The Night Manager by John le Carré
“You said that to me once before, Leonard, and I was desperate too, so I gave it to you. It didn’t do either of us any harm at the time, but it’s different now. Either I’ll ring Geoffrey, or you’ll go. It’s you to choose.”
Debbie is still smiling. So is Burr. He keeps his smile in place all the way down the lane of clerks until he reaches the street. Then the London damp hits him like a clumsy punch and turns his self-control to outrage.
Three boats. All going in different bloody directions! My joe, my guns, my dope, my case—and none of it my business!
But by the time he reaches Denham’s stately office he is his out-wardly dour self again, the way Denham would like him best.
Denham was a lawyer and Harry Palfrey’s unlikely predecessor as legal adviser to the Procurement Studies Group in the days before it became Darker’s manor. When Burr launched his bloody battle against the illegals, Denham had urged him forward, picked him up when he got hurt and sent him back to try again. When Darker made his successful putsch and Palfrey padded after him, Denham put on his hat and quietly walked back across the river. But he had remained Burr’s champion. If Burr ever felt confident of an ally among the Whitehall legal mandarins, Denham was his man.
“Oh, hullo, Leonard. Glad you rang. Aren’t you freezing cold? We don’t supply blankets, I’m afraid. Sometimes I rather think we should.”
Denham played the fop. He was lank and shadowy, with a schoolboy shock of hair turned gray. He wore broad-striped suits and outrageous waistcoats over two-toned shirts. Yet deep down, like Goodhew, he was some sort of an abstainer. His room should have been splendid, for he had the rank. It was high, with pretty moldings and decent furniture. But the atmosphere was of a classroom, and the carved fireplace was stuffed with red cellophane coated in a film of dust. A Christmas card eleven months old showed Norwich cathedral in the snow.
“We’ve met. Guy Eccles,” said a chunky man with a prominent jaw who sat reading telegrams at the center table.
We’ve met, Burr agreed, returning his nod. You’re Signals Eccles, and I never liked you. You play golf and drive a Jaguar. What the hell are you doing, muscling in on my appointment? He sat down. Nobody had quite asked him to. Denham was trying to turn up the Crimean War radiator, but either the knob had stuck or else he was turning it the wrong way.
“I’ve a bit of a load to get off my chest, Nicky, if it’s all the same to you,” said Burr, deliberately ignoring Eccles. “Time’s running against me.”
“If it’s about the Limpet thing,” said Denham, giving the knob a last wrench, “Guy might be rather good to have around.” He perched himself on a chair arm. He seemed reluctant to sit at his own desk. “Guy’s been hopping back and forth to Panama for months,” he explained. “Haven’t you, Guy?”
“What for?” said Burr.
“Just visiting,” said Eccles.
“I want interdiction, Nicky. I want you to move heaven and earth. This is what we were in business for, remember? We sat up nights, talking about just this moment.”
“Yes. Yes, we did,” Denham agreed, as if Burr had made a valid point.
Eccles was smiling at something he was reading in a telegram. He had three trays. He took the telegrams from one tray and, when he had read them, chucked them into one of the others. That seemed to be his job today.
“It is about feasibility, however, isn’t it?” Denham said. He was on the arm of the chair still, his long legs stretched straight before him, his long hands thrust into his pockets.
“So’s my paper. So’s Goodhew’s submission to Cabinet, if it ever gets there. Where there’s a will—remember, Nicky? We won’t hide behind the arguments—remember? We’ll get every country involved round a table. Face them off. Challenge them to say no. International hardball, that’s what you used to call it. We both did.”
Denham loped to the wall behind his desk and plucked a cord from the folds of a heavy muslim curtain. A large-scale map of Central America appeared, covered by a transparent skin.
“We have been thinking about you, Leonard,” he said archly. “It’s action I’m after, Nicky. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking of my own.”
A red boat was pinned off the port of Colón abreast of half a dozen gray ones. At the southern end of the Canal, projected routes to east and west of the Gulf of Panama were overlaid in different colors.
