The Night Manager

FOURTEEN

Jonathan was back in his iron bed at army school after they ripped his tonsils out ― except that the bed was huge and white, with the soft down pillows with embroidered edges that they used to have at Meister's, and a small herb pillow for the fragrance.

He was in the motel room one truck ride out of Esperance, nursing his battered jaw with the curtains drawn and sweating out a fever after telephoning a voice that had no name to say he had found his shadow ― except that his head was bandaged, he was wearing crisp cotton pyjamas, and there was a stitched device on the pocket that he kept trying to read by Braille. Not M for Meister, not P for Pine or B for Beauregard or L for Linden and Lamont. More like a Star of David with too many points.

He was in Yvonne's attic, listening for Madame Latulipe's footfall in the half-light. Yvonne wasn't there, but the attic was ― except that this was a bigger attic than Yvonne's, and bigger than the attic in Camden Town that Isabelle had painted in. And it had pink flowers in an old Delft vase, and a tapestry of ladies and gentlemen out hawking. A punkah dangled from a roof beam, making stately turns of its propeller.

He was lying beside Sophie in the apartment in the Chicago House in Luxor while she talked about courage ― except that the smell tickling his nostrils was of potpourri, not vanilla. He said I must be taught a lesson, she was saying. It is not I who must be taught a lesson. It is Freddie Hamid and his dreadful Dicky Roper.

He made out closed shutters slicing sunlight into blades, and layers of fine white muslin curtain. He turned his head the other way and saw a Meister's silver room-service tray with a jug of orange juice, and a cut-glass goblet to drink it from, and a lace cloth covering the silver tray. Across a thickly carpeted floor, he distinguished through the blur of his reduced vision a doorway to a large bathroom, with towels of ascending sizes folded along a rail.

But by then his eyes were streaming and his body was hopping the way it had hopped when he was ten and caught his fingers in somebody's car door, and he realised he was lying on his bandage, and his bandage was on the side of his head that they had smashed and Dr. Marti had repaired. So he rolled his head back to where it had been before he started his close observation, and he watched the punkah going round until the light-spots of pain had cleared and the undercover soldier's gyroscope inside him had begun to right itself.

This is where you get yourself across the bridge, Burr had said.

They'll have to mark the goods, Rooke had said. You can't just walk up to them with the boy in your arms to everyone's applause.

Fracture of the skull and cheekbone, Marti had said. Concussion, eight on the Richter scale, ten years' solitary in a darkened room.

Three cracked ribs, could be thirty.

Severe bruising of the testicles following attempted castration with the toe cap of a heavy training boot.

For it seemed that once Jonathan had gone down under the pistol whipping, it was his groin that the man had attacked, leaving among other traces the perfect imprint of a size-twelve boot in his inside thigh, to the raucous amusement of the nurses.

A black-and-white figure flitted across his vision. White uniform. Black face. Black legs, white stockings. Rubber-soled white shoes with Velcro fastenings. At first he had thought she was one person; now he knew she was several. They visited him like spirits, mutely polishing and dusting, changing his flowers and his drinking water. One was called Phoebe and had a nurse's touch.

"Hi, Mist' Thomas. How're you today? I'm Phoebe. Miranda, just you go fetch that brush again, and this time you sweep right under Mist' Thomas's bed. Yes, ma'am."

So I'm Thomas, he thought. Not Pine. Thomas. Or perhaps I'm Thomas Pine.

He dozed again, and woke to find Sophie's ghost standing over him, in her white slacks, shaking pills into a paper cup. Then he thought she must be a new nurse. Then he saw the broad belt with the silver buckle, and the maddening line of the hips, and the tousled chestnut hair. And heard the Mistress-of-the-Hunt voice, bang on station, no respect for anyone.

"But, Thomas," Jed was protesting. "Somebody must love you terribly. What about mothers, girlfriends, fathers, chums? Really nobody?"

"Really," he insisted.

"So who's Yvonne?" she asked, as she placed her head within inches of his own, spread one palm on his back and the other on his chest to sit him up. "Is she absolutely gorgeous?"

"She was just a friend," he said, smelling the shampoo in her hair.

"Well, shouldn't we be telling Yvonne?"

"No, we shouldn't," he replied, too sharply.

