Pine standing in the doorway of his office at the Queen Nefertiti, staring across the empty marble ball at the liquid crystal digits above the lift as they stammer out its ascent to the penthouses.
The lift returning empty to the ground floor.
Pine’s palms tingling and dry, Pine’s shoulders light.
Pine reopening the safe. The combination has been set—by the hotel’s sycophantic general manager—at Freddie Hamid’s date of birth.
Pine extracting the photocopies, folding the yellow envelope small and slipping it into an inside pocket of his dinner jacket for later destruction.
The copier still warm.
Pine copying the copies, first adjusting the density button a shade darker for improved definition. Names of missiles. Names of guidance systems. Techno-babble that Pine cannot understand. Names of chemicals Pine cannot pronounce yet knows the use of. Other names that are as deadly but more pronounceable. Names like Sarin, Soman and Tabun.
Pine sliding the new copies inside tonight’s dinner menu, then folding the menu longways and slipping it into his other inside pocket. The copies still warm inside the menu.
Pine placing the old copies in a fresh envelope indistinguishable from its predecessor. Pine writing PINE on the new envelope and placing it in the same spot on the same shelf, the same way up.
Pine reclosing the safe and locking it. The overt world restored.
Pine eight hours later, a different kind of servant, seated buttock-to-buttock with Mark Ogilvey in the cramped cabin of the minister’s yacht while Mrs. Ogilvey in the galley, wearing designer jeans, runs up smoked salmon sandwiches.
“Freddie Hamid buying dirty toys from Dicky Onslow Roper?” Ogilvey repeats incredulously, leafing through the documents a second time. “What the hell’s that about? Little swine would be safer sticking to baccarat. The ambassador’s going to be absolutely furious. Darling, wait till you hear this one.”
But Mrs. Ogilvey has heard this one already. The Ogilveys are a husband-and-wife team. They spy in preference to having children.
I loved you, thought Jonathan uselessly. Meet your past-tense lover.
I loved you but betrayed you instead, to a pompous British spy I didn’t even like.
Because I was on his little list of people who would always do their bit when the bugle went.
Because I was One of Us—Us being Englishmen of self-evident loyalty and discretion. Us being Good Chaps.
I loved you but never quite got around to saying so at the time.
Sybille’s letter rang in his ears: I see a shadow fall across your face. I am disgusting to you.
No, no, not disgusting at all, Sybille, the night manager hastened to assure his unwelcome correspondent. Just irrelevant. The disgust is all my own work.
2
Herr Kaspar again lifted his famous head. The throb of a powerful motor became discreetly audible above the bearing of the wind. He rolled up his bulletins from the beleaguered Zurich stock exchange and slipped an elastic band over them. He dropped the roll into his investment drawer, locked it and nodded to Mario, the head chasseur. He eased a comb from his back pocket and skimmed it through his wig. Mario scowled at Pablo, who in turn simpered to Benito, the ridiculously pretty apprentice from Lugano, who was probably favoring both of them. All three had clustered inside the lobby for shelter, but now, with Latin bravado, they breasted the storm, buttoning their capes at the neck as they grabbed their umbrellas and trolleys and vanished, swallowed by the snow.
It never happened, Jonathan thought, watching each signal of the car’s approach. There is only the snow, racing over the forecourt. It’s a dream.
But Jonathan was not dreaming. The limousine was real, even if it was floating on a white void. A stretch limousine, longer than the hotel, was berthing at the front entrance like a black liner nosing into dock, while the chasseurs in their capes scurried and pranced to make it fast, all but the impertinent Pablo, who in a moment of inspiration had unearthed a curling broom and was delicately picking the snowflakes from the red carpet. For one last blessed moment, it was true, a gust of snow did blank everything out, and Jonathan was able to imagine that a tidal wave had swept the liner back to sea, to founder against the crags of the surrounding hilltops, so that Mr. Richard Onslow Roper, and his officially licensed bodyguards, and whoever else made up the party of sixteen, had perished to a man in their private Titanic in the memorable Great Storm of January 1991, God rest their souls.