“We haven’t been idle while you’ve been so industrious, I assure you. So ship ahoy. The Lombardy, her gunwales awash with arms. We hope. Because if they’re not, we’re in the most frightful shit, but that’s another story.”
“Is this the latest position anyone’s got for her?” said Burr.
“Oh, I think so,” said Denham.
“It’s the latest we’ve got, that’s for sure,” said Eccles, dropping a green telegram into the center tray. He had a lowland Scottish accent. Burr had forgotten about it. Now he remembered. If there was one regional accent that grated on his ear like fingernails on a blackboard, it was lowland Scots.
“The Cousins’ wheels grind exceeding slow these days,” Eccles remarked, after a small suck of the front teeth. “It’s that Vandon woman, Bar-ba-ra. Everything has to be in triplicate for her.” He gave his teeth a second suck of disapproval.
But Burr kept talking only to Denham, because he was anxious not to lose his temper. “There’s two speeds, Nicky. Limpet speed and the other one. American Enforcement’s being given the runaround by the Cousins.”
Eccles did not look up from his reading as he spoke. “Central America is the Cousins’ bailiwick,” he said, in his borderer’s brogue. “The Cousins watch and listen; we get the take. No point in setting two dogs after one hare. Not cost-effective. Not at all. Not these days.” He tossed a telegram into a tray. “Bloody waste of money, in fact.”
Denham was talking before Eccles had quite finished. He seemed concerned to hurry things along.
“So let’s assume she’s where she is when last reported,” he proposed enthusiastically, poking at the Lombardy’s stern with his twig-like forefinger. “She’s got her Colombian crew—not yet confirmed, but we’ll assume it—she’s headed for the Canal and Buenaventura. All exactly as your marvelous source reports. Bravo him, her or it. If things happen in the ordinary way—and one assumes that she’ll want to look as ordinary as poss—she’ll hit the Canal sometime today. Right?”
Nobody said “Right” back.
“The Canal’s a one-way street. Down in the mornings. Up in the afternoons. Or is it t’other way round?”
A tall girl with long brown hair walked in and without a word to anybody swept her skirts under her and sat herself primly before a computer screen as if she were about to play the harpsichord.
“It varies,” Eccles said.
“Nothing to stop her turning tail and pissing off to Caracas, I suppose,” Denham continued as his finger prodded the Lombardy into the Canal. “Sorry, Priscilla. Or up the road to Costa Rica or wherever. Or down this way and hit Colombia from the western side, long as the cartels can guarantee a safe harbor. They can guarantee most things. But we’re still thinking Buenaventura, because you told us to. Hence the lines on my nice map.”
“There’s a fleet of army lorries lined up in Buenaventura to receive them,” Burr said.
“Not confirmed,” said Eccles.
“It bloody well is,” said Burr, without lifting his voice in the least. “We had it from Strelski’s late source via Moranti, plus there’s independent corroboration from satellite photographs of lorries moving down the road.”
“Lorries move up and down that road all the time,” said Eccles. And stretched both arms above his head as if Burr’s presence were draining him of energy. “Anyway, Strelski’s late source is discredited. There’s a serious school of thought says he was full of shit from the start. All these snitches fabricate. They think it’ll earn them more remission.”
“Nicky,” Burr said to Denham’s back.
Denham was pushing the Lombardy into the G
“Leonard,” he said.
“Are we boarding her? Are we pulling her in?”
“You mean, are the Americans?”
“Whoever. Yes or no?”
Shaking his head at Burr’s obduracy, Eccles posted yet another telegram ostentatiously into a tray. The girl at the computer had tucked her hair behind her ears and was pressing keys. Burr could not see her screen. The tip of her tongue had appeared between her teeth.
“Yes, well, that’s the bugger, you see, Leonard,” said Denham, all enthusiasm again. “Sorry, Priscilla. For the Americans—thank God—not for us. If the Lombardy hugs the coast”—his striped arm made a bowler’s arc until it reached a route that followed the complex coastline between the Gulf of Panama and Buenaventura—“then, so far as we can see, she’s got the Americans by the proverbial short-and-curlies. The Lombardy will then be sailing straight from Panamanian national waters into Colombian national waters, you see, so the poor old Americans won’t get a look in.”
