The Night Manager

by John Le Carré

there is nothing that dissolute men like better than confessing themselves to virtuous women.

On one short stroll to the pub you smell warm milk from the dairy, paraffin stoves, coal fires, pipe-smoke, silage, and seaweed from the Lanyon. A helicopter is plodding out to Scilly. A tanker is lowing in the sea fog. The church tower’s chimes bang in your ear like a boxing gong. Everything is single, everything a separate smell or sound or piece of remembering. A footstep in the lane snaps like a broken neck.

‘I shall expect a lavish funeral, Mr Linden,’ said Jumbo gravely. ‘Black horses, a sparkling carriage and a nine-year-old catamite in a top hat. Your health.’

Madame Latulipe let out the peal of wild laughter that is the signature-tune of humourless people.

dopers of today flew 747 transports with civil markings, hid their stuff in manifested cargo, and used airports with state-of-the-art facilities. And for the run home they stuffed their planes with mink coats for their hookers and fragmentation grenades for their friends. Dopers were like anyone else in the transport business, he said: they hated to ride home without a load.

Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.

Bush went to war. Got his knees brown. Tried out his chaps against the toys he’d flogged to Saddam back in the days when the Iranians were the bad guys.

Perhaps that’s what evil does to you, Goodhew thinks: it tires you.