The Night Manager

by John le Carré

  “Why don’t you call up the bullyboys, then?” Jonathan suggested, not to her so much as to the flowers. “Personal attack button right there beside you on the wall. Or pick up the house phone if you prefer. Dial nine, and I’ll pay for my fucking cheek in the approved manner. Daniel isn’t making a scene because he hurt himself. He doesn’t want to go back to London and he doesn’t like sharing you with Caroline and her kids. He wanted you for himself.”

  “Get out,” she said.

  But the calm was on him, and so was his concern for her, and between them they gave him the supremacy. The rehearsing and blank shots were over. It was live-ammunition time.

  “Close the door,” he ordered her, keeping his voice low. “It’s not a good moment to talk, but there’s something I have to say to you, and I don’t want Daniel hearing it. He gets enough through your bedroom wall as it is.”

  She stared at him, and he could see the uncertainty working in her face. She closed the door.

  “I’m obsessed by you. I can’t get you out of my head. I don’t mean I’m in love with you. I sleep with you, I wake up with you, I can’t clean my teeth without cleaning yours as well and most of the time I’m quarreling with you. There’s no logic to it, there’s no pleasure to it. I haven’t heard you express a single thought worth a damn, and most of what you say is affected bilge. Yet every time I think of something funny, I need you to laugh at it, and when I’m low, it’s you I need to cheer me up. I don’t know who you are, if you’re anyone at all. Or whether you’re here for the beer or because you’re wildly in love with Roper. And I’m sure you don’t know either. I think you’re a total mess. But that doesn’t put me off. Not at all. It makes me indignant, it makes me a fool, it makes me want to wring your neck. But that’s just part of the package.”

  They were his own words. He was speaking for himself and nobody else. Nevertheless, the ruthless orphan in him could not resist shifting a little of the blame onto her shoulders. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have nursed me so nicely. Lifting me up. Sitting on my bed. Let’s say it’s Daniel’s fault for getting himself kidnapped. No, let’s say it’s mine for getting myself beaten up. And yours for making those spaniel eyes at me.”

  She shut her offending eyes and seemed to go to sleep for a moment. She opened them and lifted her hand to her face. And he was afraid that he had hit her too hard and invaded the tender ground that each of them guarded against the other.

  “That’s the most fucking impertinent thing anyone has said to me ever,” she said uncertainly, after quite a pause.

  He let her dangle.

  “Thomas!” she said, as if appealing for his help.

  But he still did not come to her aid.

  “Jesus, Thomas . . . oh, fuck. Thomas, this is Roper’s house!”

  “It’s Roper’s house, and you’re Roper’s girl for as long as you can take it. My senses tell me you won’t be able to take it much longer. Roper’s a crook, as Caroline Langbourne has no doubt been telling you. He’s not a buccaneer, or a Mississippi gambler, or a romantic adventurer, or however you decided to cast him when you picked each other up. He’s an arms crook and at least a bit of a murderer.” He took an outrageous step. He broke all Burr’s rules and Rooke’s in a single sentence. “That’s why people like you and me end up spying on him,” he said. “Leaving traces an inch deep all over his office. ‘Jed was here.’ ‘Jed Marshall, her mark, her hair stuck in his papers.’ He’d kill you for that. That’s what he does. Kills.” He paused to observe the effect of his backhanded confession on her, but she had frozen. “I’d better go and talk to Daniel,” he said. “What’s he supposed to have done to himself, anyway?”

  “God knows.”

  She did a strange thing as he left. She was still at the door, and as he approached her, she took a step back to let him pass, which might have been normal courtesy. Then on some impulse that she could probably not have explained, she reached in front of him, turned the door handle and gave the door a shove, as if his hands were laden and he needed help.

  Daniel was lying on his bed, reading his book on monsters.

  “Jed just overreacted,” he explained. “All I did was act up a little. But Jed went berserk.”

