The Night Manager

THIRTEEN

Jonathan had vanished from their screens, missing believed killed by friendly fire. All their planning, all their listening and watching, all their supposed mastery of the game, lay like a trashed limousine at the roadside. They were deaf and blind and ridiculous. The windowless headquarters in Miami was a ghosthouse, and Burr walked its grim corridors like a haunted man.

Roper's yacht, planes, houses, helicopters and cars were on constant watch; so was the stylish colonial mansion in downtown Nassau where the Ironbrand Land, Ore & Precious Metals Company had its prestigious headquarters. So were the telephone and facsimile lines belonging to Roper's contacts round the globe: from Lord Langbourne in Tortola to Swiss bankers in Zug and semi-anonymous collaborators in Warsaw; from a mysterious "Rafi" in Rio de Janeiro to "Misha" in Prague and a firm of Dutch notaries in Curaçao and an as yet unidentified government official in Panama who, even when speaking from his desk in the presidential palace, affected a drugged murmur and the alias of Charlie.

But of Jonathan Pine, alias Lamont, last heard of in intensive care at Nassau's Doctors Hospital, not a whisper from any of them.

"He's deserted," Burr told Strelski, through the spread fingers of his hands. "First he goes mad, then he escapes from hospital. A week from now we'll be reading his story in the Sunday newspapers."

Yet everything so perfectly planned. Nothing left to chance, from the moment of the Pasha's departure from Nassau to the night of the faked kidnapping at Mama Low's. The arrival of the cruise guests and their children ― the bloodstock English girls of twelve with lolling faces, eating crisps and drawling about gymkhanas, the confident sons with whiplash bodies and the side-of-mouth slur that tells the world to go to hell, the Langbourne family with sullen wife and over-pretty nanny ― all had been secretly welcomed, trailed, housed and hated by Amato's watchers, and finally seen aboard the Pasha, nothing left to chance.

"You know something? Those rich kids had the Rolls pull up at Joe's Easy, just so they could buy their grass!" Arnato the proud new father protested to Strelski over his handset. The story duly entered the legend of the operation.

So did the story of the seashells. On the eve of the Pasha's departure, one of Ironbrand's bright young men ― MacArthur, who had made his debut with a nonspeaking part at Meister's ― was heard telephoning a dubious banking contact on the other side of town: "Jeremy, in God's name, help me, who sells seashells these days? I need a thousand of the bloody things by yesterday. Jeremy, I'm serious."

The listeners became unusually vocal. Seashells? Literally seashells? Shell ― like missile? Sea-to-air projectile perhaps? Nowhere in the lexicon of Roper's weaponspeak had anyone before referred to seashells. They were put out of their misery later the same day when MacArthur explained his problem to the manager of Nassau's luxury store: "Lord Langbourne's twin daughters are having a birthday on the second day of the cruise. The Chief wants to hold a shell hunt on one of the uninhabited islands and give prizes for the best collections, but last year nobody found any shells, so this year the Chief is taking no chances. He intends to have his security staff bury a thousand of the things in the sand the night before. So please, Mr. Manzini, where can I get hold of shells in bulk?"

The story had the team in stitches. Frisky and Tabby, launching a night raid on a deserted paddling beach, armed with duffel bags of seashells? It was too rich.

For the kidnapping, every step of the way had been rehearsed. First Flynn and Amato had disguised themselves as yachties and made a field reconnaissance of Hunter's Island. Back in Florida, they reconstructed the terrain on a tract of dune set aside for them in the training compound at Fort Lauderdale. Tables were laid. Tapes marked the paths. A shack was erected to denote the kitchen. A cast of diners was assembled. Gerry and Mike, the two bad guys, were professional toughs from New York with orders to do what they were told and shut up. Mike the kidnapper was bearish. Gerry the bagman was lugubrious but agile. Hollywood could not have done better.

