The Night Manager

TWELVE

Mr. Richard Roper's motor yacht, the Iron Pasha, appeared off the eastern tip of Hunter's Island at six o'clock exactly, prow forward like an attack boat, cut against a cloudless evening sky and growing perceptibly as she advanced toward Deep Bay over a flat sea. In case anybody doubted it was the Pasha, her crew had already called ahead by satcom to reserve the long mooring on the outer harbour, and the round table on the terrace for sixteen at eight-thirty, and the front row for the crab races afterwards. Even the menu was discussed. All the adults like seafood. Chips and grilled chicken for the children And the Chief goes crazy if there isn't enough ice.

It was between seasons, the time of year when you don't see too many big yachts cruising the Caribbean other than the commercial cruise ships out of Nassau and Miami. But if any of those had tried to put in at Hunter's Island, they'd have received no warm welcome from Mama Low, who liked rich yachties and abominated the common herd.

* * *

Jonathan had been waiting for the Pasha all week. Nevertheless, for a second or two after he sighted her he fancied himself trapped, and amused himself with the idea of escaping inland to the only town, or hijacking Mama Low's old bum boat, Hi-lo, which was anchored, with outboard fitted, not twenty yards from where he was staring out to sea at the Pasha's approach. Twin two-thousand-horsepower diesels, he was rehearsing. Extended afterdeck for helicopter, oversized Vosper stabilisers, seaplane launcher on the stern. The Pasha is quite a lady.

But foreknowledge did not ease his apprehension. Until this moment he had pictured himself advancing on Roper, and now Roper was advancing on him. First he felt faint, then hungry. Then he heard Mama Low yelling at him to get his white Canadian ass up here double quick, and he felt better. He trotted back along the wooden pier and up the sand track to the shack. His weeks at sea had seen an improvement in his appearance. An ocean-going looseness marked his stride, his eyes had gentled, his complexion had a healthy glow. As he climbed the rise he met the western sun starting to swell before it set, forming a copper rim round its circumference. Two of Mama Low's sons were rolling the famed round tabletop up the stone path to the terrace. Their names were Wellington and Nelson, but to Mama Low they were Swats and Wet Eye. Swats was sixteen and wreathed in fat. He was supposed to be in Nassau studying, but wouldn't go. Wet Eye was lean as a blade, smoked ganja and hated whites. The two had been working on the table for the last half hour, sniggering and achieving nothing.

"Bahamas makes you stupid, man," Swats explained as Jonathan passed by.

"You said it, Swats, I didn't."

Wet Eye watched him, no smile. Jonathan gave him a lazy salute like a wiping clean, and felt Wet Eye's tight gaze follow him up the path. If ever I wake up dead it will be what Wet Eye likes to call his cutlash that has slit my throat, he thought. Then he remembered that he didn't expect to be waking up too many more times on Hunter's Island, dead or otherwise. He took another mental reckoning of the Pasha's position. She had started to turn. She needed a lot of sea.

"Mass' Lamont, you's a lazy white Canadian slob, hear me? You the laziest white slob a poor nigger ever had to hire, an' that's God's truth. You not sick no more, Mass' Lamont. I'm goin' tell that Billy Bourne you just plain fuckin' lazy."

Mama Low sat on the veranda beside a tall and very beautiful black girl in plastic curlers known only as Miss Amelia. He was drinking beer out of a can and yelling at the same time. He was "twenty-two stone tall," as he liked to say of himself, "four feet across and bald as a light bulb." Mama Low had told a vice president of the United States to go fuck himself, Mama Low had fathered children as far off as Trinidad and Tobago, Mama Low owned serious real estate in Florida. He wore a cluster of gold skulls round his huge neck, and in a minute, when the sun set, he would don his church-going straw hat with paper roses and "Mama" done in mulberry needlework across the crown.

"You gon' cook them stuff' mussels o' yours tonight, Mass' Lamont?" he yelled as loudly as if Jonathan were still down at the water's edge. "Or you gon' lie about a-fartin' and a-pullin' at your little white fancy?"

"Mussels you ordered, Mama, mussels you get," Jonathan replied cheerfully, as Miss Amelia with her long hands delicately patted the outlines of her hair.

"So where you reck'nin' get them mussels from? You thought o' that? The shit you have. You jus' brim full o' white man's bullshit."

"You bought a fine basket of mussels from Mr. Gums this morning, Mama. And fifteen crawfish, special for the Pasha."

"From Mr. Gums the kinkajou? I did? Hell now, maybe I did so. Well, you go stuff 'em, hear me? Cos we got royalty comin', we got English lords and ladies comin', we got rich little white princes and princesses comin', and we're gon' play fine nigger music to 'em, and we're gon' give 'em a taste of gen-u-ine nigger livin', yes baass." He took another pull of his can of beer. "Swats, you gon' push that fuckin' table up them steps or you gon' die of old age?"

