The Night Manager

SIX

It was mellow time. Confidence time. They had agreed on a glass of plum spirit to wash down their coffee.

"I had a Sophie once," Burr recalled, not altogether truthfully. "Surprised I didn't marry her, come to think of it. I usually do. My current one's called Mary, which always strikes me as a bit of a comedown. Still, we've been together, oh, must be five years now. She's a doctor, as a matter of fact. Just a GP, parish priest with a stethoscope. Social conscience the size of a somewhat enlarged pumpkin. Seems to be panning out quite well."

"Long may it last," said Jonathan gallantly.

"Mary's not my first wife, mind. She's not my second, to be frank. I don't know what it is about me and women. I've aimed up, I've aimed down, I've aimed sideways; I never get it right. Is it me, is it them? I ask myself."

"I know what you mean," said Jonathan. But inside himself he had become watchful. He had no natural conversation about women. They were the sealed envelopes in his desk. They were the friends and sisters of the youth he had never had, the mother he had never known, the woman he should never have married, and the woman he should have loved and not betrayed.

"I seem to get to the root of them too fast and wear them out," Burr was complaining, once again affecting to open his heart to Jonathan in the hope of receiving the same favour in return. "It's kids are the problem. We've each got two of our own, and now we've got one between us. They take the spice out of it. You never did kids, did you? You steered clear of them. Wise, I call that. Shrewd." He took a sip of Pflumli.

"She wasn't mine. She was Freddie Hamid's."

"But you screwed her," Burr suggested equably.

* * *

Jonathan is in the bedroom of the little flat in Luxor, with the moonlight sloping between the half-closed curtains. Sophie is lying on the bed in her white nightgown, eyes closed and face upward. Some of her drollness has returned. She has drunk a little vodka. So has he. The bottle stands between them.

"Why do you sit the other side of the room from me, Mr. Pine?"

"Out of respect, I imagine." The hotelier's smile. The hotelier's voice, a careful composite of other people's.

"But you brought me here to comfort me, I think."

This time, no answer from Mr. Pine.

"Am I too damaged for you? Too old perhaps?"

Mr. Pine, normally so fluent, continues to preserve a dread silence.

"I am worried for your dignity, Mr. Pine. Perhaps I am worried for my own. I think you sit so far away from me because you are ashamed of something. I hope it is not me."

"I brought you here because it was somewhere safe, Madame Sophie. You need a pause for breath while you work out what to do and where to go. I thought I could be helpful."

"And Mr. Pine? He needs nothing, I suppose? You are a healthy man, assisting the invalid? Thank you for bringing me to Luxor."

"Thank you for agreeing to come."

Her large eyes were fixed upon him in the moonlight. She did not easily resemble a helpless woman grateful for his help.

"You have so many voices, Mr. Pine," she resumed, after too long. "I have no idea anymore who you are. You look at me, and you touch me with your eyes. And I am not insensitive to your touch. I am not." Her voice slipped a moment; she straightened herself and seemed to regroup. "You say one thing, and you are that person. And I am moved by that person. Then that person is called away, and somebody quite different takes his place. And you say something else. And I am moved again. So we have a changing of the guard. It is as if each person in you can only stand a little while of me, and then he has to go and get his rest. Are you like this with all your women?"

"But you are not one of my women, Madame Sophie."

"Then why are you here? To be a boy scout? I don't think so."

She fell silent again. He had a sense that she was deciding whether to abandon pretence. "I would like one of your many people to stay with me tonight, Mr. Pine. Can you arrange that?"

"Of course. I'll sleep on the sofa. If that's what you wish."

"No. It's not at all what I wish. I wish you to sleep with me in my bed and make love to me. I wish to feel that I have made at least one of you happy and that the others will take heart from his example. I cannot have you so ashamed. You accuse yourself much too much. We have all done bad things. But you are a good man. You are many good men. And you are not responsible for my misfortunes. If you are part of them" ― she was standing now, facing him, her arms at her sides ― "then I should wish you to be here for better reasons than shame. Mr. Pine, why do you insist on keeping yourself so far away from me?"