"Are you gentlemen fully conversant with your orders, now?" Irish Pat Flynn enquired, eyeing the brass rings on each finger of Gerry's right hand. "We're only asking for a couple of friendly belts now, Gerry. More in the line of a cosmetic alteration to the appearance is all that is required. Then we ask you to withdraw with honour. Am I making myself plain, Gerry?"

"You got it, Pat."

Then there had been the fallbacks, the what ifs. All covered. What if, at the last minute, the Pasha failed to put in at Hunter's? What if she put in at Hunter's, berthed, but the passengers decided to have dinner on board? What if the adults came ashore to dine, and the kids ― perhaps as punishment for some prank ― were made to stay aboard?

"Pray," said Burr.

"Pray," Strelski agreed.

But they were not really putting their trust in Providence. They knew that the Pasha had never yet passed Hunter's Island without putting in, even if they knew there was bound to be a first time and this would probably be it. They knew that Low's Boatyard in Deep Bay held top-up stores for the Pasha, and they knew the skipper stood to take a piece of the stores bill and of the dinner bill at Low's, because he always did. They placed great faith in Daniel's hold upon his father. Daniel had conducted several painful phone calls with Roper in recent weeks about the hellishness of adjusting to divided parents and had singled out the stopover at Hunter's Island as the high point of his forthcoming visit.

"I'm really going to get the crabs out of the basket this year, Dad," Daniel had told his father from England only ten days ago. "I don't dream about them anymore. Mums is really pleased with me."

Both Burr and Strelski had had similar upsetting conversations with their children in their time, and their guess was that Roper, though not of the English class that places children high in its priorities, would walk through fire rather than let Daniel down.

And they were right, absolutely right. And when Major Corkoran called Miss Amelia over the satcom to book the terrace table, Burr and Strelski could have hugged each other, which was what the team said they were doing these days anyway.

* * *

It was not till around eleven-thirty in the evening of the day itself that they felt the first stirrings of unease. The operation had been scheduled for 2303 hours, or as soon as the crab races had begun. The holdup, the climb to the kitchen, the descent to Goose Neck, had never taken more than twelve minutes in rehearsal. Why on earth hadn't Mike and Gerry signalled "mission accomplished"?

Then the red alarm lit up. Standing with folded arms at the centre of the communications room, Burr and Strelski listened to the playback of Corkoran's voice talking in fast order to the ship's captain, the ship's helicopter pilot, Doctors Hospital in Nassau and, lastly. Dr. Rudolf Marti at his home in Windermere Cay. Corkoran's voice was already a warning. It was cool and steady under fire:

"The Chief appreciates you're not in the first-aid business, Dr. Marti. But the skull and side of the face are severely fractured, and the Chief believes they'll have to be rebuilt. And the hospital needs a doctor to refer the patient to them. The Chief would like you waiting at the hospital when he arrives, and he will wish to compensate you generously for your trouble. May I tell him you'll be there?"

A fractured skull and side of face? Rebuilt? What the hell had Mike and Gerry got up to? The relationship between Burr and Strelski was already strained by the time a call from Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami had them racing there by flashing light, with Flynn riding alongside the driver. When they arrived, Mike was still in the operating theatre. Gerry, grey with anger, was chain-smoking in the waiting room, wearing his navy life jacket.

"Fuckin" animal crucified Mike in the fuckin' door," Gerry said.

"So what did he do to you, Gerry?" Flynn asked.

"To me, nothin'."

"What did you do to him?"

"Kissed him on the fuckin' mouth. What do you think, dickhead?"

Then Flynn picked Gerry straight off his chair as if he were a rude child and slapped him hard once across the face, then sat him down again in the same indolent attitude as before.

"You whip him, Gerry?" Flynn asked kindly.

"Fucker went crazy. Played it for real. Held a fuckin' carving knife to Mike's throat, got his arm in the fuckin' door like he's choppin' firewood."

They returned to the operations room in time to listen to Daniel talking to his mother in England over the Pasha's satcom.

"Mums, it's me. I'm all right. I really am."

Long silence while she wakes up.

"Daniel? Darling, you haven't come back to England, have you?"

"I'm on the Pasha, Mums."

