The Night Manager Read Online Free PDF Page B

female singing and running water. The singing is indistinct but provocative, if not downright bawdy. Frisky the blazer has stationed himself at a telephone in the landing and is murmuring orders to someone he disdains. Major Corkoran, armed with a fresh cigarette but minus his camel hair, is in the dining room, talking slow French on another line for the benefit of somebody whose French is worse than his. His cheeks are fluid as a baby's, the dabs of colour very high. And his French is French French, no question.
    He has slipped into it as naturally as if it were his mother tongue, which perhaps it is, for nothing about Corkoran suggests an uncomplicated provenance.
    Elsewhere in the suite, other lives and conversations are unfolding.
    The tall man with the ponytail is called Sandy, we learn, and Sandy is talking English on another telephone to somebody in Prague called Gregory, while Mrs. Sandy sits in a chair with her overcoat on, glowering at the wall. But Jonathan has banished these secondary players from his immediate consciousness. They exist, they are elegant, they revolve in their far periphery around the central light of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper of Nassau, the Bahamas. But they are chorus.
    Jonathan's guided tour of the splendours of the palace is complete.
    It is time he took his leave. A graceful wave of the hand, an endearing exhortation--"Please to be sure to enjoy every bit of it"--and in the normal way he would have descended smoothly to ground level, leaving his wards to enjoy their pleasures by themselves as best they could at fifteen thousand francs a night including tax, service and continental breakfast.
    But tonight is not the normal way, tonight is Roper's night, it is Sophie's night, and Sophie in some bizarre way is played for us tonight by Roper's woman, whose name to everyone but Roper turns out to be not Jeds but Jed--Mr. Onslow Roper likes to multiply his assets. The snow is still falling, and the worst man in the world is drawn toward it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes. He stands cavalry-backed at the centre of the room, facing the French windows and the snow-clad balcony. He holds a green Sotheby's catalogue open before him like a hymnal from which he is about to sing, and his other arm is raised to bring in some silent instrument from the edge of the orchestra. He sports a learned judge's half-lens reading spectacles.
    "Soldier Boris and his chum say okay Monday lunchtime," Corkoran calls from the dining room. "Okay Monday lunchtime?"
    "Fix," says Roper, turning a page of the catalogue and watching the snow over his spectacles at the same time. "Look at that. Glimpse of the infinite."
    "I adore it every time it happens," says Jonathan earnestly.
    "Your friend Appetites from Miami says why not make it the Kronenhalle--food's better." Corkoran again.
    "Too public. Lunch here or bring his sandwiches. Sandy, what does a decent Stubbs horse make these days?"
    The pretty male head with the ponytail pokes round the door. "Size?"
    "Thirty by fifty inches."
    The pretty face barely puckers. "There was a good'un went at Sotheby's last June. Protector in a Landscape. Signed and dated 1779. A lulu."
    "Quanta costa?"
    "You sitting comfortably?"
    "Come off it, Sands!"
    "A million two. Plus commish."
    "Pounds or bucks?"
    "Bucks."
    From the opposite doorway, Major Corkoran is complaining. "The Brussels boys want half in cash, Chief. Bloody liberty, if you ask me."
    "Tell 'em you won't sign," Roper retorts, with an extra gruffness that he apparently uses for keeping Corkoran at arm's length. "That a hotel up there, Pine?"
    Roper's gaze is fixed on the black windowpanes where the childhood snowflakes pursue their dance.
    "A beacon, actually, Mr. Roper. Some sort of navigational aid, I gather."
    Herr Meister's treasured ormolu clock is chiming the hour, but Jonathan for all his customary nimbleness is unable to move his feet in the direction of escape. His patent evening shoes