In the fading moonlight her voice had become louder, her appearance more spectral. He took a step toward her and found that the distance between them was no distance at all. He stretched out his arms to her, tentatively because of her bruises. He drew her carefully to him, slid his hands under the halter of her white nightgown, spread his palms and lightly flattened them against her naked back. She laid the side of her face against his; he smelled the vanilla again and discovered the unexpected softness of her long black hair. He closed his eyes. Clutching each other, they toppled softly onto the bed. And when the dawn came, she made him draw the curtains so that the night manager no longer did his loving in the dark.

"That was all of us," he whispered to her. "The whole regiment. Officers, other ranks, deserters, cooks. There's no one left."

"I don't think so, Mr. Pine. You have hidden reinforcements, I am sure."

* * *

Burr was still waiting for his answer.

"No," said Jonathan defiantly.

"Why ever not? Never pass one up, me. Did you have a girl at the time?"

"No," Jonathan repeated, colouring.

"You mean mind my own business?"

"Pretty much."

Burr seemed to like being told to mind his own business.

"Tell us about your marriage, then. It's quite funny, actually, thinking of you being married. It makes me uncomfortable, I don't know why. You're single. I can feel it. Maybe I am too. What happened?"

"I was young. She was younger. It makes me uncomfortable too."

"She was a painter, wasn't she? Like you?"

"I was a Sunday dauber. She was the real thing. Or thought she was."

"What did you marry her for?"

"Love, I suppose."

"You suppose. Politeness, more likely, knowing you. What did you leave her for?"

"Sanity."

No longer able to keep the flood of memory at bay, Jonathan abandoned himself to the angry vision of their married life together dying as they watched it: the friendship they no longer had, the love they no longer made, the restaurants where they watched happy people chat, the dead flowers in the vase, the rotting fruit in the bowl, her paint-caked easel propped against the wall, the dust thick on the dining table while they stared at each other through their dried tears, a mess not even Jonathan could tidy up. It's just me, he kept telling her, trying to touch her and recoiling as she recoiled. I grew up too quickly and missed women on the way. It's me, not you at all.

Burr had made another of his merciful leaps.

"So what took you to Ireland?" he suggested with a smile. "Was that running away from her, by any chance?"

"It was a job. If you were in the British Army ― if you wanted to be a real soldier, useful, live ammunition after all the training rounds ― Ireland was where you had to be."

"And you did want to be useful?"

"Wouldn't you at that age?"

"I still do," Burr replied.

Jonathan let the implicit question lie.

"Were you hoping you might get killed?" Burr asked.

"Don't be absurd."

"I'm not being absurd. Your marriage was on the rocks. You were still a kid. You thought you were responsible for all the world's ills. I'm just surprised you didn't do big game or join the Foreign Legion. What did you get up to over there, anyway?"

"Our orders were to win Irish hearts and minds. Say good morning to everyone, pat the kiddies. A bit of patrolling."

"Tell about the patrolling."

"Boring VCPs. Nothing to it."

"I'm not much of a one for initials, I'm afraid, Jonathan."

"Vehicle Control Points. You'd pick a blind hill or a corner, then pop up out of a ditch and hold up the cars. Occasionally you'd come across a player."

"And if you did?"

"You got through on the Cougar, and your controller told you which course of action to take. Stop and search. Wave him through. Question him. Whatever they wanted."

"Any other jobs on the menu, apart from VCPs?"

The same blandness as Jonathan made a show of remembering.

"Buzzing around in a helicopter a bit. Each group had a piece of land to cover. You'd book your Lynx, take a bivibag, camp out for a couple of nights, then come home and have a beer."

"How about contact with the enemy?"

Jonathan gave a deprecating smile. "Why should they come out and fight us when they could blow us up in our jeeps by remote control?"

"Why indeed?" Burr always played his best cards slowly. He sipped his drink, he shook his head and smiled as if it were all a bit of a conundrum. "So what were these special duties you got up to, then?" he asked. "All those special training courses you did, that wore me out just reading about them? I get frightened every time I see you pick up a spoon and fork, to be frank. I think you're going to skewer me."

Jonathan's reluctance was like a sudden slowing down. "There were things called Close Observation Platoons."

"Which were?"

"The senior platoon in each regiment, artificially created."

"Out of?"

"Anyone who wanted to join."

"I thought they were the elite."

Short, tight sentences, Burr noticed. Monitored as he spoke them. Eyelids down, lips tense.

"You were trained. You learned to watch, recognise the players. Make hides, get in and out of them in darkness. Lie up for a couple of nights. In lofts. Bushes. Ditches."

