The Night Manager полностью

"I'm going on down, Mike! I'll go start the boat, hear me? Jesus, fuck," he complained, as if the world were being too hard on him. Then he hurried through the kitchen to the scullery door, which he kicked open, before heading down the path toward Goose Neck. In the same moment Jonathan heard the man called Mike approaching with his hostage, Daniel. Jonathan dried his palm once more on his shorts, drew the knife from his waistband and passed it to his left hand, the sharp edge upward as if to rip a belly from below. As he did so, he heard Daniel sob. One choked or muffled sob, so brief the boy must have caught himself almost before he began it. One half-sob of tiredness, impatience, boredom or frustration, the kind you might hear from any child, whether dirt poor or super-rich, who has a bit of earache or doesn't want to go upstairs to bed until you've promised to come and tuck him up.

Yet for Jonathan it was the cry of his childhood. It echoed in every vile corridor and barrack hut and orphanage and every auntie's spare back room. He restrained himself a moment longer, knowing that attacking blows are better for this moment of delay. He felt his heartbeat slow. He saw the red mist gather across his eyes, and he became weightless and invulnerable.

He saw Sophie, her face intact and smiling. He heard the clump of adult feet, followed by the reluctant scuffle of smaller ones, as Daniel's captor came down the two steps from the wooden balcony and reached the tiled floor of the kitchen, dragging Daniel after him. As the man's foot hit the tiles, Jonathan stepped from behind the door and with his right hand seized the arm that held the pistol and gave it a ferocious, breaking twist. Simultaneously, Jonathan screamed: one prolonged cathartic scream, to ventilate, to summon help, to terrorise, to put an end to too much patience for too long. The pistol clattered on the tiles, and he kicked it out of reach. Hauling the man and his damaged arm into the doorway, he grabbed the door, threw his body weight upon it and crushed the arm between the door and jamb. The man called Mike screamed too, but stopped as Jonathan laid the knife blade against his sweating neck.

"Shit, man!" Mike whispered, somewhere between pain and shock. "Fuck you doing to me? Holy shit. You some crazy man or something? Jesus!"

"Run back down the hill to your mother," Jonathan told Daniel. "Off you go. Quick now."

And despite everything that was raging in him, he selected these words with elaborate care, knowing he might have to live with them later. For why should a mere cook know that Daniel's first name was Daniel, or that Jed was not his mother, or that Daniel's real mother was several thousand miles away in Dorset? As he spoke them, he realised that Daniel was no longer listening, but gazing past him toward the other door. And that the bagman, having heard the screaming, had come back to lend assistance.

"Fucker's broken my fucking arm!" the man called Mike was yelling. "Let go my fucking arm, you mad shit! He's got a knife, Gerry. Don't fuck with him. My fucking arm's broke. He broke it two fucking times. He's not kidding. He's crazy!"

But Jonathan went on holding him by the arm that was probably broken, and he kept the knife pressed against the man's thick neck. The head was tipped right back on him with its mouth open, like a head at the dentist's, and the man's sweated hair stroked his face. And with the red mist there before his eyes, Jonathan would have done anything that he felt was necessary, without compunction.

"Walk back down the steps," he told Daniel, quietly so as not to scare him. "Go carefully. Off you go. Now."

At which Daniel did at last consent to take his leave. He turned on his heel and began tripping unevenly down the steps toward the arc lights and the frozen crowd, flapping one hand above his head as if to acknowledge his accomplishment. And this was the consoling image that remained in Jonathan's mind as the man named Gerry hit him with his pistol butt, then hit him again over the right cheek and eye, then yet a third time as Jonathan floated to the ground in veils of Sophie's blood. While he lay on the floor in the recovery position, Gerry dealt him a couple of kicks in the groin for good measure before grabbing his accomplice, Mike, by his remaining arm and ― to renewed screams and imprecations ― dragging him across the kitchen to the opposite door. And Jonathan was pleased to see the stuffed briefcase lying not too far away, because clearly Gerry couldn't manage a maimed Mike and the loot at the same time.