The Night Manager

by John le Carré

  After Roper, it was Roper’s people who became the object of his fascinated indignation. He thought of Major Corkoran alias Corky alias Corks, in his grimy muffler and disgraceful suede boots. Corky the signer, Corky who could get five hundred years in jail anytime Burr chose.

  He thought of Frisky and Tabby and the misty company of retainers—of Sandy Lord Langbourne, with his gold hair bound at the nape; of Dr. Apostoll on his risers, whose daughter had killed herself for a Cartier watch; of MacArthur and Danby, the gray-suited executive twins from the nearly respectable side of the operation—until collectively the Roper household became a kind of monstrous First Family for him, with Jed his First Lady In the Tower.

  “How much does she know about his business?” Jonathan asked Burr once.

  Burr shrugged. “The Roper doesn’t boast and doesn’t tell. Nobody knows more than he needs to. Not with our Dicky.”

  An upper-class waif, thought Jonathan. A convent-school education. A faith rejected. A locked-up childhood like mine.

  Jonathan’s only confidant was Harlow, but between operational confidants there are limits to what either can confide. “Harlow is a walk-on,” Rooke warned, during a night visit to the Lanyon. “He’s only there for you to kill. He doesn’t know the target, and he doesn’t need to. Keep it that way.”

  Nevertheless, for this stage of the journey the murderer and his mark were allies, and Jonathan strove to make a bond with him.

  “You a married man, Jumbo?”

  They were sitting at the scrubbed pine table in Jonathan’s kitchen after returning from their planned appearance at the Snug. Jumbo shook his head regretfully and took a pull of beer. He was an embarrassed soul, as big men often are, an actor or a grounded opera singer with a huge barrel chest. His black beard, Jonathan suspected, had been grown expressly for the part and would be gratefully removed as soon as the show ended. Was Jumbo a genuine Australian? It didn’t matter. He was an expatriate everywhere.

  “I shall expect a lavish funeral, Mr. Linden,” said Jumbo gravely. “Black horses, a sparkling carriage and a nine-year-old catamite in a top hat. Your health.”

  “And yours too, Jumbo.”

  Having drained his sixth can, Jumbo slapped on his blue denim cap and lumbered to the door. Jonathan watched his crippled Land-Rover hobble up the winding lane.

  “Who on earth was that?” said Marilyn, arriving with a pair of fresh mackerel.

  “Oh, he’s just my business partner,” said Jonathan

  “Looked more like bloody Godzilla on a dark night to me.”

  She wanted to fry the fish, but he showed her how to bake it in foil, with fresh dill and seasoning. Once, as a dare, she tied his apron round him, and he felt her strong black hair brush against his cheek and waited for the smell of vanilla. Stay away from me. I betray. I kill. Go home.

  One afternoon Jonathan and Jumbo took the plane from Plymouth to Jersey and in the little port of St. Hélier made a show of inspecting a twenty-five-foot yacht that was moored on the far side of the harbor. Their journey, like their joint appearance at the Snug, was intended for display. In the evening, Jumbo flew back alone.

  The yacht they inspected was called Ariadne, and according to her log she had arrived from Roscoff two weeks earlier, sailed by a Frenchman named Lebray. Before Roscoff she was in Biarritz and, before that, open seas. Jonathan spent two days fitting her out, provisioning her and preparing the chartwork. On the third day he took her to sea to get the feel of her and boxed the compass for himself while he was about it, for at sea as on land he trusted no one’s work but his own. At first light on the fourth day he set sail. The area forecast was good, and for fifteen hours he cruised nicely at four knots, reaching for Falmouth on a southwesterly. But by evening the wind had turned blustery and by midnight it had freshened to a six or seven, throwing a big ground swell that had the Ariadne pitching. Jonathan reduced sail and ran before the weather for the safety of Plymouth. As he passed the Eddystone Lighthouse the wind veered westerly and fell, so he changed course to Falmouth once more and beat west, hugging the shore and short-tacking to avoid the heavy weather. By the time he reached harbor he had been sailing hard for two nights without sleep. Sometimes the sounds of the storm deafened him. Sometimes he heard no weather at all and wondered if he was dead. The beam sea and the close-hauling had rolled him about like a boulder; his body creaked and his head rang hollow with the solitude of the sea. But throughout the journey he thought of nothing he afterwards remembered. Or nothing but his own survival. Sophie was right. He had a future.

