The Night Manager (29 page)

"About the only thing missing is a girl in a bikini poking her fanny at the barrel of a sixteen-inch fieldpiece," said Strelski as they drove back to the operations room.

The joke fell flat.

A tropical storm descends on the city, blackening the sky. chopping the heads off the skyscrapers. Lightning strikes, triggering the burglar alarms of parked cars. The hotel shudders and cracks, the last daylight dies as if the main switch has failed. Jets of rain spew down the window-panes of Burr's bedroom, black flotsam rides on the scurrying white mist. Billows of wind ransack the palm trees, hurling chairs and plants off balconies. Then disappear, leaving the battlefield to the defeated.

But Burr's cellular phone, ringing in his ear, has miraculously survived the attack.

"Leonard," says Strelski in a voice of suppressed excitement, "get your ass down here fast. We got a couple of murmurs coming out of the rubble."

The city lights bounce back again, shining gaily after their free wash.

Corkoran to Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, lately unprincipled chairman of a group of derelict British trading companies, and occasional purveyor of deniable arms shipments to Her Majesty's procurement ministers.

Corkoran is telephoning from the Nassau apartment of one of Ironbrand's smart young men, on the mistaken assumption that the line is safe.

"Sir Tony? Corkoran here. Dicky Roper's gofer."

"Fuck do you want?" The voice sounds clotted and half drunk. It echoes like a voice in a bathroom.

"Pressing matter, Sir Tony, I'm afraid. The Chief needs your good offices. Got a pencil?"

While Burr and Strelski listen transfixed, Corkoran struggles to achieve precision: "No, Sir Tony, Pine. Pine like the tree, Pine like a sick dog. P for Peter, I for Item, N for Nuts, E for Easy. That's right. First name Jonathan. Like Jonathan." He adds a couple of harmless details, such as Jonathan's date and place of birth and British passport number. "Chief wants the head-to-toe back ground check, Sir Tony, please, preferably by yesterday. And mum. All very mum indeed."

"Who's Joyston Bradshaw?" Strelski asks, when they have heard the conversation to the end.

Seeming to wake from a deep dream. Burr allows himself a cautious smile. "Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, Joe, is a leading English shit. His financial embarrassment is one of the major joys of the current recession." His smile spreads. "Unsurprisingly, he is also a former partner in crime of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper." He warms to his theme. "As a matter of fact, Joe, if you and I were fielding the all-English team of shits, Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw would feature high on our batting list. He also enjoys the protection of some other highly placed English shits, some of whom work not too far distant from the river Thames." The relief shone through Burr's strained face as he broke out laughing. "He's alive, Joe! You don't check a corpse, not by yesterday! Head-to-toe background, he says. Well, we've got it all ready for him, and nobody better suited to provide him with it than Tony bloody Joyston Bradshaw! They want him, Joe! He's got his nose into their tent! You know what they say, the Bedouin? Never let a camel's nose into your tent, because if you do, you get the whole camel."

But while Burr was rejoicing, Strelski's mind was already on the next practical step.

"So Pat goes ahead?" he said. "Pat's boys can go bury the magic box?"

Burr sobered at once. "If it's okay by you and Pat, it's okay by me," he said.

They agreed on the very next night.

Unable to sleep, Burr and Strelski drove to an all-night hamburger joint called Murgatroyd's on U.S. 1, where a sign said: no shoes, no service. Outside the smoked-glass windows sat shoeless pelicans in the moonlight, each to his mooring-post along the wooden jetty, like feathery old bombing planes that might never bomb again. On the silver beach, white egrets peered forlornly at their reflections.

At four a. m. Strelski's cellular phone peeped. He put it to his ear, said "yes" and listened. He said, "So get yourselves some sleep." He rang off. The conversation had taken twenty seconds.

"No problem," he announced to Burr, and took a pull of Coke.

Burr needed a moment to believe his ears. "You mean they made it? It's done? They cached it?"

"They beach-landed, they found the shed, they buried the box, they were very quiet, very professional, they got the hell out. All your boy has to do now is speak."

FOURTEEN

Jonathan was back in his iron bed at army school after they ripped his tonsils out--except that the bed was huge and white, with the soft down pillows with embroidered edges that they used to have at Meister's, and a small herb pillow for the fragrance.