But the limousine had returned. Furs, well-grown men, a beautiful long-legged young woman, diamonds and gold wrist-bands and castles of matching black luggage, were emerging like plundered booty from its plush interior. A second limousine had joined it, now a third. A convoy of limousines. Already Herr Kaspar was propelling the swing doors at the speed best suited to the party’s progress. First an untidy brown coat of camel hair loomed into the glass and was cautiously rotated into focus, a grimy silk muffler dangling over its collar, surmounted by a soggy cigarette and the pouchy stare of a scion of the English upper classes. No fifty-year-old Apollo he.
After the camel hair came a navy blue blazer in his twenties, the blazer single-breasted for the cross-draw, and eyes shallow as paint. One OBG, thought Jonathan, trying not to answer their malign stare; one more to follow, and a third if Roper’s scared.
The beautiful woman had chestnut hair and wore a quilted coat of many colors that reached almost to her feet, yet she managed to appear slightly underdressed. She had Sophie’s comic slant to her, and her hair, like Sophie’s fell to either side of her face. Someone’s wife? Mistress? Anyone’s? For the first time in six months, Jonathan felt the devastating, irrational impact of a woman he instantaneously desired. Like Sophie he had a jeweled brilliance and a kind of dressed nakedness. Two strings of splendid pearls set off her neck. Diamond bracelets peeked from her quilted sleeves. But it was the vague air of shambles, the raggedy smile and unselfconscious carriage, that appointed her an instant citizen of Paradise. The doors swung open again, disgorging everyone at once, so that suddenly an entire leftover delegation of the English affluent society was ranged under the chandelier, each of its members so sleekly groomed, so sun-rich, that together they seemed to share a corporate morality that outlawed sickness, poverty, pale faces, age and manual labor. Only the camel hair coat, with his disgracefully battered suede boots, remained a voluntary outcast from their ranks.
And at their center, yet apart from them, The Man, as only The Man could be after Sophie’s furious descriptions of him. Tall, slender and at first glance noble. Fair hair stirred with gray, swept back and flicked into little horns above the ears. A face to play cards against and lose. The stance that arrogant Englishmen do best, one knee cocked, one hand backed against the colonial arse. Freddie is so weak, Sophie had explained. And Roper is so English.
Like all deft men, Roper was doing several things at once: shaking hands with Kaspar, then clapping him with the same hand on the upper arm, then using it to blow a kiss to Fräulein Eberhardt, who went pink and waved at him like a menopausal groupie. Then finally fixing his overlord’s eye on Jonathan, who must have been strolling toward him, though Jonathan himself had no direct evidence of this except that Adèle’s dummy had been replaced first by the newsstand, then by the flushed features of Fräulein Eberhardt at the reception desk, and now by The Man himself. He has no qualms, Sophie had said. He is the worst man in the world.
He’s recognized me, thought Jonathan, waiting for the denunciation. He’s seen my photograph, listened to my description. In a minute he’ll stop smiling.
“I’m Dicky Roper,” a lazy voice announced as the hand closed round Jonathan’s and briefly owned it. “My chaps booked some rooms here. Rather a lot of ’em. How d’you do?” Belgravia slur, the proletarian accent of the vastly rich. They had entered each other’s private space.
“How very good to see you, Mr. Roper,” Jonathan murmured, English voice to English voice. “Welcome back, sir, and poor you, what a perfect
ly ghastly journey you must have had. Wasn’t it rather heroic to venture aloft at all? No one else has, I can tell you. My name’s Pine. I’m the night manager.”
He’s heard of me, he thought, waiting. Freddie Hamid told him my name.
“What’s old Meister up to these days?” Roper asked, his eyes slipping away to the beautiful woman. She was at the newsstand, helping herself to fashion magazines. Her bracelets kept falling over her hand, while with the other she continually pushed back her hair. “Tucked up with his Ovaltine and a book, is he? Hope it’s a book, must say. Jeds, how you doing, darling? Adores magazines. Addict. Hate the things m’self ’
It took Jonathan a moment to realize that Jeds was the woman. Not Jed a single man, but Jeds a single woman in all her varieties. Her chestnut head turned far enough to let them see her smile. It was puckish and good-humored.
“I’m just fine, darling,” she said bravely, as if she were recovering from a knock.
“Herr Meister is unavoidably tied up tonight, I’m afraid, sir,” said Jonathan, “but he does enormously look forward to seeing you in the morning when you’re rested.”