"What weapons did they give you?"

Jonathan shrugged as if to say, Who cares? "Uzis. Hecklers. Shotguns. They teach them all. You select. Sounds exciting from the outside. Once you're into it, it's just a job."

"What was your choice?"

"Heckler gave you the best chance."

"Which brings us to Operation Night Owl," Burr suggested, with no change in the inflexion of his voice. And sat back to watch the no-change in Jonathan's expression.

* * *

Jonathan was talking in his sleep. His eyes were open, but his mind was in another country. He had not expected lunch to be a tour of the worst pans of his life.

"We had a tip-off that some players were coming across the border into Armagh to relocate a stash of weapons. RPGs." This time Burr did not ask what the initials meant. "We lay up for a couple of days, and finally they showed. We took out three. The unit was pretty chuffed. Everyone went round whispering 'three' and holding up three fingers at the Irish."

"I'm sorry?" Burr seemed not to have heard. "Take out in this context meaning killed?"

"Yup."

"Did you do the taking out yourself? Single-handed, as it were?"

"I was part of it, sure."

"Of the fire team?"

"Of a cutoff group."

"Of how many?"

"We were a pair. Two. Brian and me."

"Brian."

"He was my oppo. Lance corporal."

"What were you?"

"Corporal. Acting sergeant. Our job was to catch them when they ran."

His face had grown a harder skin, Burr noticed. The muscles round the jaw were flexed.

"It was absolute luck," Jonathan said with clean-and-press casualness. "Everyone dreams of taking out a terrorist. We got the chance. We were just terribly lucky."

"And you took out three. You and Brian. Killed three men."

"Sure. I told you. Luck."

Rigid, Burr noticed. Rigid ease and deafening understatement.

"One and two? Two and one? Who scored highest?"

"One each and one shared. We quarrelled over it at first, then settled on half each. Hard to tell who bags who in the heat of battle quite often."

Suddenly Burr didn't need to prod him anymore. It was as if Jonathan had decided to tell the story for the first time. And perhaps he had.

"There was this clapped-out farmhouse right on the border. The owner was a subsidies cowboy, smuggling the same cows over the border and claiming farming subsidies both sides. He had a Volvo and a brand-new Merc and this slummy little farm. Intelligence said three players would be coming across from the South after the pubs had closed, names supplied. We hunkered down and waited. Their cache was in a barn. Our hide was a bush a hundred and fifty yards away from it. Our brief was to sit in our hide and watch without being watched."

That's what he likes to do, thought Burr: watch without being watched.

"We were to let them go into the barn and collect their toys. When they left the barn we were to signal their direction and get out unobserved. Another team would throw up a roadblock five miles on, hold a random check, pretend it was all sheer chance. That was to protect the source. Then they'd take them out. Only trouble was, the players weren't planning to drive the weapons anywhere. They'd decided to bury them in a ditch ten yards from our hide. Sunk a box into the ground in advance."

He was lying on his belly in the sweet moss of a South Armagh hillside, gazing through light-intensifiers at three green men lugging green boxes across a green moonscape. Languidly the man on the left rises on his toes, lets go his box and spins gracefully round, his arms extended for the cross. That dark green ink is his blood. I'm raking him out, and the silly bugger isn't even complaining, Jonathan decides as he becomes aware of the bucking of his Heckler.

"So you shot them," Burr suggested.

"We had to use our initiative. We each took one, then we both took the third. The whole thing lasted seconds."

"Did they shoot back?"

"No," said Jonathan. He smiled, still rigid. "We were lucky, I suppose. Get your first shot in, you're home free. That all you want to know?"

"Ever been back since?"

"To Ireland?"

"To England."

"Not really. Neither."

"And the divorce?"

"That was all taken care of in England."

"By?"

"Her. I left her the flat, all my money and whatever friends we had. She called that fifty-fifty."

"You left her England too."

"Yes."

Jonathan had finished speaking, but Burr was still listening to him. "I guess what I really want to know, Jonathan," he resumed at last, in the commonplace voice he had used for most of their discussion, "is whether you'd be at all attracted by the idea of having another go. Not at marriage. At serving your country." He heard himself say it, but for all the response he got he could have been staring at a granite wall. He beckoned for the bill. And then: To hell with it, he thought; sometimes the worst moments are the best. So he said it anyway, which was his nature, while he counted Swiss bank notes into a white saucer.