She gave him his pills and a glass of water. "Well, Dr. Marti says you're to sleep for ever. So don't think of anything except getting better extremely slowly. Now, how about distractions ― books, a radio or something? Not quite yet, but in a day or two. We don't know anything about you, except that Roper says you're Thomas, so you'll just have to tell us what you need. There's a huge library over in the main house, with masses of frightfully learned stuff ― Corky will tell you what it all is ― and we can get anything you want flown over from Nassau, You just have to yell." And her eyes big enough to drown in.

"Thanks, I will."

She laid a hand on his face to feel his temperature. "We just never can thank you enough," she said, keeping it there. "Roper will say it all far better than I can when he gets back, but honestly, what a hero. Just so brave," she said from the door. "Shit" the convent girl added, catching the pocket of her slacks on the handle.

* * *

Then he realised that it wasn't their first meeting since he had arrived here, but their third, and that the first two were not dreams either.

Our first time you smiled at me, and that was fine: you kept quiet and I could think, and we had something going. You had jammed your hair behind your ears, you were wearing jodhpurs and a denim shirt. I said, "Where is this?" You said, "Crystal. Roper's island. Home."

The second time I was feeling vague, and I thought you were my former wife, Isabelle, waiting to be taken out to dinner, because you were got up in a perfectly ridiculous trouser suit with gold frogging on the lapels. "There's a bell right beside your water jug if you need anything," you said. And I said, "Expect my call." But I was thinking: Why the hell do you have to dress up like a pantomime boy?

Her father ruined himself keeping up with the county, Burr said with contempt. He was serving vintage claret when he couldn't pay the electricity bill. Wouldn't send his daughter to secretarial college because he thought it was infra dig.

* * *

Lying on his safe side, facing the tapestry, Jonathan made out a lady in a broad-brimmed hat and recognised her without surprise as singing Aunt Annie Ball.

Annie was a valiant woman and sang good songs, but her farmer husband got drunk and hated everyone. So one day Annie put on her hat and sat Jonathan beside her in the van with his suitcase in the back, and said they were going for a holiday. They drove late into the evening, and sang songs till they came to a house with boys carved in granite over the door. Then Annie Ball started weeping and gave Jonathan her hat as a promise she'd come back soon to get it, and Jonathan went upstairs to a dormitory full of other boys and hung the hat over the corner of his bed to show Annie which boy he was when she returned. But she never did, and when he woke in the morning the other boys in the dormitory were taking it in turns to wear her hat. So he fought for it, and won it against all comers, and rolled it up in newspaper and posted it, with no address, in a red pillar box. He would have preferred to burn it, but he hadn't a fire.

I came here by night as well, he thought. White twin-engined Beechcraft, blue interior. Frisky and Tabby, not the orphanage guardian, searched my luggage for forbidden tuck.

* * *

I hurt him for Daniel, he decided.

I hurt him to get me across the bridge.

I hurt him because I was sick of waiting and pretending.

* * *

Jed was in the room again. The close observer had no doubt of it. It wasn't her scent, because she wore none, or her sound, because she made none. And for a long time he couldn't see her, so it wasn't sight. So it must have been the sixth sense of the professional watcher, when you know an enemy is present but don't yet know why you know.

"Thomas?"

Feigning sleep, he listened to her tiptoeing toward him. He had a notion of pale clothes, dancer's body, hair hanging loose. He heard a shifting as she drew back her hair and put her ear close to his mouth to hear him breathe. He could feel the warmth of her cheek. She stood again, and he heard slippered feet disappearing down the passage, then the same feet outside, crossing the stable-yard.

They say that when she went up to London she scared herself, Burr said. Got in with a crowd of Hoorah Henries and screwed the field. Bolted to Paris for a rest cure. Met Roper.

* * *

He listened to the Cornish gulls and the long echoes from outside the shutters. He smelled the brown salt smell of weed and knew it was low tide. For a while he let himself believe that Jed had taken him back to the Lanyon and was standing barefoot on the floorboards before the mirror, doing the things women do before they come to bed. Then he heard the plop of tennis balls and leisured English voices calling to each other, and one of them was Jed's. He heard a lawn mower, and the yell of rude English children quarrelling, and surmised the Langbournes' offspring. He heard the buzz of an electric motor and decided on a skimmer cleaning the surface of a pool. He slept again and smelled charcoal and knew by the pinkish glow of the ceiling that it was evening, and when he dared to lift his head he saw Jed in silhouette before the shuttered window as she peered through it at the last of the day outside, and the evening light showed him her body through her tennis clothes.

