The Night Manager

by John le Carré

  “Bit academic, all this, actually,” the minister complains. “Can we get on to the gritty, Geoffrey? If I’m shoving this upstairs, I’ll have to collar the Cabinet Secretary before Question Time.”

  Marjoram smiles in assent but does not change his tactic by a whit. “Quite a source, I must say, Rex. And quite a lot of mischief if he’s leading you by the nose. Or she is; sorry. Not sure I’d like to take a flier on him if I was advising the PM, all the same. Not without knowing a bit more about him or her. Boundless faith in one’s agent’s all very fine in the field. Burr had a bit too much of it sometimes, back in the days when he worked for the River House. We had to keep him on a tight rein.”

  “The little I know of the source convinces me entirely,” Goodhew retorts, digging himself deeper into the mire. “The source is loyal and has made immense personal sacrifices for the sake of his or her country. I urge that the source be listened to and believed, and his intelligence acted upon today.”

  Darker takes back the controls. He looks first at Goodhew’s face, then at his hands where they rest on the table. And Goodhew in his increasingly fraught state has the disgusting notion that Darker is thinking it would be amusing to pull out his fingernails.

  “Well, that’s impartial enough for anyone,” Darker says, with a glance at the minister to make sure he has heard the witness con-demning himself out of his own mouth. “Haven’t heard such a resounding declaration of blind love since . . .” He turns to Marjoram. “What’s the man’s name again—the escaped criminal? He’s got so many names now I can’t remember which is the right one.”

  “Pine,” says Marjoram. “Jonathan Pine. Don’t think he’s got a middle name. There’s been an international warrant out for him for months.”

  Darker again. “You’re not telling me Burr’s been listening to this man Pine, are you, Rex? You can’t be. No one falls for him. Might as well believe the wino on your street corner when he tells you he’s short of the fare home.”

  For the first time, both Marjoram and Darker are smiling together, a little incredulously, at the thought that somebody as bright as dear old Rex Goodhew could have made such a mental blunder.

  Goodhew has the sensation of being alone in a great empty hall, awaiting some kind of prolonged public execution. From far away he hears Darker trying to be helpful to him by explaining that it is pretty standard, in a case where action is to be contemplated at the highest level, for intelligence services to come clean about their sources.

  “I mean, look at it their way, Rex. Wouldn’t you want to know whether Burr has bought the crown jewels or a fabricator’s load of old bones? Not as if Burr was exactly flush with sources, is it? Probably paid the bloke his whole annual budget in one shot.” He turns to the minister. “Among his other skills, this man Pine forges passports. He came to us about eighteen months ago with some story about a shipment of high-tech weaponry for the Iraqis. We checked it out, didn’t like it and showed him the door. We thought he might be a bit loco, to be frank. A few months ago he cropped up as some kind of factotum to Dicky Roper’s household out in Nassau. Part-time tutor to their difficult son. Tried to peddle anti-Roper stories round the intelligence bazaars in his spare time.”

  He glances at the open file in order to make sure he is being as fair as possible.

  “Got quite a record. Murder, multiple theft, dope-running and illegal possession of various passports. I hope to God he’s not going to get into the witness box and say he did it all for British Intelligence.”

  Marjoram’s index finger helpfully points out an entry lower down the page. Darker spots it and gives a nod to show that he is grateful to be reminded.

  “Yes, that’s an odd little story about him too. While Pine was in Cairo, it seems he ran up against a man called Freddie Hamid, one of the Hamid brothers of evil fame. Pine worked in his hotel. Probably pushed his dope for him as well. Our man Ogilvey out there tells us there are quite strong pointers to suggest that Pine killed Hamid’s mistress. Beat her to death, apparently. Took her to Luxor for a weekend, then killed her in a jealous rage.” Darker shrugged and closed the file. “We are talking of somebody who is seriously unstable, Minister. I don’t think the PM should be asked to authorize drastic action based on Pine’s fabrications. I don’t think you should either.”

  Everyone looks at Goodhew, but most look away again in order not to embarrass him. Marjoram particularly seems to feel for him. The minister is talking, but Goodhew is tired. Perhaps that’s what evil does to you, he thinks: it tires you.

