The Night Manager

THREE

Jonathan Pine, orphaned only son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British sergeant of infantry killed in one of his country's many postcolonial wars, graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes, half-mothers, cadet units and training camps, sometime army wolf-child with a special unit in even rainier Northern Ireland, caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people's languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination, sat in his sanitary Swiss office behind reception, smoking his third unusual cigarette and pondering the sage words of the hotel's revered founder that hung framed alongside his imposing sepia photograph.

Several times in the last months Jonathan had taken up his pen in an effort to free the great man's wisdom from its tortuous German syntax, but his efforts had always foundered against some immovable dependent clause. "True hospitality gives to life what true cooking gives to eating," he began, believing for a moment that he had it. "It is the expression of our respect for the essential basic value of every individual creature entrusted to our care in the course of his travail through life, regardless of his condition, of mutual responsibility in the spirit of humanity invested in the ― " Then he lost it again, as he always did. Some things were best left in the original.

His eye returned to Herr Strippli's tarty television set, squatting before him like a man's handbag. It had been playing the same electronic game for the last fifteen minutes. The aerial bomber's sights centre on a grey fleck of building far below.

The camera zooms closer. A missile speeds toward the target, enters and descends several floors. The base of the building pops like a paper bag, to the unctuous satisfaction of the news caster. A bull's-eye. Two more shots for no extra money. Nobody talks about the casualties. From that height there aren't any. Iraq is not Belfast.

The image changed. Sophie and Jonathan are taking their drive.

* * *

Jonathan is driving, and Sophie's pulped face is partly hidden by a headscarf and dark glasses. Cairo is not yet awake. The red of dawn is colouring the dusty sky. To smuggle her out of the hotel and into his car, the undercover soldier has taken every precaution. He set out for the pyramids, not knowing she had a different spectacle in mind. "No," she says. "Go that way." A foetid oozing pillow of filth hangs over the crumbling tombs of Cairo's city cemetery. On a moonscape of smoking cinders amid shanties of plastic bags and tin cans, the wretched of the earth are crouched like Technicolor vultures, picking through the garbage. He parks the car on a sand verge. Lorries thunder past them on their way to and from the rubbish dump, leaving stink in their wake.

"This is where I brought him," she says. One side of her mouth is ridiculously swollen. She speaks through a hole in the other side.

"Why?" says Jonathan, meaning: Why are you now bringing me?

" 'Look at these people, Freddie,' I told him. 'Each time someone sells weapons to another tin-pot Arab tyrant, these people starve a little more. Do you know the reason? Listen to me, Freddie. Because it is more fun to have a pretty army than to feed the starving. You are an Arab, Freddie. Never mind that we Egyptians say we are not Arabs. We are Arabs. Is it right that your Arab brothers should be the flesh to pay for your dreams?' "

"I see," says Jonathan, with the embarrassment of an Englishman when faced with political emotion.

" 'We do not need leaders,' I said. 'The next great Arab will be a humble craftsman. He will make things work and give the people dignity instead of war. He will be an administrator, not a warrior. He will be like you, Freddie, as you could be if you grew up.' "

"What did Freddie say?" says Jonathan. Her smashed features accuse him every time he looks at them. The bruises round her eyes are turning to blue and yellow.

"He told me to mind my own business." He catches the choke of fury in her voice, and his heart sinks further. "I told him it was my business! Life and death are my business! Arabs are my business! He was my business!"

And you warned him, he thinks, sickened. You let him know you were a force to be reckoned with, not a weak woman to be discarded at his whim. You let him guess that you too had your secret weapon, and you threatened to do what I did, without knowing I'd done it already.

"The Egyptian authorities will not touch him," she says. "He bribes them, and they keep their distance."

"Leave town," Jonathan tells her. "You know what the Hamids are like. Get out."

"The Hamids can have me killed as easily in Paris as in Cairo."

"Tell Freddie he must help you. Make him stick up for you against his brothers."