He was in the motel room one truck ride out of Esperance, nursing his battered jaw with the curtains drawn and sweating out a fever after telephoning a voice that had no name to say he had found his shadow--except that his head was bandaged, he was wearing crisp cotton pyjamas, and there was a stitched device on the pocket that he kept trying to read by Braille. Not M for Meister, not P for Pine or B for Beauregard or L for Linden and Lamont. More like a Star of David with too many points.

He was in Yvonne's attic, listening for Madame Latulipe's footfall in the half-light. Yvonne wasn't there, but the attic was--except that this was a bigger attic than Yvonne's, and bigger than the attic in Camden Town that Isabelle had painted in. And it had pink flowers in an old Delft vase, and a tapestry of ladies and gentlemen out hawking. A punkah dangled from a roof beam, making stately turns of its propeller.

He was lying beside Sophie in the apartment in the Chicago House in Luxor while she talked about courage--except that the smell tickling his nostrils was of potpourri, not vanilla. He said I must be taught a lesson, she was saying. It is not I who must be taught a lesson. It is Freddie Hamid and his dreadful Dicky Roper.

He made out closed shutters slicing sunlight into blades, and layers of fine white muslin curtain. He turned his head the other way and saw a Meister's silver room-service tray with a jug of orange juice, and a cut-glass goblet to drink it from, and a lace cloth covering the silver tray. Across a thickly carpeted floor, he distinguished through the blur of his reduced vision a doorway to a large bathroom, with towels of ascending sizes folded along a rail.

But by then his eyes were streaming and his body was hopping the way it had hopped when he was ten and caught his fingers in somebody's car door, and he realised he was lying on his bandage, and his bandage was on the side of his head that they had smashed and Dr. Marti had repaired. So he rolled his head back to where it had been before he started his close observation, and he watched the punkah going round until the light-spots of pain had cleared and the undercover soldier's gyroscope inside him had begun to right itself.

This is where you get yourself across the bridge. Burr had said.

They'll have to mark the goods, Rooke had said. You can't just walk up to them with the boy in your arms to everyone's applause.

Fracture of the skull and cheekbone, Marti had said. Concussion, eight on the Richter scale, ten years' solitary in a darkened room.

Three cracked ribs, could be thirty.

Severe bruising of the testicles following attempted castration with the toe cap of a heavy training boot.

For it seemed that once Jonathan had gone down under the pistol whipping, it was his groin that the man had attacked, leaving among other traces the perfect imprint of a size-twelve boot in his inside thigh, to the raucous amusement of the nurses.

A black-and-white figure flitted across his vision. White uniform. Black face. Black legs, white stockings. Rubber-soled white shoes with Velcro fastenings. At first he had thought she was one person; now he knew she was several. They visited him like spirits, mutely polishing and dusting, changing his flowers and his drinking water. One was called Phoebe and had a nurse's touch.

"Hi, Mist' Thomas. How're you today? I'm Phoebe. Miranda, just you go fetch that brush again, and this time you sweep right under Mist' Thomas's bed. Yes, ma'am."

So I'm Thomas, he thought. Not Pine. Thomas. Or perhaps I'm Thomas Pine.

He dozed again, and woke to find Sophie's ghost standing over him, in her white slacks, shaking pills into a paper cup.

Then he thought she must be a new nurse. Then he saw the broad belt with the silver buckle, and the maddening line of the hips, and the tousled chestnut hair. And heard the Mistress-of-the-Hunt voice, bang on station, no respect for anyone.

"But, Thomas," Jed was protesting. "Somebody must love you terribly. What about mothers, girlfriends, fathers, chums? Really nobody?"

"Really," he insisted.

"So who's Yvonne?" she asked, as she placed her head within inches of his own, spread one palm on his back and the other on his chest to sit him up. "Is she absolutely gorgeous?"

"She was just a friend," he said, smelling the shampoo in her hair.

"Well, shouldn't we be telling Yvonne?"

"No, we shouldn't," he replied, too sharply.

She gave him his pills and a glass of water. "Well, Dr. Marti says you're to sleep forever. So don't think of anything except getting better extremely slowly. Now, how about distractions--books, a radio or something? Not quite yet, but in a day or two. We don't know anything about you, except that Roper says you're Thomas, so you'll just have to tell us what you need. There's a huge library over in the main house, with masses of frightfully learned stuff--Corky will tell you what it all is--and we can get anything you want flown over from Nassau, You just have to yell." And her eyes big enough to drown in.

