Mambo Page 20

  “I’ve heard of stranger things,” Pagan said.

  “I daresay you have.” Joanna Lassiter pushed the sheet of paper across the desk. “There. See for yourself. Funny kind of name. Foreign, of course.”

  Pagan picked up the paper and read.

  “Does it help, Mr Pagan?” she asked.

  Pagan passed the sheet to Fox worth.

  He didn’t answer Joanna Lassiter’s question because he wasn’t sure how. He stared through the black window at the village street beyond. The pub sign hanging on the other side of the road, pale and inviting, reminded him of a thirst he’d been suffering for hours.

  Marrakech, Morocco

  Steffie Brough’s head roared and her whole body, locked for ages in one stiff position, felt like iron. Even though somebody had stuffed small pieces of foam rubber inside her ears the great noise of the plane, like that of a locomotive infinitely screaming in an infinite tunnel, had drilled through her skull anyway. She was sick and tired, shaken by the long turbulent flight. Every now and then she’d felt the craft drop suddenly, like something about to fall out of the sky.

  She didn’t know how many hours she’d actually lain in the cabin of the truck, conscious of cockpit lights up ahead and the shadows of men moving back and forth. It was very weird being conveyed inside one kind of transportation that was being transported inside another.

  When the plane began to lose altitude she became aware of pressure building up in the hollows behind her eyes and then rolling painfully through all the dark cavities of her head. Then the plane skimmed over land, bouncing. After that, the silence was wonderful as the craft slid slowly along the runway.

  Now, when the door of the truck opened, she twisted her head back and saw Ruhr. Silently, he undid the ropes that bound her and she tried to sit up but her bones seemed to have jammed in place. Her brain throbbed and the ache in her bladder was unbearable.

  “I need to go to a toilet,” she said. The rasp in her own voice surprised her. She sounded just the way her Aunt Ruth had before she died last year from throat cancer. She thought I’d rather be dead from that than trapped in this bloody awful place.

  She glanced toward the back of the big truck, whose cargo was concealed under a long green canvas cover. She didn’t want to think what it might be or why Ruhr and his friends had gone to so much trouble to steal it, because then she’d start remembering all the gunfire and how tear gas and smoke had choked her.

  But she thought she knew anyway. What else could it be but a missile? What else was there worth killing for in her small corner of the world? She’d always known there were missiles as close as ten miles from her home because she’d watched people walk along narrow country lanes on protest marches – but like many things in her young, protected life, missiles were abstractions outside her own limits and interests. They belonged in a world beyond horses and rock music and boys. Now it was different. She could reach up, she could actually touch one of the things if she wanted.

  Ruhr led her through the aircraft. She was aware of two men sitting in the half-light and how they looked at her as she passed. The air was thick with the smell of fuel and tobacco. The lavatory was tiny, filthy, the floor puddled, and somebody had removed the lock from the door, but she was beyond embarrassment.

  She splashed cold water all over her face, then drank thirstily even though the water tasted stale and dusty. She pushed her wet fingers through her hair. Her reflection in a small mirror was white and dreadful. She seemed to have diminished. She looked like a pygmy, a shrunken head. She hardly recognised herself.

  She dried her face with paper towels and wished the lavatory had a window so she could look out. She didn’t know where she was, she had no idea where she was going. Her parents – oh Christ they would be completely frantic with worry now. Even her stupid brother would have expressed concern in his own stumbling fashion. She raised her face to the mirror a second time. The rough paper towels had at least brought some colour back to her cheeks. And even if she felt like crying, she knew she wouldn’t.

  Ruhr had a global network of men and women who owed him favours. This airfield, for example, had been made available by an old associate, somebody close to the Moroccan royal family. Situated twenty-five miles from the city of Marrakech, it had, until recently, been used by Moroccan Air Force fighter planes flying against Western Saharan rebels, but its age and condition had caused it to be abandoned.

  The huge transport plane taxied over potholes towards an enormous hangar made from prefabricated metal which had rotted years ago. In the fading afternoon sun, the building’s vastness was strangely exaggerated. Bats flew in and out of the disintegrated roof, fulfilling some odd rodent urge to veer close to the strips of blinking fluorescent light that hung from the ceiling.

