The Night Manager полностью

Amos broke out in a wild chuckle. "There's only one man 'cept you on this island ever reads a book, Mist' Thomas. And he's ganja stupid and stone blind."

* * *

That night, to his horror, she came to him again.

She was not wearing her cape this time but her riding gear, which she had evidently decided gave her some sort of immunity. He was appalled but not particularly surprised, for by then he had recognised Sophie's resolution in her, and he knew he could no more send her away than stop Sophie from going back to Cairo to face Hamid. So a quiet came over him, and it became a quiet shared. She took his hand and led him upstairs. She guided him around his own bedroom, opening drawers and showing a distracted curiosity about his shirts and underclothes. Something was badly folded, so she folded it better. Something was lost, and she found a partner for it. She drew him to her and kissed him very exactly, as if she had decided in advance how much of herself she could afford to give him. and how little. When they had kissed, she went downstairs again and stood him under the overhead light and touched his face with her fingertips, verifying him, photographing him with her eyes, making pictures of him to take away with her. And in the incongruity of the moment he remembered the old émigré couple dancing at Mama Low's on the night of the kidnapping, how they had touched each other's faces in disbelief.

She asked for a glass of wine, and they sat on the sofa drinking it and relishing the quiet they had discovered they could share. She drew him to his feet and kissed him once more, laying all her body along him and spending a lot of time looking at his eyes as if to check them for sincerity. Then she left him because, as she put it, that was the most she could cope with until God pulled another trick.

When she had gone, Jonathan went upstairs to watch her from his window. Then he put his copy of Tess in a brown envelope and addressed it in illiterate capitals to the adult shop, care of a box number in Nassau given him by Rooke in the days of his youth. He dropped the envelope in the mailbox on the seafront for collection and shipment to Nassau by Roper jet next day.

* * *

"Enjoy our aloneness, did we, old love?" Corkoran enquired.

He was back in Jonathan's garden, drinking cold beer out of a can.

"Very much, thank you," said Jonathan politely.

"So one hears. Frisky says you enjoyed it. Tabby says you enjoyed it. Boys on the gate say you enjoyed it. Most of Townside seems to think you enjoyed it."

"Good."

Corkoran drank. He was wearing his Etonian Panama hat and his disgraceful Nassau suit, and he was talking out to sea.

"And the Langbourne brood didn't cramp our style at all?"

"We managed a couple of expeditions. Caroline's a bit down-in-the-mouth, so the kids were rather pleased to get away from her."

"So kind we are," Corkoran reflected. "Such a sport. Such a proper pet. Just like Sammy. And I never even had the little sod." Pulling down the brim of his hat, he crooned Nice work if you can get it as if he were a mournful Ella Fitzgerald.

"Message from the Chief for you, Mr. Pine. H hour is upon us. prepare to kiss Crystal and everybody else goodbye. Firing squad assembles at dawn."

"Where am I going?"

Jumping to his feet, Corkoran marched down the garden steps to the beach as if he couldn't stand Jonathan's company anymore. He picked up a stone and, despite his bulk, skimmed it across the darkening water.

"In my fucking place is where you're going!" he shouted. "Thanks to some very classy footwork by some shitty little queens unfriendly to the cause! Of whom I strongly suspect you to be the creature!"

"Corky, are you talking through your arse?"

Corkoran pondered the question. "Don't know, old love. Wish I did. Could be anal. Could be spot on." Another stone. "Prophet in the wilderness, me. The Chief, though he'd never admit it, is a fully paid-up, unredeemable romantic. Roper believes in the light at the end of the pier. The trouble is, so did the fucking moth." Yet another stone, accompanied by an angry grunt of exertion. "Whereas Corky here is a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic. And my personal and professional view of you is, you're poison." Another stone. And another. "I tell him you're poison, and he won't believe me. He invented you. You plucked his baby from the flames. Whereas Corky here, thanks to persons unnamed ― friends of yours, I suspect ― is used goods." He drained his beer can and tossed it onto the sand while he searched for another pebble, which Jonathan obligingly handed him. "Well, let's face it, heart, one is going a tad to seed, isn't one?"

"I think one is becoming a tad deranged, actually, Corky," said Jonathan.