Mambo Page 15

  There was another factor in the girl’s favour. He imagined a situation in which he might need a hostage, a human shield, a bargaining chip. In his past experience he’d found hostages useful tools. It was astonishing how the forces of law and order would silence their guns when they knew innocent lives might be jeopardised. The terrified face of a hostage was a mirror that reflected the image of an orderly society threatened. Let the hostage be killed and what did you have – the failure of the state to protect its innocents, the dreaded anarchy the forces of law existed to prevent.

  Trevaskis might have shot the girl, but therein lay the difference between the American and Ruhr. The former never considered the possibility of finding gold in dross; Ruhr, on the other hand, had a genius for turning the unexpected to his advantage. How else had he survived this long?

  Now the wind blew, running through the trees as if a congregation of squirrels had set the branches dancing. Under that rattle there was something else. Not the wind.

  Then Ruhr saw.

  There, at the crest of the slope, a man pushing a bicycle appeared. He was coming down toward the house; Ruhr at once recognised the man’s uniform as that of a police constable. Here, in this rustic corner of England, country policemen still cycled their beat. Ruhr watched the man come down the incline, then he turned slightly, conscious of how Trevaskis and Rick were motionless now, and how the two South Americans stood very still in the open doorway of the house.

  The policeman reached the foot of the slope. He was middle-aged and slightly overweight and he wheezed a little.

  “Morning,” he said.

  Ruhr kept his pistol covered.

  “Bloody awful day,” the policeman added. He made sure his bike was well balanced against the trunk of a tree, then he strolled toward Ruhr. Mud squelched beneath his heavy boots as he moved. About six feet from Gunther Ruhr he stopped.

  “I’m looking for a girl that’s gone missing,” the constable said. “Seems she was out riding and her horse came home without her last night. I was wondering if you’d seen any sign of the child.”

  A horse; the girl hadn’t mentioned an animal. “I’m sorry,” Ruhr said.

  “Well then,” the constable said. “Keep your eyes open, sir, if you don’t mind. Always appreciate any information. You new around here?”

  Ruhr nodded. He saw it suddenly in the man’s face: recognition, disguised behind a large uneasy smile, but recognition just the same. It was unmistakable.

  The policeman scratched the side of his face and said, “We all know how young girls are nowadays. Spend nights with their boyfriends. Parents are the last to know, of course.” The constable had himself in check now. He had control. He could go through the motions without showing the excitement of discovery. This was the terrorist being hunted all across England – and here he was, right in your own back yard!

  “Thanks for your time, sir.” The policeman glanced at the house, then walked to his bicycle. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

  He wheeled the vehicle out from under the tree and when he’d pushed the bike about ten feet, Ruhr called out to him.

  “Constable. One moment.”

  The policeman turned. Ruhr moved toward him. The wind gathered force and shook every tree on the slope and blew a quick flurry of dead leaves through the air.

  “Sir?” the policeman asked. A solitary leaf had settled on his shoulder.

  Three feet from the constable, Ruhr stopped. In a swift gesture, which looked superficially innocent – a man bending to adjust a sock, a shoelace – he reached beneath the turn-up of his trousers and into the leather sheath he kept strapped to his shin. The knife was in his hand before the constable could move, and, before the weapon registered, the policeman was all but dead. He couldn’t move quickly enough for Ruhr, who came up with the knife at an oblique angle and drove the blade into the throat. The policeman cried out, clutched the slash in his neck, then slid to his knees as if, astonished by imminent death, he needed to pray. Ruhr stabbed the man a second time, twisting the blade deep in the ribs.

  The policeman fell back, knocking his bicycle over and causing the front wheel to rise in the air, where it spun idly. Ruhr wiped the blade with some leaves.

  “Fucking impressive,” Trevaskis said to Rick.

  9

  Villa Clara Province, Cuba

  The house overlooked the ocean and the group of islands known as the Archipelago de Sabana. It was a large white stucco affair constructed around a central courtyard; moonlit water splashed out of a fountain and cascaded over a statue in the shape of a naked girl. The statue was a fine example of social realism, but the Lider Maximo, who stood on a balcony overlooking the fountain, wasn’t exactly famous for his appreciation of anything artistic, though he always talked otherwise, since nobody ever questioned his judgments. He surrounded himself at times with swarms of words – like a beekeeper of language – phrases heaped on phrases, intricate and often colourful, yet frequently convoluted and downright enigmatic.

