The Night Manager

"Dropped a boat on it," he said, which apparently was sufficient explanation. He asked her how business was. In his suit it seemed the right sort of question to ask. He had heard she had gone into interior design.

"Bloody awful," she replied heartily. "What's Jonathan up to, anyway? Oh my Lord," she said, when he told her. "You're in the leisure industries too. We're doomed, darling. You're not building them, are you?"

"No, no. Brokering. Ferrying. We've got off to quite a decent start."

"Who's we, darling?"

"An Australian chum."

"Male?"

"Male and eighteen stone."

"What are you doing for sex? I always thought you might be queer. You're not, though, are you?"

It was a charge she had made often in her day, but she seemed to have forgotten this.

"Good Lord no," Jonathan replied with a laugh. "How's Miles?"

"Worthy. Very sweet. Banking and good works. He's got to pay off my overdraft next month, so I'm being nice to him."

She ordered a warm duck salad and Badoit and lit a cigarette.

"Why did you give up hoteling?" she asked, blowing smoke in his face. "Bored?"

"Just the lure of the new," he said.

We'll desert, the captain's untameable daughter had whispered as she spread her sublime body over his. If I have to eat one more army dinner I'll blow up this whole barracks single-handed. Fuck me, Jonathan. Make me a woman. Fuck me and take me somewhere I can breathe.

"How's the painting doing?" he asked, remembering how they had both worshiped her great talent, how he had abased himself in order to elevate it, cooked and carried and swept for her, believing she would paint the better for his self-denial.

She snorted. "My last exhibition was three years ago. Sold six out of thirty, all to Miles's rich friends. Probably needed someone like you to make a basket case out of me. Jesus, you led me a dance. What the hell did you want? I wanted to be van Gogh ― what did you want? Apart from being the army's answer to Rambo?"

You, he thought. I wanted you, but you weren't there. He could say none of it. He wished he could be worse-mannered.

Bad manners are freedom, she used to say. Fucking is bad manners. But there was no point to her argument anymore. He had come to ask forgiveness for the future, not the past.

"Anyway, why didn't you want me to tell Miles I was seeing you?" she asked accusingly.

Jonathan pulled the old false smile. "I didn't want us to upset him," he said.

For a magic moment he saw her as he had first possessed her in the days when she was the belle of his regimental depot: the crisp rebellious face tilted in desire, lips parted, the angry smoulder in her eyes. Come back, he shouted in his heart. Let's try again.

The young ghost vanished and the old one reappeared.

"Why on earth

don't you pay in plastic?" she asked as he counted out the bank notes with his left hand. "Far easier to tell where the pennies are going, darling."

Burr was right, he thought. I'm a single man.

EIGHT

Hunched in the passenger seat of Rooke's car as they plunged through the gathering Cornish dusk, Burr pulled his overcoat collar more tightly about his ears and returned his soul to the suite of windowless rooms on the outskirts of Miami where not forty-eight hours earlier the covert action team for Operation Limpet had been holding its exceptional Open Day.

* * *

Covert action teams do not normally admit espiocrats and other sophists to their midst, but Burr and Strelski have their reasons. The atmosphere is of a Holiday Inn sales conference held in battle conditions. Delegates arrive singly, identify themselves, descend in steel elevators, identify themselves again and greet each other carefully. Each wears his name and occupation on his lapel, even if some names have been chosen only for this day and some occupations are so obscure that old hands pause to work them out. DEP DR OPS COORDS, reads one. SUPT NARCS & FMS SW, reads another. And between them, like refreshing smiles of clarity, U. S. SENATOR, FEDERAL PROSECUTOR or U. K. LIAISON.

The River House is represented by an enormous Englishwoman in perfect curls and Thatcherite twin set, known universally as Darling Katie and officially as Mrs. Katherine Handyside Dulling, Economic Counsellor of the British Embassy in Washington. For ten years Darling Katie has held the golden key to Whitehall's special relationship with America's numberless intelligence agencies. From Military to Naval to Air to State through Central and National to the omnipotent murmurers of the White House palace guard ― from the sane to the harmlessly mad to the dangerously ridiculous ― the secret overworld of American might is Katie's parish, to explore, bludgeon, bargain with and win to her celebrated dinner table.