The Night Manager

by John le Carré

  Sharing a quiet spell, the two men sipped Scotch together in a coffeehouse in the old town, a place with no night or day, among rich ladies wearing trilby hats to eat cream cakes. Sometimes the catholicity of the Swiss enchanted Jonathan. This evening it seemed to him they had painted their entire country in different shades of gray.

  Burr began telling an amusing story about Dr. Apostoll, the distinguished lawyer. It began jerkily, almost as a blurt, as if he had intruded upon his own thoughts. He should not have told it, which he knew as soon as he had embarked on it. But sometimes when we are nursing a great secret we can think of nothing else.

  Apo’s a voluptuary, he said. He had said it before. Apo’s screwing everything in sight, he said, don’t be fooled by that prissy demeanor; he’s one of those little men who’s got to prove he’s got a bigger willie than all the big men put together. The secretaries, other people’s wives, strings of hookers from the agencies—Apo’s into the whole thing.

  “Then one day, up gets his daughter and kills herself. Not nicely, either, if there is a nicely. A real murder job on herself. Fifty aspirin washed down with half a bottle of pure bleach.”

  “Whatever did she do that for?” Jonathan exclaimed in horror.

  “Apo had given her this gold watch for her eighteenth birthday. Ninety thousand dollars’ worth from Carrier’s in Bar Harbour. You couldn’t find a better watch than that one anywhere.”

  “But what’s wrong with giving her a gold watch?”

  “Nothing, except he’d given her the same watch on her seven-teenth and forgotten. The girl wanted to feel rejected, I suppose, and the watch tipped the scales for her.” He made no pause. He did not raise his voice or change his tone. He wanted to get away from the story as fast as possible. “Have you said ‘yes’ yet? I didn’t hear.”

  But Jonathan, to Burr’s discomfort, preferred to stay with Apostoll. “So what did he do?” he asked.

  “Apo? What they all do. Had himself born again. Came to Jesus. Burst into tears at cocktail parties. Do we sign you up or write you off, Jonathan? I never was one for long courtships.”

  The boy’s face again, green for red as it split and spread with each fresh wave of shot. Sophie’s face, smashed a second time when they killed her. His mother’s face, tilted with her jaw wide open, before the night nurse pushed it shut and bound it with a piece of cheesecloth. Roper’s face, coming too close as it leaned into Jonathan’s private space.

  But Burr too was having his own thoughts. He was berating himself for painting Apostoll so large in Jonathan’s mind. He was wondering whether he would ever learn to guard his stupid tongue.

  They were in Jonathan’s tiny flat in the Klosbachstrasse, drinking Scotch and Henniez water, and the drink was doing neither of them good. Jonathan sat in the only armchair, while Burr roamed the room in search of clues. He had fingered the climbing gear and studied a couple of Jonathan’s cautious watercolors of the Bernese Oberland. Now he stood in the alcove working his way through Jonathan’s books. He was tired, and his patience was beginning to run out, with himself as well as Jonathan.

  “You’re a Hardy man, then,” he remarked. “What’s that about?”

  “Exile from England, I suppose. My shot of nostalgia.”

  “Nostalgia? Hardy? Bollocks. Man as mouse and God as uncaring bastard, that’s Hardy. Hullo. Who’ve we got here? Colonel T.E. Lawrence of Arabia himself.” He held up a slim volume in a yellow dust jacket, waving it like a captured flag. “The lonely genius who wished only to be a number. Forsaken by his country. Now we’re getting warm. Written by the lady who fell in love with him after he was dead. Your hero. Well, he would be. All that abstinence and flawed endeavor, beans out of the can; he’s a natural. No wonder you took that job in Egypt.” He looked at the flyleaf. “Whose initials are these? Not yours.” But by the time he asked, he knew.

  “My father’s, actually. It was his book, Will you put it back, please?”

  Noticing the edge to Jonathan’s voice, Burr turned around. “Have I touched a nerve? I believe I have. Never occurred to me that sergeants read books.” He was probing the wound deliberately. “Officers only, I’d have thought books were.”

