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 center on a gray 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 newscaster. 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 coloring 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 fetid 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 humor 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?”
“He has already dumped himself. Freddie has apparently decided I am not worth protecting.”
He telephones a travel agent who does business with the hotel, a beery-voiced Englishwoman called Stella. “Stella, listen. Two VIP guests, incognito, want to fly to Luxor tonight, expense no object. I know the whole place is shut up. I know there are no planes. What can you do?”
A long silence. Stella is psychic. Stella has been in Cairo too long. “Well, I know you’re very important, darling, but who’s the girl?” And she gives a foul, wheezing laugh that chokes and whistles in Jonathan’s ear long after he has rung off.
Jonathan and Sophie sit side by side on the flat roof of the Chicago House, drinking vodka and staring at the stars. On the flight she has barely spoken. He has offered her food, but she wants none. He has put a shawl over her shoulders.
“Roper is the worst man in the world,” she announces.
Jonathan’s experience of the world’s villains is limited. His instinct is to blame himself first and others afterwards.
“I guess anyone in his business is pretty frightful,” he says.
“He has no excuse,” she retorts, unappeased by his moderation.
“He is healthy. He is white. He is rich. He is wellborn, well educated. He has grace.” Roper’s enormity grows as she contemplates his virtues. “He is at ease with the world. He is amusing. Confident. Yet he destroys it. What is missing in him?” She waits for him to say something, but in vain. “How does he come to be like this? He was not dragged up in the back streets. He is blessed. You are a man. Perhaps you know.”
But Jonathan doesn’t know anything anymore. He is watching the outline of her battered face against the night sky. What will you do? he was asking her in his mind. What will I?
He switched off Herr Strippli’s television set. The war ended. I loved you. I loved you with your smashed face as we walked at arm’s length among the temples of Karnak. Mr. Pine, you said, it is time to make the rivers flow uphill.
It was two a.m., the hour at which Herr Meister required Jonathan to make his rounds. He began in the lobby, where he always began. He stood at the center of the carpet where Roper had stood, and listened to the restless night sounds of the hotel, sounds that by day were lost in the hubbub: the throb of the furnace, the growl of a vacuum cleaner, the clink of plates from the room-service kitchen, the footfall of a waiter on the back stair. He stood where he stood every night, imagining her stepping from the lift, her face repaired, her dark glasses shoved into her black hair, crossing the lobb
y and pulling up before him while she quizzically examines him for flaws. “You are Mr. Pine. The flower of England. And you betrayed me.” Old Horwitz the night concierge was sleeping at his counter. He had laid his cropped head in the crook of his arm. You’re still a refugee, Horwitz, thought Jonathan. March and sleep. March and sleep. He set the old man’s empty coffee cup safely outside his reach.
At the reception desk, Fräulein Eberhardt had been relieved by Fräulein Vipp, a grayed, obliging woman with a brittle smile.
“Can I see tonight’s late arrivals, please, Fräulein Vipp?”
She handed him the Tower Suite registration forms. Alexander, Lord Langbourne, alias no doubt Sandy. Address: Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Profession, according to Corkoran: Peer of the realm. Accompanied by wife, Caroline. No reference to the long hair tied at the nape, or to what a peer of the realm might do apart from being a peer. Onslow Roper, Richard. Profession: Company director. Jonathan leafed briskly through the rest of the forms. Frobisher, Cyril: Pilot. MacArthur, Somebody, and Danby, Somebody Else: Company executives. Other assistants, other pilots, bodyguards, Inglis, Francis, from Perth, Australia—Francis, hence Frisky, presumably: Physical-training instructor. Jones, Tobias, from South Africa—Tobias, hence Tabby: Athlete. He had left her till last deliberately, like the one good photograph in a batch of misses. Marshall, Jemima W. Address, like Roper’s, a numbered box in Nassau. British. Occupation—rendered with a particular flourish by the Major—Equestrienne.
Can you do me copies of these, Fräulein Vipp? We’re conducting a survey of Tower Suite guests.”
“Naturally, Mr. Pine,” said Fräulein Vipp, taking the forms to the back office.
“Thank you, Fräulein Vipp,” said Jonathan.
But in his imagination it is himself that Jonathan sees, laboring over the photocopier in the Queen Nefertiti Hotel while Sophie smokes and watches him: You are adept, she says. Yes, I am adept. I spy. I betray. I love when it is too late.
Frau Merthan was the telephone operator, another soldier of the night, whose sentry box was an airless cubicle beside reception.
“Guten Abend, Frau Merthan.”
“Good morning, Mr. Jonathan.”
It was their joke.
“Gulf war running nicely, I trust?” Jonathan glanced at the bulletins dangling from the newsprinter. “Bombing continues unabated. One thousand missions already flown. Safety in numbers, they say.”
“So much money to spend on one Arab,” said Frau Merthan with disapproval.
He began tidying the papers, an instinctive habit that had been with him since his first school dormitory. As he did so his eye caught the faxes. One sleek tray for incoming, contents to be distributed in the morning. One sleek tray for outgoing, waiting to be returned to their senders.
“Lots of telephone activity, Frau Merthan? Panic selling across the globe? You must be feeling like the hub of the universe.”
“Princesse du Four must call her cousin in Vladivostok. Every night, now that things are better in Russia, she calls Vladivostok and speaks to him for one hour. Every night she gets cut off and must be reconnected. I think she is looking for her prince.”
“How about the princes in the Tower?” he asked. “They seemed to be living on the telephone from the moment they got in there.”
Frau Merthan tapped a couple of keys and peered at the screen through her bifocals. “Belgrade, Panama, Brussels, Nairobi, Nassau, Prague, London, Paris, Tortola, England somewhere, Prague again, more Nassau. All direct. Soon it will be only direct and I shall have no job.”
“One day all of us will be robots,” Jonathan assured her. Leaning over Frau Merthan’s counter he affected a layman’s curiosity.
“Does that screen of yours show the actual numbers they ring?” he asked.
“Naturally; otherwise the guests complain immediately. It’s normal.”
“Show me.”
She showed him. Roper knows the wicked people everywhere, Sophie had said.
In the dining room, Bobbi the odd-job man was balanced on an aluminum ladder, cleaning the droplets of a chandelier with his spider mop. Jonathan trod lightly in order not to disturb his concentration. In the bar, Herr Kaspar’s nymphet nieces in trembling smocks and stone-washed jeans were replenishing pot plants. Bouncing up to him, the elder girl displayed a pile of muddy cigarette stubs in her gloved palm.
“Do men do this in their own homes?” she demanded, lifting her breasts to him in saucy indignation. “Put their fag ends in the flowerpots?”
“I should think so, Renate. Men do the most unspeakable things at the drop of a hat.” Ask Ogilvey, he thought. In his abstraction, her pertness annoyed him unreasonably. “I’d watch out for that piano if I were you. Herr Meister will kill you if you scratch it.”
In the kitchens, the night chefs were preparing a dormitory feast for the German newlyweds on the Bel Étage: steak tartare for him, smoked salmon for her, a bottle of Meursault to revive their ardor. Jonathan watched Alfred the Austrian night waiter give a sensitive tuck with his fine fingers at the napkin rosettes and add a bowl of camellias for romance. Alfred was a failed ballet dancer and put “Artist” in his passport.
“They’re bombing Baghdad, then,” he said with satisfaction while he worked. That’ll teach them.”
“Did the Tower Suite eat tonight?”
Alfred took a breath and recited. His smile was becoming a little young for him. “Three smoked salmon, one fish and chips English-style, four fillet steak medium, and a double dollop of carrot cake and Schlag, which you call Rahm. Carrot cake is what His Highness has for a religion. He told me. And from the Herr Major, on His Highness’s instructions, a fifty-franc tip. You English always tip when you’re in love.”