"Freddie is frightened of me. When he is not being brave he is a coward. Why are you staring at the traffic?"

Because it's all there is to stare at apart from you and the wretched of the earth.

But she does not wait for an answer. Perhaps deep down this student of male weakness understands his shame.

"I should like some coffee, please. Egyptian." And the brave smile that hurts him more than all the recrimination in the world.

He gives her coffee in a street market and drives her back to the hotel car park. He telephones the Ogilveys' house and gets the maid. "Him out," she shouts. What about Mrs. Ogilvey? "Him not there." He telephones the embassy. Him not there either. Him gone to Alexandria for regatta.

He telephones the yacht club to leave a message. A drugged male voice says there is no regatta today.

Jonathan telephones an American friend named Larry Kermody in Luxor: Larry, is that guest suite of yours empty?

He telephones Sophie. "An archaeologist friend of mine in Luxor has a spare flat," he says. "It's in a place called the Chicago House. You're welcome to use it for a week or two." He searches for humour in the silence. "It's a kind of monk's cell for visiting academics, stuck onto the back of the house, with its own bit of rooftop. Nobody need even know you're there."

"Will you come also, Mr. Pine?"

Jonathan does not allow himself a moment's hesitation.

"Can you dump your bodyguard?"

"He has already dumped himself. Freddie has apparently decided I am not worth protecting."

He telephones a travel agent who does business with the hotel, a beery-voiced Englishwoman called Stella. "Stella, listen. Two VIP guests, incognito, want to fly to Luxor tonight, expense no object. I know the whole place is shut up. I know there are no planes. What can you do?"

A long silence. Stella is psychic. Stella has been in Cairo too long: "Well, I know you're very important, darling, but who's the girl?" And she gives a foul, wheezing laugh that chokes and whistles in Jonathan's ear long after he has rung off.

* * *

Jonathan and Sophie sit side by side on the flat roof of the Chicago House, drinking vodka and staring at the stars. On the flight she has barely spoken. He has offered her food, but she wants none. He has put a shawl over her shoulders.

"Roper is the worst man in the world," she announces.

Jonathan's experience of the world's villains is limited. His instinct is to blame himself first and others afterwards.

"I guess anyone in his business is pretty frightful," he says.

"He has no excuse," she retorts, unappeased by his moderation.

"He is healthy. He is white. He is rich. He is wellborn, well educated. He has grace." Roper's enormity grows as she contemplates his virtues. "He is at ease with the world. He is amusing. Confident. Yet he destroys it. What is missing in him?" She waits for him to say something, but in vain. "How does he come to be like this? He was not dragged up in the back streets. He is blessed. You are a man. Perhaps you know."

But Jonathan doesn't know anything anymore. He is watching the outline of her battered face against the night sky. What will you do? he was asking her in his mind. What will I?

He switched off Heir Strippli's television set. The war ended. I loved you. I loved you with your smashed face as we walked at arm's length among the temples of Karnak. Mr. Pine, you said, it is time to make the rivers flow uphill.

* * *

It was two a. m., the hour at which Herr Meister required Jonathan to make his rounds. He began in the lobby, where he always began. He stood at the centre of the carpet where Roper had stood, and listened to the restless night sounds of the hotel, sounds that by day were lost in the hubbub: the throb of the furnace, the growl of a vacuum cleaner, the clink of plates from the room-service kitchen, the footfall of a waiter on the back stair. He stood where he stood every night, imagining her stepping from the lift, her face repaired, her dark glasses shoved into her black hair, crossing the lobby and pulling up before him while she quizzically examines him for flaws. "You are Mr. Pine. The flower of England. And you betrayed me."

Old Horwitz the night concierge was sleeping at his counter. He had laid his cropped head in the crook of his arm. You're still a refugee, Horwitz, thought Jonathan. March and sleep. March and sleep. He set the old man's empty coffee cup safely outside his reach.

At the reception desk, Fräulein Eberhardt had been relieved by Fräulein Vipp, a greyed, obliging woman with a brittle smile.

"Can I see tonight's late arrivals, please, Fräulein Vipp?"

She handed him the Tower Suite registration forms. Alexander, Lord Langbourne, alias no doubt Sandy. Address: Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Profession, according to Corkoran: Peer of the realm. Accompanied by wife, Caroline. No reference to the long hair tied at the nape, or to what a peer of the realm might do apart from being a peer. Onslow Roper, Richard. Profession: Company director. Jonathan leafed briskly through the rest of the forms. Frobisher, Cyril: Pilot. Mac-Arthur, Somebody, and Danby, Somebody Else: Company executives. Other assistants, other pilots, bodyguards. Inglis, Francis, from Perth, Australia ― Francis, hence Frisky, presumably: Physical-training instructor. Jones, Tobias, from South Africa ― Tobias, hence Tabby: Athlete. He had left her till last deliberately, like the one good photograph in a batch of misses. Marshall, Jemima W. Address, like Roper's, a numbered box in Nassau. British. Occupation ― rendered with a particular flourish by the Major ― Equestrienne.

"Can you do me copies of these, Fräulein Vipp? We're conducting a survey of Tower Suite guests."

"Naturally, Mr. Pine," said Fräulein Vipp, taking the forms to the back office.

"Thank you, Fräulein Vipp," said Jonathan.

But in his imagination it is himself that Jonathan sees, labouring over the photocopier in the Queen Nefertiti Hotel while Sophie smokes and watches him: You are adept, she says. Yes. I am adept. I spy. I betray. I love when it is too late.

Frau Merthan was the telephone operator, another soldier of the night, whose sentry box was an airless cubicle beside reception.

"Guten Abend, Frau Merthan."

"Good morning, Mr. Jonathan."

It was their joke.

"Gulf war running nicely, I trust?" Jonathan glanced at the bulletins dangling from the newsprinter. "Bombing continues unabated. One thousand missions already flown. Safety in numbers, they say."

"So much money to spend on one Arab," said Frau Merthan with disapproval.

He began tidying the papers, an instinctive habit that had been with him since his first school dormitory. As he did so his eye caught the faxes. One sleek tray for incoming, contents to be distributed in the morning. One sleek tray for outgoing, waiting to be returned to their senders.

"Lots of telephone activity, Frau Merthan? Panic selling across the globe? You must be feeling like the hub of the universe."

"Princesse du Four must call her cousin in Vladivostok. Every night, now that things are better in Russia, she calls Vladivostok and speaks to him for one hour. Every night she gets cut off and must be reconnected. I think she is looking for her prince."

"How about the princes in the Tower?" he asked. "They seemed to be living on the telephone from the moment they got in there."

Frau Merthan tapped a couple of keys and peered at the screen through her bifocals. "Belgrade, Panama, Brussels, Nairobi, Nassau, Prague, London, Paris, Tortola, England somewhere, Prague again, more Nassau. All direct. Soon it will be only direct and I shall have no job."

"One day all of us will be robots," Jonathan assured her. Leaning over Frau Merthan's counter he affected a layman's curiosity.

"Does that screen of yours show the actual numbers they ring?" he asked.

"Naturally; otherwise the guests complain immediately. It's normal."

"Show me."

She showed him. Roper knows the wicked people everywhere, Sophie had said.

In the dining room, Bobbi the odd-job man was balanced on an aluminium ladder, cleaning the droplets of a chandelier with his spider mop. Jonathan trod lightly in order not to disturb his concentration. In the bar, Herr Kaspar's nymphet nieces in trembling smocks and stone-washed jeans were replenishing pot plants. Bouncing up to him, the elder girl displayed a pile of muddy cigarette stubs in her gloved palm.

"Do men do this in their own homes?" she demanded, lifting her breasts to him in saucy indignation. "Put their fag ends in the flowerpots?"

