The Night Manager

Goodhew glanced up and down the rain-swept street. He was in sparkling mood. The previous day, his daughter had won a scholarship to South Hampstead, and his son, Julian, had been accepted by Clare College, Cambridge. "My master is having a severe case of the croup, Leonard. He has been talking to people again. Worse than scandal, he now fears he will look a bully. He is offended by the notion that he is instigating a wide-flung plot, mounted by two powerful governments against a lone British trader locked in battle against the recession. His sense of fair play tells him you are being disproportionate."

"Bully," Burr echoed softly, remembering Roper's eleven volumes of file, the tons of sophisticated weaponry lavished upon unsophisticated people. "Who's the bully? Jesus."

"Leave Jesus out of it, thank you. I need a counterblast. For Monday at first light. Brief enough to go on a postcard, no adjectives. And tell your nice man Strelski I adored his aria. Ah. We're saved. A bus."

* * *

Whitehall is a jungle, but like other jungles, it has a few watering holes where creatures who at any other hour of the day would rip each other to pieces may assemble at sunset and drink their fill in precarious companionship. Such a place was the Fiddler's Club, situated in an upper room on the Thames Embankment and named after a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, which used to stand next door.

"I think Rex is in the pay of a foreign power, don't you, Geoffrey?" said the solicitor from the Cabinet Office to Darker, while together they drew themselves a pint from the keg in the corner and signed a chit. "Don't you? I think he's taking Frog gold to undermine the effectiveness of British government. Cheers."

Darker was a small man, as men of power often are, with hollowed cheeks and sunken, steady eyes. He dressed in sharp blue suits and lots of cuff, and this evening he wore brown suede shoes as well, which gave a hint of Ascot to his gallows smile.

"Oh, Roger, however did you guess?" Goodhew replied with willed cheerfulness, determined to take the sally in good part. "I've been on the take for years, haven't I, Harry?" ― passing the question down the line to Harry Palfrey. "How else could I afford my shiny new bicycle?"

Darker continued smiling. And since he had no sense of humour, his smile was a little sinister, even mad. Eight men and Goodhew sat at the long refectory table: a Foreign Office mandarin, a baron from Treasury, the Cabinet Office solicitor, two squat-suited earthlings from the Tory middle benches, and three espiocrats, of whom Darker was the grandest and poor Harry Palfrey the most derelict. The room was fuggy and smoke-stained. Nothing commended it other than its handiness to Whitehall, to the House of Commons and to Darker's concrete kingdom across the river.

"Rex is dividing and ruling, if you ask me, Roger," said a Tory earthling who spent so much of his time sitting on secret committees that he was often mistaken for a civil servant.

"Power mania got up as constitutional cant. He's deliberately eroding the citadel from within, aren't you, Rex? Admit it."

"Sheer balderdash, thank you," Goodhew replied lightly.

"My master is merely concerned to drag the intelligence services into the new era and help them to set down their old burdens. You should be grateful to him."

"I don't think Rex has got a master," the mandarin from the Foreign Office objected, to laughter. "Has anyone ever seen the wretched fellow? I think Rex makes him up."

"Why are we so squeamish about drugs, anyway?" a Treasury man complained, his thin fingertips propped together like a bamboo bridge. "Service industry. Willing buyer, willing seller. Vast profits to the Third World, some of it's going to the right places, must be. We accept tobacco, booze, pollution, pox. Why are we such prudes about drugs? I wouldn't mind an order for a couple of billion quids' worth of arms, even if there was

a bit of cocaine on the bank notes; I'll tell you that for nothing!"

A drenched voice cut through their merriment. It came from Harry Palfrey, a River House lawyer now on permanent loan to Darker's Procurement Studies Group. "Burr's real," he warned huskily, with no particular prompting from anybody. He was drinking a large Scotch, not his first. "Burr does what he says."

"Oh my God," cried the Foreign Office in horror. "Then we're all for the high jump! Right, Geoffrey? Right?"

But Geoffrey Darker just listened with his eyes and smiled his mirthless smile.

* * *