  Jonathan was standing in Burr’s path, blocking him in the alcove. His face was stone pale, and his hands, instinctively freed for action, had risen from his sides.

  “If you could put it back on the shelf, please. It’s private.”

  Taking his time, Burr replaced the book on the shelf among its companions. “Tell us something,” he suggested, announcing another change of topic as he ambled past Jonathan to the center of the room. It was as if their conversation of a moment ago had never taken place. “Do you handle hard cash at all at that hotel of yours?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Which times?”

  “If we get a late-night departure and somebody pays cash, we handle it. The reception desk is closed between midnight and five a.m., so the night manager stands in.”

  “So you’d take the cash off them, would you, and you’d put it in the safe?”

  Jonathan lowered himself into an armchair and folded his hands behind his head. “I might.”

  “Suppose you stole it. How long before anybody noticed?”

  “End of the month.”

  “You could always put it back for accounting day and take it out after, I dare say,” said Burr thoughtfully.

  “Meister’s pretty watchful. Nothing if not Swiss.”

  “I’m building up a legend for you, you see.”

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “No, you don’t. I want to get you inside Roper’s head, Jonathan. I believe you can do it. I want you to lead him to me. I’ll never nail him else. He may be desperate, but he doesn’t drop his guard. I can have microphones up his arse, overfly him with satellites, read his mail and listen to his telephones. I can smell him, hear him and watch him. I can send Corkoran to jail for five hundred years, but I can’t touch the Roper. You’ve four more days before you’re due back at Meister’s. I want you to come to London with me in the morning, meet my friend Rooke and hear the deal. I want to rewrite your life from day one and make you love yourself at the end of it.”

  Tossing an air ticket onto the bed, Burr placed himself at the dormer window, parted the curtains and stared out at the dawn. There was more snow in the air. The sky was dark and low. “You don’t need time to think about it. You’ve had nothing but time since you jacked in the army and your country. There’s a case for saying no, same as there’s a case for digging a deep shelter for yourself and living in it for the rest of your life.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “I don’t know. If you don’t want to do it, a week’s too long. Rex Goodhew was in fighting Do you want another sermon?”

  “No.”

  “Want to call me in a couple of hours?”

  “How far have you got, then?”

  Nowhere, Jonathan thought as he opened the ticket and read the time of departure. There’s no such thing as a decision. There never was. There’s whether you’ve had a good day or a bad day, there’s going forward because there’s nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you’ll fall over. There’s movement or there’s stagnation, there’s the past that drives you, and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free, and the women who say you have no feelings but they can’t live without you. There’s a prison called England, there’s Sophie whom I betrayed, there’s an Irish boy without a gun who kept looking at me while I shot his face off, and there’s a girl I’ve scarcely spoken to who puts equestrienne on her passport and annoyed me so much that weeks later I’m still raging at her. There’s a hero I can never be worthy of who had to be put back into uniform to be buried. And a sweaty Yorkshire Pied Piper whispering in my ear to come and do it all again.

  Rex Goodhew was in fighting fettle. He had spent the first half of the morning successfully arguing Burr’s cause to his master, and the secon
d half addressing a Whitehall seminar on the misuses of secrecy, ending with a pleasurable shoot-out with a young fogy from the River House, barely old enough to tell his first lie. Now it was lunchtime in Canton Gardens, a low sun hit the white façades and his beloved Athenaeum was a stroll away.

  “Your chap Leonard Burr is putting himself about a bit, Rex,” said Stanley Padstow of the Home Office with an anxious smile, falling in beside him. “I don’t think I quite realized what you were letting us in for, to be honest.”

  “Oh dear,” said Goodhew. “Poor you. What sort of putting about, exactly?”

  Padstow had been up at Oxford at the same time as Goodhew, but the only thing Goodhew remembered about him was that he had seemed to have a mission to the plainer girl. “Oh, nothing much,” said Padstow, trying to sound light. “Using my staff to launder his file requests. Persuading the registrar to lie in her teeth for him. Taking senior police officers to three-hour lunches at Simpson’s. Asking us to vouch for him when they get cold feet.” He was glancing all the time at Goodhew but failing to catch his eye.