  19

  It was evening of the same day, and Jonathan was still alive, the sky was still in its place, no security gorillas fell on him out of the trees as he made his way back through the tunnel to Woody’s House. The cicadas ticked and sobbed, the sun disappeared behind Miss Mabel’s Mountain, dusk fell. He had played tennis with Daniel and the Langbourne children, he had swum with them and sailed with them, he had listened to Isaac on the subject of the Tottenham Hotspurs and to Esmeralda on evil spirits and to Caroline Langbourne on men, marriage and her husband.

  “It isn’t the unfaithfulness I mind, Thomas, it’s the lying. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except you’re straight. I don’t care what he says about you, we all of us have our problems, but I know straightness when I see it. If he’d only say to me, ‘I’m having an affair with Annabelle’—or whoever he’s having an affair with at the time—‘and what’s more, I’m going to go on having an affair with her,’ well, I’d say, ‘All right. If that’s the way we’re playing it, so be it. Just don’t expect me to be faithful while you’re not.’ I can live with that, Thomas. We have to if we’re women. I just feel so furious I’ve let him have all my money and practically kept him for years, and let Daddy pay for the children’s education, only to find that he’s been lavishing money on any little trollop he happens to meet, leaving us, well, not penniless, but certainly not flush.”

  During the rest of the day, he had spotted Jed twice: once in the summerhouse, wearing a yellow caftan and writing a letter, once walking with Daniel in the surf, her skirts pulled to her waist while she held his hand. And as Jonathan left the house, passing deliberately beneath her bedroom balcony, he heard her talking on the telephone to Roper: “No darling, he didn’t hurt himself at all, it was just fuss, and he got over it very quickly and did me an absolutely super painting of Sarah doing her airs above the ground right on top of the stable roof, you’ll absolutely adore it. . . .”

  And he thought: Now you tell him, That was the good news, darling. But guess who I found skulking in our bedroom when I got upstairs. . . . .

  It was only when he reached Woody’s House that time refused to pass. He let himself in cautiously, reasoning that if the protection had been alerted, their most likely course of action would be to go to his house ahead of him. So he entered by the back door and patrolled both floors before he felt able to extract the tiny steel cassette of film from his camera and, with a sharp knife from the kitchen, make a bed for it inside the pages of his paperback copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  After that, things happened very much one by one.

  He had a bath and thought: About now, you’ll be having your shower, and nobody will be there to hand you your towel.

  He made himself a chicken soup from leftovers that Esmeralda had given him, and he thought: About now, you and Caroline will be sitting on the patio eating Esmeralda’s grouper with lemon sauce, and you’ll be listening to another chapter of Caroline’s life while her children are doing crisps and Coke and ice cream and watching Young Frankenstein in Daniel’s playroom, and Daniel lies reading in his bedroom with the door shut, hating the pack of them.

  Then he went to bed, because it seemed a good place to think about her. And remained in bed until twelve-thirty, at which time the naked close observer slid soundlessly to the floor and picked up the steel poker that he kept beneath it, because he had heard a furtive footfall on his doorstep. They’ve come for me, he thought. She’s blown the whistle to Roper, and they’re going to do a Woody on me.

  But another voice in him spoke differently, and it was the voice he had been listening to ever since Jed had discovered him in her bedroom. So that by the time she rapped on his front door, he had put away the poker and knotted a sarong round his waist.

  S
he too had dressed for the part: in a long dark skirt and a dark cape, and it would not have surprised him if she had turned up the Father Christmas hood, but she hadn’t; it hung becomingly behind her. She was carrying a flashlight, and while he rechained the door she set it down and drew the cape more tightly round her. Then stood facing him with her hands crossed dramatically at her throat.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said, quickly drawing the curtains. “Who saw you? Caroline? Daniel? The night staff?”

  “No one.”

  “Of course they did. What about the boys at the lodge?”

  “I tiptoed. No one heard me.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. Not because he thought she was lying but because of the sheer foolhardiness of her behavior. “So what can I get you?” he said in a tone that implied: since you’ve come.