Which, plus or minus, was how Mama Low addressed his troops each evening when a half-bottle of rum and the attentions of Miss Amelia had restored his humour after the trials of another day in Paradise.

Jonathan walked round to the washrooms behind the kitchen and changed into his whites, remembering Yvonne, which he did each time he put them on. Yvonne had temporarily supplanted Sophie as the object of his self-distaste. The bubble of nervousness in his stomach had a sexual urgency. His fingertips kept tingling as he chopped the bacon and the garlic. Charges of expectation like electric shocks ran across his back. The kitchen was spotless as a ship's galley and as trim, with stainless steel worktops and a Hobart steel dishwasher. Glancing through the barred window while he worked, Jonathan observed the Iron Pasha's advance in framed shots: her radar mast and satcom dome, then the Carlisle and Finch search lights. He could make out the red ensign winking on her stern and the gold curtains in the stateroom windows.

"Everyone you love is aboard." Burr had told him in a call to the third public phone cabin on the left as you walk out to sea on Deep Bay pier.

Melanie Rose was singing-along gospel music to the radio while she scrubbed sweet potatoes at the sink. Melanie Rose taught Bible school and had twin daughters by someone called Cecil ― pronounced Ceesill ― who three months ago had taken a return ticket to Eleuthera and thus far had not used the second half. Ceesill might come back one day, and Melanie Rose lived in the cheerful hope he would. Meanwhile Jonathan had taken Cecil's place as second cook to Mama Low, and on Saturday nights Melanie Rose consoled herself with O'Toole, who was cleaning grouper at the fish table. Today was Friday, so they were starting to get friendly.

"You goin' dancin' tomorrow, Melanie Rose?" O'Toole enquired.

"Ain't no point to dancin' alone, O'Toole," said Melanie Rose with a defiant sniff.

Mama Low waddled in and sat down on his folding chair and smiled and shook his head, as if he were remembering some damned tune he couldn't shake out of it. A voyaging Persian had recently made him a present of a set of worry beads, and he was swinging them round his enormous fingers.

The sun had nearly set. Out at sea the Pasha was sounding her air horns in salute.

"Oh man, you some damn big feller," Mama Low murmured admiringly, turning to stare at her through the open doorway. "You sho's hell one big white fuckin' millionaire king, Lord King Richard Fuckin' Onslow Fuckin' Roper, sir. Mass' Lamont, you cook nice tonight, mind. Otherwise that Mr. Lord Pasha of Roper he gonna have yo' ass. Then us po' niggers gonna help ou'selves to what's left of that ass, same as nigger pickin's off a rich man's plate."

"What does he make his money from?" Jonathan asked while he toiled.

"Roper?" Mama Low retorted incredulously. "You mean you don't know?"

"I mean I don't know."

"Well, sure as hell. Mass' Lamont, I don't. And I sure as hell don't ask. He's some big company from Nassau that's losin' all its money. Man's as rich as that in recession time, he sure as hell some mighty big crook."

In a short while Mama Low would start creating his hot chilli sauce for the crawfish. Then the kitchen would fall into a dangerous hush. The sous-chef was not born yet who dared suggest that the yachties came to Hunter's Island for any other reason than Mama's chilli sauce.

* * *

The Pasha is in, her party of sixteen will soon arrive, an atmosphere of battle grips the kitchen as the first diners take their places at the lesser tables. No more brave talk, no more last touches of camouflage paint or nervous checking of the weapons. The unit has become a silent team, relating with eyes and bodies only, weaving round each other like mute dancers. Even Swats and Wet Eye have gone silent in the tension as the curtain rises on another fabled night at Mama Low's. Miss Amelia, poised at the cash desk in her plastic curlers, is braced for the first bill. Mama Low in his famous hat is everywhere, now rallying his troops in a stream of subdued obscenities, now out front jiggling and dissembling with the hated enemy, now back in the kitchen again, grating out orders made more effective by the suppression of his massive voice:

"Fine white lady, table eight, she some kind o' fuckin' caterpillar. Won't eat nuttin' but fuckin' lettuce leaves. Two Mama's salads, O'Toole! Bastard kid on six, he won't eat nuttin' but fuckin' hamburgers. One kid-sized hamburger, and spit on it! What's happenin' to the world, O'Toole? Ain't they got no fuckin' teeth no more? Don't they eat no fish? Wet Eye, take five 7-Ups and two Mama's punch to table one. Move it. Mass' Lamont, you just keep-on goin'-on makin' them mussels, six more dozen ain't too many, hear me, just you be sure you keep back sixteen portions for the Pasha. Mussels goes straight to the balls. Mass' Lamont. Ladies and gentlemen gon' screw their hearts out tonight, all on account yo' mussels. O'Toole, where's the dressings, you done drunk them? Melanie Rose, hon', them taters needs turnin' or they'll be sackcloth and ashes before yo' very eyes!"

All this under the protective strains of the six-strong Huntsman's steel band, which roosts on the sprawling roof of the terrace, the sweating faces of the players glistening in the fairy lights, white shirts glowing in the strobes. A boy called Henry is singing calypso. Henry did five years in Nassau prison for pushing coke and came home looking like an old man. Melanie Rose told Jonathan that Henry wasn't any good for lovin' no more, not after his beatings. "Some native people is sayin' that's how come he sing so high," she said with a sad smile.

It's a busy night, Mama Low's busiest in weeks, which explains the extra excitement. Fifty-eight dinners to be served and sixteen coming up the hill ― Mama Low has spotted them through his eyeglass ― and this is still low season. A whole tense hour goes by before Jonathan is able to do what he likes to do when the lull comes: sluice some cold water over his head and take the measure of his customers through the fisheye peephole in the swing door.

* * *

A close observer's view. Measured, technical, thorough. An in-depth, undeclared reading of the quarry, ahead of any contact with him. Jonathan can do this for days on end, has done it in ditches, hedges, lying up in barns, his face and hands dappled with camouflage paint, real foliage stitched into his battle dress. He is doing it now: I shall come to him when I come to him, and not before.

First the harbour below, with its horseshoe of white lights and small yachts, each a separate campfire sitting on the glass of the sheltered water. Lift your eyeline by a knuckle and there she is: the Iron Pasha herself, dressed for a carnival, gold-lit from stem to stern. Jonathan can make out the shapes of the guards, one forward, one aft, and a third lurking in the shadow of the bridge. Frisky and Tabby are not among them. Their duties tonight are on land. His gaze moved in tactical bounds up the sand track and passed under the driftwood archway that announced the sacred kingdom of Mama Low. It scanned the lighted hibiscus bushes and the tattered Bahamian flags dangling at the halfway point either side of the skull and crossbones. It paused at the dance floor where a very old couple held each other close, touching each other's faces unbelievingly with their fingertips. Jonathan guessed they were émigrés still marvelling at their survival. Younger dancers pressed together in stationary ecstasy. At a ringside table, he picked out a pair of hard men in their forties. Bermuda shorts, wrestlers' chests. A thrusting way of using their forearms. Is it you? he asked them in his mind ― or are you two more Roper leash dogs?

"They'll probably use a Cigarette," Rooke had said. "Superfast low job, no draught."

The two men had arrived in a new white powerboat shortly before dusk, whether a Cigarette or not he didn't know. Bui they had the stillness of professionals.

They stood up, smoothing their nether parts and slinging their handbags over their shoulders. One of them threw a Roman wave in Mama Low's direction.

"Sir? Loved it. Oh, nice eating. Brilliant."

Elbows aloft, they waddled down the sand path to their boat.

They were nobodies, Jonathan decided. They belonged to one another. Maybe. Or maybe not.

He shifted his sights to a table of three Frenchmen and their girls. Too drunk, he decided. They had already put away twelve orders of Mama's punch among them, and nobody was pouring his drink into the flower vase. He focused on the mid-deck bar. Against a background of yachting pennants, heads of blue marlin and tail ends of plundered neckties, two black girls in radiant cottons perched on high stools, chatting to two black men in their twenties. Maybe it's you, he thought. Maybe it's the girls. Maybe it's all four of you.

Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a low white powerboat heading out of Deep Bay toward the ocean. My two candidates eliminated. Maybe.

He allowed his gaze to begin the climb toward the terrace, where the worst man in the world, surrounded by retainers, jesters, bodyguards and children, was disporting himself in his private Camelot. As his boat now mastered the harbour, so the person of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper mastered the round table, the terrace and the restaurant. Unlike his boat, he was not dressed for spectacle but had the comfy look of a fellow who had thrown on a few clothes to answer the door to a friend. A navy pullover was slung carelessly over his shoulders.

Nevertheless, he commanded. By the stillness of his patrician head. By the speed of his smile and the intelligence of his expression. By the attention lavished on him by his audience, whether he spoke or listened. By the way everything around the table, from the dishes to the bottles to the candles in their green string jars to the faces of the children, seemed to be ranged toward him or away from him. Even the close observer felt his pull: Roper, he thought, it's me, Pine, the chap who told you not to buy your Italian marbles.

And as he was thinking this, a general cry of laughter went up from the terrace, led by Roper himself and evidently provoked by him, for his bronzed right arm was flung out to make the humorous point and his head was lifted to the woman who faced him across the table. Her carelessly disordered chestnut hair and naked back were thus far all Jonathan could see of her, but he remembered at once the grain of the skin inside Herr Meister's bathrobe, the endless legs and clusters of jewels at the wrists and neck. He felt the surge that had passed through him the first time he set eyes on her, the stab of indignation that someone so young and beautiful should accept the captivity of a Roper. She smiled, and it was her comedian's smile, kooky, slanted and impertinent.

Blocking her from his mind, he allowed his gaze to range the children's end of the table. The Langbournes have three, MacArthur and Danby one apiece, Burr had said. The Roper draughts them to amuse his Daniel.

Lastly came Daniel himself, aged eight, a tousled, pallid boy with a determined chin. And at Daniel, Jonathan's eye paused guiltily.

"Couldn't we use somebody else?" he had asked Rooke. But he had hit against their iron wall.

Daniel is the apple of the Roper's eye, Rooke had replied, while Burr looked out of the window. Why go for second best?

We're talking five minutes, Jonathan, Burr had said. What's five minutes for a kid of eight?

A lifetime, Jonathan thought, remembering a few minutes of his own.

Meanwhile Daniel is in grave discourse with Jed, whose raggedy chestnut hair divides into two roughly equal parts as she leans downward to address him. The flame of the candle sets a gold fringe on their two faces. Daniel pulls at her arm. She rises, glances at the band above her and calls to somebody she seems to know. Sweeping up her flimsy skirts, she swings one leg then the other over the stone bench, as if she were a teenager vaulting a garden gate. Jed and Daniel scamper hand in hand down the stone staircase. Upper-class geisha, Burr had said, nothing recorded against. It depends what you're recording, thought Jonathan as he watched her take Daniel in her arms.

* * *

Time stops. The band is playing a slow samba. Daniel clutches Jed's hips as if he were about to enter her. The grace of Jed's movements is near-criminal. A flurry interrupts Jonathan's reverie. Something dire has happened to Daniel's trousers. Jed is holding them at the waistband, laughing away his embarrassment. Daniel's top button has broken loose, but Jed in an inspired act of improvisation pins him together with a six-inch safety pin borrowed from Melanie Rose's apron. Roper is standing on the parapet, gazing down on them like a proud admiral inspecting his fleet. Catching his eye, Daniel releases Jed long enough to give a child's wave, sawing the air from side to side. Roper responds with a thumbs-up. Jed blows Roper a kiss, then takes Daniel's hands and leans back, mouthing the rhythm for him to follow. The samba quickens. Daniel relaxes, getting the hang of it. The liquidity of Jed's hip movements becomes an outrage against public order. The worst man in the world is too much blessed.

* * *

Returning his gaze to the terrace, Jonathan makes a perfunctory inspection of the rest of the Roper party. Frisky and Tabby sit at opposite sides of the table, Frisky favouring the left draw, Tabby covering the diners and the dance floor. Both men appear larger than Jonathan remembers them. The Lord Langbourne, blond hair still bundled in a ponytail, converses with a pretty English rose while his gloomy wife scowls at the dancers. Across the table from them sits Major Corkoran, lately of the Life Guards, sporting a battered Panama hat with an old Etonian hatband. He is making gallant conversation with an awkward girl in a high-necked dress. She frowns, then blushes and giggles, then corrects herself and takes a stern mouthful of ice cream.

From the top of the tower, Henry the impotent singer breaks into a calypso about a-very-sleepy-girl-who-couldn't-get-to-sleep. On the dance floor, Daniel's chest is cuddled against Jed's mound and his head against her breast, while his hands clutch her hips. Jed lets him rock against her in peace.

"Girl on table six got tits like l'il warm puppy dogs," O'Toole announced, prodding Jonathan in the spine with a tray of Mama's punch.

Jonathan took a last long look at Roper. He had turned his face toward the sea, where a moon path led from his fairy-lit yacht to the horizon.

"Mass' Lamont, sound the Allelujah, sir!" cried Mama Low, majestically sweeping O'Toole aside. He had donned a pair of ancient jodhpurs and a pith topee, and he was armed with his famous black basket and riding crop. Jonathan followed Mama Low onto the balcony and, white as a target in his chef's tunic and hat, tolled the brass tocsin. The echoes were still booming out to sea as the children of the Roper party came pelting down the path from the terrace, followed at a more becoming pace by the adults, led by Langbourne and a pair of wispy young men of the polo-playing classes. The band played a roll of drums, the perimeter torches were doused, coloured spotlights made the dance floor glisten like an ice rink. As Mama Low moved centre stage and cracked his whip. Roper and his entourage began taking their reserved places in the front row. Jonathan glanced out to sea. The white motorboat that might have been a Cigarette had vanished. Must have rounded the headland to the south, he thought.

"Right where I'm standin' heah is the startin' gate! Any nigger crab tries to beat the startin' pistol, that's ten lashes cold!"

His pith helmet tipped to the back of his head, Mama Low is giving his celebrated rendering of a British colonial administrator.