“Why not arrest her in Panamanian waters? The Americans are all over Panama. They own the bloody place, or think they do.”
“Not so, at all, I’m afraid. If they’re going to pounce on the Lombardy with all guns blazing, they’ll need to sail in behind the Panamanian Navy. Don’t laugh.”
“It was Eccles laughing, not me.”
“And in order to get the Panamanians to the starting line, they’ve got to prove that the Lombardy has committed a crime under Panamanian law. She hasn’t. She’s in transit from Curaçao and on her way to Colombia.”
“But she’s stuffed with illegal bloody guns!”
“So you say. Or your source does. And of course one terribly hopes you’re right. Or he, she or it is, rather. But the Lombardy wishes the Pans no ill and she also happens to be Pan registered. And the Pans are frightfully reluctant to be seen providing flags of convenience and then inviting the Americans to tear them down. Very hard, in fact, to persuade the Pans to do anything at the moment. Post-Noriega tristis, I’m afraid. Sorry, Priscilla. Sullen hatred is more like it. Nursing some very wounded national pride.”
Burr was standing. Eccles was watching him dangerously, like a policeman who has spotted trouble. Denham must have heard him stand, but he had taken refuge in the map. The girl Priscilla had stopped pressing keys.
“All right, hit her in Colombian waters!” Burr almost shouted, jabbing a finger at the coastline north of Buenaventura. “Lean on the Colombian government. We’re helping them clean up their shop, aren’t we? Rid themselves of the curse of the cocaine cartels? Busting their dope laboratories for them?” His voice slipped a little. Or perhaps it had slipped a lot and he only heard a little. “The Colombian government is not going to be exactly overjoyed to see weapons pouring into Buenaventura to equip the cartels’ new army. I mean, have we forgotten everything we talked about, Nicky? Has yesterday been declared a top-secret area or something? Tell me there’s some logic in this somewhere.”
“If you think you can separate the Colombian government from the cartels, you’re living in cloud-cuckoo-land,” Denham retorted, with more steel than he seemed to possess. “If you think you can separate the cocaine economy from the economies of Latin America, you’re barking.”
“Wanking,” Eccles corrected him, with no apology to Priscilla.
“A lot of people down that way regard the coca plant as a double blessing bestowed on them by God,” Denham resumed, launching himself on a paean of self-exculpation. “Not only does Uncle Sam choose to poison himself with it, but he enriches the oppressed Latinos while he’s about it! What could possibly be jollier? The Colombians will be frightfully willing to cooperate with Uncle Sam in a venture like this, of course. But they just may not quite get their act together in time to stop the shipment. Weeks of diplomacy necessary, one’s afraid, and a lot of people on holiday. And they will want a guarantee of costs for when they pull her into port. All that unloading, the overtime, the unsociable hours.” The sheer force of his harangue was producing calm. It is not easy to fulminate and listen at the same time. “And they’ll want legal indemnification in case the Lombardy is clean, naturally. And if she isn’t, which I’m delighted to believe, there’ll be unseemly haggling about whose guns they are once they’re confiscated. And who gets to keep them, and sell them back to the cartels when its all over. And who goes to prison where, and how long for, and with how many hookers to keep him happy in the meantime. And how many thugs he’s allowed to have look after him, and how many telephone lines to run his business, and order his assassinations, and talk to his fifty bank managers. And who gets paid off when he decides he’s done enough time, which will be in about six weeks. And who gets disgraced, and who gets promoted, and who gets a medal for bravery when he escapes. Meanwhile, one way or another, your guns will be safely in the hands of the chaps who’ve been trained to use them. Welcome to Colombia!”
Burr mustered the last of his self-control. He was in London. He was in the land of make-believe power. He was standing in its hallowed headquarters. He had left the most obvious solution till last, perhaps because he knew that in the world where Denham lived, the obvious was the least likely course.