"Daniel, really. Do you know the time? Where's your father?"

"I didn't get the crabs out of the basket, Mums. I chickened. They make me sick. I'm all right, Mums. Honestly."

"Danny?"

"Yes?"

"Danny, what are you trying to tell me?"

"Only we were on Hunter's Island, you see, Mums. There was this man who smelled of garlic and took me prisoner, and another man who took Jed's necklace. But the cook saved me and they let me go."

"Daniel, is your father there?"

"Paula. Hi. Sorry about that. He was determined to tell you he's okay. We got held up at gunpoint by a couple of thugs at Mama Low's. Dans was taken hostage for ten minutes, but he's totally unharmed."

"Wait," said Paula. Like his son before him, Roper waited for her to collect herself. "Daniel's been kidnapped and released. But he's all right. Now go on."

"They marched him up the path to the kitchen. Remember the kitchen, up the path on the hill?"

"You're sure all this happened, are you? We all know Daniel's stories."

"Yes, of course I'm sure. I saw it."

"At gunpoint? They marched him up a hill at gunpoint? A boy of eight?"

"They were going for the cash in the kitchen. But there was this cook up there, a white chap, who had a go at them. He winged one, but the other one came back, and they beat him up while Daniel escaped. God knows what would have happened if they'd taken Dans with them, but they didn't. All over now. We even got the loot back. Thank God for cooks. Come on, Dans, tell her how we're giving you the Victoria Cross for gallantry. Here he is again."

* * *

It was five in the morning. Burr sat motionless as a Buddha at his desk. Rooke smoked his pipe and wrestled with the Miami Herald crossword. Burr let the phone ring several times before he was able to pick it up.

"Leonard?" said Goodhew's voice.

"Hullo, Rex."

"Did something go wrong? I thought you were going to ring me. You sound as if you're in shock. Did they swallow the bait, then? Leonard?"

"Oh, they swallowed it, all right."

"So what's wrong? You don't sound victorious, you sound funereal. What happened?"

"I'm just trying to work out whether we're still holding the rod."

Mr. Lamont is in intensive care, said the hospital. Mr. Lamont is stable.

Not for long. Twenty-four hours later Mr. Lamont had vanished.

* * *

Has he discharged himself? The hospital says he has. Has Dr. Marti had him shifted to his clinic? Apparently so, but only briefly, and the clinic gives no information about the destination of discharged patients. And when Amato telephones in the guise of a newspaper reporter, Dr. Marti himself replies that Mr. Lamont has left without leaving an address. Suddenly, outlandish theories are being passed round the ops room. Jonathan has confessed to everything! Roper has rumbled him and dumped him in the sea! On Strelski's orders, the watch on Nassau airport has been suspended. He fears Amato's team is becoming too visible.

"We're engineering human nature, Leonard," says Strelski consolingly, in an effort to lift the burden from Burr's soul. "Can't get it right every time."

"Thanks."

* * *

Evening comes. Burr and Strelski sit in a roadside barbecue house with their cellular telephones on their laps, eating ribs and Cajun rice and watching well-fed America come and go. A summons from the telephone monitors has them racing back to headquarters in mid-mouthful.

Corkoran to a senior editor of the leading Bahamian newspaper:

"Old love! It's me. Corky. How are we? How are the dancing girls?"

Coarse intimacies are exchanged. Then the nub:

"Sweetheart, listen, the Chief wants a story killed... pressing reasons why the hero of the hour doesn't need the spotlight... young Daniel, very hyper boy... I'm talking serious gratitude, a mega-improvement to your retirement plans. How about 'a practical joke that came unstuck'? Can you do that, lover?"

The sensational robbery on Hunter's Island is laid to rest in the great cemetery for stories permanently spiked by Higher Authority.

