The Night Manager

TWENTY-EIGHT

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was a man's man, as Yale men of his generation tend to be, and when Joe Strelski entered his big white office in downtown Miami after being kept waiting half an hour in the anteroom, Ed gave him the news as one man should to another, cutting out the bullshit, straight from the shoulder the way a man likes it, whether he's old New England stock like Ed, or plain Kentucky hillbilly like Strelski. Because frankly, Joe, those boys have fucked me over too: dragged me here from Washington to do this thing, had me turn down some very attractive work at a time when everyone, and I mean everyone, even the guys right up there, needs the work. Joe, I have to say it to you ― these people have not been square with us. So I want you to appreciate we're together in this. It's been a year of your life, but by the time I've put my house back in order it will have been a year of my life too. And at my age, Joe ― well, hell, how many years do I have?

"I'm sorry for you, Ed," said Strelski.

And if Ed Prescott caught the undertone, he preferred to let it pass him by, in the interest of being two men together, solving a shared dilemma.

"Joe, just exactly how much did the Brits tell you about this undercover man they had, this Pine, this fellow with the names?"

Strelski did not fail to notice the past tense.

"Not too much," said Strelski.

"So how much?" said Prescott, man-to-man.

"He wasn't a professional. He was some kind of volunteer."

"A walk-in? I never trusted walk-ins, Joe. In the days when the Agency paid me the compliment of consulting me from time to time, back in the Cold War, which seems like a century ago, I always counselled caution toward these would-be Soviet defectors clamouring to make us a present of their wares. What, else did they tell you about him, Joe, or did they keep him wrapped in a flattering shroud of mystery?"

Strelski's manner was deliberately deadpan. With men like Prescott that was all you could do: parry until you had worked out what he wanted you to say, then either say it, or plead the Fifth, or tell him to shove it up his ass.

"They told me they had structured him in some way," he replied. "They'd given him extra background to make him more attractive to the target."

"Who told you, Joe?"

"Burr."

"Did Burr tell you the nature of this background at all, Joe?"

"No."

"Did Burr indicate to you how much background was there already, and how much came out of the makeup box?"

"No."

"Memory is a whore, Joe. Think back. Did he tell you that this man was alleged to have committed a homicide? Maybe more than one?"

"No."

"Smuggled drugs? In Cairo as well as Britain? Maybe in Switzerland also? We're checking."

"He was not specific. He said they had fitted the guy out with this background, and that now that he had this back-pound we could have Apostoll badmouth one of Roper's lieutenants and figure Roper would take to the new guy as a signer. Roper uses signers. So they gave him a signer. He likes his people flaky. So they gave him flaky."

"So the Brits were witting to Apostoll. I don't think I knew ."

"Sure they were. We made a meeting with him. Burr, Agent Flynn and myself."

"Was that wise, Joe?"

"It was collaboration," said Strelski with a tightening of his tie. "We were into collaboration, remember? It's come apart, the seams a little. But in those days we had joint planning."

Time stopped while Ed Prescott took a tour around his very large office. Its darkened windows were of inch-deep armoured glass, turning the morning sunlight into afternoon. The double doors, closed against intruders, were of reinforced steel. Miami was enduring a season of home invasions, Strelski remembered. Teams of masked men held up everybody in the house, then helped themselves to whatever caught their eye. Strelski wondered whether he would go to Apo's funeral this afternoon. The day is young. See what I decide. After that he wondered whether he would go back to his wife. When things got this lousy, that was what he always wondered. Sometimes being away from her was like being out on parole. It wasn't freedom, and sometimes you seriously wondered whether it was any better than the alternative. He thought of Pat Flynn and wished he had Pat's composure. Pat took to being an outcast like other people take to fame and money. When they told Pat not to bother with coming into the office till this thing was cleared up, Pat thanked them, shook all their hands, had a bath and drank a bottle of Bushmills. This morning, still drunk, he had called Strelski to warn him of a new form of AIDS that was afflicting Miami. It was called Hearing Aids, Pat said, and came from listening to too many assholes from Washington. When Strelski asked him whether he happened to have heard any news about the Lombardy ― for instance, whether anybody had seized it, sunk it or married it ― Flynn had given the best rendering of an Ivy League exquisite that Strelski could remember: "Oh now, Joe, you bad boy, you know better than to ask a man a secret thing like that, with your clearance." Where the hell does Pat get all those voices from? he wondered. Maybe if I drank a bottle of Irish a day, I could do some too. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was trying to put more words into his mouth, so he supposed he'd better pay attention.

