Mambo Page 10

  Trevaskis shrugged. Ruhr’s sarcasm didn’t go down big with him. A silver St Christopher around his neck shimmered. “This place isn’t exactly a day at the beach, Ruhr.”

  “As long as I’m in charge, my friend, there will be no fire. When you remember how much you’re being paid, Trevaskis, you’ll find that discomfort has a way of becoming tolerable.”

  Trevaskis fingered his medallion. He had never worked with Ruhr before. He thought the German unstable, like an unpinned hand-grenade in a closed fist. The business with the metal claw – what sort of sick shit was that? And then the goddam rescue, which had cost the lives of the Australian and the other guy, the little Swede called Anderssen – all that stoked Trevaskis’ general resentment. He wasn’t going to get into a fight with Ruhr, though. When this job was finished, there was going to be a quarter of a million dollars in hard cash, and you didn’t blow off that kind of bonanza. You didn’t let Ruhr do anything to fuck it up either. The Cuban guy had quietly promised Trevaskis there would be a big bonus if Ruhr behaved himself.

  “You’re the boss,” Trevaskis said. The fucking Führer, he thought.

  Ruhr drained his glass and set it down in the sink. He let his left hand touch the pistol tucked into the waistband of his corduroy trousers. “Keep that fact in mind, Trevaskis.”

  “It’s like tattooed right here,” and Trevaskis tapped his head. Asshole. He shivered in an exaggerated way, blowing on his hands as he shuffled toward the door of the kitchen.

  “One other matter,” Ruhr said. “This room needs to be cleaned. If the men are complaining of cold, a little hard work might quickly warm them up.”

  “Great idea,” Trevaskis remarked.

  “You’re so agreeable I feel I can delegate the task to you with every confidence.”

  Trevaskis smiled oddly. “Spick and span. Shipshape. Every surface like a mirror. Count on it.”

  Ruhr said, “You know what cleanliness is next to.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  Ruhr raised his deformed hand suddenly and laid the palm on Trevaskis’ shoulder. He watched with some delight the American flinch, then try to conceal his gesture of revulsion behind a stupid little grin.

  “Godliness,” Ruhr said. “If you believe in God.”

  Trevaskis didn’t move.

  “I have no such belief,” Ruhr went on. “This hand, for example. Would a caring God allow a child to be born with a deformity like this? Why would any God wish to punish an innocent child? What sin could I possibly have committed in my mother’s womb to deserve to be born a freak?”

  Trevaskis said nothing. Ruhr’s touch offended him. But how could he back away without admitting a surrender of some kind?

  “I lie,” Ruhr said. “I wasn’t born this way at all, Trevaskis. I was born with five fingers. Perfectly natural. When I was twelve I took my mother’s kitchen-knife and I hacked off the two middle fingers. I remember a rather boring juvenile desire to understand pain. So I experimented on the only subject available – myself.”

  Trevaskis moved an inch or so, getting out from under the hand. But Ruhr was quick. He brought his palm up to Trevaskis’ cheek and laid it there. It was an odd gesture that might have been affectionate in some other circumstances, but here it was sinister. Ruhr’s clammy flesh had a strange smell to it, like decay. Trevaskis stood motionless. He wanted to smack Ruhr’s hand away. This close to the German you could practically hear him ticking.

  Ruhr said, “I was a child wonder, Trevaskis. A marvel. At the age of eight I had read Kant. I found the Categorical Imperative less of a directive than the urge to discover what lay under a girl’s skirt, which I did at ten.” Here Ruhr laughed in a dry, quiet way.

  “By the time I was eleven, I knew how to make gunpowder. First the intellectual pursuits, then the sexual, finally the destructive. I learned one thing with great certainty: the effect of a bomb is more immediate than all Kant’s philosophy. The only way to kill a man with Kant is to strike him over the head with the Complete Works in German.”

  There were elements of truth in Ruhr’s brief narrative. He had read Kant at eight, as he claimed, and he had indeed learned to make gunpowder at eleven. But these strands had become so interwoven with myth that they were hard to separate: he no longer knew if he’d been born deformed or caused it to happen. He no longer cared either way. The reality of his past was often mundane, so he altered it. Self-mutilation was much more intriguing than some genetic error.

