The Night Manager

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."