“Anyone proposing to go up to the Tower Suite these days has to sign in.”
“And hanging around the lobby for an evening?”
“Herr Meister expects it of me. I hang around. I ask whatever I want. I’m a presence; that’s why I’m there.”
“So tell us about these visitors of his,” Burr suggested. “There was this Austrian, as you call him. Three separate visits to the Tower Suite.”
“Dr. Kippel, address Vienna, wore a green loden coat.”
“He’s not Austrian, he’s not Kippel. He’s a humble Pole, if a Pole’s ever humble. They say he’s one of the new czars of the Polish underworld.”
“Why on earth should Roper be messing with the Polish underworld?”
Burr gave a regretful smile. His purpose was not to enlighten Jonathan but to tantalize him. “How about the thickset fellow with the glittery gray suit and eyebrows, then? Called himself Larsen. Swedish.”
“I simply assumed he was a Swede called Larsen.”
“He’s Russian. Three years ago he was a big shot in the Soviet Ministry of Defense. Today he runs a flourishing employment agency, pimping East Bloc physicists and engineers. Twenty thousand dollars a month, some are pulling in. Your Mr. Larsen takes his cut both ends. As a sideline he traffics in military hardware. If you’re looking to buy a couple of hundred T-72 tanks or a few Scud missiles at the Russian back door, Mr. Larsen is your man. Biological warheads come extra. What about your two military-looking Brits?”
Jonathan remembered two loose-limbed men in British blazers. “What about them?”
“They come from London, all right, but they re not Forbes and Lubbock. Belgium is where they’re based, and they’re purveyors of military trainers to the leading crazies of the world.”
The Brussels boys, Jonathan was thinking as he began to follow the threads that Burr was deliberately weaving before his memory’s eye. Soldier Boris. Who’s next?
“This one ring any bells? You didn’t describe him, not in as many words, but I thought he might be one of those suited gentlemen our chum received in the ground-floor conference room.”
While Burr was speaking he had drawn a small photograph from his wallet and passed it across the table for Jonathan’s inspection. It showed a tight-mouthed man in his forties with saddened shallow eyes and unnaturally waved black hair and an incongruous gold cross hanging over his Adam’s apple. It had been taken in bright sunlight and, to judge by the shadows, with the sun directly overhead.
“Yes,” Jonathan said.
“Yes what?”
“He was half the size of anyone else, but they deferred to him. Carried a black briefcase that was too big for him. Wore risers.”
“A Swiss? A Brit? Pin him down.”
“More a Latin American of some sort.” He handed back the photograph. “Could be anything. Could be Arab.”
“His name is Apostoll, believe it or not, Apo for short.” And Appetites for long, thought Jonathan, once again remembering Major Corkoran’s asides to his chief. “Greek, first-generation American, doctor of law at Michigan, magna cum laude, crook. Offices in New Orleans, Miami and Panama City, all places of impeccable respectability, as you are no doubt aware. Remember Lord Langbourne? Sandy?”
“Of course,” Jonathan replied, recalling the unnervingly beautiful man with the ponytail and the sour wife.
“He’s another bloody lawyer. Dicky Roper’s, actually. Apo and Sandy Langbourne do deals together. Very lucrative deals.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t, but you’re getting the idea. How’s your Spanish, by the by?”
“All right.”
“Should be more than all right, shouldn’t it? Eighteen months at the Ritz in Madrid, with your gifts, it should be bloody perfect.”
“I’ve let it go a bit, that’s all.”
An interval while Burr sat back in his chair and let the waiter clear away their plates. Jonathan was surprised to rediscover excitement: the feeling of edging toward the secret center, the pull of action after too long away.
“You’re not going to be a pudding traitor, are you?” Burr asked aggressively as the waiter handed them each a plastic-coated card.
“Good Lord, no.”
They settled for a purée of chestnut with whipped cream.