“You English, Pine? Sound it.”
“To the core, sir.”
“Wise man.” The pale gaze wanders away again, this time to the reception desk, where the camel hair coat is filling in forms for Fräulein Eberhardt. “You proposing marriage to that young lady, Corky?” Roper calls. “That’ll be the day,” he adds to Jonathan in a lower tone. “Major Corkoran, my assistant,” he confides with innuendo.
“Nearly there, Chief!” Corky drawls, and lifts a camel hair arm. He has squared his legs and pushed out his rump like somebody about to play a croquet shot, and there is a tilt to his haunches that, by nature or intent, suggests a certain femininity. A heap of passports lie at his elbow.
“Only got to copy a few names, God’s sake. Not a fifty-page contract, Corks.”
“It’s the new security, I’m afraid, sir,” Jonathan explains. “The Swiss police insist. There seems to be nothing we can do.”
The beautiful Jeds has chosen three magazines but needs more. She has perched one slightly scuffed boot pensively on its long heel, with the toe pointing in the air. Sophie used to do the same. Mid-twenties, Jonathan thinks. Always will be.
“Been here long, then, Pine? Wasn’t here last time round, was he, Frisky? We’d have noticed a stray young Brit.”
“No way,” said the blazer, eyeing Jonathan through an imaginary gun slit. Cauliflower ears, Jonathan noticed, Blond hair, going on white. Hands like axheads.
“I make it six months, Mr. Roper, almost to the day.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Cairo,” Jonathan replied, light as a spark. “The Queen Nefertiti.”
Time passes, like time before a detonation. But the carved mirrors of the lobby do not shatter at the mention of the Queen Nefertiti Hotel, the pilasters and chandeliers hold still.
“Likee, did you? Cairo?
“Loved it.”
“What made you leave the place, then, if you were so high on it?”
Well, you did, actually, Jonathan thinks. But he said instead: “Oh, wanderlust, I suppose, sir. You know how it is. The drifting life is one of the attractions of the trade.”
Suddenly everything was in motion. Corkoran had detached himself from the reception desk and, cigarette held wide, was advancing on them with high steps. The woman Jeds had chosen her magazines and was waiting, Sophie-like, for someone to do something about paying for them. Corkoran said, “On the room bill, heart.” Herr Kaspar was unloading a wad of mail into the arms of the second blazer, who ostentatiously explored the bulkier packages with his fingertips.
“High bloody time, Corks. Hell’s happened to your signing hand?”
“
Wanker’s colic, I should think, Chief,” said Major Corkoran. “Could be limp wrist,” he added, with a special smile for Jonathan.
“Oh, Corks,” said the woman Jeds, giggling.
Out of the corner of his eye Jonathan spotted Mario, the head doorman, wheeling a stack of matching luggage to the service lift, using the paddling gait with which porters hope to imprint their images on the fickle minds of clients. Then he saw his own fragmented reflection passing him in the mirrors, and Corkoran’s beside him, carrying his cigarette in one hand and the magazines in the other, and he allowed himself a moment of officious panic because he couldn’t see Jeds. He turned and saw her and caught her eye and she smiled at him, which in his startling resurgence of desire was what he craved. He caught Roper’s eye also, because she was hanging from Roper’s arm, holding it in both her long hands while she almost trod on his feet. The bodyguards and the affluent society trailed behind them. Jonathan noticed a blond male beauty with his hair tied at the nape, a plain wife scowling beside him.
“Pilot’ll be along later,” Corkoran was saying. “Some crap about the compass. If it’s not the compass, it’s the bogs won’t flush. You a permanency here, darling, or just a one-night stand?”
His breath smelled of the day’s good things: the martinis before lunch, the wines with it and the brandies afterwards, washed down by his foul French cigarettes.
“Oh, I think as permanent as one can be, in this profession, Major,” Jonathan replied, altering his manner a little for an underling.
“Goes for us all, heart, believe me,” said the Major fervently. “Permanently temporary. Jesus.”
Another film cut, and they were traversing the great hall to the tune of “When I Take My Sugar to Tea,” played by Maxie the pianist to two old ladies in gray silk. Roper and the woman were still entwined. You’re new to each other, Jonathan told them sourly, out of the corner of his eye. Or else you’re making up after a quarrel. Jeds, he repeated to himself. He needed the safety of his single bed.