Corkoran to the desk of a senior Nassau police officer known for his understanding of the peccadilloes of the rich:

"Heart, how are we? Listen, in re Brother Lamont, last seen at Doctors Hospital by one of your heavier-footed brethren... can we just kind of lose that one from the menu ― do you mind? The Chief would greatly prefer the lower profile, feels it's better for Daniel's health... wouldn't wish to prefer charges, even if you found the culprits, hates the fuss... bless you.... Oh, and by the by, don't believe all that crap you're reading about Ironbrand shares going through the floor.... Chief's considering a very nice little divi this Christmas; we should all be able to buy ourselves a piece of whatever we like best..."

The strong arm of the law agrees to withdraw its claws. Burr wonders whether he is listening to Jonathan's obituary.

And from the rest of the world, not a peep.

* * *

Should Burr return to London? Should Rooke? Logically, it made no difference whether they hung by a thread in Miami or in London. Illogically, Burr needed nearness to the place where his agent was last seen. In the end, he sent Rooke to London and the same day checked out of his steel-and-glass hotel and moved to humbler premises in a sleazy part of town.

"Leonard's putting on the hair shirt while he waits this thing out," Strelski told Flynn.

"Tough," said Flynn, still trying to come to terms with the experience of having his agent immolated by Burr's ewe-lamb.

Burr's new cell was a pastel-painted art deco box beside the beach, with a bedside light made out of a chrome Atlas holding up the globe, and steel-framed windows that buzzed to every passing car, and a doped-out Cuban security guard with dark glasses and an elephant gun, lounging in the lobby. Burr slept there lightly, with his cellular phone on the spare pillow.

One dawn, unable to sleep, he took his phone for a walk down a great boulevard. A regiment of cocaine banks loomed at him out of the misted sea. But as he went toward them he found himself in a building site full of coloured birds screaming from the scaffolding, and Latinos sleeping like war dead beside their parked bulldozers.

* * *

Jonathan was not the only one who had disappeared. Roper too had entered a black hole. Deliberately or not, he had given Amato's watchers the slip. The tap on the Ironbrand headquarters in Nassau revealed only that the Chief was away selling farms ― "selling farms" being Roperspeak for "mind your own damn business."

The supersnitch Apostoll, urgently consulted by Flynn, offered no consolation. He had heard vaguely that his clients might be holding a business conference on the island of Aruba, but he had not been invited. No, he had no idea where Mr. Roper was. He was a lawyer, not a travel agent. He was Mary's soldier.

* * *

Another evening came, and Strelski and Flynn determined to take Burr out of himself. They collected him from his hotel and, cellular phones in hand, made him stroll among the crowds on the promenade beside the beach. They sat him at a pavement cafe and fed him margaritas and forced him to take an interest in the people who went by, in vain. They watched muscular blacks in multicoloured shirts and gold rings, rolling with the majesty of high life for as long as the highs and the living lasted, their dolls in skintight miniskirts and thigh boots toppling between them, their shaven-headed bodyguards in robes of mullah grey to conceal their automatic weapons. A swarm of beachboys on skateboards raced past, and the wiser ladies whisked their handbags out of reach. But two old lesbians in straw trilbies refused to be daunted and marched their poodles straight at them, causing them to veer. After the beach-boys came a shoal of long-necked fashion models on roller skates, each more gorgeous than the last. At the sight of them, Burr, who loved women, did for a moment come alive ― only to lapse again into his melancholy abstractions.

"Hey, Leonard," said Strelski, making a last gallant effort. "Let's go see where the Roper does his weekend shopping."

In a big hotel, in a conference room protected by men with padded shoulders, Burr and Strelski mingled with the buyers of all nations and listened to the sales talk of wholesome young men with name tags pinned to their lapels. Behind the men sat girls with order books. And behind the girls, in shrines cordoned off with blood-coloured ropes, stood their wares, each polished like a loved possession, each guaranteed to make a man of whoever owned them: from the most cost-effective cluster bomb through the all-plastic undetectable Glock automatic pistol to the latest thing in hand-held rocket launchers, mortars and anti-personnel mines. And for your reading man, standard works on how to build yourself a rocket-propelled gun in your own backyard or make a one-time silencer out of a tubular can of tennis balls.