  “Coffee. Coffee please. Don’t make it specially.”

  Coffee, please. Egyptian, he remembered.

  “They were watching television,” she said. “The boys in the lodge. I could see them through the window.”

  “Sure.”

  He put on a kettle, then lit the pine logs in the grate, and for a while she shivered and frowned at the sputtering logs. Then she looked round the room, getting the idea of the place, and of him, taking in the books he had managed to assemble, and the spruceness of everything—the flowers, the watercolor of Carnation Bay propped on the chimneypiece beside Daniel’s painting of a pterodactyl.

  “Dans did a painting of Sarah for me,” she said. “To make amends.”

  “I know. I was passing your room when you were telling Roper. What else did you tell him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She flared. “What do you expect me to tell him? Thomas thinks I’m a cheap little trollop without a thought in my head?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said worse. You said I was a mess and he was a murderer.”

  He handed her a mug of coffee. Black. No sugar. She drank some, both hands round the mug. “How the fuck did I get into this?” she asked. “Not you. Him. This place. Crystal. The whole shit.”

  “Corky said he bought you at a horse sale.”

  “I was shacked up in Paris.”

  “What were you doing in Paris?”

  “Fucking these two men. The story of my life. I fuck all the wrong people and miss out the right ones.” She took another pull of coffee. “They had a flat on the rue de Rivoli. They scared the hell out of me. Drugs, boys, booze, girls, me, the whole bit. One morning I woke up and there was this flat full of bodies. Everyone had passed out.” She nodded to herself as if to say, yes, that was it, that was the crunch. “Okay, Jemima, you don’t collect two hundred quid, you just go. I didn’t even pack. I stepped over the bodies and went to this bloodstock auction in Maison Lafitte that I’d read about in the Trib. I wanted to see horses. I was still half-stoned, and that was all I could think of: horses. That’s all we ever did till my father had to sell up. Ride and pray. We’re Shropshire Catholics,” she explained gloomily, as if confessing the family curse. “I must have been smiling. Because this dishy middle-aged man said, ‘Which one would you like?’ And I said, ‘That big one in the window.’ I was feeling . . . light. Free. I was in a movie. That feeling. I was being funny. So he bought her. Sarah. The bidding was so quick I didn’t really follow it. He had some Pakistani with him and they were sort of bidding together. Then he just turned to me and said, ‘She’s yours. Where do you want her sent?’ I was scared stiff, but it was a dare, so I thought I’d see it through. He took me to a shop in the Élysées, and we were the only people. He’d had the riffraff cleared out before we got there. We were the only customers. He bought me ten thousand quids’ worth of tat and took me to the opera. He took me to dinner and told me about an island called Crystal. Then he took me to his hotel and fucked me. And I thought: With one leap she clears the pit. He’s not a bad man, Thomas. He just does bad things. He’s like Archie the driver.”

  “Who’s Archie the driver?”

  She forgot him for a while, preferring to stare at the fire and sip her coffee. Her shivering had stopped. Once, she winced and drew in her shoulders, but it was her memory, not the cold, that was troubling her. “Jesus,” she whispered. “Thomas, what do I do?”

  “‘Who’s Archie?”

  “In our village. He drove an ambulance for the local hospital. Everyone loved Archie the driver. He came to all the point-to-points and looked after people if they were hurt. He scraped up the bodies at the kids’ gymkhanas, everything. Nice Archie. Then there was an ambulance strike, and Archie went and picketed the hospital gates and wouldn’t let in the casualties because he said the drivers were all blacklegs. And Mrs. Luxome, who cleaned for the Priors, died because he wouldn’t let her in.” Another shudder passed over her. “Do you always have a fire? Seems silly, a fire in the tropics.”

  “You have them at Crystal.”

  “He really likes you. You know that?”

