The Night Manager

by John le Carré

  And at night she sleeps with Roper, waiting for the chink.

  In his bed.

  Having dressed and undressed in his presence, worn his jewelry and charmed his guests.

  The encounter most often comes at dawn, when her will, like the will of the dying, is at its weakest. He reaches for her, and Jed in some dreadful eagerness at once returns his call, telling herself that in doing so she is drawing the teeth of Jonathan’s oppressor, taming him, bribing him, making peace with him for Jonathan’s salvation. And waiting for the chink.

  Because that is what she is trying to buy from Roper all the time, in this mad silence they are sharing, following their first exchange of gunfire: a chance to get past his guard. They can laugh together about something as crucial as a bad olive. Yet, even in their sexual frenzies, they no longer mention the one subject that still joins them. Jonathan.

  Is Roper too waiting for something? Waiting herself, Jed believes he is. Why else does Corkoran tap on the stateroom door at all odd hours, poke his head round, shake it and withdraw? In her nightmares, Corkoran doubles as Jonathan’s executioner.

  She knows where he is now. Roper hasn’t told her, but it has been an amusing game for him, looking on while Jed spots the clues and pieces them together. And now she knows.

  First she notices the unnatural grouping at the forward end of the boat, on the lower deck beyond the guest cabins: a clogging of people, an air of accident. It is nothing she can put her finger on, and anyway that section of the boat has always been hazy to her. In the days of her innocence, she heard it referred to as the security area. Another time as the hospital. It is the one part of the boat that belongs to neither guests nor crew. And since Jonathan himself is also neither, Jed sees the hospital as the fitting place to put him. Hovering with intent around the kitchen, Jed observes trays of invalid food, not ordered by herself. They are laden when they go forward. They are empty when they return.

  “Is someone ill?” she demands of Frisky, stopping him in his path.

  Frisky’s manner is no longer deferential, if it ever was. “Why should there be?” he says pertly. The tray aloft. One-handed.

  “Then who’s eating slops? Yogurt, chicken broth—who’s that for?”

  Frisky affects to notice for the first time what is on his tray. “Oh, that’s Tabby, that is, miss.” He has never in his life called her “miss” before. “Got a bit of the toothache, Tabby has. Had a wisdom tooth out in Antigua. Lot of bleeding. He’s on the painkillers. Yeah.”

  She has begun to work out who visits him and when. It is an advantage of the rituals that control her that the smallest irregular movement on the ship is her concern; she knows by instinct whether the pretty Filipino stewardess has slept with the captain or the bosun or—as happened briefly one afternoon while Caroline was sunbathing on the afterdeck—with Sandy Langbourne. She has observed that it is Roper’s three trusties—Frisky, Tabby and Gus—who sleep in the cabin above the private stairway to what she now believes is Jonathan’s cell. And that the German-Argentinians across the gangway may suspect, but do not share the secret. And that Corkoran—the new, puffed up, officious Corkoran—makes the journey twice a day at least, setting out with an air of circumstance and returning churlish.

  “Corky,” she beseeches him, trading on past friendship. “Corks, darling, please—for God’s sake—how is he? Is he ill? Does he know I’m here?”

  But Corkoran’s face is shaded by the darkness he has visited. “I warned you, Jed. I gave you every chance,” he retorts huffily. “You wouldn’t hear me. You were willful.” And goes his way like an offended beadle.

  Sandy Langbourne is also an occasional visitor. His chosen hour is after dinner during his evening prowl of the decks in search of more diverting company than his wife.

  “You bastard, Sandy,” she whispers at him as he saunters past her. “You utter spoilt bloody shit.”

  Langbourne remains unaffected by this onslaught. He is too beautiful and bored to care.

