The Night Manager полностью

"Why don't you call up the bully-boys, then?" Jonathan suggested, not to her so much as to the flowers. "Personal attack button right there beside you on the wall. Or pick up the house phone if you prefer. Dial nine, and I'll pay for my fucking cheek in the approved manner. Daniel isn't making a scene because he hurt himself. He doesn't want to go back to London and he doesn't like sharing you with Caroline and her kids. He wanted you for himself.'"

"Get out," she said.

But the calm was on him, and so was his concern for her, and between them they gave him the supremacy. The rehearsing and blank shots were over. It was live-ammunition time.

"Close the door," he ordered her, keeping his voice low. "It's not a good moment to talk, but there's something I have to say to you, and I don't want Daniel hearing it. He gets enough through your bedroom wall as it is."

She stared at him, and he could see the uncertainty working in her face. She closed the door.

"I'm obsessed by you. I can't get you out of my head. I don't mean I'm in love with you. I sleep with you, I wake up with you, I can't clean my teeth without cleaning yours as well and most of the time I'm quarrelling with you. There's no logic to it, there's no pleasure to it. I haven't heard you express a single thought worth a damn, and most of what you say is affected bilge. Yet every time I think of something funny, I need you to laugh at it, and when I'm low, it's you I need to cheer me up. I don't know who you are, if you're anyone at all. Or whether you're here for the beer or because you're wildly in love with Roper. And I'm sure you don't know either. I think you're a total mess. But that doesn't put me off. Not at all. It makes me indignant, it makes me a fool, it makes me want to wring your neck. But that's just part of the package."

They were his own words. He was speaking for himself and nobody else. Nevertheless, the ruthless orphan in him could not resist shifting a little of the blame onto her shoulders. "Perhaps you shouldn't have nursed me so nicely. Lifting me up. Sitting on my bed. Let's say it's Daniel's fault for getting himself kidnapped. No, let's say it's mine for getting myself beaten up. And yours for making those spaniel eyes at me."

She shut her offending eyes and seemed to go to sleep for a moment. She opened them and lifted her hand to her face.

And he was afraid that he had hit her too hard and invaded the tender ground that each of them guarded against the other.

"That's the most fucking impertinent thing anyone has said to me ever" she said uncertainly, after quite a pause.

He let her dangle.

"Thomas!" she said, as if appealing for his help. But he still did not come to her aid.

"Jesus, Thomas... oh, fuck. Thomas, this is Roper's house!"

"It's Roper's house, and you're Roper's girl for as long as you can take it. My senses tell me you won't be able to take it much longer. Roper's a crook, as Caroline Langbourne has no doubt been telling you. He's not a buccaneer, or a Mississippi gambler, or a romantic adventurer, or however you decided to cast him when you picked each other up. He's an arms crook and at least a bit of a murderer." He took an outrageous step. He broke all Burr's rules and Rooke's in a single sentence. "That's why people like you and me end up spying on him," he said. "Leaving traces an inch deep all over his office. 'Jed was here.' 'Jed Marshall, her mark, her hair stuck in his papers.' He'd kill you for that. That's what he does. Kills."

He paused to observe the effect of his backhanded confession on her, but she had frozen. "I'd better go and talk to Daniel," he said. "What's he supposed to have done to himself, anyway?"

"God knows."

She did a strange thing as he left. She was still at the door, and as he approached her, she took a step back to let him pass, which might have been normal courtesy. Then on some impulse that she could probably not have explained, she reached in front of him, turned the door handle and gave the door a shove, as if his hands were laden and he needed help.

Daniel was lying on his bed, reading his book on monsters.

"Jed just overreacted," he explained. "All I did was act up a little. But Jed went berserk.'"

It was evening of the same day, and Jonathan was still alive. the sky was still in its place, no security gorillas fell on him out of the trees as he made his way back through the tunnel to Woody's House. The cicadas ticked and sobbed, the sun disappeared behind Miss Mabel's Mountain, dusk fell. He had played tennis with Daniel and the Langbourne children, he had swum with them and sailed with them, he had listened to Isaac on the subject of the Tottenham Hotspurs and to Esmeralda on evil spirits and to Caroline Langbourne on men, marriage and her husband: