Mambo Page 21

  Rosabal kept walking until he came to the small dark bar at the rear, a narrow room lit by two dim bulbs. He asked for a mojito only to be told by an apologetic barman that lemon and lime juice were both temporarily out of stock. He settled for a beer, which he took to a table.

  Apart from himself, there was one other customer, a tall, bony man in a dark blue two piece suit. This was Rosabal’s contact, Teodoro Diaz-Alonso. The word that always popped into Rosabal’s head when he saw Diaz-Alonso was remilgado, prim. Diaz-Alonso wore small glasses parked near the tip of his nose. His stiff bearing suggested a professor of the kind you no longer saw in the city. Diaz-Alonso was drinking cola from a tall glass. Rosabal sat down beside him.

  Rosabal was a little uneasy whenever he had meetings with Diaz-Alonso in Havana. And yet why shouldn’t there be a point of connection between Rosabal’s Ministry of Finance and MINFAR, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, for which Diaz-Alonso worked as a senior advisor? Both men were government servants, after all. They knew the same people, went to the same restaurants and parties, enjoyed the same privileges of rank. Besides, Diaz-Alonso was a frequent visitor to Rosabal’s apartment in the Vedado. This encounter would look perfectly natural to any casual observer. So why worry about it?

  Diaz-Alonso said, “The General has asked me to convey his greetings, Rafael.”

  “Thank the General.”

  “I am also to give you a message.” Diaz-Alonso paused and looked like a scholar recalling a quotation. “The General says that the conditions you require will be ready.”

  Rosabal sat back in his chair and tried to relax. It was extraordinary how, when you were so involved with the architecture of a conspiracy, when one blueprint had obsessed you for so long, you forgot simple pleasures – the taste of a beer, the aroma of a good cigar. It was like living in a room with the shades constantly drawn. Nothing happened beyond the shades, no cars passed in the street, no women strolled on the boulevards, no sun, no moon. The room was everything.

  “Tell the General this will not be forgotten,” he said. “Nor will any of the recent services he has provided.”

  Diaz-Alonso was expressionless as he remarked, “The General does not underestimate the importance of his role in this whole project, Rafael. He is not a man who favours false modesty. But for himself he expects no monetary rewards, of course. He is no mercenary. The General seeks only the post of Minister of the Armed Forces.”

  “That’s understood.”

  Diaz-Alonso raised his hand very slightly, as if to admonish Rosabal, in the gentlest way, for interrupting him. “The General also expects a certain seniority among Ministers, naturally. First among equals, so to speak.”

  Rosabal said, “The General will be accommodated. Assure him of that.” General Alfonso Capablanca, second in command of the Armed Forces to Raul Castro, had always been consistent in what he wanted. Negotiating with the General through his intermediary had been part of the arrangement from the beginning. The General liked the distance. He also thought it observed a certain kind of protocol which even conspirators must obey, lest they become mere anarchists. There was such a thing as form, Capablanca said. If Rosabal was to become one day the President of this nation – with the help of the General and a number of his senior officers, of course – he would understand that form often meant more than substance. Politics, in the final analysis, was not to be confused with the real world. Politics was a matter of appearance.

  Rosabal was equal to the General’s cynicism. He found Capablanca an extreme bore, but indispensable. Without his inclusion, and the role of his officers, the scheme would fall to pieces. And without the General’s ability to acquire the Lider Maximo’s signature on a certain document, the plot – if it existed in any form – would have taken a different shape. Therefore Rosabal, out of a gratitude more pragmatic than sincere, met the General’s demands, and was very polite even as he looked forward to the day when Capablanca might be “retired” by a firing squad.

  Diaz-Alonso inclined his head a little. The gaunt, tight-lipped face yielded very little emotion. “The General will also need to know about any changes in schedule as soon as they occur.”

  “I expect none.” Rosabal was thinking of Gunther Ruhr now, and the missile. He looked at his watch. Ruhr would be in North Africa, if all had gone well. And since there was no news to indicate otherwise, Rosabal assumed everything was in order. Anyhow, he would have heard from Caporelli if anything had altered. They usually exchanged messages by telephone. Caporelli called Mexico City, and the message was conveyed to Havana by one of the Italian’s employees. Rosabal smiled a little as he thought of the Italian. Caporelli’s problem was the way he deemed himself smarter and sharper than anyone else.

