Mambo Page 23
Besides, Perry’s philosophy was suspect. Like Harry, he called himself a patriot, but Hurt thought he was stretching the definition. He’d once listened to Perry explain the greatness of the USA, a diatribe that caused Hurt some dismay.
According to Perry, the Constitution was a wonderful document, sure; but what made America great was the other marvellous invention it had given the world – the loophole. There were loopholes in the Constitution, in the legal system, in the tax codes; here, there, everywhere a loophole, and Perry thrived on them. America was a wonderful country just so long as you recognised the loopholes. Perry had grown quite animated at the time. Hurt often thought about the cynicism behind The Loophole Speech. The tragedy was that Sheridan Perry didn’t think it cynical at all.
The midnight-blue limousine that had been following Hurt and Perry at a distance of a hundred feet rolled a little closer. Three armed bodyguards sat in the vehicle. They observed the two men closely, watched the street, studied windows, shop fronts, rooftops. Hurt had suggested this stroll so that he could phrase his question in private, without having to embarrass Perry in front of the bodyguards. But the car, the protection, was never very far away, while Hurt’s sensitive question was further away than ever.
How could he possibly come right out and ask Perry such a terrible thing? It’s a process of elimination, Sheridan. Since I know it’s not me, it either has to be you or Caporelli or Kinnaird. Caporelli’s a possible, Kinnaird less so, which leaves you and Enrico as the best possible candidates. It couldn’t be asked. Perry would be deeply offended, a wedge of mistrust would be driven between them. It was, Hurt thought, a no-win situation.
The shop front at which Hurt and Perry paused belonged to a tailoring establishment so exclusive it made suits with no labels, no identifying marks save a special little cross-stitch applied beneath the collar, where it was invisible. Had the needlework been evident, it would have been recognised by only a hundred men at most. It was the apotheosis of elitism. The grubby windows were curtained. No fancy displays here. Nor was there a sign to indicate the business of the shop, simply a street number on a plain metal disc. People who came here tended to have Rolodexes filled with unlisted numbers. These men used Charles Katzner & Sons, Tailors, Established 1925, as a kind of club in which they also happened to have their suits made.
Hurt rang the doorbell; the door was opened within seconds by a tall quiet man who wore a black jacket and pin-striped trousers. A tape measure was draped around his shoulders. With a slightly effeminate gesture, he indicated that Hurt and Perry should follow him – between long tables covered with tweeds and linens, wools and silks, up a narrow flight of stairs and through double doors into a large unfurnished room panelled in dark-brown wood. The air had the universal scent of tailoring shops, composed of the smells of dozens of brand new fabrics, all so completely intermingled they were impossible to separate. Blinds, discoloured by too many summers, hung against the windows. The little light that filtered through had a strange brownish hue.
A red-cheeked man stood by the only furniture in the room, a long table on which lay a number of bulky volumes filled with fabric samples. The man wore very black glasses and a blue suit. He leafed through the swatches, pausing every now and then when one took his interest.
“This is a nice linen,” he said. “I’ve always liked linen, more so in the pale colours.” He spoke softly. He didn’t have to raise his voice to make people listen to him. When Allen Falk entered a room people turned to look. Neither handsome nor trim nor elegant, he had the elusive quality known as “presence”.
Falk closed the fabric book. “Let me bring you up to date, gentlemen, in case you’ve missed anything en route. Gunther Ruhr seized the missile, as expected. A nice job too, I understand. He managed, however, to introduce a little complexity we didn’t anticipate. He’s got a hostage, a young girl. It’s no big deal. But the unpredictable throws us off balance.”
“A hostage?” Sheridan Perry had been expecting something strange from the German. “Why the hell did he need a hostage?”
Al Falk stepped in front of the table. “We’ll get back to the child later. The only important thing is the missile arriving at its destination. And Ruhr’s plane, I’m informed, is presently only three hours from landing.”