"I should think so, Renate. Men do the most unspeakable things at the drop of a hat." Ask Ogilvey, he thought. In his abstraction, her pertness annoyed him unreasonably. "I'd watch out for that piano if I were you. Herr Meister will kill you if you scratch it."

In the kitchens, the night chefs were preparing a dormitory feast for the German newlyweds on the Bel Etage: steak tartare for him, smoked salmon for her, a bottle of Meursault to revive their ardour. Jonathan watched Alfred the Austrian night waiter give a sensitive tuck with his fine fingers at the napkin rosettes and add a bowl of camellias for romance. Alfred was a failed ballet dancer and put "Artist" in his passport.

"They're bombing Baghdad, then," he said with satisfaction while he worked. "That'll teach them."

"Did the Tower Suite eat tonight?"

Alfred took a breath and recited. His smile was becoming a little young for him. "Three smoked salmon, one fish and chips English style, four fillet steak medium, and a double dollop of carrot cake and Schlag, which you call Rahm. Carrot cake is what His Highness has for a religion. He told me. And from the Herr Major, on His Highness's instructions, a fifty-franc tip. You English always tip when you're in love."

"Do we indeed?" said Jonathan. "I must remember that."

He ascended the great staircase. Roper's not in love; he's just rutting. Probably hired her from some tarts' agency, so much a night. He had arrived at the double doorway to the Grande Suite. The newlyweds were also newly shod, he noticed: he in patent black with buckles, she in gold sandals flung impatiently where they lay. Impelled by a lifetime of obedience, Jonathan stooped and placed them side by side.

Reaching the top floor, he put his ear to Frau Loring's door and heard the braying of a British military pundit over the hotel's cable network. He knocked. She was wearing her late husband's dressing gown over her nightdress. Coffee was glugging on a ring. Sixty years of Switzerland had not altered her High German by a single explosive consonant.

"They are children. But they are fighting, so they are men," she announced in his mother's perfect accents, handing him a cup.

The British television pundit was moving model soldiers round a sandbox with the fervour of a convert.

"So the Tower Suite is full of whom tonight?" asked Frau Loring, who knew everything.

"Oh, some English mogul and his cohorts. Roper. Mr. Roper and party. And one lady half his age."

"The staff say she is exquisite."

"I didn't look."

"And quite unspoilt. Natural."

"Well, they should know."

She was studying him the way she always did when he sounded casual. Sometimes she seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

"You are glowing tonight. You could light a city. What is going on inside you?"

"I expect it's the snow."

"So nice the Russians are on our side at last. No?"

"It's a great diplomatic achievement."

"It's a miracle," Frau Loring corrected him. "And like most miracles, nobody believes in it."

She handed him his coffee and sat him firmly in his usual chair. Her television set was enormous, bigger than the war.

Happy troops waving from armoured personnel carriers. More missiles racing prettily to their mark. The sibilant shuffle of tanks. Mr. Bush taking another encore from his admiring audience.

"You know what I feel when I watch war?" Frau Loring asked.

"Not yet," he said tenderly. But she seemed to have forgotten what she had meant to say.

Or perhaps Jonathan does not hear it, for the clarity of her assertions reminds him irresistibly of Sophie. The joyful fruition of his love for her is forgotten. Even Luxor is forgotten.

He is back in Cairo for the final awful act.

* * *

He is standing in Sophie's penthouse, dressed ― what the hell does it matter what I wore? ― dressed in this very dinner jacket, while a uniformed Egyptian police inspector and his two plainclothes assistants eye him with the borrowed stillness of the dead. The blood is everywhere, reeking like old iron. On the walls, on the ceiling and divan. It is spilled like wine across the dressing table. Clothes, clocks, tapestries, books in French and Arabic and English, gilt mirrors, scents and ladies' paint ― all have been trashed by a gigantic infant in a tantrum.

