet unidentified government official in Panama who, even when speaking from his desk in the presidential palace, affected a drugged murmur and the alias of Charlie.

But of Jonathan Pine, alias Lamont, last heard of in intensive care at Nassau's Doctors Hospital, not a whisper from any of them.

"He's deserted," Burr told Strelski, through the spread fingers of his hands. "First he goes mad, then he escapes from hospital. A week from now we'll be reading his story in the Sunday newspapers."

Yet everything so perfectly planned. Nothing left to chance, from the moment of the Pasha's departure from Nassau to the night of the faked kidnapping at Mama Low's. The arrival of the cruise guests and their children--the bloodstock English girls of twelve with lolling faces, eating crisps and drawling about gymkhanas, the confident sons with whiplash bodies and the side-of-mouth slur that tells the world to go to hell, the Langbourne family with sullen wife and overpretty nanny--all had been secretly welcomed, trailed, housed and hated by Amato's watchers, and finally seen aboard the Pasha, nothing left to chance.

"You know something? Those rich kids had the Rolls pull up at Joe's Easy, just so they could buy their grass!" Arnato the proud new father protested to Strelski over his handset. The story duly entered the legend of the operation.

So did the story of the seashells. On the eve of the Pasha's departure, one of Ironbrand's bright young men--MacArthur, who had made his debut with a nonspeaking part at Meister's--was heard telephoning a dubious banking contact on the other side of town: "Jeremy, in God's name, help me, who sells seashells these days? I need a thousand of the bloody things by yesterday. Jeremy, I'm serious."

The listeners became unusually vocal. Seashells? Literally seashells? Shell--like missile? Sea-to-air projectile perhaps? Nowhere in the lexicon of Roper's weaponspeak had anyone before referred to seashells. They were put out of their misery later the same day when MacArthur explained his problem to the manager of Nassau's luxury store: "Lord Langbourne's twin daughters are having a birthday on the second day of the cruise. The Chief wants to hold a shell hunt on one of the uninhabited islands and give prizes for the best collections, but last year nobody found any shells, so this year the Chief is taking no chances. He intends to have his security staff bury a thousand of the things in the sand the night before. So please, Mr. Manzini, where can I get hold of shells in bulk?"