The Night Manager by John le Carré
Pulling a large silk handkerchief from his pocket, Apostoll wiped away the sweat that had formed below his toupee.
Now, thought Burr in the hiatus. Go.
“And was Major Corkoran present on this occasion, Michael?” Burr asked innocently.
Immediately a scowl of disapproval settled over Apostoll’s darting features. His voice became snappish and accusing. “Major Corkoran, like Lord Langbourne, was very much in evidence. Major Corkoran was a valued guest. He operated the projector and performed the social honors, he spoke correctly to the ladies, fixed drinks and made himself agreeable. When my clients half-humorously proposed that Major Corkoran remain behind as a hostage until the deal was completed, the idea was warmly received by the ladies. When general heads of agreement were drawn up by myself and Lord Langbourne, Major Corkoran made a droll speech and signed with much flourish on Mr. Roper’s behalf. My clients relish a little foolery to lighten the daily burden. He took an indignant breath and his little fist opened to reveal a rosary. “Unfortunately, Doctor, on the insistence of Patrick and his rough-tongued friend here, I have been compelled to denigrate Major Corkoran in the eyes of my clients to the point where their enthusiasm for fun has waned. This is un-Christian behavior, sir. It is hearing false witness, and I deplore it. So does Father Lucan.”
“It’s just so shitty,” Lucan complained. I don’t think its even ethical. Is it?”
“Would you mind telling me, please, Michael, exactly what your clients have so far been told to the detriment of Major Corkoran?”
Apostoll’s head was stuck out like an indignant chicken’s. The strings in his neck were taut.
“Sir, I am not responsible for what my clients may have heard from other sources. As to what I have told them myself, I have told them precisely what my—” He seemed suddenly to have no word for his handlers. “I have advised my clients in my capacity as their lawyer of certain alleged facts in Major Corkoran’s past, which, if true, invalidate his suitability as a nominee in the longer term.”
“Such as?”
“I have been obliged to advise them that he has an irregular life-style and uses alcohol and drugs to excess. To my shame, I also told them he was indiscreet, which does not in the least accord with my experience of the Major. Even in his cups, he is the very soul of discretion.” He tipped his head indignantly at Flynn. “I was given to understand that the purpose of this distasteful maneuver was to clear away the surrogate figure of Major Corkoran, thereby moving Mr. Roper personally into the firing line. I am obliged to tell you that I do not share the optimism of these gentlemen in that regard, and even if I did share it, I would not consider these actions to be consistent with the ideals of a true legionary. If Major Corkoran is found unacceptable, Mr. Roper will merely procure for himself another signer.”
“Is Mr. Roper, so far as you know, aware of your clients’ reservations about Major Corkoran?” asked Burr.
“Sir, I am neither Mr. Roper’s keeper nor the keeper of my clients. They do not inform me of their inner deliberations. I respect that.”
Burr put his hand into the recesses of his sweat-soaked jacket and dragged out a limp envelope, which he tore open while Flynn, in his broadest Irish, explained its contents:
“Michael, what the Doctor has brought with him here is an exhaustive list of Major Corkoran’s misdemeanors before his employment by Mr. Roper. Most of the incidents relate to acts of venery. But we also have a couple of cases of riotous behavior in public places, drunk driving, drug abuse and going walkabout for days at a time, plus peculation of army finds. As the guardian of your clients’ interest, you are so worried by the rumors you’ve been hearing about the poor soul that you have taken it upon yourself to cause discreet inquiries to be made over in England, and this is what you’ve come up with.”
Apostoll was already protesting. “Sir, I am a member in good standing of the Florida and Louisiana bars, and a former president of the Dade County Bar Association. Major Corkoran is not duplicitous. I will not be used to frame an innocent man.”
“Sit the fuck down,” Strelski told him. “And that’s bullshit about the bar association.”
“He just makes things up,” Lucan told Burr in despair. “He’s incredible. Every time he says something, he indicates its opposite. Like, if he’s giving an example of the truth, it turns out to be a lie. I don’t know how to get him out of it.”
