The Night Manager полностью

"He had a ding-dong with that Sophie woman in Cairo, I bloody know he did," Burr told Rooke as they flew home.

Rooke gave a disapproving frown. He did not hold with Burr's occasional flights of intuition, any more than he believed in blackening a dead woman's name.

* * *

"Darling Katie is as mad as a wet hen," Harry Palfrey announced proudly, seated over a whisky in Goodhew's drawing room in Kentish Town. He was grey-haired and ravaged and fifty, with puffy drinker's lips and haunted eyes. He wore a lawyer's black waistcoat. He had come straight from his work across the river. "She's Concording back from Washington, and Marjoram is on his way to Heathrow to meet her. It's a war party."

"Why doesn't Darker go himself?"

"He likes cut-outs. Even if they're his deputy, like Marjoram, he can still say he wasn't there."

Goodhew started to ask something else but thought it better not to interrupt while Palfrey was unburdening himself.

"Katie says the Cousins are waking up to what they've got. They've decided that Strelski lulled them into imbecility in Miami and you and Burr aided and abetted him. She says she can stand on the banks of the Potomac and watch the smoke rising off Capitol Hill. She says everyone is talking new parameters and power vacuums in their own backyard. Filled or created, I can't quite fathom which."

"God, I do hate parameters," Goodhew remarked, buying himself time while he replenished Palfrey's whisky. "I had formulaic this morning. It ruined my day. And my master escalates. Nothing rises for him, or increases, or grows, or advances, or progresses, or multiplies, or matures. It escalates. Cheers," he said, sitting down again.

But as Goodhew spoke these words, a cold shudder passed over him, raising the hair down his spine and causing him to sneeze several times in quick succession.

"What do they want, Harry?" he asked.

Palfrey screwed up his face as if he had soap in his eyes, and ducked his mouth to his glass.

"Limpet," he said.

 Mr. Richard Roper's motor yacht, the Iron Pasha, appeared off the eastern tip of Hunter's Island at six o'clock exactly, prow forward like an attack boat, cut against a cloudless evening sky and growing perceptibly as she advanced toward Deep Bay over a flat sea. In case anybody doubted it was the Pasha, her crew had already called ahead by satcom to reserve the long mooring on the outer harbour, and the round table on the terrace for sixteen at eight-thirty, and the front row for the crab races afterwards. Even the menu was discussed. All the adults like seafood. Chips and grilled chicken for the children And the Chief goes crazy if there isn't enough ice.

It was between seasons, the time of year when you don't see too many big yachts cruising the Caribbean other than the commercial cruise ships out of Nassau and Miami. But if any of those had tried to put in at Hunter's Island, they'd have received no warm welcome from Mama Low, who liked rich yachties and abominated the common herd.

* * *

Jonathan had been waiting for the Pasha all week. Nevertheless, for a second or two after he sighted her he fancied himself trapped, and amused himself with the idea of escaping inland to the only town, or hijacking Mama Low's old bum boat, Hi-lo, which was anchored, with outboard fitted, not twenty yards from where he was staring out to sea at the Pasha's approach. Twin two-thousand-horsepower diesels, he was rehearsing. Extended afterdeck for helicopter, oversized Vosper stabilisers, seaplane launcher on the stern. The Pasha is quite a lady.

But foreknowledge did not ease his apprehension. Until this moment he had pictured himself advancing on Roper, and now Roper was advancing on him. First he felt faint, then hungry. Then he heard Mama Low yelling at him to get his white Canadian ass up here double quick, and he felt better. He trotted back along the wooden pier and up the sand track to the shack. His weeks at sea had seen an improvement in his appearance. An ocean-going looseness marked his stride, his eyes had gentled, his complexion had a healthy glow. As he climbed the rise he met the western sun starting to swell before it set, forming a copper rim round its circumference. Two of Mama Low's sons were rolling the famed round tabletop up the stone path to the terrace. Their names were Wellington and Nelson, but to Mama Low they were Swats and Wet Eye. Swats was sixteen and wreathed in fat. He was supposed to be in Nassau studying, but wouldn't go. Wet Eye was lean as a blade, smoked ganja and hated whites. The two had been working on the table for the last half hour, sniggering and achieving nothing.

"Bahamas makes you stupid, man," Swats explained as Jonathan passed by.

"You said it, Swats, I didn't."