The Night Manager полностью

Vile cloud rolled over the wrecked industrial landscape. Hand in pocket ― he had reduced the dressing to a simple adhesive bandage ― he walked the damp streets. Seated in a barber's chair, he glimpsed his picture on the back of someone's evening paper, the photograph that Burr's people had taken of him in London: a likeness deliberately unlike, but still a likeness. He became a ghost, haunting a ghost town. In the cafes and billiard halls he was too white and separate, in the smarter streets too ragged. The churches, when he tried to enter them, were locked. His face when he checked it in mirrors scared him with its hostile intensity. Jumbo's faked death was like a goad to him. Visions of his supposed victim unmurdered and unhunted, carousing serenely in some secret haven, taunted him at all odd moments. Nevertheless, in his other persona, he determinedly shouldered the guilt of his imaginary crime. He bought a pair of leather gloves and threw away his bandage. To buy his air ticket he spent a morning inspecting travel agents before he chose the busiest and most anonymous. He paid in cash and made the booking for two days later, in the name of Fine. Then he took the bus to the airport and changed his booking to the flight that same evening. There was one seat left. At the departure gate a girl in mulberry uniform asked to see his passport. He pulled off a glove and gave it to her with his good hand.

"Are you Pine or Fine then?" she demanded.

"Whichever you prefer," he assured her, with a flash of the old hotelier's smile, and she grudgingly waved him through ― or had Rooke squared them?

When he reached Paris he dared not risk the barrier at Orly, so he sat up in the transit area all night. In the morning he took a flight to Lisbon, this time in the name of Dine, for on Rooke's advice he was trying to stay one jump ahead of the computer. In Lisbon he again made for the docks and again lay low.

"She's called the Star of Bethel, and she's a pig," Rooke had said. "But the skipper's venal, which is what you're looking for."

He saw a half-bearded man trailing from one shipping office to another in the rain, and the man was himself. He saw the same man pay a girl for a night's lodging, then sleep on her floor while she lay on her bed and whimpered because she was afraid of him. Would she be less afraid of me if I slept with her? He didn't stay to find out but, leaving her before dawn, walked the docks once more and came upon the Star of Bethel moored in the outer harbour, a filthy, twelve-thousand-ton coaling vessel bound for Pugwash, Nova Scotia. But when he asked at the shipping agent's, they said she had a full complement and was sailing on the night tide. Jonathan bribed his way aboard. Was the captain expecting him? Jonathan believed he was.

"What can you do, son?" the captain asked. He was a big, soft-spoken Scot of forty. Behind him stood a barefoot Filipino girl of seventeen.

"Cook," said Jonathan, and the captain laughed in his face but took him as a supernumerary on condition he worked his passage and the captain pocketed his pay.

Now he was a galley slave, sleeping in the worst bunk and receiving the insults of the crew. The official cook was an emaciated Lascar, half dead from heroin, and soon Jonathan was doing duty for them both. In his few hours of sleep he dreamed the lush dreams of prisoners, and it was Jed without her Meister's bathrobe who played the leading role. Then a sunny morning dawned and the crew were patting him on the back and saying they had never been better fed at sea. But Jonathan would not go ashore with them. Equipped with rations he had set aside, the close observer preferred to make himself a hideaway in the forward hold and lie up for two more nights before sneaking past the dock police.

Alone in an immense and unfamiliar continent, Jonathan was assailed by a different kind of deprivation. His resolve seemed suddenly to drain into the brilliant thinness of the landscape. Roper is an abstraction, so is Jed and so am I. I am dead and this is my afterlife. Trekking along the edge of the uncaring highway, sleeping in drivers' dormitories and barns, scrounging a day's pay for two days' labour, Jonathan prayed to be given back his sense of calling.

"Your best bet is the Château Babette," Rooke had said. "It's big and sloppy, and it's run by a harridan who can't keep staff. It's where you'd naturally hole out."

"It's the ideal place for you to start looking for your shadow," Burr had said.

Shadow meaning identity. Shadow meaning substance, in a world where Jonathan had become a ghost.

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