"About the only thing missing is a girl in a bikini poking her fanny at the barrel of a sixteen-inch fieldpiece," said Strelski as they drove back to the operations room.

The joke fell flat.

* * *

A tropical storm descends on the city, blackening the sky. chopping the heads off the skyscrapers. Lightning strikes, triggering the burglar alarms of parked cars. The hotel shudders and cracks, the last daylight dies as if the main switch has failed. Jets of rain spew down the window-panes of Burr's bedroom, black flotsam rides on the scurrying white mist. Billows of wind ransack the palm trees, hurling chairs and plants off balconies.

But Burr's cellular phone, ringing in his ear, has miraculously survived the attack.

"Leonard," says Strelski in a voice of suppressed excitement, "get your ass down here fast. We got a couple of murmurs coming out of the rubble."

The city lights bounce back again, shining gaily after their free wash.

* * *

Corkoran to Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, lately unprincipled chairman of a group of derelict British trading companies, and occasional purveyor of deniable arms shipments to Her Majesty's procurement ministers.

Corkoran is telephoning from the Nassau apartment of one of Ironbrand's smart young men, on the mistaken assumption that the line is safe.

"Sir Tony? Corkoran here. Dicky Roper's gofer."

"Fuck do you want?" The voice sounds clotted and half drunk. It echoes like a voice in a bathroom.

"Pressing matter, Sir Tony, I'm afraid. The Chief needs your good offices. Got a pencil?"

While Burr and Strelski listen transfixed, Corkoran struggles to achieve precision:

"No, Sir Tony, Pine. Pine like the tree, Pine like a sick dog. P for Peter, I for Item, N for Nuts, E for Easy. That's right. First name Jonathan. Like Jonathan." He adds a couple of harmless details, such as Jonathan's date and place of birth and British passport number. "Chief wants the head-to-toe back ground check, Sir Tony, please, preferably by yesterday. And mum. All very mum indeed."

"Who's Joyston Bradshaw?" Strelski asks, when they have heard the conversation to the end.

Seeming to wake from a deep dream. Burr allows himself a cautious smile. "Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, Joe, is a leading English shit. His financial embarrassment is one of the major joys of the current recession." His smile spreads. "Unsurprisingly, he is also a former partner in crime of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper." He warms to his theme. "As a matter of fact, Joe, if you and I were fielding the all-English team of shits, Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw would feature high on our batting list. He also enjoys the protection of some other highly placed English shits, some of whom work not too far distant from the river Thames." The relief shone through Burr's strained face as he broke out laughing. "He's alive, Joe! You don't check a corpse, not by yesterday! Head-to-toe background, he says. Well, we've got it all ready for him, and nobody better suited to provide him with it than Tony bloody Joyston Bradshaw! They want him, Joe! He's got his nose into their tent! You know what they say, the Bedouin? Never let a camel's nose into your tent, because if you do, you get the whole camel."

But while Burr was rejoicing, Strelski's mind was already on the next practical step.

"So Pat goes ahead?" he said. "Pat's boys can go bury the magic box?"

Burr sobered at once. "If it's okay by you and Pat, it's okay by me," he said.

They agreed on the very next night.

* * *

Unable to sleep, Burr and Strelski drove to an all-night hamburger joint called Murgatroyd's on U.S. 1, where a sign said: no shoes, no service. Outside the smoked-glass windows sat shoeless pelicans in the moonlight, each to his mooring-post along the wooden jetty, like feathery old bombing planes that might never bomb again. On the silver beach, white egrets peered forlornly at their reflections.

At four a. m. Strelski's cellular phone peeped. He put it to his ear, said "yes" and listened. He said, "So get yourselves some sleep." He rang off. The conversation had taken twenty seconds.

"No problem," he announced to Burr, and took a pull of Coke.

Burr needed a moment to believe his ears. "You mean they made it? It's done? They cached it?"

"They beach-landed, they found the shed, they buried the box, they were very quiet, very professional, they got the hell out. All your boy has to do now is speak."