  Ruhr had been born in Munich, the child of itinerant fundamentalists who were members of a proselytising American sect with headquarters in Baton Rouge, hard-core scriptural believers who thought Galileo and Darwin brothers of Satan. Ruhr’s parents, both rather distant persons who considered their very bright child something of an unexpected encumbrance, moved around Europe with such frequency that a three-week lease on a cheap apartment was deemed stability. It became clear to Gunther Ruhr that he was needless baggage to his parents – gaunt people with bright, spacey eyes and a disarmingly naïve zest for accosting strangers on street corners and shoving fundamentalist pamphlets into their hands. They despised the child, and he in turn was embarrassed by them and what seemed to him the sham of their religious beliefs: God was a mass of philosophical contradictions, so why bother with Him? Life was simpler without a deity.

  Somewhere along the way, Ruhr’s parents managed to leave him behind. Either they simply forgot him in their religious obsession or were too troubled by his outspoken cleverness, and his inclination toward atheism, to want his company. He was boarded out at a variety of schools where his natural brightness overwhelmed all around him. Abstract subjects were grasped in moments and committed forever to a memory that was a well-tooled trap. Other students bored him, wasted his time. He befriended nobody. At the age of sixteen he qualified for a place at the University of Hamburg, which he entered during a time of social unrest when student activists were erecting barricades in streets. Attracted by destruction, thrilled by streets made foggy from tear gas and the daily battles against the police, Ruhr came to life as he’d never before. He discovered in himself a knack for subterfuge, an affinity for the cellars where people made up revolutions and schemed to bring society down. He was a natural.

  At the age of seventeen, he took part in his first bank robbery, led by a student radical shot and killed in the course of the theft. Ruhr took the fallen leader’s place without asking or being asked. For the next two years he and his gang robbed banks throughout Europe. During this time Ruhr developed all manner of alliances that would later form the foundation of his terrorist network.

  In 1974, he was contacted in Rome by a representative from a certain Middle Eastern nation who needed some “demolition” work done – the bombing of an aeroplane, to be specific. Ruhr, amazed that he was being offered such a large sum of money to undertake a task he might have done for nothing save expenses, accepted the assignment.

  It was his first real act of mercenary terrorism. By contrast bank robberies were trifles, small local jobs with no international significance. The aeroplane, with crew and one hundred and eighteen passengers, exploded on the ground at Tel Aviv. Ruhr remembered the fascinating newspaper pictures, the TV shots. It was at this time he began to make a scrapbook of his deeds. The press, interested in Ruhr’s terrorist activities for some time, uncovered his role in the tragedy and began to delve into what little was known of his history. With that strange fascination newspapermen always reserve for people of high intelligence gone somehow “wrong”, journalists turned Ruhr into that archetype of brilliance and violence combined, the “mad genius”, “the sick boy-wonder”. It was at this time too he first wore the strange stainless steel prosthetic device and discovered that his taste for destruction, that unfathomable need, went beyond the bombing of aeroplanes.

  Now Ruhr smiled at Trevaskis, then let the hand fall back to his side. “You hated me touching you, didn’t you?”

  Trevaskis’ mouth was dry. “It didn’t faze me, Ruhr.”
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  Ruhr said, “You’re a bad liar. Nobody likes me to touch them. I can feel their revulsion. This interesting appendage” – and here he turned the hand over and over – “creates abhorrence in other people, which they try either to disguise as sympathy, or ignore. Such fools. I see through people, Trevaskis. I read the fine print on their hearts.”

  Trevaskis moved toward the kitchen door. He wanted to get away from Ruhr. Sometimes you looked into another man’s eyes and what you saw there was unknowable. It was like dark mysterious water when you had no sounding instrument to probe the depths. Ruhr, whether truthful or lying, gave Trevaskis the impression of an unpleasant illusion done with mirrors.

  “Now clean this horrible place,” Ruhr said.

  The giant Rick appeared just then, bending his head a little to clear the top of the door. He had watery brown eyes and a mouth too small for his enormous white face. He gave the impression of great physical strength without a mind to direct it.