Burr put in a quiet plea: “If we could just discuss the question of timing, Patrick,” he suggested.
They walked back to the Cessna. Flynn led again, his gun across his arms.
“You think it worked?” Burr asked. “You really don’t think he guessed?”
“We’re too stupid,” said Strelski. “Just dumb cops.”
“We’re assholes,” Flynn agreed serenely.
11
The first blow seemed to hit Jonathan in his sleep. He heard the crunch of his jawbone and saw the black lights of a knockout, followed by a long flash of sheet lightning. He saw Latulipe’s contorted face glaring at him, and Latulipe’s right arm drawn back to hit him a second time. This seemed a silly thing for anyone to be doing: to use the right fist as if it were a hammer working at a nail and leave oneself wide open to retaliation. He heard Latulipe’s question and realized he was hearing it for the second time.
“Salaud! Who are you?”
Then he saw the crates of empties he had helped the Ukrainians stack in the yard that afternoon, and heard the striptease music playing through the disco fire exit. He saw a crescent moon hanging above Latulipe’s head like a crooked halo. He remembered that Latulipe had asked him to come outside a moment. And he supposed he should hit Latulipe back or at least block the second blow, but indifference or some sense of chivalry stayed his hand, so that the second blow hit him pretty much where the first had, and he had a brief memory of being back at the orphanage and running into a fire hydrant in the dark. But either his head was numb by then or it wasn’t a real fire hydrant, because it didn’t have half the effect of the first blow, except to open a cut at the corner of his mouth and send a flood of warm blood tracking down his chin.
“Where’s your Swiss passport? Are you a Swiss or not? Talk to me! What are you? You fuck up my daughter’s life, you lie to me, you drive my wife crazy, you eat at my table, who are you? Why do you lie?”
And this time, as Latulipe pulled back his fist, Jonathan kicked his feet out from under him and laid him on his back, careful at the same time to ease his fall because there was no nice tuft of windblown grass from the Lanyon to cushion him: the yard was paved with good Canadian asphalt. But Latulipe was undeterred and, scrambling gamely to his feet, seized Jonathan’s arm and frog-marched him into the dingy alley that ran along the back of the hotel, for years an informal urinal for the male population of the town. Latulipe’s Jeep Cherokee was parked at the far end. Jonathan could hear its engine running as they shuffled toward it.
“Get in!” Latulipe ordered. Pulling open the passenger door, he made to force Jonathan into the seat but lacked the skill. So Jonathan climbed in anyway, knowing that at any point in his ascent he could have felled Latulipe with his foot; could probably have killed him, in fact, with a kick to the head, for Latulipe’s wide Slav brow was at just the height for Jonathan to smash the temples. By the interior light of the Jeep he saw his Third World air bag lying on the back seat.
“Put on your belt. Now!” Latulipe shouted, as if a fastened seat belt would ensure his prisoner’s obedience.
But Jonathan obeyed anyway. Latulipe started the engine; the last lights of Espérance disappeared behind them. They entered the blackness of the Canadian night and drove for twenty minutes before Latulipe pulled out a packet of cigarettes and shoved it in Jonathan’s direction. Jonathan took one and lit it from the dashboard lighter. Then he lit Latulipe’s. The night sky, through the windscreen, was an immensity of rocking stars.
“So?” said Latulipe, trying to maintain his aggression.
“I’m English,
A car overtook them, but it wasn’t a baby-blue Pontiac.
“Did you kill him?”
“So they say.”
“How?”
Shot him in the face, he thought. With a pump-action shotgun, he thought. Betrayed him. Slit his dog from head to tail.
“They say his neck was broken,” he replied, in the same evasive tone as before, for he was overcome by an absurd reluctance to tell yet another lie.
“Why couldn’t you have left her alone?” Latulipe demanded in tragic exasperation. “Thomas is a good man. Her whole future waiting for her. Jesus Christ.”
“Where is she?”
Latulipe seemed to know no answer except a fierce gulp. They were heading north. Now and then Jonathan caught sight of a pair of headlights in the rearview mirror. They were chase-car lights, the same each time he looked.