Sophie herself is by comparison an insignificant feature of this havoc. Half crawling, perhaps toward the open French windows leading to her white roof garden, she lies in what the Army First Aid Manual used to call the recovery position, with her head on her outstretched arm, a counterpane draped across her lower body, and over the upper part the remnants of a blouse or nightdress, of which the colour is unlikely ever to be known. Other policemen are doing other things, none with much conviction. One man is leaning over the parapet of the roof garden, apparently in search of a culprit. Another is fiddling with the door of Sophie's wall safe, making it plop as he works it back and forth across its smashed hinges. Why do they wear black holsters? Jonathan wonders. Are they night people too?

From the kitchen a man's voice is talking Arabic into the telephone. Two more policemen guard the front door, leading to the landing, where a bunch of first-class cruise passengers in silk dressing gowns and face-cream stare indignantly at their protectors. A uniformed boy with a notebook takes a statement.

A Frenchman is saying he will call his lawyer.

"Our guests on the floor below are complaining about the disturbance," Jonathan tells the inspector. He realises he has made a tactical mistake. At a moment of violent death it is neither natural nor polite to explain one's presence.

"You was friends with thisser woman?" the inspector asks.

A cigarette hangs from his lips.

Does he know about Luxor?

Does Hamid?

The best lies are told face-to-face, with a touch of arrogance: "She liked to make use of the hotel," Jonathan replies, still fighting for a natural tone. "Who did this? What happened?"

The inspector shrugs a prolonged, disinterested shrug. Freddie is not normally troubled by the Egyptian authorities. He bribes them, and they keep their distance.

"You was having sex with thisser woman?" the inspector asks.

Did they see us board the plane?

Follow us to the Chicago House?

Bug the flat?

Jonathan has found his calm. He can do that. The more terrible the occasion, the more certainly can his calm be relied upon. He affects a certain irritation: "If you call the odd cup of coffee sex. She had a bodyguard. He was employed by Mr. Hamid. Where is he? Has he disappeared? Perhaps the bodyguard did it."

The inspector appears unimpressed. "Hamid? What is Hamid, please?"

"Freddie Hamid. The youngest of the Mr. Hamids."

The inspector frowns as if the name is not agreeable to him, or not relevant, or not known. Of his two assistants, one is bald, the other ginger-haired. They wear jeans and bomber jackets and a lot of facial hair. Both are listening intently.

"What you talk with thisser woman? You are political with her?"

"Small talk."

"Small?"

"Restaurants. Social gossip. Fashion. Mr. Hamid sometimes took her to the yacht club, here or in Alexandria. We'd smile at each other. Wave good morning."

"You killer this woman?"

Yes, he replies in his mind. Not in quite the way you think, but yes, I definitely killered her.

"No," he says.

The inspector hitches his black belt with both his thumbs at once. His trousers are also black, his buttons and insignia gold.

He loves his uniform very much. An acolyte is addressing him, but the inspector pays him no attention.

"She ever tell you that someone wish to killer her?" the inspector asks Jonathan.

"Of course not."

"Why, please?"

"If she had done I would have reported it to you."

"Okay. You go now."

"Have you contacted Mr. Hamid? What are you going to do?"

The inspector touches the peak of his black cap in order to give authority to his theory. "Was burglar. Crazy burglar killer woman. Maybe drug."

Bleary-eyed medics in green overalls and sneakers are arriving with a stretcher and a body bag. Their leader wears dark glasses. The inspector grinds the stub of his cigarette into the carpet and lights another. A camera is flashing, operated by a man in rubber gloves. Everyone has raided the properties chest in order to wear something different. Lifting her onto the stretcher, they turn her over, and one white breast, much diminished, slips free of its torn covering. Jonathan notices her face. It has been almost obliterated, perhaps by kicks, perhaps by a pistol butt.

"She had a dog," he says. "A Pekingese."

But even as he speaks he spots it through the open doorway to the kitchen. It lies on the tiles, straighter than it has ever lain before. A gash like a zipper runs along its underbelly from its throat to its back legs. Two men, Jonathan thinks dully: one to hold, one to cut; one to hold, one to beat.