"Burr was evidently not as forthcoming about his Mr. Pine as you were about your Dr. Apostoll, Joe," he was saying, with enough reproach in his voice to sting.

"Pine and Apostoll were different types of sources. They were not comparable in any way," Strelski retorted, pleased to hear himself loosening up. It must have been Flynn's about Hearing Aids.

"Like to explain that a little, Joe?"

"Apostoll was a decadent creep. Pine was ― Pine was an honourable guy who took risks for the right side. Burr was very strong on that. Pine was an operative, he was a colleague, he was family. Nobody ever called Apo family. Not even his daughter."

"Was this Pine the same man who practically dismembered your agent, Joe?"

"He was under tension. It was a big piece of theatre. Maybe pounds over-reacted, took his instructions a little too much to heart."

"Is that what Burr told you?"

"We tried to work it out that way."

"That was generous of you, Joe. An agent in your employ uses a beating to the tune of twenty thousand dollars' worth of medication plus three months' sick leave and a pending law-suit, and you tell me his assailant maybe overreacted a little. Some of these Oxford-educated Englishmen can be very persuasive in their arguments. Did Leonard Burr ever strike you as a disingenuous person?"

Everyone is in the past, thought Strelski. Including me. "I don’t know what that means," he lied.

"Lacking in candour? Insincere? Morally fraudulent in some way?

"No."

"Just no?"

"Burr's a good operator and a good man."

Prescott took another tour round the room. As a good man himself, he seemed to have difficulty wrestling with the facts of life.

"Joe, we have a couple of problems with the Brits right now. I'm speaking at the Enforcement level. What your Mr. Burr and his confederates promised us here was a squeaky-clean witness in the form of Mr. Pine, a sophisticated operation, some big heads on a platter. We went along with that. We had fine expectations of Mr. Burr, and of Mr. Pine. I have to tell you that at the Enforcement level the British have not lived up to their promises. In their dealings with us, they have shown a duplicity which some of us might not have expected of them. Others, with longer memories, on the other hand, might."

Strelski supposed he should join Prescott in some general damnation of the British, but he didn't feel inclined. He liked Burr. Burr was the kind of fellow you could rustle horses with. He'd learned to like Rooke, although he was a tight-ass. They were a pair of nice guys, and they had run a good operation.

"Joe, this class act of yours ― forgive me, of Mr. Burr's ― this honourable guy, this Mr. Pine, has a criminal record going back for years. Barbara Vandon in London and friends of hers up in Langley have dug up some very unsettling background material on Mr. Pine. It seems he is a closet psychopath. Unfortunately, the British pandered to his appetites. There was a quite bad killing in Ireland, something with a semiautomatic. We haven't gotten to the bottom of it, because they hushed it up." Prescott gave a sigh. The ways of men were devious indeed. "Mr. Pine kills, Joe. He kills and he steals and he runs dope, and it's a mystery to me that he never used that knife he pulled on your agent. Mr. Pine is also a cook, a night owl, a close-combat expert and a painter. Joe, that is the classic pattern of a psychopathic fantasist. I do not like Mr. Pine. I would not trust him with my daughter. Mr. Pine had a psychopathic relationship with a doper's hooker in Cairo, and ended up beating her to death. I would not trust Mr. Pine on the stand as my witness, and I have the gravest, and I mean the gravest, reservations about the intelligence he has hitherto supplied. I've seen it, Joe. I've studied it at the many points where his testimony stands alone and uncorroborated yet indispensable to the credibility of our case. Men like Mr. Pine are the secret liars of society. They will sell their own mothers and believe themselves to be Jesus Christ while they do it. Your friend Burr may be capable, but he was an ambitious man who was breaking his ass to get his own outfit off the ground and have it compete with the big players. Such men are the natural prey of the fabricator. I do not believe that Mr. Burr and Mr. Pine made a wholesome pair. I don't say they consciously conspired, but men in secret conclave can psych one another up in ways that make them cavalier with the truth. If Dr. Apostoll; were still with us ― well, he was a lawyer, and even if he was I a little crazy, it was my belief that he would hold up pretty, well in the stand. Juries always have a place in their hearts for a man who has returned to God. However, that is not to be. Dr. Apostoll's no longer available as a witness."