  “You been somewhere nice, then?” Marilyn asked him, staring at the fire. She had taken off her cardigan. She wore a sleeveless blouse, buttoned down the back.

  “Just a trip up-country.”

  He realized with dread that she had been waiting for him all day. Another painting stood on the chimney piece, very like the first. She had brought him fruit, and freesias for the vase.

  “Well, thank you,” he said politely. “That’s super of you. Thanks.”

  “You want me, then, Jack Linden?”

  She had lifted her hands to the back of her neck and unfastened the top two buttons of her blouse. She took a step to him and smiled. She began weeping, and he didn’t know what to do. He put his arm round her and led her to her van and left her there to weep till she was ready to drive home.

  That night, an almost metaphysical sense of his uncleanliness descended over Jonathan. In his extreme solitude, he decided that the fake murder he was about to commit was an externalization of the real murders he had already committed in Ireland and the murder he had committed against Sophie; and that the ordeal that awaited him was a mere foretaste of a lifetime of penance.

  For the days that remained to him, a passionate fondness for the Lanyon took possession of his heart and he rejoiced in every fresh example of the cliff’s perfection: the seabirds wherever they put themselves, always in the right place, the hawks lying on the wind, the setting sun melting into black cloud, the fleets of small boats clustered over the shoals below, while the gulls above made a shoal of their own. And when darkness came, there were the boats again, a tiny city in the middle of the sea. With each last hour, this urge to be assumed into the landscape—hidden in it, buried in it—became almost unbearable.

  A storm got up. Lighting a candle in the kitchen, he stared past it into the swirling night, while the wind crackled in the window frames and made the slate roof chatter like an Uzi. In the early morning, when the storm dropped, he ventured outdoors to wander over last night’s battlefield—then, Lawrence-like, leapt helmetless onto his motorbike, drove up to one of the old hill forts and scanned the coastline till he made out some landmark that pointed to the Lanyon. That is my home. The cliff has accepted me. I will live here forever. I will be clean.

  But his vows were in vain. The soldier in him was already polishing his boots for the long march toward the worst man in the world.

  It was during these final days of Jonathan’s tenure of the cottage that Pete Pengelly and his brother, Jacob, made the mistake of going lamping at the Lanyon.

  Pete tells the story cautiously, and with visitors present he won’t tell it at all, for there’s confession to it and a certain rueful pride. Lamping for rabbits in those parts has been a hallowed sport for fifty years and more. With two motorcycle batteries in a small box strapped against your hip, an old car spot-lamp with a close beam, and a bunch of spare six-volt bulbs, you can mesmerize a whole convocation of rabbits for long enough to pick them off in salvos. No law and no battalions of strident ladies in brown berets and ankle socks have succeeded in putting a stop to it, and the Lanyon has been a favored hunting ground for generations—or was, until four of them went up there one night with guns and lamps, led by Pete Pengelly and his younger brother, Jacob.

  They parked at Lanyon Rose, then picked their way along the river-bed. Pete swears to this day they were quiet as rabbits themselves and hadn’t used the lamps but found their way by full moon, w
hich was why they’d chosen that night. But when they came out on the cliff, careful to keep below the horizon, there stood Jack Linden not half a dozen paces uphill from them, his bare hands lifted from his sides. Kenny Thomas afterwards kept on about his hands, so pale and prominent in the moonlight, but that was the effect of the occasion. The knowing recall that Jack Linden never had big hands. Pete prefers to talk about Linden’s face, which was set, he says, like a chunk of bloody blue elvan rock against the sky. You’d have broken your fist on it. There is no dispute about what took place after that.

  “Excuse me, but where do you gentlemen think you’re going, if I may ask?” says Linden with his customary respectfulness but no smile.

  “Lamping,” says Pete.