"Suppose I asked you to trash your whole life till now in favour of a better one," he suggested. "Not better for you maybe, but better for what you and I are pleased to call the common good. A five-star unimpeachable cause, guaranteed to improve the lot of mankind or your money back in full. Bye-bye to the old Jonathan, enter the new blue improved product. Resettlement afterwards, a new identity, money, the usual. There's a lot of people I know might find that quite attractive. I'm not sure I mightn't, to be frank, except it wouldn't be fair on Mary. But who've you got to be fair to except yourself? Nobody, not so far as I know. You'll be feeding the rat three meals a day, hanging on by your fingernails in force-twelve gales, there's not a scrap of you won't be used, not an hour you won't be frightened stiff. And you'll be doing it for your country, same as your dad, whatever you thought of Ireland. Or Cyprus, for that matter. And you'll be doing it for Sophie, too. Tell him I need a receipt, will you? Benton. Lunch for two. What do I give? Another five? I won't ask you to sign for me, not like some. Let's move."

* * *

They were strolling beside the lake. The snow had disappeared. An afternoon sun shimmered on the steaming pathway. Teenaged drug addicts, huddled in costly overcoats, gazed at the disintegrating ice. Jonathan had thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and he was listening to Sophie congratulating him on his gentleness as a lover.

"My English husband was also very gentle," she was saying while she drew her fingers admiringly over his face. "I had preserved my virginity so jealously that it took him days to persuade me I was better off without it." Then a presentiment seized her, and she drew him against her for protection. "Just remember you have a future, Mr. Pine. Never again renounce it. Not for me or for anyone. Promise me."

So he had promised her. As we promise anything in love.

Burr was talking about justice. "When I get to run the world," he announced comfortably to the steaming lake, "I'm going to hold the Nuremberg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the lying politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz."

"What's Roper done?" Jonathan asked in a kind of angry frustration. "Apart from... Hamid, all that."

"It's what he's doing now that matters."

"If he stopped today. How bad is he? How bad's he been?"

He was remembering Roper's shoulder riding unconsciously against him. Pergola over the top, view of the sea at the end. He remembered Jed: Most beautiful place on earth.

"He plunders," said Burr.

"Where? Who?"

"Everywhere and everyone. If the deal is bent, our chum is in there cutting it, and getting Corkoran to sign for him. He's got his white operation, and that's Ironbrand: venture capital, hairy land deals, minerals, tractors, turbines, commodities, a couple of tankers, a bit of corporate raiding. Offices in the whitest part of Nassau, smart young men with short-back-and-sides, tapping at computers. That's the part that's in deep trouble, and that's the part you've read about."

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Well, you should have done. His last year's results were bloody awful, and this year's will be worse. His shares are down to seventy from one sixty, and three months ago he took a bold position on platinum just in time to see it go through the floor. He's not seriously concerned; he's just desperate." He drew breath and began again. "And tucked underneath his Ironbrand umbrella he's got his little uglies. There's the five Caribbean classics ― money laundering, gold, emeralds, wood from the rain forests, arms and more arms. There's phony Pharmaceuticals, phony aid packages with bent health ministers and fake fertilisers with bent agricultural ministers." The anger in Burr's voice was like a slowly rising storm, and the more alarming because it didn't break. "But weapons are his first love. Toys, he calls them. If you're into power, there's nothing like toys to feed the habit. Don't ever believe that crap about just another commodity, service industry. Arms are a drug, and Roper's hooked. Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they're not. Iran-Iraq was an arms dealers' charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it's been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course ― Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland ― but the numbers weren't in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba's gone dead; so's South Africa ― they make their own. Ireland isn't worth a light, or he'd have done that too. Peru, he's got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he's been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I've a suspicion he's going to get his nose bloodied again."

"Well, who lets him?" Jonathan asked aggressively. And when Burr for once was taken aback: "It's a hell of a lot to get away with, isn't it, with people like you breathing down his neck?"

For a moment longer Burr was stuck for a rejoinder. Exactly the same question, with its disgraceful answer, had been coursing in his own mind as he spoke: The River House lets him, he wanted to say. Whitehall lets him. Geoffrey Darker and his pals in Procurement Studies let him. Goodhew's master puts his telescope to both blind eyes and he lets him. If his toys are British, anyone will let him do anything he bloody likes. But his good luck delivered a distraction:

"Well, I'm damned!" he exclaimed, grasping Jonathan's arm. "Where's her father, then?"