"Now, Thomas, what about a little more food in your life?" she proposed in a school matron's voice. She must have heard him move his head. "Esmeralda's made you some beef broth and bread and butter. Dr. Marti said toast, but it goes so floppy in the humidity. Or there's chicken breast, or apple pie. Actually, Thomas, there's pretty much anything you want," she added, in the startled accents he was becoming accustomed to. "Just whistle."

"Thanks. I will."

"Thomas, it really is odd, you not having a single person to worry about you in the world. I don't know why it should, but it makes me frightfully guilty. Can't you even have a brother? Everyone's got a brother," she said.

"Afraid not."

"Well, I've got one gorgeous brother and one absolute pig. So that cancels them out, really. Except I'd far rather have them than not. Even the pig."

She was coming across the room to him. She smiles all the time, he thought in alarm. She smiles like a television commercial. She's afraid we'll switch her off if she stops smiling. She's an actress in search of a director. One small scar on her chin, otherwise no distinguishing marks. Maybe somebody swiped her too. A horse did. He held his breath. She had reached his bed. She was stooping over him, pressing what felt like a piece of cold sticking plaster to his forehead.

"Got to let it cook," she said, smiling more broadly. Then she sat on the bed to wait, tennis skirt parted, bare legs carelessly crossed, the muscles of one calf gently swelling against the shin below. And her skin all one soft tan.

"It's called a fever tester," she explained in a stagy, top-hostess accent. "For some extraordinary reason this entire house has no proper thermometer. You're such a mystery, Thomas. Were those all your things? Just one small bag?"

"Yes."

"In the world?"

"I'm afraid so." Get off my bed! Get into it! Cover yourself!

Who the hell do you think I am?

"God, you are lucky!" she was saying, this time sounding like a princess of the blood. "Why can't we be like that? We take the Beechcraft to Miami just for one weekend, and we can hardly get our stuff in the hold."

Poor you, he thought.

She talks lines, he recorded in his misery. Not words. Lines. She talks versions of who she thinks she ought to be.

"Perhaps you should use that big boat of yours instead," he suggested facetiously.

But to his fury she seemed to have no experience of being laughed at. Perhaps beautiful women never had.

"The Pasha? Oh, that would take far too long," she explained condescendingly. Reaching a hand to his forehead, she unpeeled the plastic strip and took it to the shutters to read. "Roper's away selling farms, I'm afraid. He's decided to slow down a bit, which I think is a frightfully good idea."

"What does he do?"

"Oh, business. He runs a company, actually. Who doesn't these days? Well, at least it's his own," she added, as if she were apologising for her lover being in trade. "He did found it. But mainly he's just a lovely, darling man." She was tilting the strip, frowning at it. "He's also got masses of farms, which is rather more fun, not that I've ever seen any of them. All over Panama and Venezuela and places where you have to have an armed guard to go on a picnic. Not my idea of farming, but it's still land." The frown deepened. "Well, it says normal, and it says clean with alcohol when dirty. Corky could do that for us. No trouble at all." She giggled, and he saw that side of her too: the party girl who is the first to kick off her shoes and dance when things warm up.

"I'll have to be hitting the road pretty soon," he said. "You've been terribly kind. Thanks."

Always play hard to get, Burr had advised. If you don't, they'll be bored with you in a week.

"Go?" she cried, making her lips into a perfect O and keeping them there for a moment. "What are you talking about? You aren't nearly ready to go anywhere till Roper gets back, and Dr. Marti said specifically that you've got to have simply weeks of convalescence. The least we can do is build you up. Anyway, we're all dying to know what on earth you were doing saving life and limb at Mama's after you'd been someone totally different at Meister's."

"I don't think I'm different. I just felt I was getting in a rut. Time I threw away my striped pants and drifted for a while."

"Well, jolly good for us you drifted our way, is all I can say," said the equestrienne, in a voice so deep that she might have been tightening her horse's girth while she spoke.

"What about you?" he asked.

"Oh, I just live here."

"All the time?"