"Thanks, I will."

She laid a hand on his face to feel his temperature. "We just never can thank you enough," she said, keeping it there. "Roper will say it all far better than I can when he gets back, but honestly, what a hero. Just so brave," she said from the door. "Shit" the convent girl added, catching the pocket of her slacks on the handle.

Then he realised that it wasn't their first meeting since he had arrived here, but their third, and that the first two were not dreams either.

Our first time you smiled at me, and that was fine: you kept quiet and I could think, and we had something going. You had jammed your hair behind your ears, you were wearing jodhpurs and a denim shirt. I said, "Where is this?" You said.

"Crystal. Roper's island. Home."

The second time I was feeling vague, and I thought you were my former wife, Isabelle, waiting to be taken out to dinner, because you were got up in a perfectly ridiculous trouser suit with gold frogging on the lapels. "There's a bell right beside your water jug if you need anything," you said. And I said, "Expect my call." But I was thinking: Why the hell do you have to dress up like a pantomime boy?

Her father ruined himself keeping up with the county, Burr said with contempt. He was serving vintage claret when he couldn't pay the electricity bill. Wouldn't send his daughter to secretarial college because he thought it was infra dig.

Lying on his safe side, facing the tapestry, Jonathan made out a lady in a broad-brimmed hat and recognised her without surprise as singing Aunt Annie Ball.

Annie was a valiant woman and sang good songs, but her farmer husband got drunk and hated everyone. So one day Annie put on her hat and sat Jonathan beside her in the van with his suitcase in the back, and said they were going for a holiday.

They drove late into the evening, and sang songs till they came to a house with boys carved in granite over the door.

Then Annie Ball started weeping and gave Jonathan her hat as a promise she'd come back soon to get it, and Jonathan went upstairs to a dormitory full of other boys and hung the hat over the corner of his bed to show Annie which boy he was when she returned. But she never did, and when he woke in the morning the other boys in the dormitory were taking it in turns to wear her hat. So he fought for it, and won it against all comers, and rolled it up in newspaper and posted it, with no address, in a red pillar box. He would have preferred to burn it, but he hadn't a fire.

I came here by night as well, he thought. White twin-engined Beechcraft, blue interior. Frisky and Tabby, not the orphanage guardian, searched my luggage for forbidden tuck.

I hurt him for Daniel, he decided.

I hurt him to get me across the bridge.

I hurt him because I was sick of waiting and pretending.

Jed was in the room again. The close observer had no doubt of it. It wasn't her scent, because she wore none, or her sound, because she made none. And for a long time he couldn't see her, so it wasn't sight. So it must have been the sixth sense of the professional watcher, when you know an enemy is present but don't yet know why you know.

"Thomas?"

Feigning sleep, he listened to her tiptoeing toward him. He had a notion of pale clothes, dancer's body, hair hanging loose.

He heard a shifting as she drew back her hair and put her ear close to his mouth to hear him breathe. He could feel the warmth of her cheek. She stood again, and he heard slippered feet disappearing down the passage, then the same feet outside, crossing the stable-yard.

They say that when she went up to London she scared herself, Burr said. Got in with a crowd of Hoorah Henries and screwed the field. Bolted to Paris for a rest cure. Met Roper.

He listened to the Cornish gulls and the long echoes from outside the shutters. He smelled the brown salt smell of weed and knew it was low tide. For a while he let himself believe that Jed had taken him back to the Lanyon and was standing barefoot on the floorboards before the mirror, doing the things women do before they come to bed. Then he heard the plop of tennis balls and leisured English voices calling to each other, and one of them was Jed's. He heard a lawn mower, and the yell of rude English children quarrelling, and surmised the Langbournes' offspring. He heard the buzz of an electric motor and decided on a skimmer cleaning the surface of a pool. He slept again and smelled charcoal and knew by the pinkish glow of the ceiling that it was evening, and when he dared to lift his head he saw Jed in silhouette before the shuttered window as she peered through it at the last of the day outside, and the evening light showed him her body through her tennis clothes.