The Night Manager полностью

Nevertheless, the orphan, soldier and hotelier was soon aware of something familiar to him from his homeless past: the rhythm of an efficient institution, even when the high command was not there to enforce it. The gardeners began work at seven-thirty, and Jonathan could have set his clock by them. The single chime of a tocsin sounded the eleven o'clock break, and for twenty minutes nothing stirred, not a mower or a cut-lash, as they dozed. At one o'clock the tocsin sounded twice, and if Jonathan strained his ears he could hear the murmur of native chatter from the staff canteen.

A knock on his door. Frisky opened it and grinned. Corkoran's as degenerate as Caligula, Burr had warned, and as clever as a box of monkeys.

* * *

"Old love, " breathed a husky, upper-class English voice through the fumes of last night's alcohol and this morning's vile-smelling French cigarettes. "How are we today? Not stuck for variety, I must say, heart. We kick off Garibaldi scarlet, then we go blue-based baboon, and today we're a sort of livery, rather stale donkey-piss yellow. Dare one hope we're on the mend?"

The pockets of Major Corkoran's bush jacket were stuffed with pens and male junk. Huge sweat patches reached from his armpits across his gut.

"I'd like to go soon, actually," said Jonathan.

"Absolutely, heart, whenever you like. Talk to the Chief. Soon as they're back. Due season and all that. And we're eating all right and so forth, are we? Sleep the great healer. See you tomorrow. Chűss."

And when tomorrow came, there was Corkoran again peering down at him, puffing at his cigarette.

"Fuck off, will you please, Frisky, old love?"

"Will do, Major," said Frisky with a grin, and he obediently slipped from the room while Corkoran paddled through the gloom to the rocking chair, into which he lowered himself with a grateful grunt. Then for a while he drew on his cigarette without saying a thing.

"Don't mind the fag, do we, old love? Can't do the brainwork if I haven't got a fag between my fingers. It's not the sucking and puffing that I'm hooked on. It's physically holding the little sod."

His regiment couldn't stomach him, so he did five unlikely years in Army Intelligence, said Burr, which is a misnomer, as we know, but Corky served them proud. The Roper doesn't love him for his looks alone.

"Smoke ourselves, do we, heart? In better times?"

"A bit."

"What times are they, old love?"

"Cooking."

"Can't hear us."

"Cooking. When I'm taking a break from hoteling."

Major Corkoran became all enthusiasm. "I must say, not a word of a lie, bloody good grub you ran us up at Mama's before you saved the side that night. Were those sauced-up mussels all our own work?"

"Yes."

"Finger-lickin' good. How about the carrot cake? We scored a bull's-eye there, I can tell you. Chief's favourite. Flown in, was it?"

"I made it."

"Come again, old boy?"

"I made it."

Corkoran was robbed of words. "You mean you made the carrot cake? Our own tiny hands? Old love. Heart." He drew on his cigarette, beaming admiration at Jonathan through the smoke. "Pinched the recipe from Meister's, no doubt." He shook his head. "Sheer genius." Another enormous draught of cigarette smoke. "And did we pinch anything else at all from Meister's while we were about it, old love?"

Motionless on his down pillow, Jonathan affected to be motionless in his mind as well. Get me Dr. Marti. Get me Burr. Get me out.

"Bit of a dilemma, frankly, you see, heart. I was filling in these forms for us at the hospital. That's my job in this shop. For as long as I've got one. Official form-filler. Us military types, about all we know how to do, isn't it? Well, well, I thought. Ho, ho. This is a bit rum. Is he a Pine or is he a Lamont? He's a hero, well we know that, but you can't put hero when you've got to put a chap's name. So I put Lamont, Thomas Alexander ― I say, old love, I do hope I did right? Born whatnot in Toronto? See page thirty-two for next of kin, except you hadn't got any? Case closed, I thought. Chap wants to call himself Pine when he's a Lamont, or Lamont when he's a Pine, far as I'm concerned, his good right."

He waited for Jonathan to speak. And waited. And drew more cigarette smoke. And still waited, because Corkoran possessed the interrogator's advantage of having all the time in the world to kill.