"When we're not on the boat. Or travelling. Yes. This is where I live."

But her answer seemed to puzzle her. She laid him flat again, avoiding his eye.

"Roper wants me to hop over to Miami for a couple of days," she said as she was leaving. "But Corky's back, and everyone's absolutely dying to spoil you rotten, and the hot line to Dr. Marti is wide open, so I don't think you'll exactly fade away."

"Well, remember to pack light this time," he said.

"Oh, I always do. Roper insists on shopping, so we always come back with tons."

She left, to his profound relief. It was not his own performance that had tired him out, he realised. It was hers.

* * *

He was woken by the sound of a page turning and made out Daniel in a bathrobe crouched on the floor, with his bottom in the air, reading a large book by a convenient shaft of sunlight, and he knew it was morning, which was why there were brioches and croissants and Madeira cake and homemade jam and a silver teapot beside his bed.

"You can get giant squid sixty feet long," Daniel said. "What do they eat, anyway?"

"Other squid probably."

"I could read you about them if you like." He turned another page. "Do you like Jed, actually?"

"Of course."

"I don't. Not really."

"Why not?"

"I just don't. She's soppy. They're all terrifically impressed you saved me. Sandy Langbourne's talking about organising a collection."

"Who's she?"

"It's a him. He's a lord, actually. Only there's a question mark hanging over you. So he thought he'd better hold off until it's removed one way or the other. That's why Miss Molloy says I'm not to spend too much time with you."

"Who's Miss Molloy?"

"She teaches me."

"At school?"

"I don't go to school, actually."

"Why not?"

"It hurts my feelings. Roper gets in other kids for me, but I hate them. He's bought a new Rolls-Royce for Nassau, but Jed likes the Volvo better."

"Do you like the Rolls-Royce?"

"Yuck."

"What do you like?"

"Dragons."

"When are they coming back?"

"The dragons?"

"Jed and Roper."

"You're supposed to call him the Chief."

"All right. Jed and the Chief."

"What's your name, anyway?"

"Thomas."

"Is that your surname or your Christian name?"

"Whichever you like."

"It's not either of them, according to Roper. It's made up."

"Did he tell you that?"

"I just happened to hear it. Thursday probably. Depends if they stay on for Apo's binge."

"Who's Apo?"

"He's foul. He's got a tan's penthouse in Coconut Grove, which is where he does his screwing. That's in Miami."

So Daniel read to Jonathan about squid, and then he read to him about pterodactyls, and when Jonathan dozed off, Daniel tapped him on the shoulder to ask whether it would be all right to eat a bit of Madeira cake and would Jonathan like some too? So to please Daniel, Jonathan ate a bit of Madeira cake, and when Daniel shakily poured him a cup of tea he drank some tepid tea as well.

"Coming along, are we, Tommy? They made a right job of you, I will say. Very professional."

It was Frisky, seated on a chair just inside the door, wearing a T-shirt and white ducks and no Beretta, and reading the Financial Times.

* * *

While the patient rested, the close observer used his wits.

Crystal. Mr. Onslow Roper's island in the Exumas, one hour's flying time from Nassau by Frisky's right-handed watch, which Jonathan had managed to get a sight of as they loaded him on and off the plane. Slumped in the rear seat, his mind secret-bright, he had watched by white moonlight as they flew over reefs fretted like the tongues of a jigsaw puzzle. A solitary island rose toward them, a cone-shaped hillock at its centre. He made out a neat, floodlit airstrip cut into the crest, with a helicopter pad to one side of it, and a low green hangar and an orange communications mast. In his peculiar alertness he looked for the cluster of broken slave houses in the woods that Rooke said marked the spot, but he didn't see one. They landed and were met by a soft-topped Toyota jeep driven by a very big black man who wore string gloves with the knuckles left bare for hitting people.

"He okay for sittin', or you wan' me pull out the back?"

"Just take him nice and slow," Frisky had said.

