The Night Manager

"Well, you should have done. His last year's results were bloody awful, and this year's will be worse. His shares are down to seventy from one sixty, and three months ago he took a bold position on platinum just in time to see it go through the floor. He's not seriously concerned; he's just desperate." He drew breath and began again. "And tucked underneath his Ironbrand umbrella he's got his little uglies. There's the five Caribbean classics ― money laundering, gold, emeralds, wood from the rain forests, arms and more arms. There's phony Pharmaceuticals, phony aid packages with bent health ministers and fake fertilisers with bent agricultural ministers." The anger in Burr's voice was like a slowly rising storm, and the more alarming because it didn't break. "But weapons are his first love. Toys, he calls them. If you're into power, there's nothing like toys to feed the habit. Don't ever believe that crap about just another commodity, service industry. Arms are a drug, and Roper's hooked. Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they're not. Iran-Iraq was an arms dealers' charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it's been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course ― Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland ― but the numbers weren't in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba's gone dead; so's South Africa ― they make their own. Ireland isn't worth a light, or he'd have done that too. Peru, he's got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he's been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I've a suspicion he's going to get his nose bloodied again."

"Well, who lets him?" Jonathan asked aggressively. And when Burr for once was taken aback: "It's a hell of a lot to get away with, isn't it, with people like you breathing down his neck?"

For a moment longer Burr was stuck for a rejoinder. Exactly the same question, with its disgraceful answer, had been coursing in his own mind as he spoke: The River House lets him, he wanted to say. Whitehall lets him. Geoffrey Darker and his pals in Procurement Studies let him. Goodhew's master puts his telescope to both blind eyes and he lets him. If his toys are British, anyone will let him do anything he bloody likes. But his good luck delivered a distraction:

"Well, I'm damned!" he exclaimed, grasping Jonathan's arm. "Where's her father, then?"

Watched by her boyfriend, a girl of about seventeen was rolling up the leg of her jeans. Patches like wet insect bites covered her calf. She inserted the needle and didn't wince. But Burr winced for her, and his disgust sent him into himself for a while, so that they walked a distance in silence while Jonathan for a moment forgot Sophie and remembered instead Jed's endless baby-pink legs coming down Meister's ornamental staircase, and her smile as she just happened to catch his eye.

* * *

"So what is he?" Jonathan asked.

"I told you what he is. He's a bastard."

"What's his background? What makes him run?"

Burr shrugged. "Father a small-time auctioneer and valuer in the shires. Mother a pillar of the local church. One brother. Private schools the parents couldn't afford ― "

"Eton?"

"Why should he be?"

"It's that voice. No pronouns. No articles. The slur."

"I've only ever overheard him on the telephone. That'll do me fine. He's got one of those voices that make me vomit."

"Is Roper the elder or younger brother?"

"Younger."

"Did he go to university?"

"No. In too much of a hurry to screw up the world, most likely."

"Did his brother?"

"Yes. Are you being clever? The brother joined the family firm. It went down in the recession. Now he's pig-farming. So what?" He cast Jonathan an angry sideways look. "Don't you bloody start making excuses for him now, Jonathan," he warned. "If the Roper had gone to Eton and Oxford and had half a million a year of his own, he'd still be screwing up the world. He's a villain, and you'd better believe it. Evil exists."

"Oh, I know, I know," said Jonathan, placating him. Sophie had said the same.

"So what he's done is, he's done the lot," Burr resumed.