  “Nobody’s lamping here, I’m afraid, Pete,” says Linden, who had only set eyes on Pete Pengelly a couple of times but seemed never to forget a name. “I own these fields, you know that. I don’t farm them, but I do own them, and I let them be. That’s what I expect other people to do as well. So I’m afraid lamping is out.”

  “It is, is it, Mr. Linden?” Pete Pengelly says.

  “Yes, it is, Mr. Pengelly. I won’t have sitting game shot on my land. It’s not fair play. So why don’t you all please empty your guns and go back to the car and go home and no hard feelings?”

  At which Pete says, “To hell with you, boy,” and the other three gather to Pete’s side so that they are all four bunched and looking up at Linden, four guns against one fellow with the moon behind him. They had come straight on from the Snug, all of them, and were the better for a beer or two.

  “Get out of our bloody way, Mr. Linden,” says Pete.

  Then he makes the mistake of fidgeting his gun under his arm. Not pointing it at Linden: he swore he would never have done that, and those who know Pete believe him. And the gun was broken: Pete would never in his life have walked with a closed and loaded gun at night, he says. Nevertheless, as he fidgeted the gun, making it clear that he meant business, it is possible he snapped the breach shut by mistake; he will grant you that. Pete does not claim to have a precise and accurate memory of everything that happened, because the world by then was turning on its head around him, the moon was in the sea, his arse was on the other side of his face, and his feet were the other side of his arse, and the first useful information Pete could put together was that Linden was standing over him emptying the cartridges from his gun. And since it is true that big men fall harder than small men, Pete had fallen very hard indeed, and the impact of the blow, wherever it had hit him, had robbed him not only of his breath but of his will to get up.

  The ethics of violence required that it was now the turn of the others, and there were still three of them. The two Thomas brothers had always been quick with their fists, and young Jacob played wing forward for the Pirates and was broad as a bus. And Jacob was all set to go in after his brother. It was Pete, lying in the bracken, who ordered him off.

  “Don’t touch him, boy. Don’t you ever bloody go near him. He’s a bloody witch. Go back to the car, all of us,” he said, climbing slowly to his feet.

  “Empty your guns first, please,” says Linden.

  On Pete Pengelly’s nod the three men emptied the cartridges from their guns. Then all four trooped back to the car.

  “I’d have bloody killed him!” Jacob protested as soon as they had driven off. “I’d have broke the bugger’s legs for him, Pete, after what he done to you!”

  “No, you wouldn’t, my handsome,” Pete replied. “But he’d have broke yours for sure.”

  And Pete Pengelly, they say in the village, changed his manners from that night on, though perhaps they are a little hasty to link cause with effect. Come September month, Pete married a sensible farmer’s daughter from St. Just. Which is why he is able to look back on the episode with distance and tell about the night Jack Linden damn near did for him the way he did for that fat Aussie.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, boy. If Jack did do him in, he made some neat job of it, that’s for sure.”

  But there’s a better ending to it than that, even if Pete sometimes keeps it to himself like a thing too precious to share. The night before Jack Linden disappeared, he walked into the Snug and laid a bandaged hand on Pete Pengelly’s shoulder and bought him a bloody beer, man. They talked for ten minutes, then Jack Linden went on home. “He was puttin’ it right with himself,” Pete insists proudly. “You bloody listen to me, boy. Jack Linden was setting his bloody house straight after he done his business with the Aussie.”

  Except that his name wasn’t Jack Linden by then, which was something they couldn’t properly get used to, and perhaps they never will. A couple of days after his disappearance, Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e turned out to be Jonathan Pine of Zurich, wanted by the Swiss police on suspicion of embezzlement at a fashionable hotel where he had been a trusted employee. “Sailing Hotelier on the Run,” the Cornishman sang, over a photograph of Pine alias Linden. “Police seek Falmouth boat trader in case of missing Australian. ‘We are treating this as a drug-related murder inquiry,’ says CUD chief. ‘The man should be easily identified by his bandaged hand.’”

  But Pine was not a man they knew.

  Yes, bandaged. And wounded. Wound and bandage were both integral features of Burr’s plan.