“Her mother went to the police,” said Latulipe.
“When?” Jonathan asked. He supposed it should have been Why? The chase car was closing on them. Stay back, he thought. “She checked you out with the Swiss Embassy. They never heard of you. Would you do it again?”
“Do what?”
“This man who robbed you. Break his neck.”
“He came at me with a knife.”
“They sent for me,” Latulipe said, as if that were another insult. “The police. Wanted to know what kind of guy you are. Do you push drugs, make a lot of phone calls out of town, who do you know? They think you’re Al Capone. They don’t get a lot of action up here. They’ve got a photo from Ottawa, looks a bit like you. I told them, wait till morning, when the guests are sleeping.”
They had reached an intersection. Latulipe drew off the road. He was speaking breathlessly, like a messenger who had run his distance. “Men on the run here go north or south,” he said. “Best go west to Ontario. Never come back, understand? You come back, I’ll—” He took several breaths. “Maybe this time it will be me who does the killing.”
Jonathan took his bag and climbed into the dark. There was rain in the air and a smell of resin from the pines. The chase car passed them, and for a dangerous second Jonathan saw the rear license plate of her Pontiac. But Latulipe had his eyes on Jonathan.
“Here’s your pay,” he said, shoving a bunch of dollar bills at him.
She had driven back along the opposing roadway, then bumped across the center strip to make a U-turn. They sat in her car with the light on. The brown envelope lay on her lap, unopened. The sender’s name was printed in the corner: Bureau des Passeports, Ministère des Affaires Extérieures, Ottawa. Addressed to Thomas Lamont, care of Yvonne Latulipe, Le Château Babette. Thomas who says it’s all in Canada.
“Why didn’t you hit him back?” she asked.
One side of her face was swollen, and the eye was closed. That’s what I do for a living, he thought: I obliterate faces.
“He was just angry,” he said.
“You want me to take you somewhere? Drive you? Leave you somewhere?”
“I’ll handle it from here.”
“You want me to do anything?”
He shook his head. Then shook it again until he knew she had seen.
She handed him the envelope. “Which was better?” she asked harshly. “The fuck or the passport?”
“They were both great. Thanks.”
“Come on! I need to know! Which was better?”
He opened the door and climbed out, and saw by the courtesy light that she was smiling brightly.
“You nearly had me fooled, know that? God damn it, nearly got my wires crossed! You were great for an afternoon, Jonathan. Anything longer, I’ll take Thomas every time.”
“I’m glad I helped,” he said,
“So what was it for you?” she demanded, the smile still brilliantly in place. “Come on. Level. Scale of one to nine. Five? Six? Zero? I mean, Jesus, don’t you keep a score?”
“Thanks,” he said again.
He closed the car door and by the glow of the sky saw her head fall forward, then lift again, as she squared her shoulders and turned the ignition. With the engine running, she waited a moment, staring hard ahead of her. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. She drove onto the highway and for the first couple of hundred yards she either forgot her headlights or didn’t bother with them. She seemed to drive on compass in the darkness.
You killer this woman?
No. But I married her for her passport.
A lorry pulled up, and he rode for five hours with a black man called Ed who had problems with his mortgage and needed to talk them through. Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere, Jonathan called the number in Toronto and listened to the cheerful gossiping of the operators as they passed his commission across the forest wastes of eastern Canada.
“My name’s Jeremy. I’m a friend of Philip’s,” he said, which was what he had been saying each week from different pay phones whenever he checked in. Sometimes he could hear the call being rerouted. Sometimes he wondered whether it went to Toronto at all.
“Good morning, Jeremy! Or is it evening? How’s the world using you, old boy?”
Till now Jonathan had imagined someone enlivening. This time he seemed to be talking to another Ogilvey, false and overbred.
“Tell him I’ve got my shadow and I’m on my way.”
“Then allow me to offer the congratulations of the house,” said Ogilvey’s familiar.