Strelski was trying to help Prescott off the hook. "It never happened, right, Ed? How's about we agree the whole case was a piece of horseshit? There's no dope, no guns, Mr. Onslow Roper never broke bread with the cartels, mistaken identity, you name it."

Prescott pulled a rueful smile as if to say he did not think that he would go that far. "We are talking about what's demonstrable, Joe. That's a lawyer's job. The lay citizen has the luxury of believing in the truth. A lawyer has to be content with the demonstrable. Put it that way."

"Sure." Strelski was smiling too. "Ed, may I say something?" Strelski leaned forward in his leather chair and opened his hands in a gesture of magnanimity.

"Go right ahead, Joe."

"Ed, relax, please. Don't strain yourself. Operation Limpet. It's dead. Langley killed it. You're just the mortician. I understand that. Operation Flagship lives, but I'm not Flagship cleared. My guess is, you are. You want to screw me, Ed? Listen, I’ve been screwed before; you don't have to take me to dinner first. I've been screwed so many times, with so many variations, I'm a veteran. This time it's Langley and some bad Brits. Not to mention a few Colombians. Last time it was Langley and some bad somebody else, maybe they were Brazilians ― -no, dammit, they were Cubans, and they'd done us a few favours in the dark days. Time before that it was Langley and some very, very rich Venezuelans, but I think there were also some Israelis besides ― to be honest, I forget ― and the files got lost. And I think there was an Operation Surefire, but I wasn't Surefire cleared."

He was furious but wonderfully comfortable. Prescott's deep leather armchair was a dream; he could lounge in it forever, just breathing in the luxury of a nice penthouse office without the unpleasantness of a lot of people getting in his way or a naked snitch kneeling on the bed with his tongue pulled down his chest.

"The other thing you want to tell me, Ed, is I can kiss but I can't tell," Strelski resumed. "Because if I tell, somebody will have my ass and take away my pension. Or if I really tell, somebody may feel obliged reluctantly to shoot my fucking head off. I understand those things, Ed. I have learned the rules. Ed, will you do me a favour?"

Prescott was not accustomed to listening without interrupting, and he never did anyone a favour unless he could count on one in return. But he knew anger when he saw it, and he knew that anger given time subsides, whether in people or in animals, so he regarded his role as essentially a waiting one and kept his smile going and answered rationally, as he would if he were in the presence of a raving lunatic. He knew also that it was essential not to show alarm. There was always the red button on the inside of his desk.

"If I can, Joe, for you, anything," he replied handsomely.

"Don't change, Ed. America needs you as you are. Don't give up any of your friends in high places or your connections with the Agency or your wife's arm's-length lucrative directorships of certain companies. Keep fixing things for us. The decent citizen knows too much already, Ed. Any more knowledge could seriously endanger his health. Think television. Five seconds of any subject is enough for anybody. People have to be normalised, Ed, not destabilised. And you're the man to do it for us."

* * *

Strelski drove home carefully through the winter sunlight. Anger brought its own vividness. Pretty white houses along the waterfront. White sailing yachts at the end of emerald lawns. The postman on his midday round. A red Ford Mustang was parked in his drive, and he recognised it as Amato's. He found him sitting on the deck wearing a funereal black tie and drinking Coke from the icebox. Stretched beside him on Strelski's rattan sofa, dressed in a Bogside black suit complete with waistcoat and black derby, lay a comatose Pat Flynn, an empty bottle of Bushmills single malt whiskey, ten years old, clutched to his bosom.

"Pat's been socialising with his former boss again," Amato explained, with a glance at his recumbent comrade. "They had like early breakfast. Leonard's snitch is aboard the Iron Pasha. Two guys helped him off the Roper jet at Antigua, two more guys helped him onto the seaplane. Pat's friend is quoting from reports compiled by very pure persons in Intelligence who have the honour to be Flagship cleared. Pat says maybe you'd like to pass the word of this to your friend Lenny Burr. Pat says to give Lenny his best respects. He enjoyed the experience of Mr. Burr despite the subsequent difficulties, tell him."