Watched by her boyfriend, a girl of about seventeen was rolling up the leg of her jeans. Patches like wet insect bites covered her calf. She inserted the needle and didn't wince. But Burr winced for her, and his disgust sent him into himself for a while, so that they walked a distance in silence while Jonathan for a moment forgot Sophie and remembered instead Jed's endless baby-pink legs coming down Meister's ornamental staircase, and her smile as she just happened to catch his eye.

* * *

"So what is he?" Jonathan asked.

"I told you what he is. He's a bastard."

"What's his background? What makes him run?"

Burr shrugged. "Father a small-time auctioneer and valuer in the shires. Mother a pillar of the local church. One brother. Private schools the parents couldn't afford ― "

"Eton?"

"Why should he be?"

"It's that voice. No pronouns. No articles. The slur."

"I've only ever overheard him on the telephone. That'll do me fine. He's got one of those voices that make me vomit."

"Is Roper the elder or younger brother?"

"Younger."

"Did he go to university?"

"No. In too much of a hurry to screw up the world, most likely."

"Did his brother?"

"Yes. Are you being clever? The brother joined the family firm. It went down in the recession. Now he's pig-farming. So what?" He cast Jonathan an angry sideways look. "Don't you bloody start making excuses for him now, Jonathan," he warned. "If the Roper had gone to Eton and Oxford and had half a million a year of his own, he'd still be screwing up the world. He's a villain, and you'd better believe it. Evil exists."

"Oh, I know, I know," said Jonathan, placating him. Sophie had said the same.

"So what he's done is, he's done the lot," Burr resumed.

"We're talking high-tech, mid-tech, low-tech and bugger-all-tech. He hates tanks because they've a long shelf life, but at a price he'll bend his rules. We're talking boots, uniforms, poison gas, cluster bombs, chemicals, MREs ― that's meals ready to eat ― inertial navigation systems, fighter aeroplanes, signal pads, pencils, red phosphorus, grenades, torpedoes, custom-built submarines, motor torpedo boats, fly killer, guidance systems, leg irons, mobile kitchens, brass buttons, medals and regimental swords, Metz flashguns and spook laboratories got up as chicken batteries, tires, belts, bushings, ammo of all calibres, both U. S. and Sov compatible, Red Eyes and other shoulder-held launchers such as Stingers, and body bags. Or we were ― because today we're talking glut and national bankruptcies and governments offering better terms than their own crooks. You should see his warehouses. Taipei, Panama, Port of Spain, Gdansk. He used to employ close to a thousand men, did our chum, just to polish the equipment he was storing while the price went up. Always up, never down. Now he's reduced to sixty men, and prices are through the floor."

"So what's his answer?"

It was Burr's turn to become evasive. "He's going for the big one. One last bite of the apple. The deal to end all deals. He wants to turn Ironbrand around and hang up his boots in a blaze of glory. Tell me something."

Jonathan was not yet accustomed to Burr's abrupt changes of direction.

"That morning in Cairo when you took Sophie for a drive. After Freddie had smacked her about."

"Well?"

"Do you think anyone tumbled you at all, spotted you with her, put two and two together?"

Jonathan had asked himself the same question a thousand times: at night when he roamed his darkened kingdom in order to escape his inner self, by day when he couldn't sleep but flung himself instead against the mountains, or sailed his boat to nowhere.

"No," he retorted.

"Certain?"

"Certain as I can be."

"Did you take any other risks with her? Go anywhere together where you could have been recognised?"

It gave Jonathan a mysterious pleasure, he discovered, to lie for Sophie's protection, even though it was too late.

"No," he repeated firmly.

"Well, you're clean then, aren't you?" Burr said, unconsciously echoing Sophie again.

* * *

Sharing a quiet spell, the two men sipped Scotch together in a coffeehouse in the old town, a place with no night or day, among rich ladies wearing trilby hats to eat cream cakes. Sometimes the catholicity of the Swiss enchanted Jonathan. This evening it seemed to him they had painted their entire country in different shades of grey.