That night, he dreamed of the Lanyon and of the lapwings flocking on the cliff, rising in their hundreds with stately wing-beats, then falling in a rolling twisting dive, until an unseasonable easterly caught them off their guard. He saw fifty dead and more floating out to sea. And he dreamed he had invited them, then let them die while he went off to find the worst man in the world.
This is the way safe houses should be, thought Burr. No more tin sheds full of bats in Louisiana swamps. Goodbye to bed-sits in Bloomsbury, stinking of sour milk and the previous user’s cigarettes. From now on we’ll meet our joes right here in Connecticut, in white weatherboard houses like this one, with ten acres of woodland and leather-lined dens crammed with books on the morality of being mountainously rich. There was a basketball hoop, and an electrified fence for keeping out deer and an electric zapper that, now evening was upon them, noisily cremated the bugs it lured with its sickly purple glow. Burr had insisted on manning the barbecue and had bought enough meat for several loyal regiments. He had removed his tie and jacket and was basting three enormous steaks in a violent crimson sauce. Jonathan, in swimming shorts, lounged beside the pool. Rooke, arrived from London the day before, sat in a deck chair, smoking his pipe.
“Will she talk?” Burr asked. No answer. “I said, will she talk?”
“What about?” said Jonathan.
“The passport. What do you think?”
Jonathan plunged back into the water and swam a couple of lengths. Burr waited till he had climbed out, then put the question a third time.
“Shouldn’t think so,” Jonathan said, vigorously toweling his head.
“Why not?” Rooke asked through his pipe smoke. “They usually do.”
“Why should the? She’s got Thomas,” Jonathan said.
They had been putting up with his taciturnity all day. For most of the morning he had walked alone in the forest. When they went shopping he had sat in the car while Burr foraged in the supermarket and Rooke went to Family Britches to buy a Stetson for his son.
“Loosen your girdle, will you?” Burr said. “Give yourself a Scotch or something. It’s me. Burr. All I’m trying to do is measure risk.”
Jonathan topped up Burr’s gin and tonic and poured one for himself. “How’s London?” he asked.
“The usual sewer,” said Burr. Billows of smoke belched from the steaks. He turned them over and brushed on red sauce to dress the burn.
“How about the old priest chap?” Rooke called from the ot
“She says she’ll take care of him,” Jonathan replied.
“Must be quite a girl,” said Rooke.
“She was,” said Jonathan, and flung himself into the water again, lunging up and down the pool like a man who could never get clean.
They ate dinner to the unnerving beat of the rapper’s executions. The steak, Burr decided, was really not that bad. Maybe there was only so much you could do to ruin good meat. Now and then he cast a covert glance across the candlelight at Jonathan, who was chatting with Rooke about riding motorbikes in Canada. You’re unlocking yourself, he decided with relief. You’re coming round. You just needed to talk to us for a while.
They huddled in the den, Rooke at his adventurous best. He had lit the wood stove, and on the table he had spread letters of reference in praise of one Thomas Lamont, and a portfolio of brokers’ illustrated prospectuses of private motor yachts.
“This one’s called Salamander,” he said, while Jonathan peered over his shoulder and Burr watched them from across the room. “A hundred and thirty feet, owner’s some Wall Street bandit. As of now she’s got no cook. This one’s called Persephone, but nobody who’s that rich knows how to pronounce her, so the new owner’s about to rechristen her Lolita. . . . She’s two hundred feet, takes a crew of ten plus six protection, two cooks and a majordomo. They’re looking for a majordomo, and we think you’re perfect for them.” A photograph of an agile, smiling man in tennis gear. “This man’s Billy Bourne, and he runs a charter and crewing agency in Newport, Rhode Island. Both the owners are clients of his. Tell him you cook and sail and give him your references. He won’t check them out, and anyway the people who are supposed to have written them are on the other side of the earth. All Billy cares about is, can you do the job, are you what he calls civilized, and have you got a police record? You can and you are and you haven’t. That’s to say, Thomas hasn’t.”
“Is Roper Billy’s client too?” Jonathan asked, now out ahead of them.