  “There’s somebody out front,” he said. His voice was a whisper.

  “Who?” Ruhr asked.

  “I didn’t get a real good look. I saw somebody step across the front yard and go behind the vehicle.”

  “One? More than one?” Ruhr asked.

  “Only saw one,” Rick replied.

  Ruhr moved quickly out of the kitchen. He went from the living-room to his bedroom, the window of which looked directly out into the yard. He parted the damp yellow blind an eighth of an inch: all he saw was the Range Rover in the heavy, slanting rain. And yet he had a feeling of a scene recently disturbed, a stillness through which some trespasser has moved. He couldn’t say why, simply an old instinct. He took the pistol from his waistband and returned to the living-room. When he moved with stealth and speed he was impressive, graceful, a man whose quiet elegance had been honed by more than fifteen years of surreptitious acts.

  The Argentinians had automatic rifles clutched in their arms. Trevaskis and Rick carried handguns.

  “Flavell, Zapino, stay at the windows, but don’t show yourself,” Ruhr said. “Trevaskis, you and Rick cover me from the kitchen.”

  “You’re going out there?” Trevaskis asked.

  Ruhr didn’t answer. He was already moving to the kitchen. There was a side-door that opened on to the place where the run-down chicken hatches were located.

  “Wait,” Trevaskis said. “Let somebody else go outside. You oughta stay here.”

  Ruhr heard nothing. When he was involved in action he closed his senses down to anything extraneous. Action was everything, single-minded, demanding all one’s concentration. He opened the kitchen door softly. The cold mid-afternoon rain stung his face. He loved the sensation. Trevaskis stood behind, whispering his useless objections.

  Ruhr stared across the mud. Raindrops rattled the old coops. He took a step outside. He was insubstantial now, merging with the elements, a kind of transformation that Trevaskis could only admire from the kitchen doorway. This was no ordinary man sneaking through the rain with a gun: Ruhr melted into the greyness of the weather, as if the rain created a funnel of camouflage around him.

  Ruhr reached the corner of the house. He looked at the Range Rover. The muddy yard was empty. He stood motionless against the wall of the house. Water ran from his thin hair over the lids of his eyes. Then he heard the sound, something that lay under the incessant squabble of the rain, a wet noise but different, a squelching pressure on soft mud.

  And there she was.

  A child, a girl dressed in school uniform, short black skirt and maroon blazer and long maroon scarf trailing over her shoulder. She was running, breaking free from the cover of the Rover, but the black mud fettered her movements and disturbed her balance. She was heading towards the slope that rose up behind the farmhouse, arms stretched on either side for equilibrium, a dancer in the slime. Ruhr went after her, enjoying the certainty of catching her. He moved with long strides, strong ones, cutting down the distance between himself and the girl at will. Her beret flew off. Her short blond hair quickly became soaked with rain.

  Ruhr grabbed her around the waist before she was even halfway up the slope. He swung her round to face him and she blinked from all the rainwater in her eyes. Through her soaked blouse could be seen the small white brassière she wore. She tried to tear herself away, but Ruhr, laughing, moved behind her and locked one arm tightly under her chin, forcing her tiny face back.

  “Why were you spying?”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Ruhr applied more pressure. “What were you doing sneaking around my house?”

  “Nothing … cross my heart … let me go!”

  Ruhr released her and she rubbed her neck at the place where he’d bruised her.

  “I can hardly breathe,” she said.

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “I live a few miles away, I wanted to say hello, introduce myself, but you’re obviously not friendly –”

  Ruhr said, “If you’re so innocent, why did you run?”

  She shook her wet hair. “Scared.”

  “Scared? Of what?”

  “The gun in your hand,” the girl said. She walked a few steps, reached down to pick up her beret, turned it round between her fingers. Ruhr watched the short skirt rise upon her young thigh. The expanse of flesh between the knee-length socks and the hem of the risen skirt was all the more provocative for its innocence. She was slim, and pretty in the awkward fashion of the young; insecure about her own looks, uncertain about her place in the world.

  Ruhr put the gun in his waistband.

  “I’ll leave,” the girl said. “I won’t bother you again, I swear it.”

