The Night Manager (19 page)

There are no vulgar emblems of wealth in the town either, if you discount the seventy-five-thousand-dollar power yachts in the parking lot beside the Chateau Babette's kitchens, or the herds of Harley-Davidson motorcycles clustered round the Bonnie and Clyde Saloon. Canadians--French or any other sort--don't care for display, whether of money or emotion.

Fortunes are still made, of course, by those who strike it lucky. And luck is the real religion of the town. Everyone dreams of a gold mine in his garden, and a couple of the lucky ones have found just that. Those men in baseball hats and sneakers and bomber jackets who stand about talking into mobile phones: in other towns they would be drug pushers or numbers boys or pimps, but here in Esperance they are the quiet millionaires of thirty. As to the older ones, they eat their lunches out of tin boxes a mile below ground.

Jonathan devours all this in the first minutes of his arrival. In his state of bright-eyed exhaustion, he takes in everything at once, while his heart bursts with the gratitude of a voyager setting foot on the promised shore. It's beautiful. I worked for it.

It's mine.

He had ridden out of the Lanyon at daybreak without looking back, and headed for Bristol for his week of lying low. He had parked his motorbike in a run-down suburb where Rooke had promised to have it stolen, he had taken a bus to Avonmouth, where he found a seamen's hostel run by two elderly Irish homosexuals who, according to Rooke, were famous for not collaborating with the police. It rained all day and night, and on the third day, while Jonathan was eating breakfast, he heard his name and description on the local radio: last seen West Cornwall area, injured right hand, ring this number. While he listened he saw the two Irishmen listening too, their eyes fixed on one another. He paid his bill and took the bus back to Bristol.

Vile cloud rolled over the wrecked industrial landscape. Hand in pocket--he had reduced the dressing to a simple adhesive bandage--he walked the damp streets. Seated in a barber's chair, he glimpsed his picture on the back of someone's evening paper, the photograph that Burr's people had taken of him in London: a likeness deliberately unlike, but still a likeness.

He became a ghost, haunting a ghost town. In the cafes and billiard halls he was too white and separate, in the smarter streets too ragged. The churches, when he tried to enter them, were locked. His face when he checked it in mirrors scared him with its hostile intensity. Jumbo's faked death was like a goad to him. Visions of his supposed victim unmurdered and unhunted, carousing serenely in some secret haven, taunted him at all odd moments. Nevertheless, in his other persona, he determinedly shouldered the guilt of his imaginary crime. He bought a pair of leather gloves and threw away his bandage.

To buy his air ticket he spent a morning inspecting travel agents before he chose the busiest and most anonymous. He paid in cash and made the booking for two days later, in the name of Fine. Then he took the bus to the airport and changed his booking to the flight that same evening. There was one seat left. At the departure gate a girl in mulberry uniform asked to see his passport. He pulled off a glove and gave it to her with his good hand.

"Are you Pine or Fine, then?" she demanded.

"Whichever you prefer," he assured her, with a flash of the old hotelier's smile, and she grudgingly waved him through--or had Rooke squared them?

When he reached Paris he dared not risk the barrier at Orly, so he sat up in the transit area all night. In the morning he took a flight to Lisbon, this time in the name of Dine, for on Rooke's advice he was trying to stay one jump ahead of the computer. In Lisbon he again made for the docks and again lay low.

"She's called the Star of Bethel, and she's a pig," Rooke had said. "But the skipper's venal, which is what you're looking for."

He saw a half-bearded man trailing from one shipping office to another in the rain, and the man was himself. He saw the same man pay a girl for a night's lodging, then sleep on her floor while she lay on her bed and whimpered because she was afraid of him. Would she be less afraid of me if I slept with her? He didn't stay to find out but, leaving her before dawn, walked the docks once more and came upon the Star of Bethel moored in the outer harbour, a filthy, twelve-thousand-ton coaling vessel bound for Pugwash, Nova Scotia. But when he asked at the shipping agent's, they said she had a full complement and was sailing on the night tide. Jonathan bribed his way aboard. Was the captain expecting him? Jonathan believed he was.

"What can you do, son?" the captain asked. He was a big, soft-spoken Scot of forty. Behind him stood a barefoot Filipino girl of seventeen.

