"Corky!"
"Right here, Chief!"
The moment's hesitation. The corrected voice. "Give Danby and Mac Arthur a bell. Shampoo."
"Will do, Chief."
"Sandy! Caroline! Shampoo! Hell are those two? Fighting again. Bores. Give me the queers every time," he adds, in an aside to Jonathan. "Don't go, Pine ― party's just warming up. Corks, order up another couple of bottles!"
But Jonathan goes. Somehow semaphoring his regrets, he gains the landing, and as he looks back, Jed is flapping a zany goodbye at him over her champagne glass. He responds with his most glacial smile.
"Night night, old love," Corkoran murmurs as they brush past each other on their separate ways. "Thanks for the tender loving care."
"Good night, Major."
Frisky, the ash-blond OBG has installed himself on a tapestried throne beside the lift and is studying a paperback of Victorian erotica. "Play golf, do we, sweetheart?" he asks as Jonathan flits by.
"No."
"Me neither."
I shoot the snipe with ease, Fischer-Dieskau is singing. I shoot the snipe with ease.
* * *
The half-dozen dinner guests sat bowed over their candlelit tables like worshipers in a cathedral. Jonathan sat among them, basking in a determined euphoria. This is what I live for, he told himself: this half-bottle of Pommard, this foie de veau glace with vegetables of three colours, this hotel silver with its bruised old face, twinkling wisely up at me from the damask cloth.
Dining alone had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war's depletion, Maitre Berri had promoted him from his single-seater by the service door to one of the high altars at the window. Gazing down over the snow-clad golf links to the city lights prickling along the lakeside, Jonathan doggedly congratulated himself on the satisfying completeness of his life till now, the early uglinesses he had left behind.
That wasn't easy for you up there with the egregious Roper, Jonathan my boy, the school's grey-jawed commandant told his best cadet approvingly. And that Major Corkoran is a real piece of work. So was the girl, in my opinion. Never mind. You were firm, you fought your comer. Well played. And Jonathan actually managed to bestow a congratulatory smile on his reflection in the candlelit window as he recalled his every fawning phrase and lustful thought in the order of its shameful appearance.
Suddenly the foie de veau turned to ash in his mouth and the Pommard tasted of gunmetal. His bowels writhed, his vision blurred. Rising from the table in a flurry, he mumbled something to Maitre Berri about a forgotten duty, and made it just in time to the men's room.
THREE
Jonathan Pine, orphaned only son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British sergeant of infantry killed in one of his country's many postcolonial wars, graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes, half-mothers, cadet units and training camps, sometime army wolf-child with a special unit in even rainier Northern Ireland, caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people's languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination, sat in his sanitary Swiss office behind reception, smoking his third unusual cigarette and pondering the sage words of the hotel's revered founder that hung framed alongside his imposing sepia photograph.
Several times in the last months Jonathan had taken up his pen in an effort to free the great man's wisdom from its tortuous German syntax, but his efforts had always foundered against some immovable dependent clause. "True hospitality gives to life what true cooking gives to eating," he began, believing for a moment that he had it. "It is the expression of our respect for the essential basic value of every individual creature entrusted to our care in the course of his travail through life, regardless of his condition, of mutual responsibility in the spirit of humanity invested in the ― " Then he lost it again, as he always did. Some things were best left in the original.
His eye returned to Herr Strippli's tarty television set, squatting before him like a man's handbag. It had been playing the same electronic game for the last fifteen minutes. The aerial bomber's sights centre on a grey fleck of building far below.
The camera zooms closer. A missile speeds toward the target, enters and descends several floors. The base of the building pops like a paper bag, to the unctuous satisfaction of the news caster. A bull's-eye. Two more shots for no extra money. Nobody talks about the casualties. From that height there aren't any. Iraq is not Belfast.
The image changed. Sophie and Jonathan are taking their drive.
* * *
Jonathan is driving, and Sophie's pulped face is partly hidden by a headscarf and dark glasses. Cairo is not yet awake. The red of dawn is colouring the dusty sky. To smuggle her out of the hotel and into his car, the undercover soldier has taken every precaution. He set out for the pyramids, not knowing she had a different spectacle in mind. "No," she says. "Go that way." A foetid oozing pillow of filth hangs over the crumbling tombs of Cairo's city cemetery. On a moonscape of smoking cinders amid shanties of plastic bags and tin cans, the wretched of the earth are crouched like Technicolor vultures, picking through the garbage. He parks the car on a sand verge. Lorries thunder past them on their way to and from the rubbish dump, leaving stink in their wake.
"This is where I brought him," she says. One side of her mouth is ridiculously swollen. She speaks through a hole in the other side.
"Why?" says Jonathan, meaning: Why are you now bringing me?
" 'Look at these people, Freddie,' I told him. 'Each time someone sells weapons to another tin-pot Arab tyrant, these people starve a little more. Do you know the reason? Listen to me, Freddie. Because it is more fun to have a pretty army than to feed the starving. You are an Arab, Freddie. Never mind that we Egyptians say we are not Arabs. We are Arabs. Is it right that your Arab brothers should be the flesh to pay for your dreams?' "
"I see," says Jonathan, with the embarrassment of an Englishman when faced with political emotion.
" 'We do not need leaders,' I said. 'The next great Arab will be a humble craftsman. He will make things work and give the people dignity instead of war. He will be an administrator, not a warrior. He will be like you, Freddie, as you could be if you grew up.' "
"What did Freddie say?" says Jonathan. Her smashed features accuse him every time he looks at them. The bruises round her eyes are turning to blue and yellow.
"He told me to mind my own business." He catches the choke of fury in her voice, and his heart sinks further. "I told him it was my business! Life and death are my business! Arabs are my business! He was my business!"
And you warned him, he thinks, sickened. You let him know you were a force to be reckoned with, not a weak woman to be discarded at his whim. You let him guess that you too had your secret weapon, and you threatened to do what I did, without knowing I'd done it already.
"The Egyptian authorities will not touch him," she says. "He bribes them, and they keep their distance."
"Leave town," Jonathan tells her. "You know what the Hamids are like. Get out."
"The Hamids can have me killed as easily in Paris as in Cairo."
"Tell Freddie he must help you. Make him stick up for you against his brothers."
"Freddie is frightened of me. When he is not being brave he is a coward. Why are you staring at the traffic?"
Because it's all there is to stare at apart from you and the wretched of the earth.
But she does not wait for an answer. Perhaps deep down this student of male weakness understands his shame.