The Night Manager

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.