  “But it’s all right, is it? It’s just that, with these chaps, one never absolutely knows. Does one?”

  There was a small delay while they negotiated themselves out of earshot of a flock of nuns.

  “No, Stanley, one doesn’t,” said Goodhew. “But I did send you a detailed confirmation in writing, top secret for your very own file.”

  Padstow struggled yet more valiantly for the throwaway tone. “And devilish frolics in the West Country—I mean, that’s all going to be covered, is it? Only your letter didn’t seem to make that totally clear.”

  They had reached the Athenaeum steps.

  “Sounds fine to me, Stanley,” Goodhew said. “Para three of my letter, as I recall, covers West Country frolics to the hilt.”

  “Murder not excluded?” Padstow asked urgently below his breath, as they stepped inside.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Not as long as nobody gets hurt.” Stanley Goodhew’s voice changed tone. “And it’s compartmentation, isn’t it?” he said. “Nothing to the River boys, nothing to anyone except Leonard Burr and, when you’re worried, me. That’s all right for you, is it, Stanley? Not a strain?”

  They ate at separate tables. Goodhew treated himself to steak-and-kidney pie and a glass of the club’s claret. But Padstow ate very fast, as if he were counting his bites against the clock.

  7

  Jonathan arrived at Mrs. Trethewey’s post office store on a bleak Friday, calling himself Linden, a name he had picked out of the air when Burr invited him to suggest one. He had never met a Linden in his life, unless he was unconsciously recalling something on his German mother’s side, a song or poem she had recited to him on her seemingly eternal deathbed.

  The day had been sullen and damp, an evening that began at breakfast. The village lay a few miles from Land’s End. The blackthorn on Mrs. Trethewey’s granite hedge was hunch-backed from the south-westerly gales. The bumper stickers in the church car park told strangers to go home.

  There is larceny to returning covertly to your own country after you have abandoned it. There is larceny to using a brand-new alias and being a new version of yourself. You wonder whose clothes you have stolen, what shadow you are casting, whether you have been here before as someone else. There is a sense of occasion about your first day in the part after six years as your undefined self in exile. Some of this freshness may have shown in Jonathan’s face, for Mrs. Trethewey has always afterwards maintained that she observed a cockiness about him, what she called a twinkle. And Mrs. Trethewey is not given to romancing. She is a clever woman, tall and stately, not country to look at at all. Sometimes she says things that make you wonder what she might have been if she’d had the education they get these days, or a husband with more under his hat than poor old Tom, who dropped dead of a stroke in Penzance last Christmastime after a touch too much charity at the Masonic Hall.

  “Jack Linden, he was sharp, now,” she will say in her didactic Cornish way. “His eyes was nice enough when you first looked at them; merry, I dare say. But they was all over you and not the way you’re thinking, Marilyn. They saw you far and close at the same time. You’d think he’d stole something before he ever come in the shop. Well, he had. We know that now. Same as we know a lot else we’d sooner not.”

  It was twenty-past five and ten minutes to closing, and she was running up her totals on the electronic till before watching Neighbors on TV with Marilyn, her daughter, who was upstairs minding her little girl. She heard his big motorbike—“one of them real growlers.” She saw him bump it onto its stand and take off his helmet and smooth down his nice hair though it didn’t need it, more a way of relaxing himself, she guessed. And she believed she saw him smile. An emmet, she thought, and a cheerful one at that. In West Cornwall emmet means foreigner, and a foreigner is anyone who comes from east of the river Tamar.

  But this one could have been an emmet from the moon. She’d a good mind to turn the notice round on the door, she says, but his looks stopped her. Also his shoes, which were the same as her Tom’s used to be, polished like conkers and wiped carefully on the mat as he came in, not what you expected from a motorcyclist at all.

  So she went on with her totals while he drifted round the shelves without bothering to take a basket, which is men all over whether they’re Paul Newman or plain as mud: come in for a packet of razor blades, end up with their arms full, anything but take a basket. And very quiet on his feet, soundless almost, him being so light. You don’t think of motorbike people being quiet as a rule.

  “You from up-country then, are you, my dove?” she asked him.

  “Oh, well, yes, I’m afraid I am.”

