The Night Manager (59 page)

Palfrey sat down again with a plop, on the same bench where he had been sitting earlier. He held his hand to the offended cheek.

"Animal," he whispered.

To a point, Palfrey was right, except that Burr's wildness was under iron control. Burr had the real black mood on him, and not his closest friends, not his wife, had seen him with the real black mood. Burr himself had seen it seldom. He didn't sit, but crouched fat-arsed and chapel style at Palfrey's side, so that their heads could stay nice and close together. And to help Palfrey listen, he grabbed the poor fellow's drink-stained tie at the knot in both hands while he spoke, and it made a rather fearful noose.

"I've been very, very kind to you, Harry Palfrey, up till now," he began, in a mainstream speech that benefited from not having been prepared. "I've not queered your pitch. I've not peached. I've looked on indulgently while you gumshoed back and forth across the river, into bed with Goodhew, selling him out to Darker, playing all the ends against the middle, just the way you always did. Still promising divorce to every girl you meet, are you? Of course you are! Then hurrying home to renew your marriage vows to your wife? Of course you are! Harry Palfrey and his Saturday night conscience!" Burr tightened the hangman's knot of Palfrey's tie against the poor man's Adam's apple. " 'Oh, the things I have to do for England, Mildred!' " he protested, playing Palfrey's part. " 'The cost to my integrity, Mildred! If you but knew the tenth of it, you'd not sleep for the rest of your life--except with me, of course. I need you, Mildred. I need your warmth, your consolation. Mildred, I love you!... Just don't tell my wife; she wouldn't understand.' " A painful lunge of the knot. "You still peddling that crap, Harry? Back and forth across the border, six times a bloody day? Ratting, re-ratting, re-re-ratting, till your furry little head's sticking out of your puzzled little arse? Of course you are!"

But it was not easy for Palfrey to give a rational response to these questions, because of Burr's unyielding, double handed, closing grip on his silk tie. It was a grey tie, silvery, which made the stains more prominent. Perhaps it had served Palfrey for one of his many marriages. It seemed incapable of breaking.

Burr's voice became a mite regretful. "Ratting days are over, Harry. The ship's sunk. Just one more rat, and that's your lot." Without at all relaxing his grip on Palfrey's necktie, he put his mouth close to Palfrey's ear. "You know what this is, Harry?" He lifted the thick end of the tie. "It's Dr. Paul Apostoll's tongue, pulled through his throat, Colombian style, thanks to Harry Palfrey's ratting. You sold Apostoll to Darker. Remember? Ergo, you sold my agent Jonathan Pine to Darker also." He was tightening his grip on Palfrey's throat with every sold. "You sold Geoffrey Darker to Goodhew--except you didn't really, did you? You pretended to, then you doubled on yourself and sold Goodhew to Darker instead. What are you getting out of it, Harry? Survival? I wouldn't bet on it. In my book you're due about one hundred and twenty pieces of silver out of the reptile fund, and after that it's the Judas tree. Because, knowing what I know and you don't, but what you are about to know, you are finally, terminally ratted out." He relinquished his grip and rose abruptly to his feet. "Can you still read? Your eyes are looking poppy. Is that terror or penitence?" He swung to the door and grasped the black briefcase.

It was Goodhew's. It had scuff lines where it had ridden on the carrier of Goodhew's bicycle for a quarter of a century, and the remnants of the official crest, worn off. "Or is it alcoholic myopia affecting our vision these days? Sit there! No, here! The light's better."

And on the there and here Burr flung Palfrey like a rag doll, using his armpits to lift him and sitting him down very heavily each time. "I'm feeling rough today, Harry," he explained apologetically. "You'll just have to bear with me. I think it's the thought of young Pine sitting there being burned alive by flicky Roper's beauties. I must be getting too old for the job." He slapped a file on the table. It was stamped FLAGSHIP in red.

"The purport of these papers that I wish you to peruse is, Harry: you are singly and collectively fucked. Rex Goodhew is not the buffoon you took him for. More under his flat hat than we ever knew. Now read on."

Palfrey read on, but it cannot have been an easy read, which was what Burr had intended when he went to such lengths to rob him of his repose. And before Palfrey had quite finished reading he started weeping, so copiously that some of his tears blotted the signatures and Dear Ministers and Yours evers that topped and tailed the faked correspondence.