They drove down an unmade snake track, and the trees changed from blue pine to lush green heart-shaped leaves the size of dinner plates. The track straightened, and by the jeep's headlights he saw a broken sign saying Pindar's Turtle Factory and behind the sign a brick sweatshop with the roof torn off and its windows smashed. And at the roadside, shreds of cotton hanging like old bandages from the bushes. And Jonathan memorised everything in order, so that if he ever got out of here and was on the run, he could count them in reverse: pineapple field, banana grove, tomato field, factory. By the burning white moon he saw fields with wooden stumps like unfinished crosses, then a Calvary Chapel, then a clapboard Highway Church of God. Go left at the Highway Church, he thought, as they turned right. Everything was information, everything a straw to clutch as he fought to stay afloat.

A circle of natives sat in the road, drinking from brown bottles. The driver manoeuvred respectfully round them, his gloved hand lifted in a calm salute. The Toyota bumped over a plank bridge, and Jonathan saw the moon hanging to his right, with the north star straight above it. He saw flame-of-the-woods and hibiscus and, with the lucidity that was on him, remembered reading that the hummingbird drank from the back of the hibiscus, not the centre. But then he couldn't remember whether this made the bird remarkable or the plant.

They passed between two gateposts that reminded him of Italian villas on Lake Como. Beside the gates stood a white bungalow with barred windows and security lights, and Jonathan took this to be a gatehouse of some kind, because the jeep slowed to a crawl as the gates appeared, and two black guards made a leisurely inspection of its occupants.

"This the one the Major say comin'?"

"What do you think he is?" Frisky asked. "A fucking Arab stallion?"

"Just askin', man. Ain't no cause for perturbation. What they do to his face, man?"

"Styled it," said Frisky.

From the gates to the main house was four minutes by Frisky's watch at around ten miles an hour for the speed bumps, and the Toyota seemed to move in a left-handed arc with sweet-smelling water to the left, so Jonathan reckoned a curved driveway about 1.5 kilometres long skirting the shore of a man-made lake or lagoon. As they drove he kept seeing distant lights between the trees and guessed a perimeter fence with halogen lamps, like Ireland. Once he heard the flutter of a horse's feet scampering beside them in the dark.

The Toyota rounded another turn, and he saw the floodlit façade of a Palladian palace, with a central cupola and a triangular pediment supported by four tall pillars. The cupola had round dormer windows like portholes lit from within, and a small tower that shone like a white shrine in the moonlight. On the top of the tower stood a weather vane, with two coursing dogs pursuing a spotlit gold arrow. The bill for the house is twelve million pounds and more to come, Burr had said. Contents insured for another seven, fire only. The Roper doesn't reckon on being robbed.

The palace stood on a grass mound that must have been shaped for it. There was a gravel sweep with a lily pond and a marble fountain, and a hooped marble stairway with a balustrade rising from the sweep to a high entrance with iron Ianterns. The lanterns were lit and the fountain was playing; the double doors were made of glass. Through them Jonathan glimpsed a manservant in a white tunic standing under a chandelier in the hall. The jeep kept going across the gravel, through a cobbled stableyard that smelled of warm horses, past a spinney of eucalyptus trees and a floodlit swimming pool with a kids' end with a slide, and two floodlit clay tennis courts, and a croquet lawn and a putting green, between a second pair of gateposts, less imposing but prettier than the first, to stop before a redwood door.

And there Jonathan had to close his eyes because his head was splitting and the pain in his groin was driving him nearly mad. Besides, it was time that he played dead again.

Crystal, he repeated to himself as they carried him up the teak staircase. Crystal. A Crystal as Big as the Ritz.

* * *

And now in his luxurious confinement the unsleeping part of Jonathan still toiled, noting and recording every symptom for posterity. He listened to the day-long flow of black men's voices from outside the shutters, and soon he had identified Gums, who was repairing the wooden jetty, and Earl, who was shaping boulders for a rockery and was an avid supporter of the St. Kitts football team, and Talbot, who was the boatmaster and sang calypso. He heard land vehicles, but their engines had no throat so he divined electric buggies. He heard the Beechcraft plough back and forth across the sky to no routine, and each time it passed he imagined Roper with his half-lens spectacles and Sotheby's catalogue riding home to his island, with Jed beside him reading magazines. He heard the distant whinnying of horses and the scrabbling of hooves in the stableyard. He heard the occasional roar of a guard dog and the yapping of much smaller dogs that could have been a pack of beagles. And he discovered by degrees that the emblem on his pyjama pocket was a crystal, which he supposed he might have guessed from the beginning.