"Cook," said Jonathan, and the captain laughed in his face but took him as a supernumerary on condition he worked his passage and the captain pocketed his pay.

Now he was a galley slave, sleeping in the worst bunk and receiving the insults of the crew. The official cook was an emaciated Lascar, half dead from heroin, and soon Jonathan was doing duty for them both. In his few hours of sleep he dreamed the lush dreams of prisoners, and it was Jed without her Meister's bathrobe who played the leading role. Then a sunny morning dawned and the crew were patting him on the back and saying they had never been better fed at sea. But Jonathan would not go ashore with them. Equipped with rations he had set aside, the close observer preferred to make himself a hideaway in the forward hold and lie up for two more nights before sneaking past the dock police.

Alone in an immense and unfamiliar continent, Jonathan was assailed by a different kind of deprivation. His resolve seemed suddenly to drain into the brilliant thinness of the landscape.

Roper is an abstraction, so is Jed and so am I. I am dead and this is my afterlife. Trekking along the edge of the uncaring highway, sleeping in drivers' dormitories and barns, scrounging a day's pay for two days' labour, Jonathan prayed to be given back his sense of calling.

"Your best bet is the Chateau Babette," Rooke had said. "It's big and sloppy, and it's run by a harridan who can't keep staff. It's where you'd naturally hole out."

"It's the ideal place for you to start looking for your shadow," Burr had said.

Shadow meaning identity. Shadow meaning substance, in a world where Jonathan had become a ghost.

The Chateau Babette roosted like a tattered old hen amid the razzmatazz of the Avenue des Artisans. She was the Meister's of the town. Jonathan spotted her at once from Rooke's description, and as he approached her he remained on the opposite pavement so that he could take a better look at her. She was tall and timbered and decrepit and, for a former whorehouse, stern. A stone urn stood at each corner of her hideous porch. Flaking naked maidens cavorted on them in a woodland setting. Her hallowed name was blazoned vertically on a rotting wooden board, and as Jonathan started across the road, a sharp east wind made it clatter like a railway train, filling his eyes with grit and his nostrils with smells of frites and hair spray.

Striding up the steps, he confidently pushed the ancient swing doors and entered the darkness of a tomb. From far away, as it seemed to him at first, he heard male laughter and caught the stink of last night's dinner. Gradually he made out an embossed copper postbox, then a grandfather clock with flowers on its face that reminded him of the Lanyon, then a reception desk littered with correspondence and coffee mugs and illuminated by a canopy of fairy lights. The shapes of men surrounded him, and it was they who were doing the laughing.

His arrival had evidently coincided with that of a bunch of raunchy surveyors from Quebec, who were looking for a little action before taking off next day for a mine up north. Their suitcases and kit bags were flung in a heap at the foot of a wide staircase. Two Slavic-looking boys in earrings and green aprons picked sullenly among the labels.

"Et vous, monsieur, vous etes qui?" a woman's voice yelled at him above the hubbub.

Jonathan made out the queenly form of Madame Latulipe, the proprietress, standing behind the desk in a mauve turban and cake makeup. She had tilted her head back in order to quiz him and she was playing to her all-male audience.

"Jacques Beauregard," he replied.

"Comment, cheri?"

He had to repeat it above the din: "Beauregard," he called, unused to raising his voice. But somehow the name came easier to him than Linden.

"Pas d'bagage?"

"Pas de bagage."

"Alors, bon soir et amusez-vous Men, m'sieu," Madame Latulipe yelled back at him as she handed him his key. It occurred to Jonathan that she had mistaken him for a member of the surveyors' party, but he saw no need to enlighten her.

"Allez-vous manger avec nous a'soir, M'sieu Beauregard?" she called, waking to his good looks as he started up the stairs.

Jonathan thought not, thank you, madame. Time he got some sleep.

"But one cannot sleep on an empty stomach, M'sieu Beauregard!" Madame Latulipe protested flirtatiously, once more for the benefit of her raucous guests. "One must have energy to sleep if one is a man! N'est-ce pas, mes gars?"

Pausing at the half-landing, Jonathan bravely joined the laughter but insisted nonetheless that he must sleep.

"Bien, tant pis d'abord!" cried Madame Latulipe.