Strelski glanced at his watch and went quickly indoors. Speech on this phone was not secure. Burr picked up his end at once, as if he were waiting for it to ring.

"Your boy's gone sailing with his rich friends," Strelski said.

* * *

Burr was thankful for the pelting rain. A couple of times he had pulled onto the grass verge and sat in the car with the torrent booming on the roof while he waited till it eased. The downpour bestowed a temporary pardon. It restored the handloom weaver to his attic.

He was running later than he had meant to. "Take care," he had said meaninglessly, as he consigned the abject Palfrey to Rooke's custody. Take care of Palfrey, perhaps he was thinking. Or perhaps: Dear God, take care of Jonathan.

He's on the Pasha, he kept thinking as he drove. He's alive, even if he'd rather not be. For a while, that was all Burr's brain could do for him: Jonathan's alive, Jonathan's in torment, they're doing it to him now. Only after this period of due anguish, it seemed to Burr, was he able to apply his considerable powers of reasoning and, little by little, count up what crumbs of consolation he could find.

He's alive. Therefore Roper must want to keep him that way. Otherwise he would have had Jonathan killed as soon as he had signed his last piece of paper: another unexplained corpse on the Panamanian roadside, who cares?

He's alive. A crook of Roper's stamp does not bring a man to his a cruise yacht in order to kill him. He brings him because he needs to ask him things, and if he needs to kill him afterwards, he does it at a decent distance from the boat, with a proper respect for the local hygiene and the sensitivities of his guests.

So what does Roper want to ask him that he doesn't already know?

Perhaps: How much has Jonathan betrayed of the fine detail of the operation?

Perhaps: What is now the precise risk to Roper ― of prosecution, of the frustration of his grand scheme, of exposure, scandal, outcry?

Perhaps: How much protection do I still enjoy among those who are protecting me? Or will they be tiptoeing out of the back door as soon as the alarms begin to sound?

Perhaps: Who do you think you are, worming your way into my palace and stealing my woman from under me?

An arch of trees rose over the car, and Burr had a memory of Jonathan seated in the cottage at the Lanyon the night they dispatched him on his mission. He is holding Goodhew's letter to the oil lamp: I'm sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I'll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign?

You signed too bloody much, Burr told him gruffly in his mind. And it was me who egged you on.

Confess, he begged Jonathan. Betray me, betray us all. We've betrayed you, haven't we? Then do it back to us and save yourself. The enemy's not out there. He's here among us.

Betray us.

He was ten miles out of Newbury and forty miles out of London, but he was in the depths of rural England. He climbed a hill and entered an avenue of bare beech trees. The fields to either side were freshly ploughed. He smelled silage and remembered winter teas before the hob in his mother's kitchen in Yorkshire. We are honourable people, he thought, remembering Goodhew. Honourable English people with self-irony and a sense of decency, people with a street spirit and a good heart. What the hell's gone wrong with us?

A broken bus shelter reminded him of the tin hut in Louisiana where he had met Apostoll, betrayed by Harry Palfrey to Darker, and by Darker to the Cousins, and by the Cousins to God knew whom. Strelski would have brought a pistol, he thought. Flynn would have waded ahead of us, cradling his machine gun in his arms. We would be gun people, feeling safer for our guns.

But guns aren't the answer, he thought. Guns are a bluff. I'm a bluff. I'm unlicensed and unloaded, an empty threat. But I'm all I've got to wave at Sir Anthony Bloody Joyston Bradshaw.

He thought of Rooke and Palfrey sitting silently together in Rooke's office and the telephone between them. For the first time he almost smiled.

He spotted a signpost, turned left into an unpaved drive and was assailed by the false conviction that he had been here before. It's the conscious meeting the unconscious, he had read in some smart magazine: between them they give you the sense of déjà vu. He didn't believe that junk. Its language moved him to near violence, and he was feeling near violent now, just at the thought of it.

He stopped the car.

He was feeling too violent altogether. He waited for the feeling to subside. Christ almighty, what am I becoming? I could have strangled Palfrey. He lowered his window, put back his head and drank the country air. He closed his eyes and became Jonathan. Jonathan in agony, with his head back, unable to utter. Jonathan crucified, nearly dead and loved by Roper's woman.