  Diaz-Alonso said, “These are very strange times for our nation, Rafael. Once upon a time, I remember, we all had high hopes. Very high. Now, everywhere I look I see discontent.” He shrugged and finished his soda. “Change must come. Every day, a little more pressure builds up, and steam always seeks an outlet. I wish there was a legal way of achieving change, but there is no longer any legality in the system. The Party is the only voice. And the Party is a big problem, Rafael. It is governed by men who cannot hear the voices of the people.”

  “Not for much longer,” Rosabal said.

  “Let us hope so, Rafael.” Diaz-Alonso set his empty glass down on the table. He rose to his feet. “You know how to contact me if you have to.”

  Rosabal watched Diaz-Alonso cross the room, then took another sip of his beer. He put on his black sunglasses and prepared to leave. As he passed in front of the bar, the bartender asked, “Did you hear?”

  “Hear?”

  “On the radio a moment ago. Fidel has cancelled his speech today. They didn’t say why. He must be pretty damn sick if he can’t make a speech, heh?”

  Rosabal, who worked to maintain a low profile in Castro’s government because he found anonymity a more useful tool than renown, said nothing. He thought he saw a slight look of recognition cross the barman’s face, but then it was gone.

  “I heard a story he has ulcers,” the barman remarked. “Maybe they’re acting up. I don’t remember a time when he ever cancelled.”

  Rosabal replied with a platitude and continued walking past the bar and the reception desk and back on to Obispo Street, where the breeze had gathered strength and shook the posters that hung in the air. The Lider Maximo was too sick to make his speech. For the first time in history, Rosabal thought.

  He walked past the herbal shop, El Herbolario. The scent of mint drifted toward him, evoking an unwelcome memory of Guantanamo and Rosabal’s impoverished childhood there. Hierbabuena, which so many people found pleasing, had grown in profusion near his home. His father had been a poor, illiterate cane-cutter, his house a miserable hut through which hot winds blew dust and which, in the rainy season, became flooded and filled with mosquitoes. People were said to be better off in Guantanamo these days, but that was a relative thing. Poverty, no matter what the Communist statisticians told you, still existed. The only difference was that increased life expectancy and low infant mortality meant there were many more people around to enjoy it.

  Rosabal, thinking how far he had travelled from his wretched origins and how close he was to his goal, paused on the corner. He was rich now, he had access to vast sums of money and investments all over the world and he rarely ever thought about his background. Who needed it anyway? Who needed to recall the lack of nutrition and the mosquitoes that fed on thin bodies and the sheer hopelessness that the land instilled in people? He remembered his emphysematic father cutting cane, cutting cane, on and on, season after monotonous season, stooped and burned black by the harsh sun in the cane-fields, a prisoner of King Sugar. He remembered his mother, dour, thick-hipped from too many births, dead at the age of thirty-five. She had never smiled, never. These memories bored into him, one despised picture after another, until he felt tension rise in his throat and a hammer knocking the inside of his skull.
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  He remembered the terrible day in 1962, two years after the death of his mother, when his father had tried to seek political asylum at the American naval base in Guantanamo; he recalled clutching his father’s hand and being surrounded by Yanquis in khaki uniforms who asked his father tough questions and laughed at some of the answers. Rosabal recalled the fear he’d felt at the strangeness of it all, the alien language, the unfamiliar uniforms. The cowed look in his father’s eyes had haunted him ever since. The Americans turned father and son back. They rejected a dying man and his nine-year-old boy. They spoke of immigration quotas and application forms and the need for sponsors, things neither Rosabal nor his father understood.

  A day later, as a direct consequence of his attempt to flee Cuba, Felipe Rosabal was taken away by fidelistas. He was never seen again. For years, Rafael Rosabal couldn’t decide whom he hated more, Castro or the Yanquis.