"She was a British subject," Jonathan says, using the past tense to punish himself. "You'd better call the embassy."

But the inspector is no longer listening. The bald assistant takes Jonathan by the arm and starts to lead him to the door.

For a moment ― but it is long enough ― Jonathan feels the heat of combat race across his shoulders, down his arms and into his hands. The assistant feels it also and steps back as if he has received a shock. Then he smiles dangerously in kinship. As he does so, Jonathan feels the panic taking hold of him. Not of fear, but of permanent and inconsolable loss. I loved you. And never even admitted it, to you or to myself.

* * *

Frau Merthan was dozing beside her switchboard. Sometimes very late she rang her girlfriend and whispered dirty to her, but not tonight. Six incoming faxes for the Tower Suite lay waiting for the morning, together with the originals of last night's outgoing. Jonathan eyed but did not touch them. He was listening to Frau Merman's breathing. He passed his hand tentatively across her closed eyes. She let out a piggish snore. Like a skilled child stealing from his mother's shopping bag, he coaxed the faxes from their trays. Will the copier still be warm? Has the lift returned empty from the top floor? You killer her? He touched a key on Frau Merthan's computer, then another, then a third. You are adept. The computer peeped, and he had another disconcerting vision of Roper's woman descending the Tower Suite stairs. Who were the Brussels boys? Who was Appetites from Miami? Who was Soldier Boris?

Frau Merthan turned her head and growled. He began writing down the telephone numbers while she went on snoring.

* *

Ex-Junior Leader Jonathan Pine, a sergeant's son trained to fight in all weathers, crunched down the snowy footpath beside a hillside stream as it bubbled and tumbled through the woods.

He was wearing an anorak over his dinner jacket and a pair of light climbing boots over his midnight-blue socks. His patent-leather evening shoes dangled in a plastic bag at his left side.

All round him in trees and gardens and along the bank, the snow's tracery sparkled under a perfect blue sky. But Jonathan for once was indifferent to such beauty. He was heading toward his staff apartment in the Klosbachstrasse, and the time was eight-twenty in the morning. I shall eat a serious breakfast, he decided: boiled eggs, toast, coffee. Sometimes it was a pleasure to serve oneself. Perhaps a bath first to restore him. And over breakfast, if he could get himself onto a single track, he would decide. He slipped a hand inside his anorak. The envelope was still in place. Where am I going? A fool is someone who does not learn by experience. Why do I feel battle-bright?

Approaching the house that contained his apartment, Jonathan discovered that his step had settled to a marching rhythm.

Far from relenting, it conveyed him instead to the Romerhof, where a tram waited for him with its doors ominously open.

He rode in it without any opinion as to his behaviour, the alien brown envelope stabbing at his chest. Alighting at the main railway station, he allowed himself with the same passivity to proceed once more on foot as far as an austere building in the Bleicherweg, where a number of countries, among them his own, maintained consular and commercial representatives.

"I'd like to speak to Wing Commander Quayle, please," Jonathan said to the big-jawed Englishwoman behind the bulletproof window. He extracted his envelope and slid it under the glass. "It's a private matter. Perhaps you'll tell him I'm a friend of Mark Ogilvey from Cairo. We sailed together."

* * *

Was the affair of Herr Meister's wine cellar partly responsible for Jonathan's decision to vote with his feet? A short while before Roper's arrival, Jonathan had been incarcerated in it for sixteen hours, and he recalled the experience as an introductory course in death.

Among the extra duties entrusted to Jonathan by Herr Meister was the preparation of the monthly inventory of the fine-wine cellar, which lay deep in the blue rock underneath the oldest part of the hotel. Jonathan customarily undertook this task on the first Monday of each month, before beginning the six-day break to which he was by contract entitled in lieu of weekends. On the Monday in question, his routine did not vary.

