The Night Manager

"We're talking high-tech, mid-tech, low-tech and bugger-all-tech. He hates tanks because they've a long shelf life, but at a price he'll bend his rules. We're talking boots, uniforms, poison gas, cluster bombs, chemicals, MREs ― that's meals ready to eat ― inertial navigation systems, fighter aeroplanes, signal pads, pencils, red phosphorus, grenades, torpedoes, custom-built submarines, motor torpedo boats, fly killer, guidance systems, leg irons, mobile kitchens, brass buttons, medals and regimental swords, Metz flashguns and spook laboratories got up as chicken batteries, tires, belts, bushings, ammo of all calibres, both U. S. and Sov compatible, Red Eyes and other shoulder-held launchers such as Stingers, and body bags. Or we were ― because today we're talking glut and national bankruptcies and governments offering better terms than their own crooks. You should see his warehouses. Taipei, Panama, Port of Spain, Gdansk. He used to employ close to a thousand men, did our chum, just to polish the equipment he was storing while the price went up. Always up, never down. Now he's reduced to sixty men, and prices are through the floor."

"So what's his answer?"

It was Burr's turn to become evasive. "He's going for the big one. One last bite of the apple. The deal to end all deals. He wants to turn Ironbrand around and hang up his boots in a blaze of glory. Tell me something."

Jonathan was not yet accustomed to Burr's abrupt changes of direction.

"That morning in Cairo when you took Sophie for a drive. After Freddie had smacked her about."

"Well?"

"Do you think anyone tumbled you at all, spotted you with her, put two and two together?"

Jonathan had asked himself the same question a thousand times: at night when he roamed his darkened kingdom in order to escape his inner self, by day when he couldn't sleep but flung himself instead against the mountains, or sailed his boat to nowhere.

"No," he retorted.

"Certain?"

"Certain as I can be."

"Did you take any other risks with her? Go anywhere together where you could have been recognised?"

It gave Jonathan a mysterious pleasure, he discovered, to lie for Sophie's protection, even though it was too late.

"No," he repeated firmly.

"Well, you're clean then, aren't you?" Burr said, unconsciously echoing Sophie again.

* * *

Sharing a quiet spell, the two men sipped Scotch together in a coffeehouse in the old town, a place with no night or day, among rich ladies wearing trilby hats to eat cream cakes. Sometimes the catholicity of the Swiss enchanted Jonathan. This evening it seemed to him they had painted their entire country in different shades of grey.

Burr began telling an amusing story about Dr. Apostoll, the distinguished lawyer. It began jerkily, almost as a blurt, as if he had intruded upon his own thoughts. He should not have told it, which he knew as soon as he had embarked on it. But sometimes when we are nursing a great secret we can think of nothing else.

Apo's a voluptuary, he said. He had said it before. Apo's screwing everything in sight, he said, don't be fooled by that prissy demeanour; he's one of those little men who's got to prove he's got a bigger willie than all the big men put together.

The secretaries, other people's wives, strings of hookers from the agencies ― Apo's into the whole thing.

"Then one day, up gets his daughter and kills herself. Not nicely either, if there is a nicely. A real murder job on herself. Fifty aspirin washed down with half a bottle of pure bleach."

"Whatever did she do that for?" Jonathan exclaimed in horror.

"Apo had given her this gold watch for her eighteenth birthday. Ninety thousand dollars' worth from Cartier's in Bal Harbour. You couldn't find a better watch than that one anywhere."

"But what's wrong with giving her a gold watch?"

"Nothing, except he'd given her the same watch on her seventeenth and forgotten. The girl wanted to feel rejected, I suppose, and the watch tipped the scales for her." He made no pause. He did not raise his voice or change his tone. He wanted to get away from the story as fast as possible. "Have you said 'yes' yet? I didn't hear."

But Jonathan, to Burr's discomfort, preferred to stay with Apostoll. "So what did he do?" he asked.

"Apo? What they all do. Had himself born again. Came to Jesus. Burst into tears at cocktail parties. Do we sign you up or write you off, Jonathan? I never was one for long courtships."

The boy's face again, green for red as it split and spread with each fresh wave of shot. Sophie's face, smashed a second time when they killed her. His mother's face, tilted with her jaw wide open, before the night nurse pushed it shut and bound it with a piece of cheesecloth. Roper's face, coming too close as it leaned into Jonathan's private space.

But Burr too was having his own thoughts. He was berating himself for painting Apostoll so large in Jonathan's mind. He was wondering whether he would ever learn to guard his stupid tongue.

* * *