"This historic ring right heah" ― indicating a circular red stain at his feet ― "is the finishin' post. Every crab in this basket heah has got a numbah. Every crab in this basket heah is goin' to run his ass off, or Ay am gonna know the reason whay. Every crab who doesn't make the finishin' post heah will go right back into the chowdah."

Another crack of the whip. The laughter dwindles to silence. At the edge of the dance floor Swats and Wet Eye are dispensing complimentary rum punches from an elderly perambulator that once bore the infant Low himself. The older children squat cross-legged, the two boys with folded arms, the girls hugging their knees. Daniel is propped against Jed, thumb in mouth. Roper stands next to her. Lord Langbourne takes a flash photograph, distressing Major Corkoran. "Sandy, old love, for Christ's sake, can't we just remember it for once?" he says in a murmur that fills the amphitheatre. The moon hangs like a pink parchment lantern over the sea. The harbour lights bob and twinkle in a restless arc. On the balcony where Jonathan is standing, O'Toole lays a proprietary hand on Melanie Rose's arse and she wriggles herself obligingly against it. Only Miss Amelia in her curlers spurns the proceedings. Framed in the white-lit window of the kitchen behind them, she is intently counting the cash.

The band plays another roll of drums. Mama Low bows to the black wicker basket, grabs the lid and bears it into the air. The crabs are under starter's orders. Abandoning their perambulator, Swats and Wet Eye strike out into the audience with their books of tickets.

"Three crabs racin', all crabs is evens!" Jonathan hears Swats yell.

Mama Low is appealing to the spectators for a volunteer:

"I'm lookin'! I'm a-lookin'!" he cries in an enormous voice of black man's pain. "I'm a-lookin' for a fine white pure Christian chil' who knows his bounden duty by these dumb crabs and won't stand no back-talkin' or insurrection. You, sir! I'm pinnin' my humble simple hopes on you."

His whip is pointing at Daniel, who lets out a serio-comic yell and buries his face in Jed's skirts, then rushes to the back of the audience. But one of the girls is already scampering forward. Jonathan hears the rah-rah voices of the polo boys applauding her.

"Well played, Sally! Sock it to 'em, Sals! Jolly good!"

Still from his place of vantage on the balcony, Jonathan takes a raking glance at the bar, where the two men and their girls are clustered in earnest conversation, resolutely ignoring the dance floor. His gaze glides back to the audience, the band, then the dangerous patches of darkness in between.

They'll come from behind the terrace, he decides. They'll use the cover of the bushes beside the steps. Just make sure you stay up on the kitchen balcony, Rooke had said.

The girl Sally or Sals pulls a face and peers into the black basket. The drummer strikes up another roll. Sally reaches one bold arm into the basket, then the other. To shrieks of laughter, she puts her whole head in, emerges with a crab in each hand and places them side by side in the starting gate, while Langbourne's camera whirs and zooms and flashes. She dives in for the third crab, adds it to the starting line and bounds back to her place, to more rah-rah from the polo set. The trumpeter on the tower sends up a hunter's tattoo. Its echoes are still resounding round the harbour as a pistol shot tears the night apart. Caught off guard, Frisky drops into a half-crouch, while Tabby starts to push back the spectators to make himself shooting space, without knowing whom to shoot.

Even Jonathan momentarily searches for the shooter, until he spots Mama Low, sweating under his topee, pointing a smoking starter's pistol at the night sky.

The crabs are off.

* * *

Then, casually, it was happening.

No formality, no epiphany, no commotion, no screams ― scarcely a sound beyond Roper's curt order to Frisky and Tabby to "stand still and do nothing, now."

If anything was remarkable at all, it was not the noise but the quiet. Mama Low abandoned his harangue, the band stopped playing fanfares and the polo players gave up their frenzied cheers.

And this quiet developed slowly, in the same way that a large orchestra fizzles out at rehearsal, with the most determined players, or the most oblivious, going on for several bars before they too dwindle to a halt. Then for a while all Jonathan noticed were the things you suddenly hear on Hunter's Island when people stop making such a din: bird cries, cicadas, the bubbling of the coral water off Penguin Point, the bray of a wild pony from the cemetery and a couple of tinny wallops of a hammer as some late toiler down in Deep Bay negotiates with his outboard. Then he heard nothing at all, and the quiet became vast and terrible, and Jonathan with his grandstand view from the balcony picked out the two broad-armed professionals who had left the restaurant earlier in the evening and ridden away in their new white Cigarette but were now edging along the lines of the spectators like sidesmen in church, taking their collection of pocketbooks, wallets, purses and wristwatches and little wads of cash from people's back pockets.

And jewellery, Jed's particularly. Jonathan was just in time to see her bare arms lift first to her left ear, then to her right, pushing aside her hair and bowing slightly. Then to her throat to remove her necklace, just as if she were about to climb into someone's bed. Nobody is mad enough to wear jewellery in the Bahamas anymore, Burr had said: unless they happen to be Dicky Roper's girl.

