The Night Manager

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.