“And Corky, Major Corkoran, your brother soldier, his gofer,” said Burr, in the tone of one who has left the best until the end. “What did you make of him, then? Why are you laughing?”
“He was amusing.”
“What else is he?”
“The gofer, as you say. The majordomo. He signs.”
Burr leapt on the word as if it were the one he had been waiting for all lunch. “What does he sign?”
“Registration forms. Bills.”
“Bills, letters, contracts, waivers, guarantees, company accounts, bills of lading, checks,” said Burr excitedly. “Waybills, freight certificates, and a very large number of documents saying that everything his employer ever did wrong wasn’t done by Richard Onslow Roper but by his loyal servant Major Corkoran. Very rich man, Major Corkoran. Hundreds of millions to his name, except he’s signed them all away to Mr. Roper. There’s not a dirty deal the Roper does but Corky puts his signature to it. ‘Corks, come over here! You don’t have to read it, Corks old boy, sign it, there’s a good lad. You’ve just earned yourself another ten years in Sing Sing.”
The force with which Burr delivered this image, combined with the jagged edge to his voice as he imitated Ropers, gave a jolt to the easy rhythm of their conversation.
“There’s not a paper trail worth a damn,” Burr confided, his pale face close to Jonathan’s. “You can go back twenty years, I don’t care, you’ll not find Roper’s name on anything worse than a church donation. All right, I hate him. I’ll admit it. So should you, after what he did to Sophie.”
“Oh, I have no problem about that.”
“You don’t, eh?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, keep it that way. I’ll be right back. Hold everything.”
Fastening the waistband of his trousers, Burr went off for a pee, leaving Jonathan mysteriously elated. Hate him? Hate was not an emotion he had so far indulged. He could do anger; certainly he could mourn. But hate, like desire, seemed a lowly thing until it had a noble context, and Roper with his Sotheby’s catalogue and his beautiful mistress had not yet provided one. Nevertheless, the idea of hate, dignified by Sophie’s murder—of hate turned perhaps to revenge—began to appeal to Jonathan. It was like the promise of a distant great love, and Burr had appointed himself its procurer.
“So why?” Burr continued cozily, settling back into his chair. “That’s what I kept asking myself. Why’s he doing it? Why does Mr. Jonathan Pine the distinguished hotelier risk his career pinching faxes and snitching on a valued client? First Cairo, now again in Zurich. ’Specially after you were cross with us. Quite right. I was cross with us too.”
Jonathan pretended to address the question for the first time. “You just do it,” he said.
“No, you don’t. You’re not an animal, all instinct. You decide to do it. What drove you?”
“Something stirred, I suppose.”
“What stirred? How does it stop stirring? What would stir it again?”
Jonathan took a breath but for a moment did not speak. He had discovered that he was angry, and didn’t know why. “If a man’s peddling a private arsenal to an Egyptian crook . . . and he’s English . . . and you’re English . . . and there’s a war brew-ing . . . and the English are going to be fighting on the other side—”
“And you’ve been a soldier yourself . . .”
“—you just do it,” Jonathan repeated, feeling his throat clog.
Burr pushed aside his empty plate and leaned forward across the table. “‘Feeding the rat’—isn’t that the climbers’ expression? The rat that gnaws inside us telling us to take the risk? It’s quite a big rat, yours is, I suppose, with that father of yours
to live up to. He was undercover too, wasn’t he? Well, you knew that.”
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” said Jonathan politely as his stomach turned.
“They had to put him back into uniform after he was shot. They didn’t tell you?”
Jonathan’s hotelier smile, cast iron from cheek to cheek. His hotelier voice, iron soft. “No. They didn’t. Really not. How strange. You’d think they would, wouldn’t you?”
Burr shook his head at the enigmatic ways of civil servants.
“I mean, you did retire quite early, when you work it out,” Burr resumed reasonably. “It’s not everyone gives up a promising army career at twenty-five in favor of being a night flunky. Not with all the sailing and climbing and Outward Bound activities in the world. What made you choose hoteling, for heaven’s sake? Of all the ways you could have gone, why that one?”