Burr began telling an amusing story about Dr. Apostoll, the distinguished lawyer. It began jerkily, almost as a blurt, as if he had intruded upon his own thoughts. He should not have told it, which he knew as soon as he had embarked on it. But sometimes when we are nursing a great secret we can think of nothing else.

Apo's a voluptuary, he said. He had said it before. Apo's screwing everything in sight, he said, don't be fooled by that prissy demeanour; he's one of those little men who's got to prove he's got a bigger willie than all the big men put together.

The secretaries, other people's wives, strings of hookers from the agencies ― Apo's into the whole thing.

"Then one day, up gets his daughter and kills herself. Not nicely either, if there is a nicely. A real murder job on herself. Fifty aspirin washed down with half a bottle of pure bleach."

"Whatever did she do that for?" Jonathan exclaimed in horror.

"Apo had given her this gold watch for her eighteenth birthday. Ninety thousand dollars' worth from Cartier's in Bal Harbour. You couldn't find a better watch than that one anywhere."

"But what's wrong with giving her a gold watch?"

"Nothing, except he'd given her the same watch on her seventeenth and forgotten. The girl wanted to feel rejected, I suppose, and the watch tipped the scales for her." He made no pause. He did not raise his voice or change his tone. He wanted to get away from the story as fast as possible. "Have you said 'yes' yet? I didn't hear."

But Jonathan, to Burr's discomfort, preferred to stay with Apostoll. "So what did he do?" he asked.

"Apo? What they all do. Had himself born again. Came to Jesus. Burst into tears at cocktail parties. Do we sign you up or write you off, Jonathan? I never was one for long courtships."

The boy's face again, green for red as it split and spread with each fresh wave of shot. Sophie's face, smashed a second time when they killed her. His mother's face, tilted with her jaw wide open, before the night nurse pushed it shut and bound it with a piece of cheesecloth. Roper's face, coming too close as it leaned into Jonathan's private space.

But Burr too was having his own thoughts. He was berating himself for painting Apostoll so large in Jonathan's mind. He was wondering whether he would ever learn to guard his stupid tongue.

* * *

They were in Jonathan's tiny flat in the Klosbachstrasse, drinking Scotch and Henniez water, and the drink was doing neither of them good. Jonathan sat in the only armchair, while Burr roamed the room in search of clues. He had fingered the climbing gear and studied a couple of Jonathan's cautious watercolours of the Bernese Oberland. Now he stood in the alcove, working his way through Jonathan's books. He was tired, and his patience was beginning to run out, with himself as well as Jonathan.

"You're a Hardy man, then," he remarked. "What's that about?"

"Exile from England, I suppose. My shot of nostalgia."

"Nostalgia? Hardy? Bollocks. Man as mouse and God as uncaring bastard, that's Hardy. Hullo. Who've we got here? Colonel T. E. Lawrence of Arabia himself." He held up a slim volume in a yellow dust jacket, waving it like a captured flag.

"The lonely genius who wished only to be a number. Forsaken by his country. Now we're getting warm. Written by the lady who fell in love with him after he was dead. Your hero. Well, he would be. All that abstinence and flawed endeavour, beans out of the can; he's a natural. No wonder you took that job in Egypt." He looked at the flyleaf. "Whose initials are these? Not yours." But by the time he asked, he knew.

"My father's, actually. It was his book. Will you put it back, please?"

Noticing the edge to Jonathan's voice, Burr turned round.

"Have I touched a nerve? I believe I have. Never occurred to me that sergeants read books." He was probing the wound deliberately. "Officers only, I'd have thought books were."

Jonathan was standing in Burr's path, blocking him in the alcove. His face was stone pale, and his hands, instinctively freed for action, had risen from his sides.

"If you could put it back on the shelf, please. It's private."

Taking his time, Burr replaced the book on the shelf among its companions. "Tell us something," he suggested, announcing another change of topic as he ambled past Jonathan to the centre of the room. It was as if their conversation of a moment ago had never taken place. "Do you handle hard cash at all at that hotel of yours?"

"Sometimes."

"Which times?"

"If we get a late-night departure and somebody pays cash, we handle it. The reception desk is closed between midnight and five a. m., so the night manager stands in."

"So you'd take the cash off them, would you, and you'd put it in the safe?"

Jonathan lowered himself into the armchair and folded his hands behind his head. "I might."

"Suppose you stole it. How long before anybody noticed?"