While Palfrey was still weeping, Burr produced a Home Office warrant, which so far bore nobody's signature at all. It was not a plenary warrant. It was merely a warrant of interference, authorising the listeners to impose a technical fault on three telephone numbers, two in London and one in Suffolk. This simulated fault would have the effect of misrouting all calls made to the three numbers to yet a fourth number, of which the coordinates were given in the appropriate space. Palfrey stared at the warrant; Palfrey shook his head and tried to make noises of refusal through his clogged mouth.

"Those are Darker's numbers," he objected. "Country, town, office. I can't sign that. He'd kill me."

"But if you don't sign, Harry, I'II kill you. Because if you go through channels and take this warrant to the appropriate minister, the said minister will go running to his Uncle Geoffrey. So we're not doing that, Harry. You personally are going to sign the warrant on your own authority, which is what you're empowered to do in exceptional circumstances. And I personally am going to send the warrant to the listeners by very safe messenger. And you personally are going to spend a quiet social evening with my friend Rob Rooke in his office, so that you personally don't run the temptation of ratting in the meantime out of habit. And if you do make any fuss, my good friend Rob will most likely chain you to a radiator until you repent yourself of your many sins, because he's a hulk. Here. Use my pen. That's the way. In triplicate, please. You know what these civil servants are. Who do you talk to over at the listeners, these days?"

"No one. Maisie Watts."

"Who's Maisie, Harry? I'm not in touch these days."

"Queen bee. Maisie makes it happen."

"And if Maisie's out to lunch with her Uncle Geoffrey?"

"Gates. Pearly, we call him." A weak grin. "Pearly's a bit of a boy."

Burr picked Palfrey up again and dropped him heavily before a green telephone.

"Call Maisie. Is that what you'd do in an emergency?"

Palfrey whistled a kind of yes.

"Say there's a very hot authorization on its way by special courier. She's to handle it herself. Or Gates is. No secretaries, no lower decks, no answering back, no raised eyebrows. You want slavish, mute obedience. Say it's signed by you, and the highest ministerial confirmation in the land will follow soonest. Why are you shaking your head at me?" He slapped him. "I don't like you shaking your head at me. Don't do it."

Palfrey managed a tearful smile while he held a hand to his lip. "I'd be jokier, Leonard, that's all. Specially if it's as big as this. Maisie likes a laugh. So does Pearly. 'Hey Maisie! Wait till you get a load of this one! It'll blow your socks off!' Clever gal, you see. Gets bored. Hates us all. Only interested in who's next up the guillotine steps."

"Then that's how you play it, isn't it?" said Burr, putting a friendly hand on Palfrey's shoulder. "Just don't fox with me, Harry, or the next one up the steps is you."

All eagerness to oblige, Palfrey lifted the receiver of the green Whitehall internal telephone and, under Burr's gaze, dialled the five digits that every River rat learns at his mother's knee.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was a man's man, as Yale men of his generation tend to be, and when Joe Strelski entered his big white office in downtown Miami after being kept waiting half an hour in the anteroom, Ed gave him the news as one man should to another, cutting out the bullshit, straight from the shoulder the way a man likes it, whether he's old New England stock like Ed, or plain Kentucky hillbilly like Strelski. Because frankly, Joe, those boys have rucked me over too: dragged me here from Washington to do this thing, had me turn down some very attractive work at a time when everyone, and I mean everyone, even the guys right up there, needs the work. Joe, I have to say it to you--these people have not been square with us. So I want you to appreciate we're together in this. It's been a year of your life, but by the time I've put my house back in order it will have been a year of my life too. And at my age, Joe--well, hell, how many years do I have?

"I'm sorry for you, Ed," said Strelski.

And if Ed Prescott caught the undertone, he preferred to let it pass him by, in the interest of being two men together, solving a shared dilemma.

"Joe, just exactly how much did the Brits tell you about this undercover man they had, this Pine, this fellow with the names?"

Strelski did not fail to notice the past tense.

"Not too much," said Strelski.

"So how much?" said Prescott, man-to-man.

"He wasn't a professional. He was some kind of volunteer."