  “Tell me your name first.”

  “Steffie.”

  “What a very ugly name,” Ruhr said.

  “Stephanie then.”

  “That’s better.” It occurred to Ruhr that he could let this girl walk away. By tomorrow morning he’d be gone from this place anyhow. What did it matter? He looked down at the house; he thought he saw the shadows of the two South Americans in the windows.

  “Well,” the girl said, and there was a flutter of fear in her voice. “I suppose I’d better leave.”

  Ruhr watched her face. There was renewed anxiety in her eyes and her mouth had become very tense. And of course he knew why.

  “I can’t let you go.”

  She backed away. “I didn’t see anything. I swear I didn’t.”

  He stepped toward her. She slipped as she moved backward. She lay in the mud, the skirt above her waist, white underwear showing, her legs raised and bent at the knees. He stood over her.

  “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  She shook her head, tried to rise, slipped again. “Please,” she said. “I won’t say anything. Not to a living soul. I promise.”

  “You saw my picture in the newspapers. You saw this,” and he raised his right hand.

  Tears rolled over her cheeks. “I only want to go home.”

  “We all want that, Steffie.”

  He reached for her arm, hauled her to her feet, led her down the slope to the house. She wouldn’t stop crying; he hit her once, rather softly, across the side of her face. After that she sobbed in silence, as if something inside her had begun to break. He pushed her into the house, slammed the door shut.

  “What the hell is this?” Trevaskis asked.

  “A little gem,” Ruhr said. “Isn’t it surprising what a man can find in an otherwise dreary English landscape?”

  At the summit of the slope, under bare, sodden trees, the girl’s horse whinnied, a sound obliterated by wind and rain.

  Nobody in the farmhouse heard.

  London

  Martin Burr dreaded visits to the Home Secretary’s office. It was a vast oak-panelled room hung with faded oil paintings of politicians past. Under the scrutiny of the portraits the Commissioner felt like a defendant in the dock of history, judged by the stern faces of an awesome jury – the first Earl of Chatham, Gladstone, Lord Acton, Sir
Robert Peel. Their faces glowered disapprovingly into the room as if abruptly summoned from a long, well-deserved sleep. Martin Burr looked round the room for a sign of something less imposing, less official, and found it parked in a dim corner – a small, bedraggled canary in a brass cage. The little bird shivered in misery.

  Burr turned when the door opened and the Home Secretary came in. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, Martin.” He tossed some folders down on his enormous desk, then rummaged in a drawer and brought out an eye-dropper filled with clear liquid. He went to the bird cage and pushed the dropper through the bars, letting fluid drip into the canary’s food dish. “Bird’s got some kind of flu. This stuff’s supposed to help it. It’s touch and go, I fear. We live in hope.” The Home Secretary gently rattled the cage, bringing his face very close to it and whispering to the canary. “Don’t we, Charlie? Don’t we live in hope?”

  He walked back to his desk, sat down. “Now then. This bloody Ruhr business. Where are we exactly?”

  Burr, who half-expected to be axed, gazed at the window. The afternoon sky over the Thames was low and leaden. “Not as far along as I would have liked, Secretary,” he said. “The search continues. Sea ports are being watched. Air terminals. Railways. All public transport. Ruhr’s picture is plastered everywhere. Frank Pagan’s office is examining all known terrorist connections.”

  “Pagan? Shouldn’t he be in hospital or something?”

  “He’s a stubborn bastard,” Burr said. That damned Pagan. “He discharged himself yesterday.”

  The Home Secretary turned his face toward the window and appeared to consider this information. Then he turned back to the Commissioner. “What news of the leak, Martin?”

  Martin Burr imagined he saw Sir Robert Peel frown. He glanced up at the portrait of the man who had founded the London police force in 1829. Then he looked elsewhere. “I’ve imposed unusually strict limits on the number of people who have access to the paperwork generated by the Ruhr investigation. Memoranda and confidential reports on the affair no longer circulate in the usual way. Pagan has tightened his own departmental security – restricted access to computer data, telephone scrambling devices, that sort of thing. When we communicate with each other in the future, we do so directly, either face to face, or on a safe line. No third parties.”