The Night Manager полностью

The Château Babette roosted like a tattered old hen amid the razzmatazz of the Avenue des Artisans. She was the Meister's of the town. Jonathan spotted her at once from Rooke's description, and as he approached her he remained on the opposite pavement so that he could take a better look at her. She was tall and timbered and decrepit and, for a former whorehouse, stern. A stone urn stood at each corner of her hideous porch. Flaking naked maidens cavorted on them in a woodland setting. Her hallowed name was blazoned vertically on a rotting wooden board, and as Jonathan started across the road, a sharp east wind made it clatter like a railway train, filling his eyes with grit and his nostrils with smells of frites and hair spray.

Striding up the steps, he confidently pushed the ancient swing doors and entered the darkness of a tomb. From far away, as it seemed to him at first, he heard male laughter and caught the stink of last night's dinner. Gradually he made out an embossed copper postbox, then a grandfather clock with flowers on its face that reminded him of the Lanyon, then a reception desk littered with correspondence and coffee mugs and illuminated by a canopy of fairy lights. The shapes of men surrounded him, and it was they who were doing the laughing. His arrival had evidently coincided with that of a bunch of raunchy surveyors from Quebec, who were looking for a little action before taking off next day for a mine up north. Their suitcases and kit bags were flung in a heap at the foot of a wide staircase. Two Slavic-looking boys in earrings and green aprons picked sullenly among the labels.

"Et vous, monsieur, vous etes qui?" a woman's voice yelled at him above the hubbub.

Jonathan made out the queenly form of Madame Latulipe, the proprietress, standing behind the desk in a mauve turban and cake makeup. She had tilted her head back in order to quiz him and she was playing to her all-male audience.

"Jacques Beauregard," he replied.

"Comment, cheri?"

He had to repeat it above the din: "Beauregard," he called, unused to raising his voice. But somehow the name came easier to him than Linden.

"Pas d'bagage?"

"Pas de bagage."

"Alors, bon soir et amusez-vous Men, m'sieu," Madame Latulipe yelled back at him as she handed him his key. It occurred to Jonathan that she had mistaken him for a member of the surveyors' party, but he saw no need to enlighten her.

"Allez-vous manger avec nous a'soir, M'sieu Beauregard?" she called, waking to his good looks as he started up the stairs.

Jonathan thought not, thank you, madame. Time he got some sleep.

"But one cannot sleep on an empty stomach, M'sieu Beauregard!" Madame Latulipe protested flirtatiously, once more for the benefit of her raucous guests. "One must have energy to sleep if one is a man! N'est-ce pas, mes gars?"

Pausing at the half-landing, Jonathan bravely joined the laughter but insisted nonetheless that he must sleep.

"Bien, tant pis d'abord!" cried Madame Latulipe.

Neither his unscheduled arrival nor his unkempt appearance disturbed her. Unkempt is reassuring in Esperance, and to Madame Latulipe, the town's self-elected cultural arbiter, a sign of spirituality. He was farouche, but farouche in her book meant noble, and she had detected Art in his face. He was a sauvage distingue, her favourite kind of man. By his accent she had arbitrarily ruled him French. Or perhaps Belgian. She was not an expert; she took her holidays in Florida. All she knew was, when he spoke French she could understand him, but when she spoke back at him he looked as insecure as all Frenchmen looked when they heard what Madame Latulipe was convinced was the true, the uncorrupted version of their tongue.

Nevertheless, on the strength of these impulsive observations, Madame Latulipe made a pardonable error. She placed Jonathan, not on one of the floors convenient for receiving lady guests, but in her grenier, in one of four pretty attic rooms that she liked to hold in reserve for her fellow bohemians. And she gave no thought to the fact ― but then why should she? ― that her daughter, Yvonne, had made her temporary refuge two doors down.

* * *

For four days Jonathan remained in the hotel without attracting more than his share of Madame Latulipe's consuming interest in her male guests.

"But you have deserted your group!" she cried at him, in mock alarm, when he appeared next morning late and alone for breakfast. "You are not a surveyor anymore? You have resigned? You wish to become a poet perhaps? In Esperance we write many poems."

Seeing him return in the evening, she asked him whether he had composed an elegy today, or painted a masterpiece. She suggested he take dinner, but he again declined.

"You have eaten somewhere else, m'sieu?" she demanded in mock accusation.

He smiled and shook his head.