The Night Manager

The dope cartels were now Strelski's obsession. America spends more money on dope than food, Leonard! he would protest, in a taxi, in a corridor, across a glass of 7-Up. We're talking the cost of the entire Vietnam war, Rob, every year, untaxed! ― After which he would rattle off the prevailing dope prices with the same enthusiasm with which other addicts quote the Dow-Jones index, starting with raw coca leaves at a dollar a kilo in Bolivia, rising to two thousand for a kilo of base in Colombia, to twenty thousand a wholesale kilo in Miami, to two hundred thousand a kilo at street. Then, as if he had caught himself being a bore again, he would pull a hard grin and say he was damned if he knew how anyone could pass up a profit of a hundred dollars to a dollar. But the grin did nothing to quench the cold fire in his eyes.

This permanent anger seemed to make Strelski almost physically unbearable to himself. Each morning early and each evening, whatever the weather, he went jogging in the royal parks, to Burr's simulated horror.

"Joe, for God's sake, have a big slice of plum pudding and sit still," Burr urged him, with mock severity. "You're giving us all heart attacks, just thinking about you."

Everyone laughed. Among the enforcers it was that kind of locker-room atmosphere. Only Amato, who was Strelski's Venezuelan-American sidekick, refused to smile. At their conferences, he sat with his mouth clamped into a grimace and his wine-black eyes staring into the horizon. Then suddenly on the Thursday he was beaming like an idiot. His wife had had a little girl.

Strelski's unlikely other arm was an overweight, meat-faced Irishman named Pat Flynn from U. S. Customs: the kind of policeman, Burr told Goodhew with relish, who typed his reports with his hat on. Legend attached to Flynn, and with reason. It was Pat Flynn, said the word, who had invented the first pinhole-lens camera, known as a pole camera and disguised as a junction box, that could be fixed to any stray telegraph post or pylon in a matter of seconds. It was Pat Flynn who had pioneered the art of bugging small boats from under water. And Pat Flynn had other skills, Strelski confided to Burr while the two men strolled together one early evening in St. James's Park, Strelski in his jogging gear and Burr in his crumpled suit.

"Pat was the one who knew the one who knew the one," said Strelski. "Without Pat, we'd never have gotten to Brother Michael."

Strelski was talking about his most sacred and delicate source, and this was holy ground. Burr never ventured onto it except at Strelski's invitation.

* * *

If the Enforcers bonded closer every day, the espiocrats from Pure Intelligence did not take lightly to their role as second-class citizens. The first exchange of gunfire occurred when Strelski let slip his agency's intention of putting Roper behind bars. Knew the very prison he had in mind for him, he cheerfully informed the company. "Sure do, sir. Little place called Marion, Illinois. Twenty-three and a half hours a day in solitary lock-down, no association, exercise in cuffs, food off a tray they shove at you through a slit in the cell. Ground floor's toughest, no views. Top floor's better, but the smell's worse."

Icy silence greeted this revelation, broken by an acid-voiced solicitor from the Cabinet Office.

"Are you sure this is the sort of thing we should be discussing, Mr. Strelski?" he asked with courtroom arrogance. "I had rather understood that an identified rogue was of more use to society when he was left at large. For as long as he's out and about, you can do what you want with him: identify his conspirators, identify their conspirators, listen, watch. Once you lock him up, you have to start the same game all over again with someone new. Unless you think you can stamp out this sort of thing altogether. Nobody here thinks that, do they? Not in this room?"

"Sir, in my submission there's basically two ways you can go," Strelski replied, with the respectful smile of an attentive pupil. "You can be exploitative, or you can enforce. Be exploitative, that's a never-ending story: that's recruiting the enemy so that you catch the next enemy. Then recruit the next enemy so that you catch the next one, ad infinitum. Enforce, that's what we have in mind for Mr. Roper. A fugitive from justice, in my book you apprehend him, you charge him under the International Trafficking in Arms regulations, and you lock him up. Exploitation, in the end you get to ask yourself who's being exploited: the fugitive, or the public, or justice."

"Strelski is a maverick," Goodhew confided to Burr with undisguised pleasure as they stood on the pavement under umbrellas.

"You're two of a kind. No wonder the legal people have misgivings."

"Me, I've got misgivings about legal people."