“Do we indeed?” said Jonathan. “I must remember that.” He ascended the great staircase. Roper’s not in love; he’s just rutting. Probably hired her from some tarts’ agency, so much a night. He had arrived at the double doorway to the Grande Suite. The newlyweds were also newly shod, he noticed: he in patent black with buckles, she in gold sandals flung impatiently where they lay. Impelled by a lifetime of obedience, Jonathan stopped and placed them side by side.
Reaching the top floor, he put his ear to Frau Loring’s door and heard the braying of a British military pundit over the hotel’s cable network. He knocked. She was wearing her late husband’s dressing gown over her nightdress. Coffee was glugging on a ring. Sixty years of Switzerland had not altered her. High German by a single explosive consonant.
“They are children. But they are fighting, so they are men,” she announced in his mother’s perfect accents, handing him a cup.
The British television pundit was moving model soldiers round a sandbox with the fervor of a convert.
“So the Tower Suite is full of whom tonight?” asked Frau Loring, who knew everything.
“Oh, some English mogul and his cohorts. Roper. Mr. Roper and party. And one lady half his age.”
“The staff say she is exquisite.”
“I didn’t look.”
“And quite unspoilt. Natural.”
“Well, they should know.”
She was studying him the way she always did when he sounded casual. Sometimes she seemed to know him better than he knew himself.
“You are glowing tonight. You could light a city. What is going on inside you?”
“I expect it’s the snow.”
“So nice the Russians are on our side at last. No?”
“It’s a great diplomatic achievement.”
“It’s a miracle,” Frau Loring corrected him. “And like most miracles, nobody believes in it.”
She handed him his coffee and sat him firmly in his usual chair. Her television set was enormous, bigger than the war. Happy troops waving from armored personnel carriers. More missiles racing prettily to their mark. The sibilant shuffle of tanks. Mr. Bush taking another encore from his admiring audience.
“You know what I feel when I watch war?” Frau Loring
asked.
“Not yet,” he said tenderly. But she seemed to have forgotten what she had meant to say.
Or perhaps Jonathan does not hear it, for the clarity of her assertions reminds him irresistibly of Sophie. The joyful fruition of his love for her is forgotten. Even Luxor is forgotten. He is back in Cairo for the final awful act.
He is standing in Sophie’s penthouse, dressed—what the hell does it matter what I wore?—dressed in this very dinner jacket, while a uniformed Egyptian police inspector and his two plainclothes assistants eye him with the borrowed stillness of the dead. The blood is everywhere, reeking like old iron. On the walls, on the ceiling and divan. It is spilled like wine across the dressing table. Clothes, clocks, tapestries, books, in French and Arabic and English, gilt mirrors, scents and ladies’ paint—all have been trashed by a gigantic infant in a tantrum. Sophie herself is by comparison an insignificant feature of this havoc. Half crawling, perhaps toward the open French windows leading to her white roof garden, she lies in what the Army First Aid Manual used to call the recovery position with her head on her outstretched arm, a counterpane draped across her lower body, and over the upper part the remnants of a blouse or nightdress, of which the color is unlikely ever to be known. Other policemen are doing other things, none with much conviction. One man is leaning over the parapet of the roof garden, apparently in search of a culprit. Another is fiddling with the door of Sophie’s wall safe, making it plop as he works it back and forth across its smashed hinges. Why do they wear black holsters? Jonathan wonders. Are they night people too?
From the kitchen a man’s voice is talking Arabic into the telephone. Two more policemen guard the front door, leading to the landing, where a bunch of first-class cruise passengers in silk dressing gowns and face-cream stare indignantly at their protectors. A uniformed boy with a notebook takes a statement. A Frenchman is saying he will call his lawyer.
“Our guests on the floor below are complaining about the disturbance,” Jonathan tells the inspector. He realizes he has made a tactical mistake. At a moment of violent death it is neither natural nor polite to explain one’s presence.
The Night Manager Page 5