  He fought with the urge to smoke one of the cigars he’d given up a while ago. He looked up at the sky. It was a gorgeous Cuban midnight with thin, high clouds and the sound of the tide, a night of coolness and clarity. But the Lider Maximo wasn’t in any mood to appreciate such things.

  Noises rose from the party in the room below. A piano played. Somebody told a joke to polite laughter. Across the courtyard, beneath arched doorways, armed guards stood in shadows. There were always guards wherever the Lider Maximo went. He even had people who tasted his food before he consumed it.

  He turned away from the sight of the statue and walked inside the house, intolerant of this social gathering tonight; the chit-chat, the men who wanted to shake his hand, the requests whispered in his ear, a favour here, a favour there, everything was a bore. He listened a moment to the piano. He had no ear for music – especially now, when he was this impatient.

  Where was the Minister of Finance? What was keeping him?

  The Lider Maximo went down the stairs. The piano was silent. In the large drawing-room all heads turned as he entered. His unsmiling condition had been noticed earlier and the party had adjusted itself. What might have been loud was muted and discreet. Everybody tried to please the Lider Maximo. They stepped around him as if he lived at the centre of a large pampa of unbroken eggs. Everybody breathed softly in his presence and smiled just a little too eagerly. Women, some of whom underwent a suppressed hysteria in the man’s company, were shrill in their pleasantries. But he was more than a man; he was as much an icon in Cuba as the old plaster Christs and Madonnas one still found concealed all the way from the Golfo de Guanahacabibes in the west to Punta Caleta in the east.

  Communist Party officials and military leaders and attractive women filled the room. Some spilled out on to a patio where the remains of a roast pig turned on a spit and charcoals glowed and wine bottles stood in disarray on small tables. The Lider Maximo, stroking his beard, stared through the open door and across the patio.

  The car would come from that direction.

  He tried to be charming to a handsome silver-haired woman, a Danish journalist, who wanted to know something about political prisoners – but he was surrounded by his attendants and assistants and the usual Colombian novelist with three names who was something of a house pet. The entourage that swirled about him also included a group of Communist functionaries, some of whom had come from Italy and Spain and India, sightseers of Caribbean Communism: fidelismo.

  He was too tense for this congregation. He stomped outside and waved his followers away. He wanted a moment’s solitude, which wasn’t such a selfish desire in a life that had not been his own since 1959. For thirty years he’d been public property, as much nationalised as the sugar industry, or the tobacco companies, or the banks. He was very tired and growing old; he knew that the young people of Cuba referred to him as El Viejo, the old one. Where was the stamina of yesterday? where the legendary strength?

  In his starched garberdine fatig
ues he strutted across the patio. He tore a chunk of flesh from the hot pig and thrust it into his mouth. It had the taste of a highly spiced automobile tyre. He spat it out. The piano began to play again, and there was a round of quiet laughter, more of relief than genuine pleasure. He created a black hole wherever he went tonight; his absence from the main room allowed the guests to relax. He sat slumped in a chair and looked absently at a plate of scorched pig skin, left-overs. In an ill-temper he pushed the plate aside and it clattered to the tiles, where it broke, scattering the discarded food. Nobody turned to look. When El Jefe (as he was also called) broke anything, whether a plate or a law, no voices were raised in criticism.

  There wasn’t enough food on the island. Every day shortages grew worse. Every day brought some new complaint. Once the criticism had centred around ideology: people asked him questions about the urgency behind universal literacy when reading material was restricted, or why Cuba had aligned itself with the Soviet bloc. Nowadays, ideology wasn’t uppermost in the minds of Cubans; they wanted better food, better consumer goods. They heard US radio broadcasts and saw smuggled movies, videotapes, outlawed magazines, and they felt deprived. Ninety miles away in the USA people had everything. In Cuba stores had empty shelves and useless goods and clothing designed in such centres of haute couture as Varna, Bulgaria, or Brasov, Rumania.