And still no fuss. Everyone understanding the rules. No objectors, no resistance or unpleasantness at all ― for the good reason that while one of the thieves was tendering an open plastic briefcase to receive the congregation's offerings, his accomplice was wheeling the beat-up perambulator with the rum and whiskey bottles on it, and the cans of beer in their ice tub. And among the beer and the bottles sat eight-year-old Daniel Roper like a sacrificial Buddha, with an automatic pistol at his head, enduring the first of the five minutes that Burr had said wouldn't matter to a boy his age ― and perhaps Burr was right at that, for Daniel was smiling, and sharing the good joke with the crowd, grateful for relief from the scary crab race.

But Jonathan didn't share Daniel's joke. Instead, he saw a flickering of light from somewhere inside his eyes, like a red splash of fury. And he heard a call to battle stronger than any he could remember since the night he had emptied his Heckler at the unarmed green Irishman, so loud that he wasn't thinking anymore, he was only doing. For days and nights ― now in the conscious part of his brain, now the unconscious ― he had been steeling himself for this moment, relishing it, fearing it, planning it: if they do this, the logical response will be that; if they are here, the place to be is there. But he had not reckoned with his feelings. Until now. Which no doubt was why his first response was not the one that he had planned.

Having stepped as far back into the shadows as the balcony allowed, he slipped off his white chef's hat and tunic, then ran into the kitchen in his shorts, heading for the cash desk, where Miss Amelia sat working on her fingernails. He grabbed her telephone, held the receiver to his ear and rattled the cradle long enough to establish what he already knew, namely that the line was cut. He picked up a dishcloth and, jumping on the central table, removed the neon strip that lighted the kitchen. Meanwhile he ordered Miss Amelia to leave the cash desk exactly as it was and hide herself upstairs, no belly-aching, no trying to take the money or they would come after her. By the glow of the arc lights outside, he then hastened to the work surface where he kept his knife block, selected the most rigid of his carving knives, and ran with it, not back to the balcony but through the scullery to the service door on the south side.

Why the knife? he wondered as he ran. Why the knife? Who am I going to slice up with a knife? But he didn't throw it away. He was glad he had the knife, because a man with a weapon, any weapon, is twice the man he is without one: read the manual.

Once outdoors he kept running southward, ducking and leaping between the century cacti and the sea-grape trees until he gained the brow of cliff that overlooked Goose Neck. There, panting and sweating, he saw what he was looking for: the white motorboat, moored on the eastern side of the inlet for the men's escape. But he didn't pause to admire the sight. Knife in hand, he ran back to the darkened kitchen. And though the whole exercise had not taken him above a minute, it had been quite long enough for Miss Amelia to make herself scarce upstairs.

From the unlit kitchen window on the north side, Jonathan took stock of the thieves' progress, and blessedly in that time he was able to harness some of his first, murderous anger, for his focus improved and his breathing settled and self-discipline, more or less, was once more his. But where did his anger come from? From somewhere dark and far back in him. It rose and spread over him in a flood, yet its origin was a mystery. And he held on to the knife. Thumb on top, Johnny, same as buttering bread... weave the blade and watch his eyes... not too low now, and bother him a little bit with your other hand...

Major Corkoran in his Panama hat had found a chair and was sitting astride it, arms folded along the backrest and chin propped on his arms, watching the thieves as if they were a fashion show. Lord Langbourne had surrendered his camera, but the man with the briefcase no sooner had it than he threw it irritably aside as unacceptable. Jonathan heard a drawled "Oh, fuck you." Frisky and Tabby stood like men possessed, rigidly at the alert not five yards from their quarries. But Roper's right arm was still held out to them in prohibition, while his eyes remained fixed on Daniel and the thieves.

As to Jed, she was standing alone without her jewellery at the edge of the dance floor, her body made jagged by the tension, her hands spread on her thighs, as if to stop herself from running to Daniel.

"If it's money you want, you can have it," Jonathan heard Roper say, calmly. "Want a hundred thousand dollars? Have it in cash, got it on the boat, just give me the boy. Shan't send the police after you. Leave you completely alone. Long as I've got the boy. Do you understand what I'm saying? Speak English? Corky, try 'em in Spanish, will you?"

Then Corkoran's voice, obediently passing on the same message in decent Spanish.

Jonathan glanced at the cash desk. Miss Amelia's till stood open. Half-counted piles of money lay strewn across the counter. He stared down the zigzag path that led from the dance floor to the kitchen. It was steep and crudely paved. Only a lunatic would try to push a loaded perambulator up it. It was also floodlit, which meant that anyone stepping into the darkened kitchen would be unsighted. Jonathan slipped the carving knife under his waistband and wiped his sweated palm on the seat of his shorts.

