The Night Manager

TWENTY-FIVE

Jonathan was also a prisoner.

Perhaps he had always been one, as Sophie had suggested. Or perhaps he had been one ever since he had been spirited to Crystal. But an illusion of freedom had always been conceded him. Till now.

The first warning came at Fabergé, as Roper and his party were about to take their leave. The guests had left. Langbourne and Moranti had left with them. Colonel Emmanuel and Roper were exchanging last bear hugs as a young soldier came running up the track, calling and waving a piece of paper above his head. Emmanuel took the paper, glanced at it and handed it to Roper, who pulled on his spectacles and took a pace away to read in greater privacy. And as Roper read, Jonathan saw him shed his customary lassitude and stiffen; then methodically fold the paper and put it in his pocket.

"Frisky!"

"Sir!"

"A word."

Parade-ground style, Frisky marched facetiously over the bumpy ground to his master and came to attention. But when Roper took him none too gently by the arm and murmured an order in his ear, Frisky must have wished he hadn't been so damn funny. They entered the helicopter. Frisky went purposefully ahead and brusquely beckoned Jonathan to take the seat beside him.

"I've got the runs, actually, Frisk," Jonathan said. "Jungle tummy."

"Sit where you're fucking told," Tabby advised from behind him.

And on the plane Jonathan sat between them, and whenever he went to the lavatory Tabby stood outside. Roper meanwhile sat alone at the bulkhead, acknowledging nobody but Meg, who brought him fresh orange juice and, halfway into the journey, an incoming fax, which Jonathan saw to be handwritten. Having read it, Roper folded it into an inside pocket. Then he put on his eye mask and appeared to sleep.

At Colón airport, where Langbourne was waiting for them with two chauffeur-driven Volvos, Jonathan was again made unmistakably aware of his altered status.

"Chief. I need to talk to you at once. Alone," Langbourne yelled up from the runway, almost before Meg had got the door open.

So everyone waited aboard while Roper and Langbourne conferred at the foot of the gangway.

"Second car," Roper ordered, when Meg had allowed the rest of the passengers to emerge. "All of you."

"He's got jungle tummy," Frisky warned Langbourne aside.

"Fuck his tummy," Langbourne retorted. "Tell him to contain himself."

"Contain yourself," said Frisky.

It was afternoon. The police box was empty; so was the control tower. So was the airfield, except for the white Colombian-registered private jets parked in rows beside the wide runway. Langbourne and Roper got into the front car, and as they did so, Jonathan noticed a fourth man, in a hat, seated beside the driver. Frisky opened the back door of the second car, Jonathan got in. Frisky got in after him. Tabby sat the other side of him, leaving the passenger seat empty. No one spoke.

On a huge billboard, a girl in frayed shorts spread her thighs round the latest brand of cigarette. On another she teasingly licked the erect aerial of a transistor radio. They entered the town, and a stench of poverty filled the car. Jonathan remembered Cairo and sitting beside Sophie while the wretched of the earth grovelled in the rubbish. In streets of former grandeur, between shanties built of planks and corrugated iron, stood old timbered houses crumbling with decay. Bright-coloured washing hung from the rotting balconies. Children played in the blackened arcades and floated plastic cups in the open drains. From colonial porches, workless men, twenty at a time, stared expressionlessly at the passing traffic. From the windows of an abandoned factory, hundreds of immobile faces did the same.

They had stopped for lights. Frisky's left hand, low behind the driver's seat, was drawing a bead with an imaginary revolver on four armed policemen who had stepped off the curb and were walking toward the car. Tabby read his gesture at once, and Jonathan felt him ease against the backrest and unfasten the middle buttons of his bush jacket.

The policemen were huge. They wore pressed uniforms of light khaki, lanyards and medal ribbons, and Walther automatics in burnished leather holsters. Roper's car had parked a hundred yards down the road. The traffic lights turned green, but two of the policemen were blocking the car's way while a third talked to the driver and the fourth scowled into the car. One of the men at the front was inspecting the Volvo's tires. The car rocked as another tested the suspension.

"I think the gentlemen would like a nice present, don't you, Pedro?" Frisky suggested to the driver.

Tabby was patting the pockets of his bush jacket. The police wanted twenty dollars. Frisky gave the driver ten. The driver gave them to the policeman.

"Some bugger nicked my cash off of me at the camp," Tabby said as they drove again.

"Want to go back and find him?" Frisky asked.

"I need a lavatory," said Jonathan.

"You need a fucking cork, is what you need," said Tabby.

