The Night Manager (34 page)

Waiting for an answer, Corkoran was busily writing himself little notes.

"Just get me a lift to Nassau," Jonathan said. "I've done you no harm. I'm not asking for anything. You'd never have known about me if I hadn't been such a fool at Low's. I don't need anything from you, I'm not applying for anything, I don't want money, I don't want thanks, I don't want your approval. Let me go--"

Corkoran worked his cigarette while he turned the pages on his lap. "What say we do Ireland for a change?" he proposed, as if Ireland were a party game for a wet afternoon. "Two old soldiers having a chin-wag about better times. What could be jollier than that?"

When you come to the true parts, don't sit back, Burr had said. Better to flounder, forget a little and correct yourself. make them think that's where they should be looking for the lies.

"What did you do to that bloke, anyway?" Frisky was asking, with professional curiosity.

It was the middle of the night. He was stretched on a futon across the door, a masked reading light and a heap of pornographic magazines beside his head.

"Which bloke?" said Jonathan.

"The bloke who borrowed little Danny for the evening. Screaming like a stuck pig he was, up there in the cookhouse--they could have heard him in Miami."

"I must have broken his arm."

"Broken it? I think you must have screwed it off him very slowly against the thread. Are you one of these amateur Japanese martial artists, then, one of your hari-suchi merchants?"

"I just grabbed and pulled," said Jonathan.

"Fell to pieces in your hand," Frisky said understandingly. "Happens to the best of us."

The most dangerous moments are when you need a friend, Burr had said.

And after Ireland they reconnoitred what Corkoran called "our days as upwardly mobile flunky," which meant Jonathan's time at catering college, then his days as sous-chef, then as chef and then as graduate to the staff side of the hotel business.

After that again, Corkoran needed to hear about his exploits at the Chateau Babette, which Jonathan related with scrupulous regard for Yvonne's anonymity, only to discover that Corkoran knew that story too.

"So how in Gawd's name do we come to stick a pin into Mama Low's, old love?" Corkoran asked, lighting himself another cigarette. "Mama's has been the Chief's favourite watering hole for donkeys' years."

"Just somewhere I thought I'd go to ground for a few weeks."

"Keep our head down, you mean?"

"I'd been doing a job on a yacht up in Maine."

"Chief cook and bottle washer?"

"Major-domo."

"I caught a bug and had to be put ashore. I lay up in a hotel in Boston, then called Billy Bourne in Newport. Billy gets me the work. He said, Why not devil at Low's for a few months, dinners only, take a rest?"

Corkoran licked a finger, fished out whatever he was looking for and held it to the light.

"For heaven's sake," Jonathan muttered, like a prayer for sleep.

"Now, this boat we went sick on, old love. That would have been the Lolita, nee Persephone, built in Holland, owned by Nikos Asserkalian, the celebrated show business personality, God-thumper and crook, two hundred feet of bloody awful taste. Not Nikos; he's a midget."

"I never met him. We were chartered out."

"Who to, my heart?"

"Four California dentists and their women."

Jonathan volunteered a couple of names, which Corkoran wrote down in his scruffy penny notebook, having first flattened it on his ample thigh.

"Balls of fun, were they? Laugh a minute?"

"They did me no harm."

"And you didn't do them any?" Corkoran suggested kindly. "Bust their safe or someone's neck, or do a knife job on them or anything?"

"Actually, go to hell," said Jonathan.

Corkoran considered this invitation and seemed to decide it was a good idea. He packed together his papers and emptied his ashtray into the wastepaper basket, making a frightful mess. He peered at himself in the mirror, grimaced and tried to pull his hair straight with his fingers, but it wasn't a success.

"It's too bloody good, dearie," he declared.

"What is?"

"Your story. Don't know why. Don't know how. Don't know where. It's you, I think. You make me feel inadequate."

He gave his hair another disastrous yank. "But then I am inadequate. I'm a savage little poof in a grownup world. Whereas you--you're just trying to be inadequate." He wandered into the bathroom and peed. "Tabby's brought some clothes for you, by the by," he called through the open doorway. "Nothing earthshaking, but they'll clothe our nakedness till the Armanis come through." He flushed, and reappeared in the bedroom.

"Left to myself, I'd roast you, actually," he said, zipping himself up. "I'd deprive you, hood you and hang you up by your fucking ankles till the truth fell out of you by gravity. Still, can't have everything in life, can we? Toodle-oo."