Harry Hurt felt a little tense. He looked at his watch. Three hours seemed to him a very long time. He didn’t like the notion of a hostage any more than Perry did, but only because he disliked unscripted occurrences. He had never married and had absolutely no empathy with children. He sometimes saw them out of the corner of his eye and thought they were hyperactive and too robust, too loud. He had no real admiration for Gunther Ruhr – the man’s life lacked principle. Personally, thank God, he’d had no dealings with the German. When Ruhr had supplied the complicated technical specifications for his needs they had come to Harry Hurt via Caporelli, who had received them from Rosabal. Such was the complex chain of obligations. In turn, Hurt had supplied the data to Levy and Possony. This was as close as he’d come to Gunther Ruhr, and he was grateful.
Falk continued. “There should be absolutely no problems to interfere with the arrival. Our spy satellites, which would have identified the plane, have been ‘malfunctioning’ for the last eight hours and will continue to do so for at least another three. Odd timing, don’t you think?”
“Oh, very,” Hurt remarked.
Falk smiled his famous smile. His cheeks, already plump, swelled to the size of crab apples, suggesting the face of a very jolly man, which he wasn’t. He was too involved in controlling Presidents and starfucking to be either carefree or generous. The smile was secretive, and knowing, that of a man who imagines he alone has the blueprint to the power circuits of the country.
Sometimes Hurt had a suspicion that Falk knew about the Society. If so, he gave no indication that he understood Hurt and Perry were part of any organisation. Perhaps he knew nothing, but only gave an impression of knowing. Or he simply thought that his old Princeton friend, Harold S. Hurt, was one half of a two-man partnership with Perry, nothing more.
“I’ve received information that Fidel has come down with an unspecified illness,” Falk said. “Which is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”
“Beautiful,” Harry Hurt remarked.
Falk said, “Brother Raul, who could be a significant problem because he commands loyalty among some officers, is still in Africa. Events will delay him there until it’s too late for him to return to Cuba. According to my information, South African mercenaries are scheduled to launch a border attack on Angola of sufficient ferocity to keep Raul bouncing around the continent for a few more days.”
Harry Hurt was always impressed by the intricacy of the plan; it was a remarkable conception that involved not only Falk, but also the fragmented anti-Castro movement inside Cuba, a handful of terrorists under the direction of Ruhr, and the forces Hurt himself had assembled in Honduras. And behind it all, a benign overseer, a great masonic eye, the Society of Friends.
Hurt also assumed a clique existed at the CIA under Falk’s control, although like most things involving that organisation it couldn’t be confirmed. But how else could spy satellites be manipulated? How else could the presence of a small army at Cabo Gracias a Dios be kept beyond the reach of those inquisitive journalists who were professional Central America watchers? And how could a South African mercenary assault on Angola be so precisely orchestrated?
Hurt had times when he wondered if the President himself were involved, or if he knew about the scheme but could never in a hundred lifetimes admit it, far less endorse it, for fear of alienating the allies and perhaps enraging the Soviets. It was a slippery speculation and there could never be a definitive answer. The Presidency was, as usual, a mystifying law unto itself, more myth than substance, more shadow than actuality. Besides, Hurt had all along known that the United States could only be involved in this whole project in a manner that was, so to speak, on the periphery of the periphery.
Falk turned round. “You get Cuba. We get an end to Fidel. What a terrific arrangement.”
Hurt smiled in his usual lean manner. He pondered the success with which different interests had been gathered together under a common banner. The last of fidelismo, and the control of Cuba by the Society of Friends fronted by a reasonable and malleable President in the form of Rafael Rosabal. As Falk said, a terrific arrangement. The only shadow across Hurt’s otherwise undiluted enthusiasm was the way the Society was being depleted. Apart from the fact that the situation had produced paranoia, Harry Hurt didn’t like being a target on anybody’s hit list. Of course, new blood could be encouraged, new members carefully inducted into the inner sanctum of the Society – but that was hardly the point. What he really wanted to believe was that the killings had come to an end with Magiwara, Chapotin and Kluger, that these three had been murdered by a party or parties they had somehow managed to injure. A thin little hope, but he clutched it anyhow. It was better than paranoia.