Following close behind Roper's car, they entered a North American enclave of lawns, white churches, bowling centres and army brides in curlers pushing prams. They emerged on a seafront lined with pink 1920s villas with giant television aerials, razor-wire fences and high gates. The stranger in the front seat was looking for house numbers. They rounded a corner and kept looking. They were in a grassy park. Out to sea, container ships, cruise ships and tankers waited to take their turn on the Canal. The front car had pulled up before an old house set in trees. The driver was tapping the horn. The door of the house opened, a slender-shouldered man in a white jacket tripped down the path. Langbourne lowered his window and called to him to take the car behind. Frisky leaned forward and opened the passenger door. Jonathan glimpsed a studious Arab-looking young man in spectacles. He took his place without speaking.

"How's the runs?" said Frisky.

"Better," said Jonathan.

"Well, keep them that way," said Tabby.

They entered a stretch of straight road. Jonathan had been to an army school like this. A high stone wall festooned with cables ran along their right side. It was topped with a triple strand of barbed wire. He remembered Curaçao and the road to the dockyard. Billboards appeared to their left: Toshiba, Citizen and Toyland. So this is where the Roper buys his toys. thought Jonathan absurdly. But it wasn't. It was where he collected his reward for all the hard work and hard cash he had invested. The Arab student lit a cigarette. Frisky coughed ostentatiously. The front car swung through an archway and stopped. They stopped behind it. A policeman appeared at the driver's window.

"Passports," the driver said.

Frisky had Jonathan's and his own. The Arab student in the front raised his head far enough for the policeman to recognise him. The policeman waved them through. They had entered the Free Zone of Colón.

Sleek shopfronts for jewellery and furs recalled Herr Meister's lobby. The skyline was ablaze with trade names from across the world and the pure blue glass of banks. Shiny cars lined the streets. Lurid container lorries backed and shunted and belched exhaust fumes over the crowded sidewalks. Shops are forbidden to sell retail, but everyone was selling retail. Panamanians are forbidden to buy here, but the streets were thronged with them, in all their different races, and most had come by taxi because taxi drivers have the best arrangements at the gate.

Every day, Corkoran had told Jonathan, the official workers arrive in the zone bare-necked, bare-wristed and bare-fingered. But when evening comes they look as though they are going to a wedding, in their shining bracelets, necklaces and rings. From all over Central America, he said, shoppers fly in and out unmolested by immigration or customs, some spending a million dollars in a day and depositing millions more for next time round.

The front car entered a dark street of warehouses, and they followed it nose to tail. Spots of rain rolled like fat tears down the windscreen. The hatted stranger in the front car was studying names and numbers:

Khan's Comestibles, Macdonald's Automotor, the Hoi Tin food & Beverage Company, the Tel Aviv Goodwill Container Company, El Akhbar's Fantasias, Hellas Agricultural, Le Baron of Paris, Taste of Colombia Limitada, Coffee & Comestibles.

Then a hundred yards of black wall and one sign saying Eagle, which was where they got out.

"Are we going indoors? Maybe they've got one there," said Jonathan. "It's getting urgent again," he added, for Tabby's benefit.

* * *

Tension now, as they stand in the unlit side street. A fast tropical dusk is gathering. The sky is aglow with coloured neon, but in this canyon of walls and dingy alleys, the dark is already here. Everyone's eyes are on the hatted man. Frisky and Tabby stand either side of Jonathan, and Frisky's hand is on Jonathan's upper arm: not grasping it exactly, Tommy, just making sure nobody gets lost. The Arab student has gone ahead to join the forward group. Jonathan sees the man in the hat enter the blackness of a doorway. Langbourne, Roper and the student follow him.

"Mush," Frisky murmurs. They walk forward.

"If you could just find me a loo," Jonathan says. Frisky's hand tightens on his arm.

Inside the doorway, reflected light glows at the end of a brick corridor lined with posters too dark to read. They reach a T junction, turn left. The light brightens, leading them to a glazed door with plywood tacked over the upper panes of glass to hide the writing underneath. A smell of chandlery pervades the still air: rope and flour and tar and coffee and linseed oil. The door stands open. They enter a luxurious anteroom: leather chairs, silk flowers, ashtrays like glass bricks. On a coffee table, glossy trade magazines about Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. And in a corner, a discreet green door with a bucolic lady and gentleman going for a walk on a ceramic tile.

"Quick, then," says Frisky, shoving Jonathan forward, and Jonathan keeps his jailers waiting for two and a half infuriating minutes by his watch while he sits on the lavatory and scribbles on a piece of writing paper spread on his knee.