  The plane came to a stop outside the hangar, where a large fuel truck was parked. Joseph Sweeney stepped out of the flight deck and moved into the rear cabin, where Ruhr stood. The two men who had come with Ruhr, Trevaskis and the Argentinian, sat against the wall and looked sullen. Sweeney opened one of the paratroop doors and tossed a rope ladder down. Ruhr said, “Keep your eye on the girl, Trevaskis,” and then swung down the ladder to the tarmac. Sweeney followed him.

  When he had his feet firmly on the ground, Sweeney worked a small finger inside his ear. “That damned roar deafens the hell out of me,” he said. He shook his head a couple of times, then pinched his nostrils and puffed up his cheeks.

  Sweeney glanced a moment at the fuel truck, which was moving slowly towards the plane. Born in County Cork and swept off to Boston at the age of ten, he’d worked with Ruhr a dozen times all over the world and if anybody could be said to know the German it was Joseph James Sweeney. And while Sweeney wouldn’t have enjoyed a night’s drinking with Gunther, nor let the man anywhere near his teenaged nieces, he had a certain admiration for him.

  Sweeney gestured toward the plane. He asked a question he’d been hesitant about. “I suppose the kid somehow fits your general plan?”

  Ruhr said, “She may provide insurance. Or diversion.”

  Sweeney nodded, then dropped the subject. He knew when to persist and when to let go. Ruhr could be incommunicative and distant when it suited him, and it obviously suited him now. Sweeney felt a passing pity for the girl, but like most of his emotions it was allowed to evaporate quickly.

  “You had me worried, Gunther.”

  “How so?”

  “When they took you in Cambridge, I thought it was all over.”

  Ruhr made a dismissive gesture and laughed abruptly. “You know me better than that. I have many lives.”

  Sweeney watched the fuel truck park alongside the plane. In half an hour or so they’d be out of this godawful place and flying the Atlantic. Frankly, he’d be glad when this one was over and he could go back to the anonymous life he’d worked hard to build for himself in the USA, a quiet house in a quiet street in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His neighbours thought he was living off land investments, an illusion he gladly encouraged.

  He wasn’t sure why this particular undertaking made him so goddam uneasy. The presence of the kid obviously contributed to it, but something was different about Ruhr as well. He had a cold distance about him, a weariness. Sweeney felt these were danger signals although he couldn’t interpret them. He’d stay away from Gunther as much as he could for the duration.

  He watched the hose from the fuel truck extend to the fuselage of the big plane and remembered the thought that had occurred to him a couple of times recently: in his lifetime, he’d killed more men than he’d fucked women. Somehow this realisation had shocked him. He said, “I really think this is my last time, amigo.”

  “You’ve said so before. You’ve always come back.” Ruhr was conscious of Trevaskis watching him in a hostile way from the door of the plane.

  “This time I’m beginning to hear the creak of my bones,” Sweeney said. “And the thrill’s not in it any more. Or maybe there’s too much for me to handle. I’m forty
-two, Gunther. I’ve lived this life since I was twenty-two and that’s a long time. And I’m not including the five years before that when I was in the United States Air Force. How long can a man go on? Can you imagine doing this when you’re sixty?”

  Ruhr had also been living this life for a long time. Unlike Sweeney, he couldn’t imagine retirement. The real trick was to find new ways to keep the game fresh, to introduce new elements. Even new risks. The alternative was dullness and Ruhr couldn’t tolerate that. A bat flew out of the sun and flapped close to his face and he lashed out at the thing.

  Sweeney said, “I can get absorbed real smoothly into what they call the mainstream of American life.”

  The mainstream of American life. Sweeney must have been reading Time magazine. Ruhr said, “Barbecues and Budweisers and little girls with metal on their teeth and tedium without end.”

  “You make it sound comforting.”

  “All anaesthetics give comfort,” Ruhr remarked. “But only on a temporary basis.”