Falk released a blind, which snapped up. The light in the room was tangerine now, and cold. Harry Hurt watched the Presidential advisor as the light struck him. Small reddish veins were stitched across Falk’s face, like some form of embroidery. The black glasses glowed as if the eyes behind them had turned orange. Falk appeared quite demonic.
He said, “I’ve been watching Cuba for more than thirty years. I’ve watched over it the way a physician monitors vital signs. I’ve sniffed the wind from the place, and let me tell you it doesn’t smell like sugar. It smells the way the dogshit of Communism always smells. That’s what we don’t need down there. So let’s deodorise the Caribbean. And if the United States can’t do it officially, then let it be done the only way it can.”
Falk paused. His loathing of Communism had surfaced in 1956 during the failed Hungarian revolution, and had seized him with the passion of a first love affair. In 1968, brutal events in Czechoslovakia had strengthened this hatred. Recent occurrences in China confirmed his beliefs.
The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of his wristwatch beeping twice. He ignored it and went on, “Whenever the CIA tried in the past to assassinate Fidel, it was always ridiculed. The USA was always the oversized bully trying to push little Fidel round the schoolyard, with no justification except for the fact we were bigger than Cuba and could kick its ass all the livelong day. A stinking image, friends. In the feckless court of world opinion, which is the only international court that really matters these days, we had no justification for killing the cretin and clearing the excrement out of Cuba.” Here Falk puffed out his cheeks. “It’s another ballgame now. This time we’ll have evidence that’s damned hard and incontrovertible. The trick of victory in our day and age is to present to a reproachful world a fait accompli which is perceived as utterly regrettable but inevitable. We don’t want to upset the Organisation of American States, some of whose member countries have close relations with Cuba, and we don’t want to upset our NATO allies, some of whom enjoy lucrative trade with Fidel. We need the mumble of world approval in everything we do because that’s how goddam sensitive we’ve become. A nation of images. We’re not people. We’re holographs. All we want to do is look good, for Christ’s sake.”
Falk paused, swallowed. “Consequently, we can’t go in with a big stick. No, we go in sideways, obliquely, pretending we have absolutely nothing to do with it. We use surrogates. And if by some slight chance we are associated with them, we stand in the courtroom and wring our hands, filled with terrible remorse for having helped recover a missile from a sick despot. But what were we supposed to do? That missile was being pointed directly at our goddam throat, after all. So we gave some assistance to a small army of Cuban exiles just to show that we weren’t bullying poor little Cuba again. And we laid out our photographs of the missile for all the judges to see. Case closed. Amen.”
Hurt, who enjoyed the way Falk talked, looked down into the narrow street. The limousine was parked across the way, engine running. A white Ford Taurus passed, then stopped.
Falk reached under his glasses with a finger and rubbed an eye. “Now. The hostage. I think a simple message to Ruhr is going to be enough. Something to the effect that no excess baggage is allowed. No hysterical little eyewitnesses. He knows what to do. He’s been around.”
Harry Hurt was about to agree when he noticed the Ford Taurus backing up very quickly until it was aligned with the parked limousine. Something was going on down there. Hurt started to mention the suspicious appearance of the Taurus in the centre of the street, a great plume of exhaust hanging behind it like an angry wraith. He got out the words I wonder what the hell and then stopped, because the Ford moved forward very quickly, tyres whining on concrete, leaving the limousine exposed to view.
But only for a second. There was a flash of extraordinary light. The limousine exploded. It rose a foot in the air. Windows shattered, metal buckled, a wheel flew off. A great sphere of smoke, dark, thick, rich, billowed around the limousine. Shockwaves blew across the street and shattered the window where Hurt stood. He managed to step away before thin razors of glass lanced into the room. Allen Falk, less nimble, received a scalpful of slivers. Perry, who stood by the table, was unscathed.