It was the next day. Daniel had decided that Jonathan was in need of entertainment.

"What's a Grecian urn?"

"A pot. A jug. Art form of the ancient Greeks."

"Fifty dollars a week. What goes through a tortoise's brain when it's being hit by a Mercedes?"

"Slow music?"

"Its shell. Corky's talking to Roper in the study. He says he's gone as far as he can go. Either you're squeaky clean or you're the biggest con in Christendom."

"When did they get back?"

"At first light. Roper always flies at first light. They're talking about your question mark."

"With Jed?"

"Jed's riding Sarah. She always rides Sarah as soon as she gets back. Sarah hears her and gets in a rage if she doesn't come. Roper says they're a pair of dykes. What's a dyke?"

"A woman who loves women."

"Roper talked to Sandy Langbourne about you while they were in Curaçao. No one's to discuss you on the telephone. Radio silence on Thomas until further notice. Chief's orders."

"Maybe you shouldn't eavesdrop on people so much. You'll wear yourself out."

Daniel arched his back, flung up his head and yelled at the punkah: "I don't eavesdrop! That's not fair! I wasn't even trying! I just can't help hearing! Corky says you're a dangerous riddle, that's all! You're not! I know you're not! I love you! Roper's going to feel your bones for himself and take a view!"

It was just before dawn.

"Know the best way to make a bloke talk, Tommy?" Tabby asked from the futon, offering a helpful tip. "Infallible? One hundred percent? Never known to fail? The fizzy-drink treatment. Bung his mouth up so he can't breathe except through his nose. Or her. Get a funnel, if there's one handy. And pour the fizz into his nose. Hits you right in the switchboard, like your brain's boiling. Bloody diabolical."

It was ten in the morning.

Walking uncertainly at Corkoran's side across the gravel sweep of Crystal, Jonathan had an exact memory of crossing the main courtyard of Buckingham Palace on the arm of his German Aunt Monika the day she took him to collect his dead father's medal. What's the point of prizes when you're dead? he had wondered. And school while you're alive?

A stocky black manservant admitted them. He wore a green waistcoat and black trousers. A venerable black butler in a striped cotton waistcoat came forward to receive them.

"For the Chief, please, Isaac," said Corkoran. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We're expected."

The immense hall echoed like a church to their footsteps. A curved marble staircase with a gilded handrail rose into the cupola, making three landings on its way to a blue-painted heaven. The marble they were walking on was pink, and the sunlight lifted from it in a rosy dew. Two man-sized Egyptian warriors guarded an arched doorway of carved stone. They passed through it and entered a gallery dominated by a gold head of the sun god Ra. Greek torsos, marble heads, hands, urns and stone panels of hieroglyphics stood or lay about in disarray. Brass-bound glass cabinets ran along the walls, crammed with figurines. Hand-printed signs declared their provenance: West African, Peruvian, pre-Columbian, Cambodian, Minoan, Russian, Roman and in one case simply "Nile."

He plunders, Burr had said.

Freddie likes to sell him stolen artefacts, Sophie had said.

Roper's going to feel your bones for himself, Daniel had said.

They entered the library. Leather-bound books reached from floor to ceiling. A rolling spiral staircase, unmanned, stood by.

They entered a prison corridor between arched dungeons. From their solitary cells, antique weapons glimmered in the twilight: swords and pikes and maces, suits of armour posed on wooden horses; muskets, halberds, cannon balls and green cannons still barnacled from the sea.

They passed a billiards room and came to the second centre of the house. Marble columns supported a wagon roof. A tiled blue pool mirrored them, bordered by a marble concourse. On the walls hung Impressionist paintings of fruit and farms and naked women: can this really be a Gauguin? On a marble chaise two young men in shirtsleeves and twenties baggy trousers talked business across open attaché cases.

"Corky, hi, how's tricks?" drawled one.

"Darlings," said Corkoran.

They approached a pair of high doors of burnished bronze. Before them sat Frisky in a porter's chair. A matronly woman emerged, carrying a shorthand pad. Frisky shoved out his foot at her, pretending to trip her up.

"Oh, you silly boy," said the matronly woman happily.

The doors closed again.

