The Night Manager

But the limousine had returned. Furs, well-grown men, a beautiful long-legged young woman, diamonds and gold wristbands and castles of matching black luggage, were emerging like plundered booty from its plush interior. A second limousine had joined it, now a third. A convoy of limousines. Already Herr Kaspar was propelling the swing doors at the speed best suited to the party's progress. First an untidy brown coat of camel hair loomed into the glass and was cautiously rotated into focus, a grimy silk muffler dangling over its collar, surmounted by a soggy cigarette and the pouchy stare of a scion of the English upper classes. No fifty-year-old Apollo he.

After the camel hair came a navy blue blazer in his twenties, the blazer single-breasted for the cross-draw, and eyes shallow as paint. One OBG, thought Jonathan, trying not to answer their malign stare; one more to follow, and a third if Roper's scared.

The beautiful woman had chestnut hair and wore a quilted coat of many colours that reached almost to her feet, yet she managed to appear slightly underdressed. She had Sophie's comic slant to her, and her hair, like Sophie's, fell to either side of her face. Someone's wife? Mistress? Anyone's? For the first time in six months, Jonathan felt the devastating, irrational impact of a woman he instantaneously desired. Like Sophie she had a jewelled brilliance and a kind of dressed nakedness. Two strings of splendid pearls set off her neck. Diamond bracelets peeked from her quilted sleeves. But it was the vague air of shambles, the raggedy smile and unselfconscious carriage that appointed her an instant citizen of Paradise. The doors swung open again, disgorging everyone at once, so that suddenly an entire leftover delegation of the English affluent society was ranged under the chandelier, each of its members so sleekly groomed, so sun-rich, that together they seemed to share a corporate morality that outlawed sickness, poverty, pale faces, age and manual labour. Only the camel hair coat, with his disgracefully battered suede boots, remained a voluntary outcast from their ranks.

And at their centre, yet apart from them, The Man, as only The Man could be after Sophie's furious descriptions of him. Tall, slender and at first glance noble. Fair hair stirred with gray, swept back and flicked into little horns above the ears. A face to play cards against and lose. The stance that arrogant Englishmen do best, one knee cocked, one hand backed against the colonial arse. Freddie is so weak, Sophie had explained. And Roper is so English.

Like all deft men, Roper was doing several things at once: shaking hands with Kaspar, then clapping him with the same hand on the upper arm, then using it to blow a kiss to Fräulein Eberhardt, who went pink and waved at him like a menopausal groupie. Then finally fixing his overlord's eye on Jonathan, who must have been strolling toward him, though Jonathan himself had no direct evidence of this except that Adèle's dummy had been replaced first by the newsstand, then by the flushed features of Fräulein Eberhardt at the reception desk, and now by The Man himself. He has no qualms, Sophie had said. He is the worst man in the world.

He's recognised me, thought Jonathan, waiting for the denunciation.

He's seen my photograph, listened to my description.

In a minute he'll stop smiling.

"I'm Dicky Roper," a lazy voice announced as the hand closed round Jonathan's and briefly owned it, "My chaps booked some rooms here. Rather a lot of 'em. How d'you do?" Belgravia slur, the proletarian accent of the vastly rich.

They had entered each other's private space.

"How very good to see you, Mr. Roper," Jonathan murmured, English voice to English voice. "Welcome back, sir, and poor you, what a perfectly ghastly journey you must have had. Wasn't it rather heroic to venture aloft at all? No one else has, I can tell you. My name's Pine. I'm the night manager."

He's heard of me, he thought, waiting. Freddie Hamid told him my name.

"What's old Meister up to these days?" Roper asked, his eyes slipping away to the beautiful woman. She was at the newsstand, helping herself to fashion magazines. Her bracelets kept falling over her hand, while with the other she continually pushed back her hair. "Tucked up with his Ovaltine and a book, is he? Hope it's a book, must say. Jeds, how you doing, darling? Adores magazines. Addict. Hate the things m'self."

It took Jonathan a moment to realise that Jeds was the woman. Not Jed a single man, but Jeds a single woman in all her varieties. Her chestnut head turned far enough to let them see her smile. It was puckish and good-humoured.

"I'm just fine, darling," she said bravely, as if she were recovering from a knock.

"Herr Meister is unavoidably tied up tonight, I'm afraid, sir," said Jonathan, "but he does enormously look forward to seeing you in the morning when you're rested."

"You English, Pine? Sound it."

"To the core, sir."