  And she knows that Jonathan’s other visitor is Roper, because Roper is unusually pensive when he returns from the forward area. Even if she has not seen him go there, she can tell by his manner when he reappears. Like Langbourne, he favors evenings. First stroll on deck, chat to the skipper or call one of his many stockbrokers, currency dealers and bankers round the globe: how about taking a flier on Deutschies, Bill? Swissies, Jack? the yen, the pound, the escudo, Malaysian rubber, Russian diamonds, Canadian gold? Then gradually, by these and similar staging posts, he is drawn as if by magnetic attraction toward the forward part of the boat. And vanishes. When he reappears, his expression is overcast.

  But Jed knows better than to beg or weep or scream or cause a scene. If there is one thing that makes Roper dangerous, it is a scene. It is the unwarranted invasion of his self-esteem. It is bloody women sniveling at his feet.

  And she knows, or thinks she knows, that Jonathan is doing what he tried to do in Ireland. He is killing himself with his own courage.

  It was better than Herr Meister’s cellar, but it was also far, far worse. There was no going round and round the black walls. But that was because he was chained to them. He was not neglected; his presence was known to a succession of attentive people. But these same people had stuffed his mouth with chamois leather and taped it with adhesive, and although there was an understanding that they would remove these inconveniences whenever he gave the signal that he wished to talk, they had already demonstrated to him that if he gave the signal frivolously there would be consequences. Since then, he had developed a firm policy not to talk at all, not even a “good morning” or “hullo,” because his terror was that—since he was somebody who tended on occasion to confide, if only in his character as hotelier—this tendency would become his undoing, and “hullo” would turn into “I sent Rooke the numbers of the containers and the name of the boat,” or whatever other stray confession sprang to mind in the agony of the moment.

  Yet what confession did they want from him? What more did they need to know that they didn’t know already? They knew he was a plant and that most of the stories about him were invention. If they did not know how much he had betrayed, they knew enough to change or abort their plans before it was too late. So why the urgency? Why the frustration? Then gradually, as the sessions grew more ferocious, Jonathan came to recognize that his confession was something they felt that they were owed by right. He was their spy. They had unmasked him. Their pride demanded a contrite statement from the gallows.

  But they were reckoning without Sophie. They didn’t know about his Secret Sharer. Sophie who had been there ahead of him. And was there now, smiling at him over her coffee, please, Egyptian. Forgiving him. Amusing him: seducing him a little, urging him to live by daylight. When they beat his face—a prolonged and careful beating, but a devastating one—he wryly compared faces with her, and for a distraction he told her all about the Irish boy and the Heckler. But nothing maudlin; she was utterly against it; they never went in for self-pity or lost their sense of humor. You killer this woman? she teased him, lifting her plucked dark eyebrows and laughing her mannish laugh. No, he hadn’t killered her. They had put that discussion behind them long ago. She had listened to his account of his dealings with Ogilvey, she had heard him out, now smiling, now frowning in distaste. “I think you did your duty, Mr. Pine,” she declared when he had finished. “Unfortunately there are many kinds of loyalty, and we cannot serve them all at once. Like my husband, you believed you were a patriot. Next time you will make a better choice. Perhaps we shall make it together.” When Tabby and Frisky worked on his body—mostly by chaining him in attitudes that produced prolonged and excruciating pain—Sophie reminded him how her body had been broken too: in her case, clubbed until it was destroyed. And when he was deep down and half asleep and wondering how he would make it back to the top of the crevasse, he regaled her with accounts of difficult climbs he had made in the Oberland—a north face of the Jungfrau that had gone seriously wrong: bivouac
king in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. And Sophie, if she was bored, never showed it. She listened with her great brown eyes steadfastly upon him, loving and encouraging him: I am sure that you will never again give yourself away so cheaply, Mr. Pine, she had told him. Our good manners can sometimes disguise our courage from us. Have you something to read on the plane back to Cairo? I think I shall read. It will help me to remember that I am myself. And then, to his surprise, he was back in the little flat in Luxor, watching her pack up her overnight bag, one object at a time and very deliberately, as if she were selecting companions for a much longer journey than the trip to Cairo.

  And of course it was Sophie who had encouraged him to keep his silence. Had she herself not died without betraying him?