"Why, it's the Major," Frisky cried facetiously, affecting not to have noticed their arrival till the last minute. "How are we today, sir? Hullo there, Tommy. That's the way, then."

"Tit," said Corkoran.

Frisky unhooked a house telephone from the wall and touched a number. The doors opened to reveal a room so large, so intricate in its furnishings, so bathed with sunlight and blackened by shadow, that Jonathan had a sensation not of arriving but ascending. Through a wall of tinted windows lay a terrace of strangely formed white tables, each shaded by a white umbrella. Beyond them lay an emerald lagoon bordered by a narrow sandbar and black reefs. Beyond the reefs lay the open sea in lakes of jagged blues.

The splendour of the room was at first all Jonathan could take in. Its occupants, if there were any, were lost between the brilliance and the dark. Then, as Corkoran ushered him forward, he made out a swirling golden desk in tortoise-shell and brass, and behind it a scrolled throne covered in rich tapestry frayed with age. And beside the desk, in a bamboo sun chair with wide arms and a footstool, reclined the worst man in the world, dressed in white sailing ducks and espadrilles and a short-sleeved navy blue shirt with a monogram on the pocket.

He had his legs crossed and was wearing his half-lens spectacles, and he was reading something from a leather-backed folder that bore the same monogram as his shirt, and he was smiling while he read it, because he smiled a great deal. A woman secretary stood behind him, and she could have been the twin sister of the first.

"No disturbances, Frisky," an alarmingly familiar voice ordered, snapping the leather folder shut and shoving it at the secretary. "Nobody on the terrace. Who's the ass running an outboard in my bay?"

"That's Talbot, fixin' it, Chief," said Isaac from the back.

"Tell him to unfix it. Corks, shampoo. Well, I'm damned. Pine. Come here. Well done. Well done indeed."

He was clambering to his feet, his spectacles perched comically on the tip of his nose. Grasping Jonathan's hand, he drew him forward until, as at Meister's, they had entered each other's private space. And examined him, frowning through his spectacles. And while he did so, he slowly raised his palms to Jonathan's cheeks as if he meant to trap them in a double slap.

And kept them there, so close that Jonathan could feel their heat, while Roper posed his head at different angles, peering at him from a few inches' distance until he was satisfied.

"Bloody marvellous," he pronounced finally. "Well done, Pine; well done, Marti; well done, money. What it's for. Sorry not to be around when you arrived. Had a couple of farms to flog. When was the worst?" Disconcertingly, he had turned to Corkoran, who was advancing across the marble floor bearing a tray with three frosted silver goblets of Dom Perignon. "Here he is. Thought we were running a dry ship. Well?"

"After the operation, I suppose," said Jonathan. "Coming round. It was like the dentist multiplied by ten."

"Hang on. Here's the best bit."

Confused by Roper's scattershot method of talking. Jonathan had failed to hear the music. But as Roper's hand reached out to order silence, he recognised the dying strains of Pavarotti singing "La donna e mobile." All three stood motionless until the music ended. Then Roper lifted his goblet and drank.

"God, he's marvellous. Always play it on Sundays. Never miss, do I, Corks? Bloody good luck. Thanks."

"Good luck," said Jonathan, and drank too. As he did so, the sound of the distant outboard cut off, leaving a deep silence. Roper's gaze dropped to the scar on Jonathan's right wrist.

"How many for lunch, Corks?"

"Eighteen, rising twenty, Chief."

"Vincettis coming? Didn't hear their plane yet. That Czech twin-engined thing they fly."

"Coming when last heard of, Chief."

"Tell Jed, name cards. And decent napkins. None of that red loo paper. And track down the Vincettis, yes or no. Pauli come through about those 130s yet?"

"Still waiting, Chief."

"Well, he better be bloody quick, or never. Here you are. Pine. Sit down. Not there. Here, where I can see you. And the Sancerre, tell Isaac. Cold, for once. Apo faxed the draught amendment yet?"

"In your in-tray."

"Marvellous chap," Roper commented as Corkoran departed.

"I'm sure he is," Jonathan agreed politely.

"Loves to serve," said Roper, with the glance that heterosexuals share.

Roper was swirling the champagne in his goblet, smiling while he watched it go round and round. "Mind telling me what you want?" he asked.

"Well, I'd like to get back to Low's if I could. As soon as it's convenient, really. Just a plane to Nassau would be fine. I'll make my way from there."