  For the first time in many years, the Lider Maximo was afraid.

  He’d known fear before. In the Sierra Maestra in the late 1950s when he’d fought the armies of Batista with only a few men. In 1953, when he’d led an unsuccessful assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago. Yes, he’d known el temor, but he’d never been cowardly. What had they always said about him in Cuba? Fidel, he has the largest timbales on the whole goddam island! But this was very different, another stratum of fear; it was as if he could hear the ship of this eight-hundred-mile-long island grind to a halt, the engine broken beyond repair, the fuel tanks empty.

  Sometimes, too, the fear yielded to an odd panic. He became easily confused, and amnesiac, and caught himself in the midst of a sentence whose end he’d quite forgotten, or in the middle of an action whose purpose was a puzzle. Now and again he felt slight pains in his stomach, too inconsequential to have his physicians treat. On one occasion, a coldness had seized his heart like a gauntlet of frost, a disquieting sensation that had lasted perhaps for ten seconds. It was age, he thought. Eyesight and teeth went, so did the interior plumbing and the central pump. A man was no more than an intricate machine; and all the blueprints to explain his parts and repair them were incomplete because medicine was still a primitive quasi-science.

  Perhaps fear was something else age brought in its merciless wake.

  He tilted his head to one side, listening to the croaking of frogs in the distance, so many it was practically a roar. He gazed across the patio, seeing how his armed guards had taken up new positions in the shadows. Inside the house the piano was playing something composed by Silvio Rodriguez, considered a “safe” musician by the regime. The Lider Maximo knew that if he hadn’t been present the pianist would have performed Cole Porter or Irving Berlin or some other Yanqui music. The Lider Maximo was deferred to, even revered. But he knew people carped behind his back and ran him down and accused him of bankrupting Cuba.

  There was the sound of a car. He stood up, tugged at his beard. He saw headlights approach. At a point in the road where the concrete twisted toward the ocean, the car lights illuminated white surf. Then the motor died, and a door slammed. The Lider Maximo moved quickly across the patio to embrace the new arrival and whisk him away to a quiet upper room where they might talk, free from the noise of the party.

  The room was small, containing only a desk and two chairs and piles of unsorted books. A green-shaded lamp provided the only light. The Lider Maximo said, “You’re very late.”

  “There were flight delays,” the visitor replied.

  The Lider Maximo waved a hand impatiently. “Speak to me. Tell me the outcome.”

  The visitor said, “It’s just as we feared. The well’s running dry.”

  The Lider Maximo tossed his head back and looked up at the ceiling where a large motionless fan threw a cross-like shadow; it was possible to see, through the hairs of his beard, the thick double chin. “They want me out, am I right? They want me to step aside.”

  “No, Commandante. They expressed no such desire.”

  The Lider Maximo scoffed. “They wouldn’t tell you to your face. The Russians don’t operate that way. They smile at you, toast you, and after ten vodkas they hug you. Best of friends. Comrades! Only later do you realise you’ve been lied to and cheated. Make no mistake, compañero, they want me out. I’m too disobedient. Too unruly. They can’t always control me the way they would like. If they had a weak man in my position, they might open their purses more generously to Cuba.”

  The visitor said, “I don’t think it has anything to do with you, Commandante. They say they’ll no longer invest money in Cuba at the levels we’ve come to expect. The new Politburo has more on its collective mind than Cuba. They’ll continue to buy sugar –”

  “Oh, this makes my heart glad.” The Lider Maximo’s sarcasm was too grim to be amusing. Besides, his sense of humour was always slightly skewed and too heavy-handed to cause much mirth. The charm for which he’d been famous earlier in life had deserted him to a large extent. The world had eroded it.

  “– at the present prices. But there will be severe cutbacks in technological help. As many as three hundred advisors will be withdrawn. Joint construction projects already under way, such as the nuclear generating plant at Jurugua, will be halted. No new ones will be started. We can no longer expect – and I quote – favoured treatment.”

  The Lider Maximo was angry. “Favoured treatment!” He spluttered. “We’ve always had a special arrangement with them!”