Neither his unscheduled arrival nor his unkempt appearance disturbed her. Unkempt is reassuring in Esperance, and to Madame Latulipe, the town's self-elected cultural arbiter, a sign of spirituality. He was farouche, but farouche in her book meant noble, and she had detected Art in his face. He was a sauvage distingue, her favourite kind of man. By his accent she had arbitrarily ruled him French. Or perhaps Belgian. She was not an expert; she took her holidays in Florida. All she knew was, when he spoke French she could understand him, but when she spoke back at him he looked as insecure as all Frenchmen looked when they heard what Madame Latulipe was convinced was the true, the uncorrupted version of their tongue.

Nevertheless, on the strength of these impulsive observations, Madame Latulipe made a pardonable error. She placed Jonathan, not on one of the floors convenient for receiving lady guests, but in her grenier, in one of four pretty attic rooms that she liked to hold in reserve for her fellow bohemians. And she gave no thought to the fact--but then why should she?--that her daughter, Yvonne, had made her temporary refuge two doors down.

For four days Jonathan remained in the hotel without attracting more than his share of Madame Latulipe's consuming interest in her male guests.

"But you have deserted your group!" she cried at him, in mock alarm, when he appeared next morning late and alone for breakfast. "You are not a surveyor anymore? You have resigned? You wish to become a poet perhaps? In Esperance we write many poems."

Seeing him return in the evening, she asked him whether he had composed an elegy today, or painted a masterpiece. She suggested he take dinner, but he again declined.

"You have eaten somewhere else, m'sieu?" she demanded in mock accusation.

He smiled and shook his head.

"Tant pis d'abord," she said, which was her habitual reply to almost everything.

Otherwise he was room 306 to her, no trouble. It was not until Thursday, when he asked her for a job, that she subjected him to closer scrutiny. "What kind of job, man gars?" she enquired. renewed her impression of a man separate from the many. Perhaps too separate. She examined his shirt and decided it was the one he had been wearing when he arrived. Another prospector has gambled his last dollar, she thought. At least we haven't been paying for his meals.

"Any job," he replied.

"But there are many jobs in Esperance, Jacques." Madame Latulipe objected.

"I've tried them," said Jonathan, looking back on three days of Gallic shrugs or worse. "I tried the restaurants, the hotels, the boatyard and the lake marinas. I tried four mines, two logging companies, the cement works, two gas stations and the paper mill. They didn't like me either."

"But why not? You are very beautiful, very sensitive. Why do they not like you, Jacques?"

"They want papers. My social insurance number. Proof of Canadian citizenship. Proof I'm a landed immigrant."

"And you don't have these? None? You are too aesthetic?"

"My passport's with the immigration authorities in Ottawa. It's being processed. They wouldn't believe me. I'm Swiss," he added, as if that explained their incredulity.

But by then Madame Latulipe had pushed the button for her husband. Andre Latulipe had been born not Latulipe but Kviatkovski. It was only when his wife inherited the hotel from her father that he had consented to change his name to hers for the sake of perpetuating a branch of the Esperance nobility. He was a first-generation immigrant with a cherub's face and a broad, blank forehead and a mane of premature white hair. He was small and stocky and as fidgety as men become at fifty when they have worked themselves nearly to death and start to wonder why. As a child, Andrzej Kviatkovski had been hidden in cellars and smuggled over snowy mountain passes at dead of night. He had been held and questioned and released. He knew what it was to stand in front of uniforms and pray. He glanced at Jonathan's room bill and was impressed, as his wife had been, that it comprised no extra charges. A swindler would have used the telephone, signed tabs at the bar and in the restaurant. The Latulipes had had a few swindlers in their day, and that was what they did.

The bill still in his hand, Latulipe looked Jonathan slowly up and down, much as his wife had done before him, but with insight: at his wanderer's brown boots, scuffed but mysteriously clean; at his hands, small and workmanlike, held respectfully to his sides; at his trim stance and harrowed features and the spark of desperation in the eyes. And Monsieur Latulipe was moved to kinship by the sight of a man fighting for a toehold in a better world.

"What can you do?" he asked.

"Cook," said Jonathan.

He had joined the family. And Yvonne.

She knew him immediately: yes. It was as if, through the agency of her appalling mother, signals that might have taken months to exchange were transmitted and received in a second.