The raiding party was starting up the path. The way in which the captor held his hostage was a matter of crucial interest to Jonathan, because his plan of action depended on it: what Burr had called his plan of plausibility. Listen like a blind man, Johnny, watch like a deaf one. But nobody, so far as he remembered, had thought to offer him advice on how one man with a carving knife prizes an eight-year-old hostage from two armed gunmen and survives.

They had made the first leg of the path. Below them the motionless crowd, their faces brilliant under the arc lights, stared after them, not a movement among them, Jed still apart from them, her hair copper in the glow. He was beginning not to know himself again. Bad images of his childhood flooded his vision. Answered insults, unanswered prayers.

First came the bagman, then twenty yards behind him his accomplice, dragging Daniel up the path by his arm. Daniel wasn't joking anymore. The bagman was striding out hungrily, the stuffed briefcase hanging at his side. But Daniel's kidnapper moved in awkward, twisted strides, his upper body turning repeatedly while he menaced the crowd, then the boy, with his automatic pistol. Right-handed, Jonathan recorded, bare-armed. The safety catch at "on."

"Don't you want to negotiate with me?" Roper was shouting up at them from the dance floor. "I'm his father. Why won't you talk to me? Let's do a deal."

Jed's voice, frightened but defiant, with a note of the equestrienne's command: "Why don't you take an adult? You bloody bullies. Take one of us. Take me if you like." And then, much louder, as her fear and anger joined, "Bring him back, you bastards!"

Hearing Jed's challenge, Daniel's captor yanked Daniel round to face her, while he held the pistol to his temple and did the baddy's lines in a sawing Bronx snarl:

"Anybody comes after us, anybody comes up the path, anybody tries to cut us off, I kill the kid, okay? Then I kill whoever. I don't give a shit. I'll kill anybody. So stay down there and shut up."

The blood was pulsing in Jonathan's hands; they were out in front of him, each fingertip throbbing. Sometimes his hands wanted to do the job on their own and pull him after them. Busy footsteps thumped across the wooden deck of the balcony. The kitchen door burst open, a man's fist groped for the light switch and flicked it, to no effect. A hoarse voice panted, "The fuck, Jesus Christ, where the fuck? Shit!" A bulky figure stumbled toward the cash desk, and stopped midway.

"Anyone in here? Who's in here? Where's the fucking light, for fuck's sake? The fuck!"

Bronx, Jonathan recorded again, flattened behind the door to the balcony. A genuine Bronx accent, even when he's out of earshot. The man advanced again, holding the bag out in front of him while he groped with his other hand.

"Anyone in here, get the fuck out, hear me? That's a warning. We got the kid. Anyone makes trouble, the kid gets fucked. Don't mess with us."

But by now he had found the piles of bank notes and was sweeping them into the briefcase. When he had finished he went back to the doorway, and with only the opened door to separate him from Jonathan, he shouted down to his accomplice.

"I'm going on down, Mike! I'll go start the boat, hear me? Jesus, fuck," he complained, as if the world were being too hard on him. Then he hurried through the kitchen to the scullery door, which he kicked open, before heading down the path toward Goose Neck. In the same moment Jonathan heard the man called Mike approaching with his hostage, Daniel. Jonathan dried his palm once more on his shorts, drew the knife from his waistband and passed it to his left hand, the sharp edge upward as if to rip a belly from below. As he did so, he heard Daniel sob. One choked or muffled sob, so brief the boy must have caught himself almost before he began it. One half-sob of tiredness, impatience, boredom or frustration, the kind you might hear from any child, whether dirt poor or super-rich, who has a bit of earache or doesn't want to go upstairs to bed until you've promised to come and tuck him up.

Yet for Jonathan it was the cry of his childhood. It echoed in every vile corridor and barrack hut and orphanage and every auntie's spare back room. He restrained himself a moment longer, knowing that attacking blows are better for this moment of delay. He felt his heartbeat slow. He saw the red mist gather across his eyes, and he became weightless and invulnerable.

He saw Sophie, her face intact and smiling. He heard the clump of adult feet, followed by the reluctant scuffle of smaller ones, as Daniel's captor came down the two steps from the wooden balcony and reached the tiled floor of the kitchen, dragging Daniel after him. As the man's foot hit the tiles, Jonathan stepped from behind the door and with his right hand seized the arm that held the pistol and gave it a ferocious, breaking twist. Simultaneously, Jonathan screamed: one prolonged cathartic scream, to ventilate, to summon help, to terrorise, to put an end to too much patience for too long. The pistol clattered on the tiles, and he kicked it out of reach. Hauling the man and his damaged arm into the doorway, he grabbed the door, threw his body weight upon it and crushed the arm between the door and jamb. The man called Mike screamed too, but stopped as Jonathan laid the knife blade against his sweating neck.

"Shit, man!" Mike whispered, somewhere between pain and shock. "Fuck you doing to me? Holy shit. You some crazy man or something? Jesus!"