To submit, thought Jonathan.
To abdicate.
To rest my head.
Mind your own fucking business.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he confessed with a self-negating smile. “For the quiet life, I suppose. I expect I’m a bit of a closet sybarite, if I’m honest.”
“Well now, I don’t believe that, as a matter of fact, Jonathan. I’ve been following you very closely these weeks and thinking about you in some depth. Let’s talk army a bit more, can we? Because I was very impressed by some of the things I read about your military career.”
Great, thought Jonathan, now very lively in his mind. We’re talking Sophie, so we’re talking hate. We’re talking hate, so we’re talking hoteling. We’re talking hoteling, so we’re talking army. Very logical. Very rational.
All the same, he could find no fault with Burr. Burr was from the heart, which was his saving. He might be clever. He might have mastered the grammar of intrigue, he had an eye for human strength and failing. But the heart still led, as Goodhew knew and Jonathan could feel, which was why he permitted Burr to wander in his private kingdom and why Burr’s sense of mission was beginning to throb like a war drum in Jonathan’s ear.
6
It was mellow time. Confidence time. They had agreed on a glass of plum spirit to wash down their coffee.
“I had a Sophie once,” Burr recalled, not altogether truthfully. “Surprised I didn’t marry her, come to think of it. I usually do. My current one’s called Mary, which always strikes me as a bit of a comedown. Still, we’ve been together, oh, must be five years now. She’s a doctor, as a matter of fact. Just a GP, parish priest with a stethoscope. Social conscience the size of a somewhat enlarged pumpkin. Seems to be panning out quite well.”
“Long may it last,” said Jonathan gallantly.
“Mary’s not my first wife, mind. She’s not my second, to be frank. I don’t know what it is about me and women. I’ve aimed up, I’ve aimed down, I’ve aimed sideways; I never get it right. Is it me, is it them? I ask myself.”
“I know what you mean,” said Jonathan. But inside himself he had become watchful. He had no natural conversation about women. They were the sealed envelopes in his desk. They were the friends and sisters of the youth he had never had, the mother he had never known, the woman he should never have married, and the woman he should have loved and not betrayed.
“I seem to get to the root of them too fast and wear them out,” Burr was complaining, once again affecting to open his heart to Jonathan in the hope of receiving the same favor in return. “It’s kids are the problem. We’ve each got two of our own, and now we’ve got one between us. They take the spice out of it. You never did kids, did you? You steered clear of them. Wise, I call that. Shrewd.” He took a sip of Pflümli. “Tell us a bit more about your Sophie,” he suggested, though Jonathan had so far told him nothing.
“She wasn’t mine. She was Freddie Hamid’s.”
“But you screwed her,” Burr suggested equably.
Jonathan is in the bedroom of the little flat in Luxor, with the moonlight sloping between the half-closed curtains. Sophie is lying on the bed in her white nightgown, eyes closed and face upward. Some of her drollness has returned. She has drunk a little vodka. So has he. The bottle stands between them.
“Why do you sit the other side of the room from me, Mr. Pine?”
“Out of respect, I imagine.” The hotelier’s smile. The hotelier’s voice, a careful composite of other people’s.
“But you brought me here to comfort me, I think.” This time, no answer from Mr. Pine.
“Am I too damaged for you? Too old perhaps?”
Mr. Pine, normally so fluent, continues to preserve a dread silence.
“I am worried for your dignity, Mr. Pine. Perhaps I am worried for my own. I think you sit so far away from me because you are ashamed of something. I hope it is not me.”
“I brought you here because it was somewhere safe, Madame Sophie. You need a pause for breath while you work out what to do and where to go. I thought I could be helpful.”
“And Mr. Pine? He needs nothing, I suppose? You are a healthy man, assisting the invalid? Thank you for bringing me to Luxor.”
“Thank you for agreeing to come.”