  “There’s no need to be afraid, my darling. There’s plenty of nice people come from up-country, and there’s plenty down here I wish would go up-country.” No answer. Too busy with the biscuits. And his hands, she noticed, now he’d pulled his gloves off: groomed to a turn. She always liked well-kept hands. “What part are you from, then? Somewhere nice, I hope.”

  “Well, nowhere, really,” he confessed, pert as may be, taking down two packets of digestives and a plain crackers and reading the labels as if he’d never seen them.

  “You can’t be from Nowhere Really, my robin,” Mrs. Trethewey retorted, following him along the racks with her eyes. “You may not be Cornish, but you can’t be just air. Where you from, now?”

  But where the villagers tended to come smartly to attention when Mrs. Trethewey put on her stern voice, Jonathan merely smiled. “I’ve been living abroad,” he explained, as if humoring her. “I’m a case of the wanderer returned.”

  And his voice the same as his hands and shoes, she recounts: polished like glass.

  “What part of abroad, then, my bird?” she demanded. “There’s more than one abroad, even down here. We’re not that primitive, though there’s a lot may think we are, I dare say.”

  But she couldn’t get past him, she says. He just stood there and smiled and helped himself to tea and tuna and oat cakes, calm as a juggler, and every time she asked a question he made her feel cheeky.

  “Well, I’m the one who’s taken the cottage at the Lanyon, you see,” he said.

  “That means you’re barking mad, then, my darling,” said Ruth Trethewey comfortably. “Nobody who wasn’t mad would want to live out on the Lanyon, sitting in the middle of a rock all day.”

  And this farawayness in him, she says. Well, he was a sailor, of course, we know that now even if he put it to a bad use. This fixed grin he had while he studied the tinned fruits like he was learning them by heart. Elusive, that’s what he was. Like soap in the bath. You thought you had him, then he’d slipped through your fingers. There was something about him, that’s all she knows.

  “Well, I suppose you have a name at least, if you’ve decided to join us,” said Mrs. Trethewey in a kind of indignant despair. “Or did you leave that abroad when you come home?”

  “Linden,” he s
aid, getting out his money. “Jack Linden. With an i and an e,” he added helpfully. “Not to be confused with Lyndon with a y.”

  She remembers how carefully he loaded everything into his saddlebags, one for this side, one for that side, like trimming his boat. Then kick-started his bike, with his arm up to say goodbye. You’re Linden of the Lanyon, she decided, as she watched him ride up to the crossroads and tilt neatly to the left. From Nowhere Really.

  “I’ve had a Mr.-Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e in the shop,” she told Marilyn when she went upstairs. “And he’s got a motorbike bigger than a horse.”

  “Married, I suppose,” said Marilyn, who had a baby girl but would never talk about the father.

  And that was who Jonathan became, from his first day until the news broke: Linden of the Lanyon, another of those migrant English souls who seem almost by gravity to sink further and further westward down the peninsula, trying to escape their secrets and themselves.

  The rest of the village’s intelligence about him was gathered piecemeal by those near-supernatural methods that are the pride of any good network. How he was rich, which was to say he paid cash and paid it almost before it was owed—in new fives and tens counted like playing cards onto the lid of Mrs. Trethewey’s deep-freeze. Well, we know where he got that from, don’t we? No wonder it was cash!

  “Say when, please, Mrs. Trethewey,” Jonathan would call as he went on dealing out the bank notes. Shocking really to think they weren’t his. But money has no smell, they say.

  “Now, that’s not my job, Mr. Linden,” Mrs. Trethewey would protest. “That’s your job. I can take all you’ve got of those and more.” In the country, jokes fare best by repetition.

  How he spoke all the foreign languages in the world, least-ways German. Because when Dora Harris at the Count House had a lady German hiker go poorly on her, Jack Linden got to hear about it somehow and rode down to the Count House and talked to her, with Mr. Harris sitting on the bed for respectability. Then stayed till Dr. Maddern came, so he could translate the girl’s symptoms to him, some of them very intimate, said Dora, but Jack Linden knew all the words. Dr. Maddern said he must have special knowledge to know words like that at all.