  When they had pulled off the adhesive and removed the chamois bung, it was on Sophie’s advice that he asked to speak to Roper personally.

  “That’s the way, then, Tommy,” said Tabby, out of breath from his exertions. “You have a natter with the Chief. Then we can all have a nice beer together like the old days.”

  And Roper in his own good time strolled down to see him, dressed in his cruise gear—including the white buckskin shoes with crêpe soles that Jonathan had noticed in his dressing room at Crystal—and sat on the chair across the room from him. And it passed through Jonathan’s mind that this was now the second time that Roper had seen him with his face in a mess, and that Roper’s expression on both occasions had been identical: the same wrinkling of the nose, the same critical assessment of the damage and of Jonathan’s chances of survival. He wondered how Roper would have looked at Sophie if he had been around while they were beating her to death.

  “All right, Pine?” he asked pleasantly. “No complaints? They looking after you all right?”

  “Beds are a bit lumpy.”

  Roper laughed good-humoredly. “Can’t have everything, I suppose. Jed misses you.”

  “Then send her to me.”

  “Not her scene, I’m afraid. Convent girl. Likes a sheltered life.” So Jonathan explained to Roper that during his initial conversations with Langbourne, Corkoran and others, the suggestion had repeatedly been aired that Jed was in some way involved in Jonathan’s activities. And he wished to say categorically that whatever he had done, he had done it alone, unaided at any point by Jed. And that far too much had been made of a couple of social visits to Woody’s House that had taken place when Jed was being bored to death by Caroline Langbourne and Jonathan was lonely. After that, he regretted he could not answer any further questions. Roper, normally so swift to take a point, seemed for a while stuck for words.

  “Your people kidnapped my boy,” he said at last. “You lied your way into my house, stole my woman. You tried to screw up my deal. Hell do I care whether you talk or not? You’re dead.”

  So it’s punishment, not just confession, thought Jonathan, as they bunged up his mouth again. And his sense of kinship with Sophie, if it was possible, grew stronger. I didn’t betray Jed, he told her. And I won’t, I promise. I shall remain as steadfast as Herr Kaspar with his wig.

  Herr Kaspar wore a wig?

  But didn’t I tell you? Good heavens! Herr Kaspar is a Swiss hero! He gave up twenty thousand tax-free francs a year, just in order to be loyal to himself!

  You are right, Mr. Pine, Sophie agreed gravely, when she had listened attentively to everything he had to tell her. You must not betray Jed. You must be strong like Herr Kaspar, and you must not betray yourself either. Now you will put your head on my shoulder, please, the way you do with Jed, and we shall sleep.

  And from then on, as the questions continued without benefit of answer, now singly, now in a hail, Jonathan occasionally saw Roper back in the same chair, though no longer wearing the white buckskin shoes. And always Sophie stood behind him, not in a vengeful way but just to remind Jonathan that they were in the presence of the worst man in the world.

  “They’ll kill you, Pine,” Roper warned, a couple of times. “Corky will go over the top and that’ll be that. These queers never know where to draw the line. Quit before it’s too late, my advice.” After that, Roper would sit back, wearing that look of personal frustration that comes over all of us when we seem unable to help a friend.

  Then Corkoran would reappear and, leaning eagerly forward in the same chair, would fire his questions like commands, and count to three while he waited to be obeyed. And on three, Frisky and Tabby went to work again until Corkoran was tired, or appeased.

  “Well, if you’ll excuse me, old heart, I’ll slip into my sequined sari, pop a ruby in my navel and tuck into a few peacock’s tongues,” he said as he bowed his way, smirking, to the door. “Sorry you can’t be part of the fun. But if you won’t sing for your supper, what can one do?”

  Nobody, not even Corkoran, stayed long. If a man refuses to speak, and sticks to his resolve, the show acquires a certain same-ness. Only Jonathan, roaming his internal world with Sophie, was blessed with any sense of profit. He owned nothing he did not want to own, his life was in order, he was free. He congratulated himself on having discharged his institutional commitments. His father, his mother, his orphanages and singing Aunt Annie, his country, his past and Burr—all had been paid in full and on the nail. As to his sundry female creditors, they could no longer touch him with their accusations.

