The Night Manager

"Wise man." The pale gaze wanders away again, this time to the reception desk, where the camel hair coat is filling in forms for Fräulein Eberhardt. "You proposing marriage to that young lady, Corky?" Roper calls. "That'll be the day," he adds to Jonathan in a lower tone. "Major Corkoran, my assistant," he confides with innuendo.

"Nearly there, Chief!" Corky drawls, and lifts a camel hair arm. He has squared his legs and pushed out his rump like somebody about to play a croquet shot, and there is a tilt to his haunches that, by nature or intent, suggests a certain femininity.

A heap of passports lies at his elbow.

"Only got to copy a few names, God's sake. Not a fifty-page contract, Corks."

"It's the new security, I'm afraid, sir," Jonathan explains. "The Swiss police insist. There seems to be nothing we can do."

The beautiful Jeds has chosen three magazines but needs more. She has perched one slightly scuffed boot pensively on its long heel, with the toe pointing in the air. Sophie used to do the same. Mid-twenties, Jonathan thinks. Always will be.

"Been here long, then, Pine? Wasn't here last time round, was he, Frisky? We'd have noticed a stray young Brit."

"No way," said the blazer, eyeing Jonathan through an imaginary gun slit. Cauliflower ears, Jonathan noticed. Blond hair, going on white. Hands like axheads.

"I make it six months, Mr. Roper, almost to the day."

"Where were you before that?"

"Cairo," Jonathan replied, light as a spark. "The Queen Nefertiti."

Time passes, like time before a detonation. But the carved mirrors of the lobby do not shatter at the mention of the Queen Nefertiti Hotel, the pilasters and chandeliers hold still.

"Likee, did you? Cairo?"

"Loved it"

"What made you leave the place, then, if you were so high on it?"

Well, you did, actually, Jonathan thinks. But he said instead: "Oh, wanderlust, I suppose, sir. You know how it is. The drifting life is one of the attractions of the trade."

Suddenly everything was in motion. Corkoran had detached himself from the reception desk and, cigarette held wide, was advancing on them with high steps. The woman Jeds had chosen her magazines and was waiting, Sophie-like, for someone to do something about paying for them. Corkoran said, "On the room bill, heart." Herr Kaspar was unloading a wad of mail into the arms of the second blazer, who ostentatiously explored the bulkier packages with his fingertips.

"High bloody time, Corks. Hell's happened to your signing hand?"

"Wanker's colic, I should think. Chief," said Major Corkoran. "Could be limp wrist," he added, with a special smile for Jonathan.

"Oh, Corks" said the woman Jeds, giggling.

Out of the corner of his eye Jonathan spotted Mario, the head doorman, wheeling a stack of matching luggage to the service lift, using the paddling gait with which porters hope to imprint their images on the fickle minds of clients. Then he saw his own fragmented reflection passing him in the mirrors, and Corkoran's beside him, carrying his cigarette in one hand and the magazines in the other, and he allowed himself a moment of officious panic because he couldn't see Jeds. He turned and saw her and caught her eye and she smiled at him, which in his startling resurgence of desire was what he craved.

He caught Roper's eye also, because she was hanging from Roper's arm, holding it in both her long hands while she almost trod on his feet. The bodyguards and the affluent society trailed behind them. Jonathan noticed a blond male beauty with his hair tied at the nape, a plain wife scowling beside him, "Pilots'll be along later," Corkoran was saying. "Some crap about the compass. If it's not the compass, it's the bogs worn flush. You a permanency here, darling, or just a one-night stand?"

His breath smelled of the day's good things: the martinis before lunch, the wines with it and the brandies afterwards, washed down by his foul French cigarettes.

"Oh, I think as permanent as one can be, in this profession, Major," Jonathan replied, altering his manner a little for an underling.

"Goes for us all, heart, believe me," said the Major fervently.

"Permanently temporary. Jesus."

Another film cut, and they were traversing the great hall to the tune of "When I Take My Sugar to Tea," played by Maxie the pianist to two old ladies in grey silk. Roper and the woman were still entwined. You're new to each other, Jonathan told them sourly, out of the corner of his eye. Or else you're making up after a quarrel. Jeds, he repeated to himself. He needed the safety of his single bed.

Yet another cut, and they were standing three deep before the ornate doors of Herr Meister's new Tower Suite lift, the affluent society twittering in the background.

"Hell happened to the old lift, Pine?" Roper was demanding. "Thought Meister was a sucker for old things. Bloody Swiss would modernise Stonehenge if they got a chance. Wouldn't they, Jeds?"

"Roper, you can't make a scene about a lift" she said in awe.

"Try me."