"End of the month."

"You could always put it back for accounting day and take it out after, I dare say," said Burr thoughtfully.

"Meister's pretty watchful. Nothing if not Swiss."

"I'm building up a legend for you, you see."

"I know what you're doing."

"No, you don't. I want to get you inside Roper's head, Jonathan. I believe you can do it. I want you to lead him to me. I'll never nail him else. He may be desperate, but he doesn't drop his guard. I can have microphones up his arse, overfly him with satellites, read his mail and listen to his telephones. I can smell him, hear him and watch him. I can send Corkoran to jail for five hundred years, but I can't touch the Roper. You've four more days before you're due back at Meister's. I want you to come to London with me in the morning, meet my friend Rooke and hear the deal. I want to rewrite your life from day one and make you love yourself at the end of it."

Tossing an air ticket onto the bed, Burr placed himself at the dormer window, parted the curtains and stared out at the dawn. There was more snow in the air. The sky was dark and low.

"You don't need time to think about it. You've had nothing but time since you jacked in the army and your country. There's a case for saying no, same as there's a case for digging a deep shelter for yourself and living in it for the rest of your life."

"How long would it take?"

"I don't know. If you don't want to do it, a week's too long. Do you want another sermon?"

"No."

"Want to call me in a couple of hours?"

"No."

"How far have you got, then?"

Nowhere, Jonathan thought as he opened the ticket and read the time of departure. There's no such thing as a decision. There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over. There's movement or there's stagnation, there's the past that drives you, and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free, and the women who say you have no feelings but they can't live without you. There's a prison called England, there's Sophie whom I betrayed, there's an Irish boy without a gun who kept looking at me while I shot his face off, and there's a girl I've scarcely spoken to who puts equestrienne on her passport and annoyed me so much that weeks later I'm still raging at her. There's a hero I can never be worthy of who had to be put back into uniform to be buried. And a sweaty Yorkshire Pied Piper whispering in my ear to come and do it all again.

* * *

Rex Goodhew was in fighting fettle. He had spent the first half of the morning successfully arguing Burr's cause to his master, and the second half addressing a Whitehall seminar on the misuses of secrecy, ending with a pleasurable shoot-out with a young fogy from the River House, barely old enough to tell his first lie. Now it was lunchtime in Carlton Gardens, a low sun hit the white façades, and his beloved Athenaeum was a stroll away.

"Your chap Leonard Burr is putting himself about a bit, Rex," said Stanley Padstow of the Home Office with an anxious smile, falling in beside him. "I don't think I quite realised what you were letting us in for, to be honest."

"Oh dear," said Goodhew. "Poor you. What sort of putting about, exactly?"

Padstow had been up at Oxford at the same time as Goodhew, but the only thing Goodhew remembered about him was that he had seemed to have a mission to the plainer girl.

"Oh, nothing much," said Padstow, trying to sound light. "Using my staff to launder his file requests. Persuading the registrar to lie in her teeth for him. Taking senior police officers to three-hour lunches at Simpson's. Asking us to vouch for him when they get cold feet." He was glancing all the time at Goodhew but failing to catch his eye. "But it's all right, is it? It's just that, with these chaps, one never absolutely knows. Does one?"

There was a small delay while they negotiated themselves out of earshot of a flock of nuns.

"No, Stanley, one doesn't," said Goodhew. "But I did send you a detailed confirmation in writing, top secret for your very own file."

Padstow struggled yet more valiantly for the throwaway tone. "And devilish frolics in the West Country ― I mean, that's all going to be covered, is it? Only your letter didn't seem to make that totally clear."

They had reached the Athenaeum steps.

"Sounds fine to me, Stanley," Goodhew said. "Para three of my letter, as I recall, covers West Country frolics to the hilt."

"Murder not excluded?" Padstow asked urgently below his breath, as they stepped inside.

"Oh, I don't think so. Not as long as nobody gets hurt, Stanley." Goodhew's voice changed tone. "And it's compartmentation, isn't it?" he said. "Nothing to the River boys, nothing to anyone except Leonard Burr and, when you're worried, me. That's all right for you, is it, Stanley? Not a strain?"

They ate at separate tables. Goodhew treated himself to steak-and-kidney pie and a glass of the club's claret. But Padstow ate very fast, as if he were counting his bites against the clock.