“Dear Jesus,” Falk said. Blood flowed over his forehead and down his well-fed cheeks.
Hurt took out a handkerchief and helped Falk mop blood from his face. He glanced at Perry, who had moved to the broken window and was looking down into the street.
The trashed limousine straddled the sidewalk. The hood was gone, the fender mangled, the trunk crumpled. The doors had been blown open. Two motionless men lay in the back, one upon the other. In the front a man was twisted over the steering-wheel.
Hurt said nothing. Clearly somebody had been under the impression that he and Perry were inside the limo. Somebody had thought them sitting targets. Somebody had been mistaken. This time.
Falk touched the side of his skull with the bloodied handkerchief. “We ought to be long gone by the time the police arrive and start looking for eye witnesses. I suggest we get the hell out of here now.”
Neither Hurt nor Perry hesitated. The room was filling up with vile, rubbery smoke that drifted across the street from the ruined limousine. As Hurt walked toward the door behind Falk, he considered the question: who knew? Who the hell knew that he and Perry were travelling in that particular vehicle?
On the staircase down he was struck by a thought that would make some sense to him later: Perry. Perry knew.
13
Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras
Tomas Fuentes was in his tent when he heard the stale air around him vibrate, at first quietly and steadily, as if the evening sky were filled with the drone of a million batwings. He stepped outside and stood with his hands on his hips, listening. The sound, which originated close to the sea, had the texture of a natural force, a tornado gathering strength, say, or an earthquake forcing open a fissure on the bed of the ocean.
Roger Bosanquet emerged from the tent pitched next to Tommy’s. The sound grew more profound. Among the trees yellow kerosene lights illuminated pathways between the large marquees in which the army slept. It was Tent City here.
Tommy Fuentes scanned the heavens, but saw nothing moving. Still the sound grew in intensity, a rumbling suggestive of thunder now. Tommy thought the ground under his feet had begun to tremble, but it was only his imagination. This landscape seemed to trap and amplify sounds. It was like being imprisoned inside a loudspeaker.
“There she is,” Bosanquet said and pointed to the sky.
At first pinheads of light, nothing more. Then the shape of the craft could be seen as it lost altitude and dropp
ed so low that spray rose up from the surface of the water into the lights.
Fuentes and the Englishman walked down the slope toward the airstrip. Blue electric lamps, surrounded by agitated mosquitoes, burned the length of the runway. The plane appeared over the trees, the noise so terrible now that Fuentes and Bosanquet covered their ears. They watched the craft roar down towards the strip. It seemed for a moment to stall in the air, but then it was down with a final scream, lunging across the runway, skidding slightly before coming to a halt about twenty feet from where the concrete ended in a clump of trees.
Just before the two men reached the runway, Bosanquet mentioned the message he’d received some fifteen minutes ago by radio from Harry Hurt.
“A kid?” Fuentes asked. “There’s a kid on the plane?”
“Apparently.”
“I don’t want the blood of any kid on my hands,” Fuentes said.
“It’s Ruhr’s responsibility, I would say.” Bosanquet, forever calm, nodded toward the big plane, where a door was already opening. “Your hands will be clean, Tommy.”
Bosanquet looked at the light in the open doorway of the C-130, where Ruhr stood framed in perfect silhouette. The plane’s endless rocking during the flight had made Stephanie Brough queasy. All she’d had to eat was some dry fruit Ruhr had given her from a plastic bag. Ruhr, who was never very far from her, had watched her continually. His eyes had seemed to her like the lenses of some scanning instrument beneath which she was being dissected and scrutinised. She wished he’d turn away, look elsewhere, leave her alone. So long as she was the object of his brooding fascination, she was reminded of the danger he represented.
She still had no idea where she was and hadn’t been able to eavesdrop on any conversations because of her earplugs. The two men, Trevaskis and Zapino, who sat together some feet away, didn’t look like they communicated much and Ruhr didn’t speak, so there was probably nothing to hear anyway.