The Night Manager (24 page)

They had reached an intersection. Latulipe drew off the road. He was speaking breathlessly, like a messenger who had run his distance. "Men on the run here go north or south," he said. "Best go west to Ontario. Never come back, understand? You come back, I'll--" He took several breaths. "Maybe this time it will be me who does the killing."

Jonathan took his bag and climbed into the dark. There was rain in the air and a smell of resin from the pines. The chase car passed them, and for a dangerous second Jonathan saw the rear licence plate of her Pontiac. But Latulipe had his eyes on Jonathan.

"Here's your pay," he said, shoving a bunch of dollar bills at him.

She had driven back along the opposing roadway, then bumped across the centre strip to make a U-turn. They sat in her car with the light on. The brown envelope lay on her lap, unopened.

The sender's name was printed in the corner: Bureau des Passeports, Ministere des Affaires Exlerieures, Ottawa. Addressed to Thomas Lamont, care of Yvonne Latulipe. Le Chateau Babette. Thomas who says it's all in Canada.

"Why didn't you hit him back?" she asked.

One side of her face was swollen, and the eye was closed.

That's what I do for a living, he thought: I obliterate faces.

"He was just angry," he said.

"You want me to take you somewhere? Drive you? Leave you somewhere?"

"I'll just handle it from here."

"You want me to do anything?"

He shook his head. Then shook it again until he knew she had seen.

She handed him the envelope. "Which was better?" she asked harshly. "The fuck or the passport?"

"They were both great. Thanks."

"Come on! I need to know! Which was better?"

He opened the door and climbed out, and saw by the courtesy light that she was smiling brightly.

"You nearly had me fooled, know that? God damn it, nearly got my wires crossed! You were great for an afternoon, Jonathan. Anything longer, I'll take Thomas every time."

"I'm glad I helped," he said.

"So what was it for you?" she demanded, the smile still brilliantly in place. "Come on. Level. Scale of one to nine. Five? Six? Zero? I mean, Jesus, don't you keep a score?"

"Thanks," he said again.

He closed the car door and by the glow of the sky saw her head fall forward, then lift again, as she squared her shoulders and turned the ignition. With the engine running, she waited a moment, staring hard ahead of her. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. She drove onto the highway and for the first couple of hundred yards she either forgot her headlights or didn't bother with them. She seemed to drive on compass in the darkness.

You killer this woman?

No. But I married her for her passport.

A lorry pulled up, and he rode for five hours with a black man called Ed who had problems with his mortgage and needed to talk them through. Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere, Jonathan called the number in Toronto and listened to the cheerful gossiping of the operators as they passed his commission across the forest wastes of eastern Canada.

"My name's Jeremy, I'm a friend of Philip's," he said, which was what he had been saying each week from different pay phones whenever he checked in. Sometimes he could hear the call being rerouted. Sometimes he wondered whether it went to Toronto at all.

"Good morning, Jeremy! Or is it evening? How's the world using you, old boy?"

Till now Jonathan had imagined someone enlivening. This time he seemed to be talking to another Ogilvey, false and overbred.

"Tell him I've got my shadow and I'm on my way."

"Then allow me to offer the congratulations of the house," said Ogilvey's familiar.

That night, he dreamed of the Lanyon and of the lapwings flocking on the cliff, rising in their hundreds with stately wing-beats, then falling in a rolling twisting dive, until an unseasonable easterly caught them off their guard. He saw fifty dead and more floating out to sea. And he dreamed he had invited them, then let them die while he went off to find the worst man in the world.

This is the way safe houses should be, thought Burr. No more tin sheds full of bats in Louisiana swamps. Goodbye to bedsits in Bloomsbury, stinking of sour milk and the previous user's cigarettes. From now on we'll meet our joes right here in Connecticut, in white weatherboard houses like this one, with ten acres of woodland and leather-lined dens crammed with books on the morality of being mountainously rich. There was a basketball hoop, and an electrified fence for keeping out deer, and an electric zapper that, now evening was upon them, noisily cremated the bugs it lured with its sickly purple glow.

Burr had insisted on manning the barbecue and had bought enough meat for several loyal regiments. He had removed his tie and jacket and was basting three enormous steaks in a violent crimson sauce. Jonathan, in swimming shorts, lounged beside the pool. Rooke, arrived from London the day before, sat in a deck chair, smoking his pipe, "Will she talk?" Burr asked. No answer. "I said, will she talk?"