They pass to the main office and it is large and white and windowless, with recessed lighting and a ceiling made of perforated tiles, and a conference table with empty chairs drawn up to it, and pens and blotters and drinking glasses laid like places for dinner. Roper and Langbourne and their guide stand at one end. The guide, now that he can be seen, turns out to be Moranti. But something has happened to his body, some quickening of urgency or hate, and his face has the slashed grimness of a Halloween lantern. At the other end of the room, by a second door, stands the farmer whom Jonathan remembers from this morning's military display, and at his arm the bullfighter, with one of the richly dressed boys in a leather bomber jacket beside him. The boy is scowling. And round the walls, still more boys, all wearing jeans and sneakers, all honed and fit after their extended stay at Faberge, all pressing the smaller variety of Uzi submachine gun discreetly to their sides.

The door behind them closes, the other opens and it is a door to a real warehouse: not a steel-lined abyss like the hold of the Lombardy but a place with some pretension to taste with stone-slab floors, and iron pillars that fan into palm tree as they reach the ceiling, and dusty art deco lampshades hanging from the girders. On the side of the warehouse that borders the street, closed garage doors. Jonathan counts ten of them each with its own lock and number and its own bay for a container and a crane. And at the centre, cardboard boxes by the thousand, piled in brown cubist mountains, with forklift trucks standing at their feet to trundle them the sixty meters to the containers on the street side. Only occasionally is a commodity displayed: a cluster of outsized pottery urns, for instance, waiting to be specially packed; a pyramid of video recorders; bottles of Scotch whisky, which in a previous existence might have worn a less distinguished label.

But the forklift trucks, like everything else about the place, are idle: no watchman, no dogs, no night shift toiling at the packing bays or scrubbing down the floor; just the friendly smell of chandlery and the clip and squeak of their own feet on the flagstones.

* * *

As on the Lombardy, protocol now dictated the order of progression. The farmer led with Moranti. The bullfighter and his son walked after him. Then came Roper and Langbourne and the Arab, and finally Frisky and Tabby, with Jonathan pressed between them.

And there it stood.

Their prize, their rainbow's end. The biggest cubist mountain of them all, stacked roof-high in its own fenced enclosure and guarded by a ring of fighters with submachine guns. Each box numbered, each box bearing the same pretty-coloured label of a laughing Colombian boy juggling coffee beans above his big straw hat, a Third World model of a happy child, with perfect teeth and a cheerful shining face, drug-free, loving life, juggling his way into the future. Jonathan took a quick reckoning, left to right, up and down. Two thousand boxes. Three thousand. His arithmetic deserted him. Langbourne and Roper stepped forward together. As they did so, Roper's features came into the stiff arc of the overhead light, and Jonathan saw him as he had seen him the very first time, stepping into the glow of the chandelier at Meister's, tall and at first glance noble, brushing the snow off his shoulders, waving at Fräulein Eberhardt and looking every inch the buccaneering dealmaker of the eighties, even if it was the nineties: I'm Dicky Roper. My chaps booked some rooms here. Rather a lot of 'em...

What had changed? All this time and all these miles later, what had changed? The hair a mite more grey? The dolphin smile a fraction stiffer at the corners? Jonathan saw no change in him at all. At every point where he had learned to read the Roper signals ― the occasional flicking of a hand, the smoothing of the horns of hair above the ears, the ruminative tilting of the head while the great man affected to consider ― Jonathan saw no hint of transformation.

"Feisal, table over there. Sandy, pick a box, pick twenty, different places. You chaps all right back there, Frisky?"

"Sir."

"Hell's Moranti gone? There he is. Señor Moranti, let's get this thing on the road."

The hosts had formed a group apart. The Arab student was with his back to the audience, and while he waited he unloaded things from the recesses of his jacket and set them out on the table. Four of the fighting boys had taken the doors. One held a cellular telephone to his ear. The rest moved quickly toward the cubist mountain, passing between the ring of guards who remained facing outward like a shooting party, clutching their submachine guns across their chests.

Langbourne pointed at a box in the middle of the heap. Two boys tugged it out for him, dumped it on the ground beside the student, and pulled up the lid, which was not sealed. The student delved in the box and drew out a rectangular package bound in sackcloth and plastic and adorned with the same happy Colombian child. Placing it on the table before him, masking it with his body, he bowed low over it. Time stopped.

Jonathan was reminded of a priest at Holy Communion, helping himself to the host and the wine with his back turned, before bringing them to his communicants. The student bowed more deeply, entering a phase of particular devotion. He sat back and gave Roper a nod of approval. Langbourne selected another box, from another part of the mountain. The boys tore it from its place. The mountain slipped and recovered. The ritual was repeated. And repeated. Perhaps thirty boxes were tested in this way. Nobody fidgeted his gun or spoke. The boys at the door were motionless. The only sound was the shuffle of the boxes. The student glanced at Roper and nodded.