A pair of stone gateposts loomed before him, but no notice saying Lanyon Rose. Burr stopped the car, took up the telephone, dialled Geoffrey Darker's direct line at the River House and heard Rooke's voice say "Hullo."

"Just checking," said Burr, and dialled the number of Darker's house in Chelsea. He heard Rooke again, grunted and rang off.

He dialled Darker's number in the country, with the same result. The intervention warrant was in operation.

Burr drove through the gates and entered a formal park run wild. Deer stared stupidly at him over the broken railing. The drive was thick with weeds. A grimy sign read JOYSTON BRADSHAW ASSOCIATES, BIRMINGHAM, With the BIRMINGHAM crossed out. Below it somebody had daubed the misspelled word Enquiries and an arrow. Burr passed a small lake. On the far side of it, the outlines of a great house appeared against the restless sky. Broken greenhouses and neglected stables clustered behind it in the dark. Some of the stables had once been offices. External iron staircases and gangways led to rows of padlocked doors. Of the main house, only the porch and two ground-floor windows were lit. He switched off the engine and took Goodhew's black briefcase from the passenger seat. He slammed the car shut and mounted the steps. An iron fist protruded from the stonework. He pulled it, then pushed it, but it didn't move. He grasped the door knocker and hammered on the door. The echoes were drowned in a tumult of howling dogs and a man's gravel voice lifted roughly against them:

"Whisper, shut up! Get down, damn you! All right, Veronica, I'll take it. That you, Burr?"

"Yes."

"You alone?"

"Yes."

The clatter of a chain being slipped from its runner. The turning of a heavy lock.

"Stay where you are. Let 'em smell you," the voice ordered.

The door opened; two great mastiffs snuffled at Burr's shoes, dribbled on his trouser legs and licked his hands. He stepped into a vast dark hallway reeking of damp and wood ash. Pale rectangles marked the places where pictures had once hung. A single light bulb burned in the chandelier. By its glow, Burr recognised the dissolute features of Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw. He wore a frayed smoking jacket and a town shirt with no collar.

The woman, Veronica, stood apart from him in an arched doorway, grey-haired and indeterminately aged. A wife? A nanny? A mistress? A mother? Burr had no idea. Beside her stood a small girl. She was about nine and wore a navy blue dressing gown with gold embroidery on the collar. Her bedroom slippers had gold rabbits on the toes. With her long fair hair brushed down her back, she looked like a child of the French aristocracy on her way to the scaffold.

"Hullo," Burr said to her. "I'm Leonard."

"Off to bed, Ginny," Bradshaw said. "Veronica, take her to bed. Got some important business to discuss, darling, mustn't be disturbed. About money, you see. Come on. Give us a kiss."

Was Veronica darling, or was the child? Ginny and her father kissed while Veronica from her archway watched. Buff followed Bradshaw down a long ill-lit corridor to a drawing room. He had forgotten the slowness of big houses. The journey to the drawing room took as long as crossing a street. Two Armchairs stood before a wood fire. Stains of damp ran down the walls. Water from the ceiling plopped into Victorian pudding bowls on the floorboards. The mastiffs arranged themselves cautiously before the fire. Like Burr, they kept their eyes on Bradshaw.

"Scotch?" Bradshaw asked.

"Geoffrey Darker's under arrest," Burr said.

* * *

Bradshaw took the blow like an old boxer. He rode it, he barely winced. He held still, his puffy eyes half-closed as he calculated the damage. He glanced at Burr as if expecting him |p come again, and when Burr didn't he shuffled forward a half step and threw a series of rolling, untidy counterpunches.

"Bollocks. Utter codswallop. Crap. Who arrested Darker? You? You couldn't arrest a drunken tart. Geoffrey? You Couldn't dare! I know you. I know the law too. You're a flunkey. You're not even police. You couldn't arrest Geoffrey any more than a" ― he was lost for a metaphor ― "fly," he ended feebly. He tried to laugh. "Stupid bloody trick," he said, turning his back while he addressed a tray of drink. "Christ." And shook his head to confirm this while he poured himself Scotch from a superb decanter that he must have forgotten to sell.