"A walk-in? I never trusted walk-ins, Joe. In the days when the Agency paid me the compliment of consulting me from time to time, back in the Cold War, which seems like a century ago, I always counselled caution toward these would-be Soviet defectors clamouring to make us a present of their wares. What, else did they tell you about him, Joe, or did they keep him wrapped in a flattering shroud of mystery?"

Strelski's manner was deliberately deadpan. With men like Prescott that was all you could do: parry until you had worked out what he wanted you to say, then either say it, or plead the Fifth, or tell him to shove it up his ass. "They told me they had structured him in some way," he replied. "They'd given him extra background to make him more attractive to the target."

"Who told you, Joe?"

"Burr."

"Did Burr tell you the nature of this background at all, Joe?"

"No."

"Did Burr indicate to you how much background was there already, and how much came out of the makeup box?"

"No."

"Memory is a whore, Joe. Think back. Did he tell you that this man was alleged to have committed a homicide? Maybe more than one?"

"No."

"Smuggled drugs? In Cairo as well as Britain? Maybe in Switzerland also? We're checking."

"He was not specific. He said they had fitted the guy out with this background, and that now that he had this back-pound we could have Apostoll badmouth one of Roper's lieutenants and figure Roper would take to the new guy as a signer. Roper uses signers. So they gave him a signer. He likes his people flaky. So they gave him flaky."

"So the Brits were witting to Apostoll. I don't think I knew ."

"Sure they were. We made a meeting with him. Burr, Agent Flynn and myself."

"Was that wise, Joe?"

"It was collaboration," said Strelski with a tightening of his tie. "We were into collaboration, remember? It's come apart, the seams a little. But in those days we had joint planning."

Time stopped while Ed Prescott took a tour around his very large office. Its darkened windows were of inch-deep armoured glass, turning the morning sunlight into afternoon. The double doors, closed against intruders, were of reinforced steel. Miami was enduring a season of home invasions, Strelski remembered.

Teams of masked men held up everybody in the house, then helped themselves to whatever caught their eye. Strelski wondered whether he would go to Apo's funeral this afternoon.

The day is young. See what I decide. After that he wondered whether he would go back to his wife. When things got this lousy, that was what he always wondered. Sometimes being away from her was like being out on parole. It wasn't freedom, and sometimes you seriously wondered whether it was any better than the alternative. He thought of Pat Flynn and wished he had Pat's composure. Pat took to being an outcast like other people take to fame and money. When they told Pat not to bother with coming into the office till this thing was cleared up, Pat thanked them, shook all their hands, had a bath and drank a bottle of Bushmills. This morning, still drunk, he had called Strelski to warn him of a new form of AIDS that was afflicting Miami. It was called Hearing Aids, Pat said, and came from listening to too many assholes from Washington.

When Strelski asked him whether he happened to have heard any news about the Lombardy--for instance, whether anybody had seized it, sunk it or married it--Flynn had given the best rendering of an Ivy League exquisite that Strelski could remember: "Oh now, Joe, you bad boy, you know better than to ask a man a secret thing like that, with your clearance." Where the hell does Pat get all those voices from? he wondered.

Maybe if I drank a bottle of Irish a day, I could do some too.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was trying to put more words into his mouth, so he supposed he'd better pay attention.

"Burr was evidently not as forthcoming about his Mr. Pine as you were about your Dr. Apostoll, Joe," he was saying, with enough reproach in his voice to sting.

"Pine and Apostoll were different types of sources. They were not comparable in any way," Strelski retorted, pleased to hear himself loosening up. It must have been Flynn's about Hearing Aids.

"Like to explain that a little, Joe?"

"Apostoll was a decadent creep. Pine was--Pine was an honourable guy who took risks for the right side. Burr was very strong on that. Pine was an operative, he was a colleague, he was family. Nobody ever called Apo family. Not even his daughter."

"Was this Pine the same man who practically dismembered your agent, Joe?"

"He was under tension. It was a big piece of theatre. Maybe pounds over-reacted, took his instructions a little too much to heart."

"Is that what Burr told you?"

"We tried to work it out that way."

"That was generous of you, Joe. An agent in your employ uses a beating to the tune of twenty thousand dollars' worth of medication plus three months' sick leave and a pending law-suit, and you tell me his assailant maybe overreacted a little. Some of these Oxford-educated Englishmen can be very persuasive in their arguments. Did Leonard Burr ever strike you as a disingenuous person?"