"Señor Moranti," said Roper.

Moranti took a small step forward but didn't speak. The hatred in his eyes was like a curse. Yet what did he hate? The white colonialists who for so long had raped his continent? Or himself for stooping to this transaction?

"Reckon we're getting there. Quality's no problem. Let's do quantity, shall we?"

Under Langbourne's supervision, the fighters loaded twenty random boxes onto a forklift and drove them to a weighbridge. Langbourne read the weight from the illuminated dial, made a reckoning on his pocket calculator and showed it to Roper who appeared to agree with it, for he again called something affirmative to Moranti, who turned on his heel and with the farmer at his side led the procession back to the conference room. But not before Jonathan had seen the forklift truck take its load to the first of two containers standing open-topped in the bays numbered eight and nine.

"It's coming on again," he told Tabby.

"I'm going to kill you in a minute," said Tabby.

"No, you're not. I am," said Frisky.

* * *

There remained the paperwork, which as everybody knew was the sole responsibility of the plenipotentiary chairman of the house of Tradepaths Limited of Curaçao, assisted by his legal adviser. With Langbourne beside him and the contracting parties under the guidance of Moranti opposite him, Jonathan signed three documents, which, so far as he could make out: acknowledged receipt of fifty tons of first-quality pre-roasted Colombian coffee beans; certified the accuracy of waybills, bills of lading and customs declarations in respect of the same cargo, freight on board the SS Horacio Enriques, presently on charter to Tradepaths Limited, ex Colón Free Zone and bound for Gdansk, Poland, in containers number 179 and 180; and instructed the master of the SS Lombardy, presently docked in Panama City, to accept a fresh Colombian crew and proceed without delay to the port of Buenaventura on the western coast of Colombia.

When Jonathan had signed everything the requisite number of times in the requisite places, he put down his pen with a small slap and glanced at Roper as if to say, "That's that."

But Roper, until recently so forthcoming, seemed not to see him, and as they walked back to the cars he strode ahead of everyone, contriving to suggest that the real business lay ahead, which was by now Jonathan's view as well, for the close observer had entered a state of readiness that exceeded anything he had experienced. Seated between his captors, watching the lights slip by, he was gripped by a stealth of purpose that was like a newfound talent. He had Tabby's cash, and it amounted to a hundred and fourteen dollars. He had the two envelopes that he had prepared while he was sitting in the lavatory. In his head he had the numbers of the containers, the number of the waybill and even the number of the cubist mountain, for a battered black plate had dangled over it like a Cricket Scoreboard at cadet school: consignment number 54 in Warehouse underneath the Eagle sign.

They had reached the waterfront. Their car pulled up for the Arab student to get out. He vanished into the darkness without a word.

"We're reaching crunch time, I'm afraid," Jonathan announced calmly. "In about thirty seconds I shan't be responsible for the consequences."

"For fuck's sake," Frisky breathed. The car in front was already accelerating.

"It's due about now, Frisky. The choice is yours."

"You filthy bugger," said Tabby.

Making signs with his hands and yelling "Pedro," Frisky induced the driver to flash his headlights at the car ahead, which stopped again. Langbourne leaned his head out of his window to shout what the fuck's the matter now? A lighted petrol station winked across the road.

"Tommy here's got his tummy again," Frisky said.

Langbourne turned back into the car to consult Roper, then reappeared. "Go with him, Frisky. Don't let him out of your sight. Move it."

It was a new petrol station, but the plumbing was not up to the standard of the rest. One tiny stinking unisex cubicle with no seat was the best it could offer. While Frisky waited outside the door, Jonathan made energetic noises of distress and, once more using his bare knee as a rest, wrote his last message.

* * *

The Wurlitzer bar at the Riande Continental Hotel in Panama City is very small and pitch dark, and on Sunday nights it is presided over by a matronly round-faced woman who, when Rooke was able to make her out in the gloom, bore an odd similarity to his wife. And when she saw that he was not the kind who needed to talk, she filled a second saucer of nuts and left him to sip his Perrier in peace while she resumed her horoscope.

In the lobby, American soldiers in fatigues dawdled in glum groups amid the colourful bustle of nocturnal Panama. A short staircase led to the door of the hotel casino, with its courteous notice forbidding the carrying of arms. Rooke could make out ghostly figures playing baccarat and yanking at one-armed bandits. In the bar, not six feet from where he sat, reposed the magnificent white Wurlitzer organ itself, reminding him of cinemas in the days of his childhood, when an organist in a radiant jacket emerged from the dungeons on his white dreamboat, playing songs an audience could hum.