He learned that his room, however elegant, was not excused the battle against tropical decay. As he began to use the bathroom he noticed how the towel rail, though polished daily by the maids, grew salt sweat spots overnight. And how the brackets holding the glass shelves oxidised, as did the rivets fastening the brackets to the tiled wall. There were hours when the air was so heavy it defied the punkah and hung on him like a wet shirt, draining him of will.

And he knew that the question mark was still hanging over him.

* * *

One evening Dr. Marti paid a visit to the island by air taxi. He asked Jonathan whether he spoke French, and Jonathan said yes. So while Marti explored Jonathan's head and his groin, and hit his knees and arms with a little rubber hammer, and peered into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, Jonathan answered a string of not very casual questions about himself in French and knew he was being examined about other things than his health.

"But you speak French like a European, Monsieur Lamont!"

"It's how they taught it to us at school."

"In Europe?"

"Toronto."

"But which school was that? My God, they must have been geniuses!"

And more of the same.

Rest, Dr. Marti prescribed. Rest and wait. For what? Until you catch me out?

"Feeling a bit more like ourselves, are we, Thomas?" Tabby asked solicitously, from the seat beside the door.

"A bit."

"That's the way, then," said Tabby.

As Jonathan grew stronger, the guards grew more watchful.

* * *

But of the house where they were keeping him Jonathan learned nothing, stretch his senses as he might: no doorbells, telephones, fax machines, cooking smells, no scraps of conversation. He smelled honey-scented furniture polish, insecticide, fresh flowers, potpourri and, when the breeze was in the right direction, horses. He smelled frangipani and mown grass, and chlorine from the swimming pool.

Nevertheless, the orphan, soldier and hotelier was soon aware of something familiar to him from his homeless past: the rhythm of an efficient institution, even when the high command was not there to enforce it. The gardeners began work at seven-thirty, and Jonathan could have set his clock by them. The single chime of a tocsin sounded the eleven o'clock break, and for twenty minutes nothing stirred, not a mower or a cut-lash, as they dozed. At one o'clock the tocsin sounded twice, and if Jonathan strained his ears he could hear the murmur of native chatter from the staff canteen.

A knock on his door. Frisky opened it and grinned. Corkoran's as degenerate as Caligula, Burr had warned, and as clever as a box of monkeys.

* * *

"Old love, " breathed a husky, upper-class English voice through the fumes of last night's alcohol and this morning's vile-smelling French cigarettes. "How are we today? Not stuck for variety, I must say, heart. We kick off Garibaldi scarlet, then we go blue-based baboon, and today we're a sort of livery, rather stale donkey-piss yellow. Dare one hope we're on the mend?"

The pockets of Major Corkoran's bush jacket were stuffed with pens and male junk. Huge sweat patches reached from his armpits across his gut.

"I'd like to go soon, actually," said Jonathan.

"Absolutely, heart, whenever you like. Talk to the Chief. Soon as they're back. Due season and all that. And we're eating all right and so forth, are we? Sleep the great healer. See you tomorrow. Chűss."

And when tomorrow came, there was Corkoran again peering down at him, puffing at his cigarette.

"Fuck off, will you please, Frisky, old love?"

"Will do, Major," said Frisky with a grin, and he obediently slipped from the room while Corkoran paddled through the gloom to the rocking chair, into which he lowered himself with a grateful grunt. Then for a while he drew on his cigarette without saying a thing.

"Don't mind the fag, do we, old love? Can't do the brainwork if I haven't got a fag between my fingers. It's not the sucking and puffing that I'm hooked on. It's physically holding the little sod."

His regiment couldn't stomach him, so he did five unlikely years in Army Intelligence, said Burr, which is a misnomer, as we know, but Corky served them proud. The Roper doesn't love him for his looks alone.

"Smoke ourselves, do we, heart? In better times?"

"A bit."

"What times are they, old love?"

"Cooking."

"Can't hear us."

"Cooking. When I'm taking a break from hoteling."

Major Corkoran became all enthusiasm. "I must say, not a word of a lie, bloody good grub you ran us up at Mama's before you saved the side that night. Were those sauced-up mussels all our own work?"

"Yes."

"Finger-lickin' good. How about the carrot cake? We scored a bull's-eye there, I can tell you. Chief's favourite. Flown in, was it?"