  And Jed? Well, there was something rather wonderful in paying in advance for sins that he had yet to commit. He had deceived her, of course—Mama Low’s, getting himself smuggled into the castle, offering a faulty version of himself—but he had a sense that he had also rescued her, which was Sophie’s view entirely.

  “And you don’t think too shallow?” he asked Sophie, in the way young men consult wise women about their loves.

  She pretended to be cross with him. “Mr. Pine, I think you are playing a little bit the flirt. You are a lover, not an archaeologist. Your Jed has a nature that has not been touched. She is beautiful, so she is used to being fawned on and adored, and occasionally misused. That is normal.”

  “I have not misused her,” Jonathan replied.

  “But you have not fawned on her either. She is not confident of you. She comes to you because she wishes your approval. But you withhold it. Why?”

  “But, Madame Sophie, what do you think she does to me?”

  “You are joined by a friction that you both resent. That is also normal. It is attraction’s dark side. You have both got what you wanted. Now it is time to find out what to do with it.”

  “I’m just not ready for her. She’s banal.”

  “She is not banal, Mr. Pine. And I am sure you will never be ready for anybody. However, you are in love, and that is that. Now let us get some sleep. You have work to do, and we shall need all the strength we can muster if we are to complete our journey. Was the fizzy-drink treatment as bad as Tabby promised?”

  “Worse.”

  He nearly died again, and when he woke, Roper was there with his interested smile. But Roper was not a climber and did not understand the fixity of Jonathan’s determination: why else do I climb mountains, he explained to Sophie, if not to reach the peak? On the other hand, the hotelier in him had every sympathy for a man who has run away from feeling. Jonathan really wanted to reach out his hand to Roper, and as a gesture of friendship pull him down here into the abyss, just so that the Chief could get an idea of what it was like: you who are so proud of believing in nothing, and me down here with my faith in everything intact.

  Then he dozed off for a while, and when he woke, he was in the Lanyon, walking on the cliffs with Jed, not wondering anymore who would be round the corner, waiting for him, but content with himself and with the person at his side.

  But he still refused to speak to Roper.

  His refusal was becoming more than a vow. It was an asset, a resource.

  The very act of withholding was giving him renewal.

  Every word he didn’t speak, every juddering fist or foot or elbow that rocked him off to sleep, every new and separate pain,
went into him like fresh supplies of energy to be hoarded against a future day.

  When the pain became unbearable, he had visions of raising himself toward it to receive and store away its life-giving powers.

  And it worked. Under the cover of his agony, the close observer in Jonathan assembled his operational intelligence and prepared his plan for the deployment of his secret energy.

  Nobody carries a gun, he thought. They are following the law of all good prisons. Warders do not carry guns.

  30

  Something amazing had happened.

  Something good or terrible. Either way it was decisive, it was terminal, it was the end of life as Jed had so far known it.

  The phone call had roused them in the early evening. Person-to-person and confidential, Chief, the skipper had said cautiously. It’s Sir Anthony, Chief; I’m not sure whether you want me to put it through. Roper growled and rolled on his side to take it. He was wearing his robe again. They were lying on the bed after making love, though God knew it was not love they had been making but something closer to hate. His old appetite for screwing in the afternoons had recently revived. So had hers. Their appetite for each other seemed to grow in inverse proportion to their affection. She was beginning to wonder whether sex had anything to do with love at all. “I’m a good fuck,” she had told him afterwards, staring at the ceiling. “Oh, you are,” he had agreed. “Ask anyone.” Then this phone call, with his back to her: Oh, blast him, yes, I’ll take it. Then the stiffening of his back, a freezing of the dorsal muscles through the silk, an uneasy shifting of the buttocks, the legs settling on each other for protection.