"What about?" said Jonathan.

"The passport. What do you think?"

Jonathan plunged back into the water and swam a couple of lengths. Burr waited till he had climbed out, then put the question a third time.

"Shouldn't think so," Jonathan said, vigorously towelling his head.

"Why not?" Rooke asked through his pipe smoke. "They usually do."

"Why should she? She's got Thomas," Jonathan said.

They had been putting up with his taciturnity all day. For most of the morning he had walked alone in the forest. When they went shopping he had sat in the car while Burr foraged in the supermarket and Rooke went to Family Britches to buy a Stetson for his son.

"Loosen your girdle, will you?" Burr said. "Give yourself a Scotch or something. It's me. Burr. All I'm trying to do is measure risk."

Jonathan topped up Burr's gin and tonic and poured one for himself. "How's London?" he asked.

"The usual sewer," said Burr. Billows of smoke belched from the steaks. He turned them over and brushed on red sauce to dress the burn.

"How about the old priest chap?" Rooke called from the other side of the pool. "Going to get a bit of a shock, isn't he, when he sees whose photograph he hasn't signed?"

"She says she'll take care of him," Jonathan replied.

"Must be quite a girl." said Rooke.

"She was," said Jonathan, and flung himself into the water again, lunging up and down the pool like a man who could never get clean.

They ate dinner to the unnerving beat of the zapper's executions.

The steak, Burr decided, was really not that bad. Maybe there was only so much you could do to ruin good meat. Now and then he cast a covert glance across the candle-light at Jonathan, who was chatting with Rooke about riding motorbikes in Canada. You're unlocking yourself, he decided with relief.

You're coming round. You just needed to talk to us for a while.

They huddled in the den, Rooke at his adventurous best. He had lit the wood stove, and on the table he had spread letters of reference in praise of one Thomas Lamont, and a portfolio of brokers' illustrated prospectuses of private motor yachts.

"This one's called Salamander," he said, while Jonathan peered over his shoulder and Burr watched them from across the room. "A hundred and thirty feet, owner's some Wall Street bandit. As of now she's got no cook. This one's called Persephone, but nobody who's that rich knows how to pronounce her, so the new owner's about to rechristen her Lolita.... She's two hundred feet, takes a crew of ten plus six protection, two cooks and a major-domo. They're looking for a major-domo, and we think you're perfect for them." A photograph of an agile, smiling man in tennis gear. "This man's Billy Bourne, and he runs a charter and crewing agency in Newport, Rhode Island. Both the owners are clients of his. Tell him you cook and sail and give him your references. He won't check them out, and anyway the people who are supposed to have written them are on the other side of the earth. All Billy cares about is, can you do the job, are you what he calls civilised, and have you got a police record? You can and you are and you haven't. That's to say, Thomas hasn't."

"Is Roper Billy's client too?" Jonathan asked, now out ahead of them.

"Mind your own business," said Burr from his corner, and they all laughed. But beneath the jolly laughter lay a truth they were all aware of: the less Jonathan knew about Roper and his works, the less likely he was to betray himself.

"Billy Bourne's your trump card, Jonathan," said Rooke.

"Look after him. As soon as you're paid, make sure you send him his commission. When you're on a new job, be sure to call Billy and tell him how it's going. Play straight by Billy, and he'll open any door you want. Everybody Billy loves loves Billy."

"This is your last qualifying round," said Burr. "After this, it's the final."

Next morning, when Jonathan had had his early swim and everyone was fresh and rested, Rooke got out his magic box, the clandestine radio-telephone with alternating frequency.

First they went into the woods and played hide-and-seek, taking it in turns to cache the box and find it. Then, between briefing sessions, Rooke made Jonathan talk to London, back and forth until he was at home with the system. He showed him how to change the batteries and how to recharge them and how to steal power from the mains. And after the radio-telephone, Rooke produced his other prize exhibit: a subminiature camera got up as a Zippo lighter that was not just idiot-proof, he said, but actually took photographs. In all, they spent three days in Connecticut, which was longer than Burr had intended.

"It's our last chance to talk this through," he kept telling Rooke, as a way of excusing the delay.

Talk what? Through to where? Deep down, as Burr afterwards admitted to himself, he was waiting for an obligatory scene.

Yet, as so often with Jonathan, he had no idea how it should have unfolded.