  Jack Linden’s hand, the same as he had laid on Pete Pengelly’s shoulder. A lot of people, not just Pete Pengelly, had seen that hand bandaged, and the police, at Burr’s instigation, made a fair fuss of who they all were, which hand it was, and when. And when they’d got the who and the when and the which, then, being police, they wanted the why. Which is to say, they wrote down the conflicting versions that Jack had given for having his right hand done up in a big gauze bandage, professional, and the fingertips tied together like asparagus. And with Burr’s help, the police made sure these found their way into the press.

  “Trying to fit a new pane of glass at my cottage,” Jack Linden told Mrs. Trethewey on the Thursday as he paid her out his cash wrong-handed for the last time.

  “Teach me to help out a friend,” Jack had remarked to old William Charles when the two of them chanced to meet at Penhaligon’s garage, Jack for petrol for the bike, William Charles for passing the tithe. “Asked me to pop by and help him mend his window. And now look.” Then shoved his bandaged hand at William Charles like a sick dog with his paw, because Jack could make a joke of anything.

  But it was Pete Pengelly who got them hot and bothered. “Of course it was in his bloody woodshed, boy!” he told the detective sergeant. “Trimming a pane of bloody glass, he was, up at the Lanyon in his woodshed, and the cutter slipped, blood all over the place. He put a bandage on it, bound it tight and drove himself one-handed to hospital on his bike, blood running up his sleeve all the way to Truro, told me! You don’t make that up, boy. You bloody do it.”

  But when the police dutifully inspected the Lanyon woodshed, they found no glass, no cutter and no blood.

  Murderers lie, Burr had explained to Jonathan. Too consistent is too dangerous. If you don’t err, you won’t be criminal.

  The Roper checks, Burr had explained. Even when he’s not suspicious, he checks. So we give you these little murderer’s lies, to make the untrue murder true.

  And a nice scar speaks volumes.

  And at some point in these last few days, Jonathan broke all the rules and, without Burr’s consent or knowledge, visited his former wife, Isabelle, in search of atonement.

  I’ll be passing through, he lied, telephoning her from a Penzance call box. Let’s have lunch somewhere quiet. Riding his motorbike to Bath, wearing only the left glove because of his bandaged hand, he rehearsed his lines to her until they became a heroic song in his mind: You’ll read things about me in the papers, but they won’t be true, Isabelle. I’m sorry about the bad times, Isabelle, but there were good times too. Then he wished her luck, imagining she would do the same for him.

  In a men’s lavatory he changed into his suit and became a h
otelier again. He hadn’t seen her for five years, and he barely recognized her when she strode in twenty minutes late and blamed the bloody traffic. The long brown hair she used to brush down her naked back before they went to bed was cut to a practical brevity. She wore chunky clothes to hide her shape and carried a zip bag with a cellular telephone. And he remembered how, by the end, the telephone had been the only thing she could talk to.

  “Christ,” she said. “You look prosperous. Don’t worry, I’ll switch it off.”

  She’s become a blurter, he thought, and remembered that her new husband was something in the local hunt.

  “Well, stone the crows,” she shouted. “Corporal Pine. After all these years. What on earth have you done to your hand?”

  “Dropped a boat on it,” he said, which apparently was sufficient explanation. He asked her how business was. In his suit it seemed the right sort of question to ask. He had heard she had gone into interior design.

  “Bloody awful,” she replied heartily. “What’s Jonathan up to, anyway? Oh my Lord,” she said, when he told her. “You’re in the leisure industries too. We’re doomed, darling. You’re not building them, are you?”

  “No, no. Brokering. Ferrying. We’ve got off to quite a decent start.”

  “Who’s we, darling?”

  “An Australian chum.”

  “Male?”

  “Male and eighteen stone.”

  “What are you doing for sex? I always thought you might be queer. You’re not, though, are you?”

  It was a charge she had made often in her day, but she seemed to have forgotten this.

  “Good Lord no,” Jonathan replied with a laugh. “How’s Miles?”

  “Worthy. Very sweet. Banking and good works. He’s got to pay off my overdraft next month, so I’m being nice to him.”