Burr was still standing. He had set the briefcase beside him on the floor. "They haven't got to Palfrey yet, but he's pinned out on the board," he said with absolute composure. "Darker and Marjoram have been taken into custody pending charges. Most likely there'll be an announcement tomorrow morning, could be afternoon if we can keep the press off. In one hour's time exactly, unless I give instructions to the contrary, uniformed police officers are going to come to this house in big, very shiny, very noisy cars and, in the full view of your daughter, and whoever else you've got, take you down to Newbury police station in handcuffs and detain you. You'll be dealt with separately. We're throwing in fraud for extra spice. Double accounting, deliberate and systematic evasion of Customs and Excise regulations, not to mention collusion with corrupt government officials and a few other charges we propose to think up while you languish in a prison cell, preparing your soul for a seven-year stint after remission and trying to shift the blame to Dicky Roper, Corkoran, Sandy Langbourne, Darker, Palfrey and whoever else you can shop to us. But we don't need that kind of collaboration, you see. We've got Roper in the bag too. There's not a port in the Western Hemisphere but there's a big burly man waiting on the dockside with extradition papers at the ready, and the only real question is, do the Americans snatch the Pasha while she's at sea, or do they let everyone have a nice holiday because it's likely to be their last for a very long time indeed?" He smiled. Vindictively. Sportingly. "The forces of light have won the day for once, Sir Anthony, I'm afraid. That's me and Rex Goodhew and some rather clever Americans, if you were wondering. Langley led Brother Darker up the garden path. What they call a sting operation, I believe. You don't know Goodhew, I suppose. Well, you'll get to know him in the witness box, I've no doubt. A natural actor, Rex turned out to be. Could have made a fortune on the stage."

Burr was watching Bradshaw dial. First he had watched him fumble in a huge marquetry desk, flinging aside bills and letters while he rummaged. Then he had watched him holding an exhausted Filofax to the pale light of a standard lamp while he licked his thumb and turned the pages until he came to D.

Then he watched him stiffen and inflate with angry self-importance as he barked into the telephone.

"I want Mr. Darker, please. Mr. Geoffrey Darker. Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw would like to speak to him on an urgent matter. So be rather snappy, will you?"

Burr watched the self-importance drain out of him and his lips begin to separate.

"Who's that? Inspector what? Well, what's wrong? Give me Darker. It's urgent. What?"

And then, as Burr heard Rooke's confident, slightly regionalized accents on the other end of the line, he saw the scene in his mind's eye: Rooke in his office, standing at the telephone, which was what he liked to do, his left arm straight at his side and chin tucked right in ― the parade-ground position for talking on the telephone.

And little Harry Palfrey, whey-faced and dreadfully cooperative, waiting for his turn.

Bradshaw rang off, making a confident show of it. "Burglary on the premises," he announced. "Police in possession. Normal procedure. Mr. Darker is working late at his office. He has been contacted. Everything totally normal. Told me."

Burr smiled. "That's what they always say, Sir Anthony. You don't think they're going to tell you to pack up and bolt, do you?"

Bradshaw stared at him. "Bollocks," he muttered, returning it to the lamp and his phone book. "Bullshit, whole thing. Some stupid game."

This time he dialled Darker's office, and yet again Burr saw the scene in his mind: Palfrey picking up the telephone for his * finest hour as Rooke's loyal agent; Rooke standing over him while he listened on the extension, Rooke's big hand helpfully * on Palfrey's arm and his clear, uncomplicated gaze encouraging Palfrey in his lines.

"I want Darker, Harry," Bradshaw was saying. "I need to I talk to him right away. Absolutely vital. Where is he?... Well, what do you mean, you don't know?... Fuck's sake, Harry, What's the matter with you? There's been a burglary at his house, the police are there, they've been on to him, spoken to him, where is he?... Don't give me that operational shit. I'm Operational. This is operational. Find him!"

For Burr a long silence. Bradshaw has the earpiece flat against his ear. He has turned pale and frightened. Palfrey is saying his great lines. Whispering them, the way Burr and Rooke rehearsed him. From the heart, because for Palfrey they are true:

"Tony, get off the line, for Christ's sake!" Palfrey urges, doing his furtive voice and scrubbing his nose with the knuckles of his spare hand. "The balloon's gone up. Geoffrey and Neal are for the high jump. Burr and company are throwing the book at us. Chaps running in the corridors. Don't call again. Don't call anyone. Police in the lobby."