"I made it."

"Come again, old boy?"

"I made it."

Corkoran was robbed of words. "You mean you made the carrot cake? Our own tiny hands? Old love. Heart." He drew on his cigarette, beaming admiration at Jonathan through the smoke. "Pinched the recipe from Meister's, no doubt." He shook his head. "Sheer genius." Another enormous draught of cigarette smoke. "And did we pinch anything else at all from Meister's while we were about it, old love?"

Motionless on his down pillow, Jonathan affected to be motionless in his mind as well. Get me Dr. Marti. Get me Burr. Get me out.

"Bit of a dilemma, frankly, you see, heart. I was filling in these forms for us at the hospital. That's my job in this shop. For as long as I've got one. Official form-filler. Us military types, about all we know how to do, isn't it? Well, well, I thought. Ho, ho. This is a bit rum. Is he a Pine or is he a Lamont? He's a hero, well we know that, but you can't put hero when you've got to put a chap's name. So I put Lamont, Thomas Alexander ― I say, old love, I do hope I did right? Born whatnot in Toronto? See page thirty-two for next of kin, except you hadn't got any? Case closed, I thought. Chap wants to call himself Pine when he's a Lamont, or Lamont when he's a Pine, far as I'm concerned, his good right."

He waited for Jonathan to speak. And waited. And drew more cigarette smoke. And still waited, because Corkoran possessed the interrogator's advantage of having all the time in the world to kill.

"But the Chief, you see, heart," he resumed at last, "is hewn of a different tree, as you might say. The Chief, among his many talents, is a stickler for detail. Always has been. Gets on the electric blower to Meister in Zürich. From a call box, actually. Down on Deep Bay. Doesn't always care for an audience. 'How's your nice man Pine these days?' says the Chief. Well, old Meister pops his garters. 'Pine, Pine? Gott in Himmel! That bugger robbed me blind! Sixty-one thousand four hundred and two francs, nineteen centimes and two waistcoat buttons, stolen from my night safe.' Lucky he hadn't heard about the carrot cake, or he'd have done you for industrial espionage as well. You with us in there, old love? Not boring you, am I?"

Wait, Jonathan was telling himself. Eyes closed. Body flat. Your head hurts, you're going to be sick. The rhythmic rocking of Corkoran's chair gained speed, then stopped. Jonathan smelled cigarette smoke very close and saw Corkoran's bulk leaning over him.

"Old love? Are you receiving my signals? I don't think we're quite as poorly as we're making out, to be harsh. The leech says we've made a rather impressive recovery."

"I didn't ask to come here. You're not the Gestapo. I did you a favour. Just get me back to Low's."

"But, darling, you did us an enormous favour! Chief's totally on your side! Me too. We owe you one. Owe you lots. Chief's not a fellow to walk away from a debt. Very hung up on you, the way these men of vision get when they're grateful. Hates owing. Always prefers to be owed. His nature, you see. How great men are. So he needs to pay you off." He ambled down the room, hands in pockets, reasoning the thing out. "But he's also a tinsy bit exercised. In his noddle. Well, you can't blame him, can you?"

"Get out. Leave me alone."

"Seems old Meister pitched him some story to the effect that after busting his safe, you ran away to England and topped a fellow. Codswallop, says the Chief, must be some other Linden; mine's a hero. But then the Chief goes and puts out a few feelers of his own, which is his way. And it turns out old Meister's bang on target." Another life-saving drag of the cigarette while Jonathan played dead. "Chief hasn't told anyone, of course, apart from yours faithfully. Lot of chaps change their names in life, some do it all the time. But topping a chap, well, that's a bit more private. So the Chief keeps it to himself. Doesn't want to nurse a viper, naturally. Family man. On the other hand, there are vipers and vipers, if you follow me. You could be the non-poisonous variety. So he's deputed me to suss you out while he and Jed do whatever they do. Jed's his virtue," he explained, for information. "Nature's child. You've met her. Tall girl. Ethereal." He was shaking Jonathan's shoulder. "Wake up, do you mind, old love? I'm rooting for you. So's the Chief. This isn't England. Men of the world, all that. Come on, Mr. Pine."

His appeal, though roughly made, had fallen on deaf ears. Jonathan had willed himself into the deep, escaper's sleep of the orphanage.