Her large eyes were fixed upon him in the moonlight. She did not easily resemble a helpless woman grateful for his help.
“You have so many voices, Mr. Pine,” she resumed, after too long. “I have no idea anymore who you are. You look at me, and you touch me with your eyes. And I am not insensitive to your touch. I am not.” Her voice slipped a moment; she straightened herself and seemed to regroup. “You say one thing, and you are that person. And I am moved by that person. Then that person is called away, and somebody quite different takes his place. And you say something else. And I am moved again. So we have a changing of the guard. It is as if each person in you can only stand a little while of me, and then he has to go and get his rest. Are you like this with all your women?”
“But you are not one of my women, Madame Sophie.”
“Then why are you here? To be a boy scout? I don’t think so.”
She fell silent again. He had a sense that she was deciding whether to abandon pretense. “I would like one of your many people to stay with me tonight, Mr. Pine. Can you arrange that?”
“Of course. I’ll sleep on the sofa. If that’s what you wish.”
“No. It’s not at all what I wish. I wish you to sleep with me in my bed and make love to me. I wish to feel that I have made at least one of you happy and that the others will take heart from his example. I cannot have you so ashamed. You accuse yourself much too much. We have all done bad things. But you are a good man. You are many good men. And you are not responsible for my misfortunes. If you are part of them”—she was standing now, facing him, her arms at her sides—“then I should wish you to be here for better reasons than shame. Mr. Pine, why do you insist on keeping yourself so far away from me?”
In the fading moonlight her voice had become louder, her appearance more spectral. He took a step toward her and found that the distance between them was no distance at all. He stretched out his arms to her, tentatively because of her bruises. He drew her carefully to him, slid his hands under the halter of her white nightgown, spread his palms and lightly flattened them against her naked back. She laid the side of her face against his; he smelled the vanilla again and discovered the unexpected softness of her long black hair. He closed his eyes. Clutching each other, they toppled softly onto the bed. And when the dawn came, she made him draw the curtains so that the night manager no longer did his loving in the dark.
“That was all of us,” he whispered to her. “The whole regiment. Officers, other ranks, deserters, cooks. There’s no one left.”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Pine. You have hidden reinforcements, I am sure.”
Burr was still waiting for his answer.
“No,” said Jonathan defiantly.
“Whyever not? Never pass one up, me. Did you have a girl at the time?”
“No,” Jonathan repeated, coloring.
“You me
an mind my own business?”
“Pretty much.”
Burr seemed to like being told to mind his own business. “Tell us about your marriage then. It’s quite funny, actually, thinking of you being married. It makes me uncomfortable, I don’t know why. You’re single. I can feel it. Maybe I am too. “What happened?”
“I was young. She was younger. It makes me uncomfortable too.”
“
She was a painter, wasn’t she? Like you?”
“I was a Sunday dauber. She was the real thing. Or thought she was.”
“What did you marry her for?”
“Love, I suppose.”
“You suppose. Politeness, more likely, knowing you. What did you leave her for?”
“Sanity.”
No longer able to keep the flood of memory at bay, Jonathan abandoned himself to the angry vision of their married life together dying as they watched it: the friendship they no longer had, the love they no longer made, the restaurants where they watched happy people chat, the dead flowers in the vase, the rotting fruit in the bowl, her paint-caked easel propped against the wall, the dust thick on the dining table while they stared at each other through their dried tears, a mess not even Jonathan could tidy up. It’s just me, he kept telling her, trying to touch her and recoiling as she recoiled. I grew up too quickly and missed women on the way. It’s me, not you at all.
Burr had made another of his merciful leaps.
“So what took you to Ireland?” he suggested with a smile. “Was hat running away from her, by any chance?”
“It was a job. If you were in the British Army—if you wanted to be a real soldier, useful, live ammunition after all the training rounds—Ireland was where you had to be.”
“And you did want to be useful?”
“Wouldn’t you at that age?”
“I still do,” Burr replied.