Then, best of all, Palfrey rings off ― or Rooke does it for him ― leaving Bradshaw frozen at his post, and the dead phone at his ear, and his mouth open in the interests of better hearing.

"I brought the papers, if you want to see them," Burr said comfortably as Bradshaw turned to stare at him. "I'm not supposed to, but they do give me a certain pleasure, I'll admit. When I said seven years, I was being pessimistic. It's my Yorkshire blood not wanting to exaggerate, I suppose. I think you'll get more like ten."

His voice had gathered volume but not pace. He was unpacking the briefcase while he spoke, ponderously, like an insinuating magician, one rumpled file at a time. Sometimes he opened a file and paused to study a particular letter before he put it down. Sometimes he smiled and shook his head as if to say, Would you believe it?

"Funny how a case like this can turn itself round on a sixpence, just in an afternoon," he mused while he toiled. "We flog away, me and my lads and lasses, and nobody wants to know. Up against a brick wall, every time. We've had a cast-iron case against Darker for, oh" ― he allowed himself another pause for smiling ― "as long as I can remember, anyway. As for Sir Anthony, well, you were in our sights while I was a beardless lad at grammar school, I should think. You see, I really hate you. There's lots of people I want to put behind bars and never shall, it's true. But you're in a category of your own, you are; always have been. Well, you know that, really, don't you?" Another file caught his eye, and he allowed himself a moment to flip through it. "Then all of a sudden the phone goes ― lunchtime as usual, but by a mercy I'm on a diet ― and it's somebody I've hardly heard of from the Director of Public Prosecutions' office. 'Hey, Leonard, why don't you slip down to Scotland Yard, get yourself a couple of hungry police officers and go and pull that fellow Geoffrey Darker in? It's about time we cleaned up Whitehall, Leonard, got rid of all these bent officials and their shady contacts on the outside ― men like Joyston Bradshaw, for instance ― and made an example to the outside world. The Americans are doing it, so why can't we? Time we proved we're serious about not arming future enemies ― all that junk.' " He pulled out another file, marked TOP SECRET, GUARD, EYES ONLY, and gave it an affectionate pat on the flank. "Darker's under what we're calling voluntary house arrest at the moment. Confession time, really, except we don't call it that. We always like to stretch habeas corpus when we're dealing with members of the trade. You have to bend the law from time to time, otherwise you don't get anywhere."

* * *

No two bluffs are the same, but one component is necessary to all of them, and that is the complicity between the deceiver and the deceived, the mystical interlocking of opposing needs. For the man on the wrong side of the law, it may be the unconscious need to get back on the right side. For the lone criminal, a secret longing to rejoin the pack, any pack, if only he can be a member. And in the worn-out playboy and scoundrel who was Bradshaw ― or so at least the attic weaver prayed as he watched his adversary read, turn forward, turn back, take another file and read again ― it was the habitual search for exclusive treatment at any price, for the ultimate deal, for revenge against those who lived more successfully than he did, that made him the willing victim of Burr's deception.

"For Christ's sake," Bradshaw muttered at last, handing back the files as if they made him sick. "No need to go over the top. Got to be a middle ground. Must be. Reasonable man, always have been."

Burr was less forthcoming. "Oh, I don't think I would call it middle ground at all, Sir Anthony," he said, with a resurgence of his former anger as he took back the files and stuffed them into the briefcase. "I'd call it a fixture postponed until the next time round. What you do is, you telephone the Iron Pasha for me, have a quiet word with our mutual friend."

"What sort of word?"

"This sort. Tell him the shit's hit the fan. Tell him what I've told you, what you've seen, what you've done, what you've heard." He glanced out of the uncurtained window. "Can you see the road from here?"

"No."

"Pity, because they're out there by now. I thought we might see a little blue light winking at us across the lake. Not even from upstairs?"

"No."

"Tell him we've rumbled you all ways up, you've been quite careless and we've traced your phony end users back to source and we're following the careers of the Lombardy and the Horatio Enriques with interest. Unless. Tell him the Americans are warming up a cell for him at Marion. They want to bring their own charges. Unless. Tell him his high friends at court aren't friends anymore." He handed Bradshaw the telephone. "Tell him you're scared to death. Weep, if you still can. Tell him you can't take prison. Let him hate you for your weakness. Tell him I nearly strangled Palfrey with my bare hands, but that was because I thought he was Roper for a moment."