"The equestrienne's still riding high, if that's any consolation," he said, hoping to cheer Jonathan up. "Hasn't fallen out of her saddle yet."

But the memory of Yvonne must have been hanging too heavy on him, for he barely managed a smile.

"He had a ding-dong with that Sophie woman in Cairo, I bloody know he did," Burr told Rooke as they flew home.

Rooke gave a disapproving frown. He did not hold with Burr's occasional flights of intuition, any more than he believed in blackening a dead woman's name.

"Darling Katie is as mad as a wet hen," Harry Palfrey announced proudly, seated over a whisky in Goodhew's drawing room in Kentish Town. He was grey-haired and ravaged and fifty, with puffy drinker's lips and haunted eyes. He wore a lawyer's black waistcoat. He had come straight from his work across the river. "She's Concording back from Washington, and Marjoram is on his way to Heathrow to meet her. It's a war party."

"Why doesn't Darker go himself?"

"He likes cut-outs. Even if they're his deputy, like Marjoram, he can still say he wasn't there."

Goodhew started to ask something else but thought it better not to interrupt while Palfrey was unburdening himself.

"Katie says the Cousins are waking up to what they've got. They've decided that Strelski lulled them into imbecility in Miami and you and Burr aided and abetted him. She says she can stand on the banks of the Potomac and watch the smoke rising off Capitol Hill. She says everyone is talking new parameters and power vacuums in their own backyard. Filled or created, I can't quite fathom which."

"God, I do hate parameters," Goodhew remarked, buying himself time while he replenished Palfrey's whisky. "I had formulaic this morning. It ruined my day. And my master escalates. Nothing rises for him, or increases, or grows, or advances, or progresses, or multiplies, or matures. It escalates. Cheers," he said, sitting down again.

But as Goodhew spoke these words, a cold shudder passed over him, raising the hair down his spine and causing him to sneeze several times in quick succession.

"What do they want, Harry?" he asked.

Palfrey screwed up his face as if he had soap in his eyes, and ducked his mouth to his glass.

"Limpet," he said.

TWELVE

Mr. Richard Roper's motor yacht, the Iron Pasha, appeared off the eastern tip of Hunter's Island at six o'clock exactly, prow forward like an attack boat, cut against a cloudless evening sky and growing perceptibly as she advanced toward Deep Bay over a flat sea. In case anybody doubted it was the Pasha, her crew had already called ahead by satcom to reserve the long mooring on the outer harbour, and the round table on the terrace for sixteen at eight-thirty, and the front row for the crab races afterwards. Even the menu was discussed. All the adults like seafood. Chips and grilled chicken for the children And the Chief goes crazy if there isn't enough ice.

It was between seasons, the time of year when you don't see too many big yachts cruising the Caribbean other than the commercial cruise ships out of Nassau and Miami. But if any of those had tried to put in at Hunter's Island, they'd have received no warm welcome from Mama Low, who liked rich yachties and abominated the common herd.

Jonathan had been waiting for the Pasha all week. Nevertheless, for a second or two after he sighted her he fancied himself trapped, and amused himself with the idea of escaping inland to the only town, or hijacking Mama Low's old bum boat, Hi-lo, which was anchored, with outboard fitted, not twenty yards from where he was staring out to sea at the Pasha's approach. Twin two-thousand-horsepower diesels, he was rehearsing. Extended afterdeck for helicopter, oversized Vosper stabilisers, seaplane launcher on the stern. The Pasha is quite a lady.

But foreknowledge did not ease his apprehension. Until this moment he had pictured himself advancing on Roper, and now Roper was advancing on him. First he felt faint, then hungry.

Then he heard Mama Low yelling at him to get his white Canadian ass up here double quick, and he felt better. He trotted back along the wooden pier and up the sand track to the shack.

His weeks at sea had seen an improvement in his appearance.

An ocean-going looseness marked his stride, his eyes had gentled, his complexion had a healthy glow. As he climbed the rise he met the western sun starting to swell before it set, forming a copper rim round its circumference. Two of Mama Low's sons were rolling the famed round tabletop up the stone path to the terrace. Their names were Wellington and Nelson, but to Mama Low they were Swats and Wet Eye. Swats was sixteen and wreathed in fat. He was supposed to be in Nassau studying, but wouldn't go. Wet Eye was lean as a blade, smoked ganja and hated whites. The two had been working on the table for the last half hour, sniggering and achieving nothing.