The Night Manager

"If I can, Joe, for you, anything," he replied handsomely.

"Don't change, Ed. America needs you as you are. Don't give up any of your friends in high places or your connections with the Agency or your wife's arm's-length lucrative directorships of certain companies. Keep fixing things for us. The decent citizen knows too much already, Ed. Any more knowledge could seriously endanger his health. Think television. Five seconds of any subject is enough for anybody. People have to be normalised, Ed, not destabilised. And you're the man to do it for us."

* * *

Strelski drove home carefully through the winter sunlight. Anger brought its own vividness. Pretty white houses along the waterfront. White sailing yachts at the end of emerald lawns. The postman on his midday round. A red Ford Mustang was parked in his drive, and he recognised it as Amato's. He found him sitting on the deck wearing a funereal black tie and drinking Coke from the icebox. Stretched beside him on Strelski's rattan sofa, dressed in a Bogside black suit complete with waistcoat and black derby, lay a comatose Pat Flynn, an empty bottle of Bushmills single malt whiskey, ten years old, clutched to his bosom.

"Pat's been socialising with his former boss again," Amato explained, with a glance at his recumbent comrade. "They had like early breakfast. Leonard's snitch is aboard the Iron Pasha. Two guys helped him off the Roper jet at Antigua, two more guys helped him onto the seaplane. Pat's friend is quoting from reports compiled by very pure persons in Intelligence who have the honour to be Flagship cleared. Pat says maybe you'd like to pass the word of this to your friend Lenny Burr. Pat says to give Lenny his best respects. He enjoyed the experience of Mr. Burr despite the subsequent difficulties, tell him."

Strelski glanced at his watch and went quickly indoors. Speech on this phone was not secure. Burr picked up his end at once, as if he were waiting for it to ring.

"Your boy's gone sailing with his rich friends," Strelski said.

* * *

Burr was thankful for the pelting rain. A couple of times he had pulled onto the grass verge and sat in the car with the torrent booming on the roof while he waited till it eased. The downpour bestowed a temporary pardon. It restored the handloom weaver to his attic.

He was running later than he had meant to. "Take care," he had said meaninglessly, as he consigned the abject Palfrey to Rooke's custody. Take care of Palfrey, perhaps he was thinking. Or perhaps: Dear God, take care of Jonathan.

He's on the Pasha, he kept thinking as he drove. He's alive, even if he'd rather not be. For a while, that was all Burr's brain could do for him: Jonathan's alive, Jonathan's in torment, they're doing it to him now. Only after this period of due anguish, it seemed to Burr, was he able to apply his considerable powers of reasoning and, little by little, count up what crumbs of consolation he could find.

He's alive. Therefore Roper must want to keep him that way. Otherwise he would have had Jonathan killed as soon as he had signed his last piece of paper: another unexplained corpse on the Panamanian roadside, who cares?

He's alive. A crook of Roper's stamp does not bring a man to his a cruise yacht in order to kill him. He brings him because he needs to ask him things, and if he needs to kill him afterwards, he does it at a decent distance from the boat, with a proper respect for the local hygiene and the sensitivities of his guests.

So what does Roper want to ask him that he doesn't already know?

Perhaps: How much has Jonathan betrayed of the fine detail of the operation?

Perhaps: What is now the precise risk to Roper ― of prosecution, of the frustration of his grand scheme, of exposure, scandal, outcry?

Perhaps: How much protection do I still enjoy among those who are protecting me? Or will they be tiptoeing out of the back door as soon as the alarms begin to sound?

Perhaps: Who do you think you are, worming your way into my palace and stealing my woman from under me?

An arch of trees rose over the car, and Burr had a memory of Jonathan seated in the cottage at the Lanyon the night they dispatched him on his mission. He is holding Goodhew's letter to the oil lamp: I'm sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I'll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign?

You signed too bloody much, Burr told him gruffly in his mind. And it was me who egged you on.

Confess, he begged Jonathan. Betray me, betray us all. We've betrayed you, haven't we? Then do it back to us and save yourself. The enemy's not out there. He's here among us.

Betray us.