Bradshaw licked his lips, waiting. Burr crossed the room and placed himself in the darkness of a far window.

"Unless what?" Bradshaw asked nervously.

"Then tell him this," Burr resumed, speaking with great reluctance. "I'll drop all charges. Against you and against him. This time round. His ships get a free run. Darker, Marjoram, Palfrey ― they're going where they belong. But not him and not you and not the cargoes." His voice rose. "And tell him I'll follow him and his terrible generation to the ends of the earth before I give up on him. Tell him I'm going to breathe clean air before I die." He lost himself for a moment, and recovered. "He's got a man called Pine on his boat. You may have heard of him. Corkoran telephoned you from Nassau about him. The River rats dug up his past for you. If Roper lets Pine go within one hour from you putting down the phone" ― again he faltered ― "I'll bury the case. He has my word."

Bradshaw was staring at him with a mixture of astonishment and relief. "Jesus Christ, Burr. Pine must be some catch!" A happy thought struck him. "I say, old boy ― you're not on a piece of the action yourself, by any chance, are you?" he asked. Then he caught Burr's eye, and the hope faded.

"You'll tell him I'll want the girl too," Burr said, almost as an afterthought.

"What girl?"

"Mind your bloody business. It's Pine and it's the girl. Alive and unharmed."

Hating himself, Burr began reading out the satcom number of the Iron Pasha.

* * *

It was late the same night. Palfrey walked, not noticing the rain. Rooke had put him into a cab, but Palfrey had paid it off. He was somewhere near Baker Street, and London had become an Arab town. In the neon-lit windows of small hotels, dark-eyed men stood about in desultory groups, fidgeting their beads and gesticulating to each other while the children played with their new train sets and veiled women spoke among themselves. Between the hotels stood the private hospitals, and at the steps of one of these Palfrey paused in the lighted entrance, perhaps wondering whether to admit himself and then, deciding not, walked on.

He wore no coat or hat, he carried no umbrella. A cab slowed as it went past him, but the distraction in Palfrey's face could not be appealed to. He was like a man who had mislaid something essential to his purposes: his car perhaps ― which street had he left it in? ― his wife, his woman ― where had they arranged to meet? Once, he patted the pockets of his sodden jacket, for keys or cigarettes or money. Once, he went into a pub that was about to close, put a five-pound note on the bar and drank a double Scotch without water and left, forgetting his change and muttering the word "Apostoll" out loud ― though the only witness to testify to this afterwards was a theological student, who thought he was declaring himself an apostate. The street had him again, and he pursued his quest, looking at everything yet somehow rejecting it ― no, you're not, the place, not here, not here. An old whore with dyed blond hair called at him good-humouredly from a doorway, but he shook his head ― not you either. Another pub had him, just as the barman was calling for last orders.

"Fellow called Pine," Palfrey told a man to whom he raised his glass in a distracted toast. "Very much in love." The man silently drank with him because he thought Palfrey looked a bit cut up. Somebody must have pinched his girl, he thought. A little runt like him, no wonder.

Palfrey chose the island, a triangle of raised pavement with a railing round it that seemed to be uncertain whether its job was to fence people in or fence them out. But the island was still not what he had been looking for, apparently, perhaps more some kind of vantage point or a familiar landmark.

And he didn't enter the protection of the railing. He did what kids do in the playground, said another witness: he put his heels on the outside curb and hooked his arms behind him over the railing, so that for a thoughtful while he seemed to be attached to the outside of a moving roundabout that wasn't moving, while he watched the empty late-night double-decker buses racing past him in their hurry to get home.

Finally, like someone who has got his bearings, he straightened himself up and put back his rather wasted shoulders until he resembled an old soldier on Remembrance Day, chose a particularly fast oncoming bus, and threw himself under it. And really on that particular stretch of road, at that time of night, and the streets like a skating rink from the pouring rain, there was absolutely nothing the poor driver could do. And Palfrey would have been the last to blame him.

A will, handwritten but legally phrased, if somewhat battered, was found in Palfrey's pocket. It forgave all debts and appointed Goodhew his executor.