“Okay, then.” He rapped the center of Panama with the back of his hand. “Let’s grab the Lombardy when she goes up the Canal. The Americans run the Canal. They built it. Or have we got another ten good reasons for sitting on our arses?”
Denham was enthusiastically appalled.
“Oh, my dear man! We’d be infringing the most sacred article of the Canal Treaty. Nobody—not the Americans, not even the Pans—has a right of search. Not unless they can prove that the vessel they’re after presents a physical danger to the Canal. I suppose if it’s full of bombs that could go off, you’d have a case. Old bombs, they’d have to be, not new ones. If you could prove they were going to go off. You’d have to be jolly sure. If they’re properly packed, you’re scuppered. Can you so prove? It’s an all-American thing, anyway. We’re only observing, thank God. Leaning a bit where it’s helpful. Staying out of their light when it’s not. We’ll probably make a démarche to the Pans if we’re asked. In concert with the Americans, of course. Just to give strength to their elbow. Might even make one to the Colombs, if State twists our arm. Nothing much to be lost, not at the moment.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When will you try and mobilize the Panamanians?”
“Tomorrow probably. Could be the next day.” He glanced at his watch. “What is today?” It seemed important to him not to know. “Depends how tied up the ambassadors are. When’s Carnival, Priscilla? I forget. This is Priscilla. Sorry not to have done the honors.”
Tapping softly at her keyboard, Priscilla said, “Not for eons.” Eccles had more telegrams.
“But you went through all this, Nicky!” Burr implored in one last appeal to the Denham he thought he had known. “What’s changed? Joint Steering held policy meetings galore! You had every bloody contingency cooked three ways! If Roper does this, we do this. Or that. Or that. Remember? I saw the minutes. You and Goodhew agreed it all with the Americans. Plan A. Plan B. What happened to all that work?”
Denham was unperturbed “Very hard to negotiate a hypothesis, Leonard. Particularly with your Latin. You should try my desk for a few weeks. You’ve got to present him with facts. Your Latin won’t budge until it’s real.”
“Won’t till it’s not, either,” murmured Eccles.
“Mind you,” said Denham encouragingly, “from all one hears, the Cousins are absolutely busting a gut to make this one stick. The little we do isn’t going to alter the price of fish one farthing. And of course Darling Katie will be pulling out all the stops in Washington.”
“Katie’s fantastic,” Eccles agreed.
Burr had one last, terribly mistaken shot. It came from the same locker as other rash acts that he occasionally committed, and as usual he regretted it as soon as he had spoken.
“Wh
“Wrong hemisphere, I’m afraid,” said Denham. “Try Northern Department, one floor down. Or Customs.”
“How are you so sure she’s your ship?” Eccles asked, smiling again.
“My source.”
“She’s got twelve hundred containers aboard. You going to look in all of them?”
“I know the numbers,” said Burr, not believing himself as he spoke.
“You mean your source does.”
“I mean I do.”
“Of the containers?”
“Yes.”
“Bully for you.”
At the main door, while Burr was still raging against all creation, the janitor handed him a note. It was from another old friend, this time at the Ministry of Defence, regretting that, owing to an unforeseen crisis, he could not after all make their promised meeting at midday.
Passing Rooke’s door, Burr smelled aftershave. Rooke was sitting stiff-backed at his desk, changed and immaculate after his journey, a clean handkerchief in his sleeve, a copy of the day’s Telegraph in his pending tray. He might never have left Tonbridge.
“I telephoned Strelski five minutes ago. The Roper jet’s still missing,” Rooke said before Burr had a chance to ask. “Air surveillance have produced some cockeyed story about a radar black hole. Bunkum, if you ask me.”
“Everything’s happening as they planned it,” Burr said. “The dope, the weapons, the money, all heading nicely for their destinations. It’s the art of the impossible, perfected, Rob. All the right things are illegal. All the lousy things are the only logical course. Long live Whitehall.”
Rooke signed off a paper. “Goodhew wants a summary of Limpet by close of play today. Three thousand words. No adjectives.”
“Where have they taken him, Rob? What are they doing to him at this minute? While we sit here worrying about adjectives?”