Rooke took little real interest in these things, but a man who is waiting without hope must have something to distract him, or he becomes too morbid for his health.

At first he had sat in his room, keeping close to the telephone because he was afraid the clatter of the air conditioner would drown its ring. Then he switched off the air conditioner and tried opening the French windows to his balcony, but the din from the Via España was so frightful that he quickly closed them again and lay on the bed and stewed for an hour without air from either the balcony or the air conditioner, but he became so drowsy that he nearly nodded off. So he phoned the switchboard and said he was going down to the poolside now and they should hold any call that came for him till he got there. And as soon as he reached the poolside he gave the maître d' ten dollars and asked him to alert the concierge and the telephone exchange and the doorman to the fact that Mr. Robinson of room 409 was dining at the poolside, table 6, should anyone enquire.

Then he sat and stared at the illuminated blue water of the empty pool, and at the empty tables, and upward at the windows of the surrounding high-rise buildings, and across to the house telephone on the poolside bar, and at the boys at the barbecue who were cooking his steak, and at the band that was playing rumbas just for him.

And when his steak came he washed it down with a bottle of Perrier water because, although he reckoned he had as good a bead as the next man, he would as soon have gone to sleep on sentry duty as drink alcohol while he was playing the thousand-to-one chance that a blown joe would somehow get through the lines.

Then around ten o'clock, as the tables began to fill, he feared that the effect of his ten dollars might be wearing off.

So, having called the switchboard on the house line, he took himself to the bar, where he now sat. And that was where he was when the barmaid who looked like his wife put down the phone and smiled sadly at him.

"You Mr. Robinson, 409?"

Rooke was.

"You got a visitor, darling. He very personal, very urgent. But he a man."

* * *

He was a man, he was a Panamanian, he was small and Asian and silk-skinned, with heavy eyelids and a black suit and an air of sanctity. His suit was polished to a regimental brightness, like the suits worn by office messengers and undertakers. His hair was waved, his dimpled white shirt was spotless and his visiting card, which was made in the form of a sticky label to be fixed beside your telephone, announced him in Spanish and English as Sanchez Jesus-Maria Romarez II, driver of limousines day and night, English spoken but not, alas, as well as he would wish, señor; his English, he would say, was of the people but not of the scholar ― a deprecating smile to heaven ― and had been acquired mostly from his American and British clients, though fortified, it was true, by his early attendances at school, though these, alas, had been fewer than he would have wished, for his father was not a rich man, señor, and neither was Sanchez.

At which sad admission, Sanchez fixed his gaze dotingly on Rooke and got down to business.

"Señor Robinson. My friend. Please, sir. Forgive." Sanchez put a pudgy hand inside the breast of his black suit. "I have come to collect you five hundred dollar. Thank you, sir."

Rooke by now was beginning to fear he was being set up as the victim of an elaborate tourist trap, of which the upshot would be that he was to purchase pre-Columbian artefacts, or a night with the wretched man's sister. But instead Sanchez handed him a thick envelope with the word Crystal embossed on the flap, over what appeared to be a diamond. And from it Rooke drew a handwritten letter from Jonathan in Spanish, wishing the bearer joy of the enclosed one hundred dollars and promising him five hundred more if he would personally deliver the enclosed envelope into the hands of Señor Robinson at the Riande Continental Hotel in Panama City.

Rooke held his breath.

In his secret elation, a new fear had taken hold of him: namely that Sanchez had dreamed up some idiot plan to keep him on the hook in order to increase the reward ― for instance, by dumping the letter in a safe-deposit for the night, or entrusting it to his chiquita to keep under her mattress in case the gringo attempted to wrest it from him by force.

"So where's the second envelope?" he asked.

The driver touched his heart. "Señor, it is right here in my pocket. I am an honest driver, sir, and when I saw the letter lying on the floor in the back of the Volvo, my first thought was to drive full speed onto the airfield regardless of regulations and restore it to whichever of my noble clients had been so careless as to leave it there, in the hope but not necessarily the expectation of compensation, for the clients in my car were not of the quality of the clients of my colleague Dominguez, in the car in front. My clients, if I may say so, sir, without disrespect Ito your good friend, were altogether of a humbler nature ― one was so insulting as to refer to me as a Pedro. But then, sir, as soon as I had read the inscription on the envelope, I recognised that my loyalties lay elsewhere...."

Sanchez Jesus-Maria obligingly suspended his narrative while Rooke went to the concierge's desk and cashed five hundred dollars' worth of traveller’s checks.