"Run back down the hill to your mother," Jonathan told Daniel. "Off you go. Quick now."

And despite everything that was raging in him, he selected these words with elaborate care, knowing he might have to live with them later. For why should a mere cook know that Daniel's first name was Daniel, or that Jed was not his mother, or that Daniel's real mother was several thousand miles away in Dorset? As he spoke them, he realised that Daniel was no longer listening, but gazing past him toward the other door. And that the bagman, having heard the screaming, had come back to lend assistance.

"Fucker's broken my fucking arm!" the man called Mike was yelling. "Let go my fucking arm, you mad shit! He's got a knife, Gerry. Don't fuck with him. My fucking arm's broke. He broke it two fucking times. He's not kidding. He's crazy!"

But Jonathan went on holding him by the arm that was probably broken, and he kept the knife pressed against the man's thick neck. The head was tipped right back on him with its mouth open, like a head at the dentist's, and the man's sweated hair stroked his face. And with the red mist there before his eyes, Jonathan would have done anything that he felt was necessary, without compunction.

"Walk back down the steps," he told Daniel, quietly so as not to scare him. "Go carefully. Off you go. Now."

At which Daniel did at last consent to take his leave. He turned on his heel and began tripping unevenly down the steps toward the arc lights and the frozen crowd, flapping one hand above his head as if to acknowledge his accomplishment. And this was the consoling image that remained in Jonathan's mind as the man named Gerry hit him with his pistol butt, then hit him again over the right cheek and eye, then yet a third time as Jonathan floated to the ground in veils of Sophie's blood. While he lay on the floor in the recovery position, Gerry dealt him a couple of kicks in the groin for good measure before grabbing his accomplice, Mike, by his remaining arm and ― to renewed screams and imprecations ― dragging him across the kitchen to the opposite door. And Jonathan was pleased to see the stuffed briefcase lying not too far away, because clearly Gerry couldn't manage a maimed Mike and the loot at the same time.

Then came fresh footsteps and voices, and for a bad moment Jonathan thought they had decided to come back and give him some more of the same, but in his confusion he had mistaken the origin of the sounds, because it was not his enemies who were now gathered round and staring down at him, but his friends, all the people he had fought for and nearly died for: Tabby and Frisky, Langbourne and the polo players, the old couple who touched each other's faces while they danced and the four young blacks from the bar, then Swats and Wet Eye, then Roper and Jed with little Daniel clutched between them. And Miss Amelia, crying, on and on, as if Jonathan had broken her arm too. And Mama Low, yelling at Miss Amelia to shut the fuck up and Miss Amelia screaming, "That poor Lamont." And Roper had noticed it and was taking exception.

"Hell's she calling him Lamont for?" Roper was complaining while he leaned his head this way and that to get a better look at Jonathan's face beneath the blood. "He's Pine from Meister's. The night flunky chap they had. Englishman. Recognise him, Tabby?"

"That's who it is, Chief," Tabby confirmed, kneeling at Jonathan's side and holding his pulse.

Somewhere at the edge of his screen, Jonathan saw Frisky pick up the abandoned briefcase and peer inside.

"It's all here, Chief," he was saying soothingly. "No harm except to life and limb."

But Roper was still crouching over Jonathan, and whatever he saw must have been more impressive than the jewellery, for he kept wrinkling his nose as if the wine were corked. Jed had decided Daniel had seen enough and was walking him sedately down the steps.

"You hear me all right. Pine?" Roper asked.

"Yes," said Jonathan.

"Can you feel my hand okay?"

"Yes."

"Here too?"

"Yes."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"How's his pulse, Tabby?"

"Quite sporting, considering, Chief."

"You still hearing me, Pine?"

"Yes."

"You're going to be okay. Help's on its way. We'll get you the best there is. You talking to the boat there, Corky?"

"On line, Chief."

In the back of his mind, Jonathan had a notion of Major Corkoran holding a portable telephone to his ear, one hand propped on his hip and his elbow raised for extra authority.

"We'll fly him to Nassau on the chopper now," Roper was saying, in the gruff voice he had for Corkoran. "Tell the pilot, then call the hospital. Not that lower-class place. T'other one. Ours."

"Doctors Hospital, Collins Avenue," said Corkoran.

"Book him in. Who's that pompous Swiss surgeon, got a house at Windermere Cay, always trying to put his money in our companies?"

"Marti," said Corkoran.

"Call Marti, get him up there."

"Will do."

"After that, call the coast guards, the police and all the usual idiots. Raise some serious hell. Got a stretcher, Low? Go and get it. You married or anything, Pine? Got a wife or anyone?"

"I'm fine, sir," said Jonathan.

But it was the equestrienne, typically, who had to have the last word. She must have done first aid at convent school.

"Move him as little as possible," she was telling someone, in a voice that seemed to float into his sleep.