The insurance value of the fine wines had recently been set at six and a half million Swiss francs. The cellar's security devices were of a commensurate complexity. One combination and two inertia locks had to be released before a fourth, a spring lock, would yield. A baleful video camera eyed each suitor as he approached. Having successfully negotiated the locks, Jonathan embarked upon his ritual count, beginning as usual with the 1961 Chateau Petrus, offered this year at four thousand five hundred francs a bottle, and graduating to the ten-thousand-franc magnums of 1945 Mouton Rothschild. He was in the middle of his calculations when the lights went out.

Now Jonathan loathed the dark. Why else does a man elect to work at night? As a boy he had read Edgar Allan Poe and shared every hell endured by the victim of "The Cask of Amontillado." No mining disaster, no collapsed tunnel or story of alpinists trapped in a crevasse, but had its separate gravestone in his memory.

He stood motionless, deprived of orientation. Was he upside down? Had he had a stroke? Had he been blown up? The mountaineer in him braced himself for impact. The blinded sailor clung to the wreckage. The trained combatant edged toward his invisible adversary without the comfort of a weapon. Wading like a deep-sea diver, Jonathan began feeling his way along the wine racks, in search of a light switch. Telephone, he thought. Did the cellar have a telephone? His habit of observation was a hindrance to him. It was retrieving too many images. The door had the door a handle on the inside? By brute mental force he managed to recall a buzzer. But the buzzer needed electricity.

He lost his hold upon the cellar's geography and began circling the racks like a fly inside a black lampshade. Nothing in his training had equipped him for anything as awful as this. No endurance marches, hand-to-hand-combat courses or deprival exercises were of the least avail. He remembered reading that goldfish had such short memories that each circuit of the bowl was a brand-new thrill for them. He was sweating, he was probably weeping. He yelled several times: Help me! It's Pine! The name tinkled to nothing. The bottles! he thought. The bottles will save me! He contemplated hurling them into the darkness as a means of rousing help. But even in his dementia his self-discipline won the day, and he could not muster the irresponsibility to smash bottle after bottle of Chateau Petras at four and a half thousand a go.

Who would notice he was missing? So far as the staff knew, he had left the hotel for his monthly six days off. The inventory belonged technically to his free time, a bad bargain wheedled out of him by Herr Meister. His landlady would assume he had decided to sleep at the hotel, a thing he did occasionally when there were spare rooms. If no chance-millionaire came to his aid by ordering a bottle of fine wine, he would be dead before anyone noticed his absence. And millionaires were grounded by the impending war.

Willing himself into a calmer state, Jonathan sat to attention on what felt like a cardboard crate and strove with all his might to make order of his life till now, a last tidying before he died: the good times he had had, the lessons he had drawn, the improvements he had wrought upon his personality, the good women. There were none. Times, women, lessons. None. None but Sophie, who was dead. Look at himself how he might, he saw nothing but half-measures, failures and undignified withdrawals, and Sophie was the monument to all of them. In childhood he had struggled night and day to be an inadequate adult. As a special serviceman he had cloaked himself in blind obedience and, with occasional lapses, endured. As a lover, husband and adulterer, his record was quite as thin: a burst or two of wary pleasure, followed by years of abuse and craven apology.

And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.

He would leave Meister's.

He would buy a boat, something he could manage single-handed.

He would find the one girl he cared about and love her in present time, a Sophie without the betrayal.

He would make friends.

He would find a home. And, for want of parents of his own, become a parent himself.

He would do anything, absolutely anything, rather than cringe any longer in the gloom of servile equivocation where, as it now seemed to him, he had wasted his life, and Sophie's.

His saviour was Frau Loring. With her customary vigilance, she had noticed him through her net curtains on his way to the cellar, and realised belatedly that he had not returned. When the posse arrived to release him, shouting "Herr Pine! Herr Jonathan!" and led by Herr Meister wearing a hair net and armed with a twelve-watt car lamp, Jonathan was not, as might have been expected, mad-eyed with terror but at his ease.

Only the English, they assured one another as they led him to the light, were capable of such composure.