  He took a handkerchief from a pocket, wiped sweat from his forehead. You had to control these memories. You had to fight them back, suppress them. They were dead and gone, they had nothing to do with you. You escaped from your childhood, from that dank brutality, from humiliation. Every now and again it reaches out darkly as if to drag you back to your beginnings, but it means nothing. It means absolutely nothing.

  Thanks to the Revolution, to the opportunities given to you by Castro’s regime, you fled your origins. The poverty. The futility.

  The irony of this – his gratitude to the Revolution – was pointedly amusing. After all, he intended to destroy the same State that had educated and raised him at its own expense.

  He was calm again as his chauffeur-driven black BMW rolled quietly toward him. He opened the back door and stepped inside where a young woman, who had the intense good looks of a flamenco dancer, smiled and reached out to him. She wore her very black hair pulled back tightly across her scalp and ribboned with red satin. Her lips, whose lipstick matched her ribbon exactly, pressed on his mouth, and she placed the palms of her hands lightly against the sides of his face. It was a gesture in part love, in part possessiveness.

  “My darling,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  Rafael Rosabal held the woman, but not with any great enthusiasm. Her skin smelled of a perfume called Diva, which he had brought back for her from Europe.

  “Can we go home for lunch …?” She blew softly in his ear; she behaved as if the chauffeur didn’t exist.

  “We can go home for lunch,” he said, holding her hand between his own. Later, she would make love with a kind of serenity that was in total contrast to Magdalena, with whom sex was all fire and final damp exhaustion. Magdalena was like a magnificent whore, Rosabal thought. A wife never, a mistress always.

  “Do I make you happy?” the young woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You regret nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Rosabal said in an absent way.

  The gold ring on the young woman’s hand caught the light and glinted. She turned her hand over, studied the band from different angles. Until three months ago, the girl’s name had been Estela Alvarez Capablanca, daughter of the General. From time to time Estela still thought of herself as bearing her unmarried name. She hadn’t yet become accustomed to her change in marital status. Being the wife of Rafael Rosabal was a new condition for her, and one she thought fortunate. It had all happened so quickly, a fast courtship, a very quiet wedding unannounced in newspapers – because Rafael had wanted it that way – a brief honeymoon in Mexico.

  Other Ministers’ wives, who had sometimes contrived to play matchmaker for Rosabal in the past, considered them a marvellous couple who needed only a baby to make their marriage a perfect union. Certainly Estela wanted a child. She adored children. Sometimes she wept quietly when she read of atrocities enacted upon infants in the war zones of the world, or her heart ached when she saw some poor sad-eyed kid on the streets of Havana.

  Every time she felt Rafael’s sperm flood her womb, she prayed for fertility. And her prayers, it seemed, had been answered. Only fifteen minutes before her rendezvous with Rafael she’d gone to her doctor to learn that she was pregnant. Now, quietly joyful, she waited for the right moment to share this news with her husband, who was so often distracted these days.

  A mother-to-be, yes, a clinging wife no. She wasn’t at all the mindless little wife so many people, Rosabal included, perceived her to be. She had some private core to her, an independence she may have inherited from the General, a stubbornness, a native intelligence that was inviolate. She was domestic, in the sense that she enjoyed both the Havana apartment and the country house near Sancti Spiritus, but it would have been a gross underestimation to think that was the complete picture. Estela Rosabal was her own person. A fire burned inside her that few had ever seen.

  For his part, Rosabal believed that being the son-in-law of General Capablanca was a profitable connection: it kept conspiracy in the family. It was a great match, even if it had been made more by power brokers and opportunities than by heaven and heart.

  The weary man in the grey and blue plaid jacket carried a Canadian passport that falsely identified him as J. S. Mazarek. The document was a good forgery he’d been given in Miami. He had come to Havana on a cut-rate package tour from Montreal. The group with whom he’d travelled called themselves The Explorers’ Association, mostly an alliance of single middle-aged men and women whose only interest in exploration seemingly involved one another’s bodily parts. Mazarek had already had to avoid the energetic advances of an opera-humming, large-breasted widow from Trois Rivières.