  “Rex, you have to fight your corner on this one,” the minister is complaining. “Has Burr done a deal with this man or not? I hope he hasn’t had anything to do with his crimes? What have you promised him? Rex, I insist you remain. There have been far too many cases recently of British Intelligence employing criminals on terms. Don’t you dare bring him back to this country, that’s all. Did Burr tell him who he was working for? Probably gave him my phone number while he was about it. Rex, come back.” The door seems an awfully long way off. “Geoffrey says he’s been some kind of special soldier in Ireland. About all we need. The Irish will be really grateful. For Christ sake, Rex, we’ve hardly started on the agenda. Major decisions to take. Rex, this is very untidy. Not your scene at all. I’m nobody’s man, Rex. Goodbye.”

  The air in the outside stairwell is blessedly cool. Goodhew leans against the wall. Probably he is smiling.

  “I expect you’ll be looking forward to your weekend, sir, won’t you?” the janitor says respectfully.

  Touched by the man’s good face, Goodhew hunts for a kindly answer.

  Burr was working. His body clock was stuck in mid-Atlantic, his soul was with Jonathan in whatever hell he was enduring. But his intellect, his will and his inventiveness were concentrated upon the work before him.

  “Your man blew it,” Merridew commented, when Burr called him to hear how the Steering Committee meeting had gone. “Geoffrey walked all over him in hobnail boots.”

  “That’s because Geoffrey Darker tells bloody lies,” Burr explained carefully, in case Merridew needed educating. Then he went back to work.

  He was in River House mode.

  He was a spy again, unprincipled and uncontrite. The truth was what he could get away with.

  He sent his secretary on a Whitehall forage, and at two o’clock she returned, calm but slightly breathless, bearing the stationery samples he had instructed her to scrounge.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and she fetched her shorthand pad.

  Mostly, the letters he dictated were addressed to himself. A few were addressed to Goodhew, a couple to Goodhew’s master. His styles were various: Dear Burr, My dear Leonard, To the Director of Enforcement, Dear Minister. In the more elevated correspondence, he wrote “Dear So-and-so” by hand at the top, and scribbled whatever kiss-off occurred to him at the bottom. Yours, Ever, Yours aye, My best to you.

  His handwriting also varied, in both its slope and its characteristics. So did the inks and writing instruments he awarded to the various correspondents.

  So did the quality of the official stationery, which became stiffer the higher he moved up the Whitehall ladder of beings. For ministerial letters he favored pale blue, with the official crest die-stamped at the head.

  “How many typewriters have we got?” he asked his secretary. “Five.”

  “Use one for each correspondent, one for us,” he ordered. “Keep it consistent.”

  She had already made a note to do so.

  Alone again, he telephoned Harry Palfrey at the River House. His tone was cryptic.

  “But I must have a reason,” Palfrey protested.

  “You can have it when you show up,” Burr retorted.

  Then he rang Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw in Newbury.

  “Fuck should I take orders from you, Christ’s sake?” Bradshaw demanded haughtily, in a quaint echo of Roperspeak. “No executive powers, lot of wankers on the touch line.”

  “Just be there,” B
urr advised.

  Hester Goodhew telephoned him from Kentish Town to say that her husband would be staying home for a few days: winter was never his best time, she said. After her, Goodhew himself came on the line, sounding like a hostage who has been rehearsed in his lines. “You’ve still got your budget till the end of the year, Leonard. Nobody can take that away from you.” Then, rather horribly, his voice cracked. “That poor boy. What will they do to him? I think of him all the time.”

  So did Burr, but he had work to do.

  The interviewing room at the Ministry of Defence is white and sparse and prison lit and prison scrubbed. It is a brick-lined box with a blacked-out window and an electric radiator that stinks of burned dust whenever it is switched on. The absence of graffiti is alarming. Waiting, you wonder whether the last messages are painted out after the occupant is executed. Burr arrived late by design. When he entered, Palfrey attempted to look at him disdainfully over the top of his trembling newspaper, and smirked.

  “Well, I did come,” he said truculently. And stood. And made a show of folding up his paper.

  Burr closed and carefully locked the door behind him, set down his briefcase, hung his coat on the hook and slapped Palfrey very hard across the side of the face. But dispassionately, reluctantly almost. As he might have hit an epileptic to ward off a fit, or his own child to calm him in a crisis.

  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 gray 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 Dicky 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, authorizing 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 dogged 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’ll 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 Maise! 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, dialed the five digits that every River rat learns at his mother’s knee.

  28

  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 fucked 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?