Yet another cut, and they were standing three deep before the ornate doors of Herr Meister’s new Tower Suite lift, the affluent society twittering in the background.
“Hell happened to the old lift, Pine?” Roper was demanding. “Thought Meister was a sucker for old things. Bloody Swiss would modernize Stonehenge if they got a chance. Wouldn’t they, Jeds?”
“Roper, you can’t make a scene about a lift,” she said in awe. “
Try me.”
From far away, Jonathan hears a voice not unlike his own, enumerating the advantages of the new lift: a security measure, Mr. Roper, but also an attractive extra feature, installed last autumn for the sole convenience of our Tower Suite guests. . . . And as Jonathan talks, he dangles between his fingers the golden master key created to Herr Meister’s personal design, decked with a golden tassel and capped with this rather amusing golden crown.
“I mean, doesn’t it remind you of the pharaohs? It’s quite outrageous, really, but I can assure you that our less sophisticated guests adore it,” he confides, with a camp little smile that he has never vouchsafed to anyone before.
“Well, I adore it,” says the Major, offscreen “And I’m bloody sophisticated.”
Roper balances the key in his palm as if to cost its melt weight. He studies both sides, then the crown, then the tassel.
“Taiwan,” he pronounces and, to Jonathan’s alarm, slings it at the blond blazer with cauliflower ears, who catches it low down and fast on his left side, shouting “Mine!” as he dives.
Beretta .09 automatic with safety catch at the “on,” Jonathan records. Ebony finish, holster-carried under the right armpit. A left-handed OBG, with a spare magazine in his belt bag.
“Oh, well played, Frisky, heart. Good catch,” Corkoran drawls, and there is relieved laughter from the affluent outfield, led by the woman, who squeezes Roper’s arm and says honestly, darling, though in Jonathan’s clouded ear it at first sounds like policy, darling.
Now everything is in slow motion, everything is happening under water. The lift takes five at a time; the rest must wait. Roper strides in, drawing the woman after him. Roedean and model school, Jonathan is thinking
. Plus a special course that Sophie had also taken in how to do that with your hips when you walk. Then Frisky, then Major Corkoran without his cigarette, finally Jonathan. Her hair is soft as well as chestnut. She is also nude. That is to say, she has slipped off her quilted coat and slung it over her arm like an army greatcoat. She wears a man’s white shirt with Sophie’s puffy sleeves rolled to the elbows. Jonathan starts the lift. Corkoran stares disapprovingly upward like a man peeing. The girl’s hip rides carelessly against Jonathan’s flank in cheerful friendship. Get off, he wants to tell her irritably. If you’re flirting don’t. If you’re not flirting, keep your hip to yourself. She smells not of vanilla but of white carnations on Commemoration Day at cadet school. Roper stands behind her, wide hands resting possessively on her shoulders. Frisky gazes blankly downward at the faded bite mark on her neck, at her unsupported breasts inside the expensive shirt. Like Frisky, no doubt, Jonathan has a disgraceful urge to scoop one out.
“Now why don’t I go ahead and show you all the new goodies Herr Meister’s put in for you since your last visit?” he suggests.
Perhaps it’s time you gave up manners as a way of life, Sophie had said to him as she walked beside him in the dawn.
He went ahead, indicating the suite’s priceless advantages: the amazing low-flush bar . . . the thousand-year-old fruit . . . the very latest in superhygienic jetstream loos, does everything for you except clean your teeth. . . . All his whimsical little jokes, whisked out and polished for the delectation of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper and this long-waited, funny-faced, unpardonably attractive woman. How dare she be so beautiful at a time like this?
Meister’s legendary Tower hovers like an inflated dovecote over the magic peaks and valleys of the hotel’s Edwardian roof. The three-bedroom palace inside it is built on two floors, a pastel experience in what Jonathan confidingly calls Swiss Franc Quatorze. The luggage has arrived, the chasseurs have received their largesse, Jeds has retired to the master bedroom, from which issue the far sounds of intimate singing and running water. The singing is indistinct but provocative, if not downright bawdy.