  Both men walked some distance from the fuel truck. In the extensive network of reliable men Ruhr had built over the years, none had proved more valuable than Joseph Sweeney. Whenever Ruhr needed something – an individual’s name, or a certain kind of weapon, or in this case a plane – somehow Sweeney always managed to find it. He had become, in a sense, Ruhr’s quartermaster, resourceful, reassuring.

  Sweeney combined the soothing charm of a confidence man with the hardness of an assassin. Since he’d experienced at first hand the staggering ineptitude of the military mind, he knew how to exploit it ruthlessly, how to gain access to military bases and installations; how to impersonate an officer with such authority that no guard or military policeman ever questioned his presence. He was the best at his craft.

  It was Sweeney who had identified the Duty Officer responsible for the transportation of missiles at the site in Norfolk; and even if it was Ruhr who had seduced the man into treachery, nevertheless it had been Sweeney who’d first uncovered the essential information: name and rank and serial number; date of birth; marital status; specific duties; known weaknesses.

  Known weaknesses, Ruhr thought. He’d never yet found a man without a faultline to be widened; he’d never encountered a man who didn’t have a purchase price of some kind. With some it was very simple – a need for money, for drugs, certain kinds of sex. With others it was more complicated – the moment of shame recaptured, the dark skeleton in the unopened closet. The Duty Officer at the site belonged in the latter category.

  A thirty-five-year-old man from Nashville, the Duty Officer had a wife and child living in Tennessee. At the same time, he was deeply involved with a woman who lived in Norwich, a mistress with definite ambitions of her own. It was a situation Ruhr considered pathetic; loneliness had driven the Duty Officer into the grasp of a woman whose connivance overwhelmed the man’s naïvety. He was basically a nice, easy-going fellow with the kind of dull good looks essential to the success of any garden party. What the mistress wanted was marriage and an escape route out of the damp miseries of Norwich. She was about to write a letter to the wife in Tennessee. If the man wasn’t willing to talk divorce, then, by God, she’d force his hand!

  Lurid lives, Ruhr had thought. Especially in the quiet suburbs of boring cities, lurid lives. He felt as if he hovered above this human swamp like a minor god, indifferent. And so, after observing his victim for several days, he’d swooped down from his lofty place into the young man’s life, both as saviour and deceiver. He found the pub where the officer sometimes drank, engineered an introduction. He posed as a Swiss photographer who’d unfortunately lost his fingers shooting film in Vietnam. It struck a sympathetic chord in the Duty Officer, who’d served in Vietnam too, towards the bitter end – a fact Ruhr already knew, of course, courtesy of Joseph Sweeney.

  A quiet companionship grew; it was nothing substantial. A few beers now and again, under circumstances that appeared to be sheer chance. Once or twice they ran into each other in Cambridge as well as Norwich. It’s a small world, Ruhr would say, and smile his most appealing smile, the one in which his lips didn’t disappear. Gradually the facts of the Duty Officer’s life emerged. He was bogged down, the woman in Norwich was goddam demanding, why had he ever let himself in for this godalmighty mess in the first place? Ah, Sweet Jesus! He loved his wife and kid, he didn’t want to hurt them or lose them. But his wife, Louanne, couldn’t come to England because she had a sick mother in Knoxville. It was complicated, and getting more out of hand every day. Once the Duty Officer had actually said, I wish I was dead.

  That, Ruhr suggested, was the wrong solution; the wrong party would be eliminated in that event.

  Ruhr had thought up something much better.

  If there was to be a candidate for a coffin, the choice was obvious: the mistress – who else?

  But how? How could that kind of thing happen? the Duty Officer had asked.

  Ruhr was sly then, almost coy in his cunning. He offered a few suggestions, crumbs, nothing more. What it came down to was this simple: the woman in Norwich had to be … disposed of. The Duty Officer shuddered at the notion. He’d entertained it, of course. Who wouldn’t? But in the end he knew he couldn’t commit murder – other than in his heart, he’d added, as if to reassure Ruhr of his masculinity.

  Then find somebody else to do it, Ruhr had said.

