The Night Manager полностью

"Darling, do we have to have that slimy Greek again, with his dago Minnie Mouse?" she asks, objecting to the inclusion of Dr. Paul Apostoll and his inamorata among the guests for the Iron Pasha's winter cruise.

"Apostoll? El Apetito?" Roper replies in puzzlement. "Of course we do. Apo's serious business."

"They're not even Greeks, did you know that, Thomas? Greeks aren't. They're jumped-up Turks and Arabs and things. All the decent Greeks got wiped out yonks ago. Well, they can bloody well have the Peach Suite and put up with a shower."

Roper disagrees. "No, they can't. They get the Blue Suite and the Jacuzzi, or Apo will sulk. He likes to soap her."

"He can soap her in the shower," says Jed, affecting to show fight.

"No, he can't. He's not tall enough," says Roper, and they all laugh uproariously because it is the Chief's joke.

"Hasn't old Apo taken the veil or something?" Corkoran asks, looking up from an enormous Scotch. "I thought he gave up nooky after his daughter topped herself."

"That was just for Lent," says Jed.

Her wit and bad language have a hypnotic draw. There is something irresistibly funny to everyone, including herself, about her convent-educated English voice enunciating the vocabulary of a navvy.

"Darling, do we actually give a fart about the Donahues? Jenny was pissed as a rat from the moment she came aboard, and Archie behaved like a total turd."

Jonathan caught her eye and held it with deliberate lack of interest. Jed raised her eyebrows and returned his stare, as if to say, Who the hell are you? Jonathan returned her question at double strength: Who do you think you're being tonight? I'm Thomas. Who the hell are you?

* * *

He watched her in fragments forced upon him. To the naked breast that she had carelessly granted him in Zürich he added a chance view of her entire upper body in her bedroom mirror while she was changing after riding. She had her arms raised and her hands folded behind her neck, and she was performing some sinuous exercise that she must have read about in one of her magazines. As to Jonathan, he had done absolutely everything in order not to look in the direction of her windows. But she did it every afternoon, and there are only so many times that a close observer can force himself to look away.

He knew the balance of her long legs, the satin planes of her back, the surprising sharpness of her athletic shoulders, which were the tomboy bits of her. He knew the white underneath to her arms and the flow of her hips as she rode.

And there was an episode that Jonathan scarcely dared remember when, thinking he was Roper, she called out to him, "Hand me the bloody bath towel quick." And since he was passing their bedroom on his way back from reading Kipling's Just So Stories to Daniel, and since the bedroom door was ajar, and since she had not mentioned Roper by name and he honestly believed, or nearly so, that she was calling him, and since Roper's inner office on the other side of the bedroom was the constant target of the close observer's professional curiosity, he softly touched the door and made as if to enter, and stopped four feet from the peerless rear view of her naked body as she stood clutching a facecloth to her eye and cursing while she tried to rub away the soap. Heart thumping, Jonathan made his escape, and first thing next morning, uncaching his magic box, he spoke for ten excited minutes to Burr without once mentioning her: "There's the bedroom, there's his dressing room and then on the other side of the dressing room there's this little office. He keeps his private papers there, I'm sure he does."

Burr took fright at once. Perhaps, even at this early stage, he had an intimation of disaster. "Stay away from it. Too bloody dangerous. Join first, spy later. That's an order."

* * *

"Comfortable, are you?" Roper asked Jonathan, on one of their jogs along the beach in the company of several spaniels. "Getting your health back? No cockroaches? Get down, Trudy, you silly tart! Hear young Dans did a decent sail yesterday."

"Yes, he really put his heart into it."

"You're not one of these left-wing chaps, are you? Corky thought you might be a pink 'un."

"Good Lord no. It's never crossed my mind."

Roper seemed not to hear. "World's run by fear, you see. Can't sell pipe dreams, can't rule with charity, no good at all. Not in the real world. With me?" But he didn't wait to discover whether Jonathan was with him or not. "Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life." He paused to double-mark time. "If a bunch of chaps want to make war, they're not going to listen to a lot of wet-eared abolitionists. If they don't, doesn't matter whether they've got crossbows or Stingers. Fact of life. Sorry if it bothers you."

"It doesn't. Why should it?"