  “The Soviets are economising worldwide, Commandante. It’s really that simple. They face economic chaos at home. Their whole economy is rotten and cumbersome. The cost of Afghanistan was too high. Now they’re turning inward. They’re no longer enthusiastic about the spread of Communism in Central America. We’re seeing a new era. The Soviet priority is to look after themselves. Their own people are complaining bitterly about the quality of life in Russia.”

  “And the rusos throw their old allies to the dogs?”

  “There will be a bone or two. But that’s all. We can’t look forward to a continuation of generous past policies.”

  “Cochinos! Perhaps I should make the trip to Moscow myself.”

  “It may make no difference.”

  The Lider Maximo was too proud to go cap in hand before the Russians. The begging-bowl held out for scraps! Never! Besides, he had no fondness for the General Secretary, whom he considered a capitalist. He had entertained the man during the Secretary’s visit to Havana last spring. Serious talks had taken place on the subject of solving Cuba’s indebtedness to the Soviet Union, and there had been a great deal of smiling camaraderie for the benefit of the world’s press. But now, when the Lider Maximo needed some extra credits, when he needed cash, when he saw his Revolution founder in an ocean of debt and despair, the Soviets had abandoned him.

  Nothing was said for a long time. Faintly, the piano could be heard from the lower part of the house. Outside, the breeze picked up, driving the tide a little harder on to the beach. From the courtyard came the sound of a guard sliding a clip inside his automatic rifle. They were always prepared, always checking their weapons. The Lider Maximo put on a pair of glasses and walked to his desk, where he scanned a batch of papers.

  “Do you know what these are, compañero? Projections prepared by our finest economists. Graphs and numbers and scientific notations. They were prepared by people in your own Ministry. They forecast continued shortages in basic items. Beef. Fish. Milk. Shoes. Medical supplies. These might be alleviated by an infusion of hard currency. But where is it to come from? Without hard currency, how do we import goods? The shor
tages will get worse. And our soldiers returning from Angola – how are they to be absorbed into a work force that has no work for them?”

  He crunched the sheets in his hands and tossed them up in the air, swatting at them like shuttlecocks as they floated back down. He picked up those that had fallen, balled them even more tightly in his fists and threw them from the window, where they were carried briefly by the breeze. Papeleo, he kept saying with contempt. Papeleo – red tape. Those sheets he didn’t pick up he crumpled underfoot, wiping them back and forth on the floorboards as if they were dogshit that adhered to his soles. Then, his energy spent on this extraordinary display, he sat down at his desk.

  “They are out to get me,” he said. “Not just the Russians, compañero. But there are forces in Cuba that would like to see me dead. Outside Cuba, the CIA is still sniffing after my blood. I constantly hear tales of counter-revolutionary armies forming here and there in Central America. And the exile community in Miami – there are a great many who would murder me and feel joy.”

  He was quiet. He was remembering the old days when La Revolutión had been his youthful mistress, the love of his heart, when she’d been bright and optimistic and constant. Now she was turning, as many loves do, into a nagging crone whose demands grew more preposterous daily. She’d become brittle, and her breasts sagged, and she was gaunt. She had all the light-hearted humour of a Greek chorus. And yet once, in the delight of her early years, those breasts had been full, and her belly smooth and tight. She had been a glory to behold. Lost inside La Revolutión, he had squandered the very best of his seed.

  The Lider Maximo said, “I have few trusted friends. My brother, perhaps. But he’s in Africa. My inner circle – but they’re too ambitious for me to trust them wholeheartedly. My bodyguards, of course. But even guards have been known to turn. And you. My Minister of Finance. Can I trust you, Rosabal?”

  There were rare moments when Rafael Rosabal glimpsed the ghost of a younger Fidel, not this curmudgeon who grew resentfully old but another Castro of flinty determination and irresistible charm. He’d once possessed magnetism enough to persuade men to embark on the frail overcrowded craft called the Granma and sail twelve hundred miles on a harsh sea from Mexico to Cuba, the gift of convincing them they could survive not only the voyage but the killing heat and cold and malarial mosquitoes in the inhospitable mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Triumph – you could still see that glint in Fidel’s eyes when they weren’t otherwise darkened by injuries and betrayals, many of them imagined.