  The idea, once planted, grew in the dark. Ruhr, master gardener, nurtured it, made it sprout. And when it was fully grown and luxuriant in the Duty Officer’s mind, Ruhr administered the final flourish one night while he and his new American friend were drinking schnapps at a pub on St Andrew’s Hill in the centre of Norwich. Ruhr needed something from the Duty Officer. Something simple really. But classified. Ruhr hinted broadly that in exchange for this small item of information the Duty Officer’s life could be “rectified”. He wouldn’t ever have to worry about his girlfriend again. Ruhr understood, of course, that the “drastic” solution he was suggesting might be offensive, alien even, to the young man, and if he wanted to refuse Ruhr’s offer, well, what difference would it make to their friendship?

  Why did Ruhr want the classified information? the Duty Officer asked in the manner of a pharmacist asking a customer why he needed a restricted medicine for which he had no prescription.

  Ruhr answered that it was a trifle really, a journalistic matter, an opportunity to photograph a missile in transit from a site, an exclusive. He was convincing in an odd, hypnotic way. He could use a stock shot of the kind supplied by military press liaison offices, but he resented the idea. No, what he wanted was the real thing on a real road surrounded by a real escort. The feel of authenticity – that was important. The way things truly looked, that was what he was after. For a photo-journalist, veracity was what mattered.

  He needed a timetable, a calendar of forthcoming events, places and times, routes. In return for these snippets Ruhr would ensure the total security of the young man’s marriage and with it his peace of mind. And what was life when you had no serenity? How could one pursue a career distracted by emotional problems that could be clarified in an instant?

  That night of beer and schnapps on St Andrew’s Hill, everything was neatly slotted in place. Ruhr knew he’d get the kind of information so exclusive it made him indispensable. He knew what the route of the missile was to be; he knew the exact time and place. Information was power, especially when it was information his employers didn’t have.

  It was a triumph to turn the young American round, and yet easy too, because the Duty Officer was so vulnerable. Murder and treachery. Now it pleased Ruhr to think he’d made this very ordinary young man, who was neither terribly bright nor terribly stupid, an accomplice in both crimes!

  Three nights later Ruhr sneaked into the woman’s house and stabbed her directly through the heart while she slept. He waited until he heard her die, then he left. By the next evening, Ruhr had the information he wanted. It had taken him exactly twenty-three days to get it. He never saw th
e Duty Officer again.

  Now the truck had finished refuelling the plane. Joseph Sweeney lit a cigarette. He watched the sun, in a great explosion the colour of burgundy, slide towards darkness on the rocky horizon. A chill was already in the air.

  “It’s time to go,” Sweeney said.

  “I am ready,” Ruhr remarked. “As always.”

  “We should dump the cab first.”

  “Of course.”

  The cab of the truck that had conveyed the missile and the launch system was uncoupled from the trailer. It was excess weight on the plane, and useless now. It was detached from the trailer and allowed to roll down the ramp to the airstrip, there to be abandoned.

  Havana, Cuba

  In the early afternoon, Rafael Rosabal walked on the crowded, humid Calle Obispo in Old Havana. The breeze that blew over the sea wall, the Malecón, faded in the streets in a series of quiet little gasps that would barely shake a shrub. Today everything smelled of salt. Today you could practically hear metal corrode as rust devoured it. There was rust everywhere, in the decorative iron grilles of windows and doorways, on the panels and underbodies of the old American automobiles cluttering the streets, even in the paintwork of the new Cuban-built buses and the imported Fiats and Ladas. Where rain had run through rust, coppery stains, suggestive of very old tears, discoloured the façades of buildings.

  Rosabal reached the entrance to the Hotel Bristol. He was jostled on all sides by pedestrians who filled the cobbled street. Rectangular posters fluttered twenty feet overhead, advertisements announcing an exhibition of modern Cuban artists at the Casa de Bano de la Catedral. Rosabal loathed Cuban art, which he considered dull and derivative. Socialism, as it was conceived by the Lider Maximo, hadn’t altogether electrified creativity.

  He went inside the Bristol, passing the registration desk where a clerk was reading a copy of Granma, the Party’s newspaper. According to the headline, the Lider Maximo was going to make a speech sometime that day on TV.