  “Yes,”

  “You’re his son or something. I kept telling him to get rid of you. I felt you coming closer, and I couldn’t stop you. You’re such a creep. He doesn’t seem to see it. Perhaps he doesn’t want to. I suppose it’s Dan. You saved Dan. Still, that doesn’t last forever, does it?” She drank. “Then you think: Okay, fuck it. If he won’t see what’s happening under his nose, that’s his tough luck. Corky’s warned him. So’s Sandy. He doesn’t listen to them.”

  “Why’ve you been going through his papers?”

  “Caro told me a whole lot of stuff about him. Dreadful things. It wasn’t fair. I knew some of it already. I’d tried not to, but you can’t help it. Things people say at parties. Things Dan picks up. Those dreadful bankers, boasting. I can’t judge people. Not me. I always think I’m in the hot seat, not them. The trouble is, we’re so bloody straight. My father is. He’d rather starve than cheat the taxman. Always paid his bills the day they came in. That’s why he went bust. Other people didn’t pay him, of course, but he never noticed that.” She glanced at him. Her glance became a look. “Jesus,” she whispered again.

  “Did you find anything?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t, could I? I didn’t know what to look for. So I thought, fuck it, and I asked him.”

  “You what?”

  “I tackled him with it. One night after dinner. I said, ‘Is it true you’re a crook? Tell me. A girl’s got a right to know.’”

  Jonathan took a deep breath. “Well, that was honest at least,” he said, with a careful smile. “How did Roper take it? Did he make a full confession, swear never to do wrong again, blame it all on his cruel childhood?”

  “He went tight-faced.”

  “And said?”

  “Said I should mind my bloody business.”

  Echoes of Sophie’s account of her conversation with Freddie Hamid at the cemetery in Cairo invaded Jonathan’s concentration.

  “And you said it was your business?” he suggested.

  “He said I wouldn’t understand, even if he told me. I should shut up and not talk about things I didn’t understand. Then he said, This isn’t crime, this is politics. I said, What isn’t crime? What’s politics? Tell me the worst, I said. Give me the bottom line so that I know what I’m sharing.”

  “And Roper?” Jonathan asked.

  “He says there isn’t a bottom line. People like my father just think there is, which is why people like my father are suckers. He says he loves me and that’s good enough. So I get angry and say, It may have been good enough for Eva Braun, but it isn’t good enough for me. I thought he’d belt me. But he just took note. Nothing surprises him, do you know that? It’s facts. One fact more, one fact less. Then you do the logical thing at the end of it.”

  Which was what he did to Sophie, thought Jonathan. “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?” She wanted brandy. He hadn’t any, so he gave her Scotch. “It’s a lie,” she said.


  “What is?”

  “What I’m living. Someone tells me who I am, and I believe them and go with it. That’s what I do. I believe people. I can’t help it. Now you come along and tell me I’m a mess, but that’s not what he tells me. He says I’m his virtue. Me and Daniel, we’re what it’s all for. He said it straight out one night, in front of Corky.” She took a gulp of Scotch. “Caro says he’s pushing drugs. Did you know that? Some huge shipment, in exchange for arms and God knows what. We’re not talking about sailing close to the wind. Not cutting a few corners or having a quiet joint at a party, she says. We’re talking fully fledged, organized megacrime. She says I’m a gangster’s moll—that’s another version of me I’m trying to sort through. It’s a thrill a minute being me these days.”

  Her gaze was on him again, straight and unblinking. “I’m in deep shit,” she said. “I walked into this with my eyes wide shut. I deserve everything I get. Just don’t tell me I’m a mess. I can do the sermons for myself. Anyway, what the fuck are you up to? You’re no paragon.”

  “What does Roper say I’m up to?”

  “You got into some heavy trouble. But you’re a good chap. He’s fixing you up. He’s sick of Corky bitching about you. But then he didn’t catch you prowling in our bedroom, did he?” she said, flaring again. “Let’s hear it from you.”

  He took a long time to answer. First he thought of Burr, then he thought of himself and all the rules against talking. “I’m a volunteer,” he said.

  She pulled a sour face. “For the police?”

  “Sort of.”