  Mazarek, a big man with hair the colour and texture of froth on a cappuccino, had been tracking his quarry along Obispo and Mercaderes Streets, surreptitiously taking photographs. He did this expertly because he’d been doing it for much of his life. Usually his cases involved errant husbands and wandering wives, who tended to be more paranoid than the cocksure Mr Smooth, whose face and movements rarely betrayed a sign of nerves.

  Mazarek watched the Minister of Finance open the door of the BMW. Then he got off one more quick shot with his tiny camera. He had enough data on Rafael Rosabal. His employer would be satisfied, though perhaps not absolutely happy. In this line of work – often more a probe of men’s hearts than mere detection – satisfaction wasn’t always followed by contentment.

  12

  London

  At nine o’clock in the evening Frank Pagan sat in his office and listened to the constant ringing of telephones and the clack of printers. Despite all this incoming information, he was frustrated. What had he learned after all? The answer that came back was disheartening: damn little. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair and pressed his fingertips against his tired eyes, ignoring the bothersome sparrow of pain pecking away at his chest.

  Foxie came into the room with a bunch of papers in his hand. He took a sheet off the top and scanned it. “The chopper was stolen three weeks ago from the Moroccan Air Force, who assumed it was seized by West Saharan rebels. The crew members were Syrians. As you could predict, they didn’t enter the country with a shred of legality. Known terrorists, according to the Syrian press attaché in London.”

  A Moroccan Cobra helicopter, a Syrian crew; terrorism observed no boundaries. It was sovereign unto itself.

  “The other men dead at the site were Richard Mayer, a native of Buffalo, New York, and one Roderigo Flavell, a citizen of Argentina. Mayer was trained by the US Army in the fine art of explosives and was renowned for his demolition skills. Flavell is wanted for questioning in connection with the bombing of a synagogue in Paris a couple of years ago. A merry sort of bunch, Frank.”

  Pagan shifted his position. It was hard to concentrate on what Foxworth was telling him. His mind, or some dark aspect of it, kept pulling him away. Too many puzzles, each demanding his attention at the same time, nagged him.

  Foxie said, “The prints we got from the Yardley farm belong to Ruhr, Mayer, and another American named Trevaskis, who has a police record in San Diego: ex
tortion, conspiracy to sell explosives and firearms, gun-running into Mexico. Considered dangerous. We also found prints belonging to the late Flavell as well as a fellow countryman of his called Enrico Zapino. Zapino is also wanted by the French police. Same synagogue bombing.”

  The Yardley Farm. Now there was one puzzle that kept coming back like a bad taste. He couldn’t figure out the association between the man who had rented the place and Gunther Ruhr. Impatiently he looked at his watch; the tenant’s wife had been sent for an hour ago – what was keeping her? She only had to come from The Connaught, which wasn’t more than a ten-minute taxi-ride away. Pagan hoped she might be able to cast a little light on the dark area, if she ever arrived.

  Since the gunshot wound he’d felt morose. Now he felt even more bleak about the fate of Steffie Brough. He’d met her parents before leaving Norwich, two very unhappy people trying to varnish their sorrow with good old-fashioned English stoicism and finding that the stiff upper lip wasn’t all the advertising claimed it to be.

  We’ll do our best, Pagan had told them. We’ll find her.

  What makes you think so? Mrs Brough had asked in that kind of ringing voice which is a cousin to outright hysteria. It was a question to which Pagan had no answer. In the policeman’s almanac of platitudes, absolutely none was capable of creating a shield against grief. He kept seeing Mrs Brough’s face, which resembled an older version of the Stephanie in the school photograph. Sheer anxiety had stripped her features of any expression other than desperation. Pagan was filled with helpless sorrow and an anger he laboured to control.

  Billy Ewing appeared in the doorway, half in, half out of the office. He held a slip of thin yellow paper in one hand.

  “Item, gentlemen,” he said.

  “I hope it’s good news,” Pagan said.

  Billy Ewing shrugged. “Good, bad, I just deliver, Frank. You’re the swami, you interpret. Now according to this little gem a transport plane was stolen this very morning from right under the vigilant nose of our Royal Air Force.”