Mambo Page 30

  Ruhr walked to the wooden crate, asked Fuentes for a tool, a tyre iron. Tomas found one inside a jeep parked nearby. Ruhr gently opened the crate.

  Inside was a layer of packing material, which Ruhr removed.

  There it was.

  A nose cone of dull silver contained the nuclear warhead. A series of metal connecting pins studded the warhead. These fitted corresponding slots in the housing of the missile. Ruhr stared at the thing for several seconds. Instruments of destruction, from the flick-knife to the warhead, had always exerted great fascination for him. In the war museums of the world he’d been hypnotised by displays of old lances, maces, swords, blackpowder muskets, grenades from World War I, tommy-guns, sophisticated automatic rifles. He believed that man reached his creative peak only when the design and manufacture of aggressive weapons was his goal. All the rest, the other products of creativity, the symphonies and poems and philosophical thinking, the computers and scientific theories, all that was just so much dross in contrast to the creation of devices meant to maim and kill.

  Slicks of rain slid over the cone. Ruhr replaced the lid of the box. The beat of his heart was just a little faster.

  “Now what?” Fuentes asked.

  “I will wait,” Ruhr replied.

  “For God’s sake, what for?” Bosanquet asked.

  “For the ship.” Ruhr stepped back from the wooden crate. “On board the ship I will make the final marriage.”

  “The marriage?”

  Ruhr smiled. “Have I used the wrong phrase?”

  Bosanquet loathed this smug character. It was damned hard to stay calm. “You are supposed to attach the warhead to the missile and make all the connections now, Ruhr. That is the plan. The missile is to be loaded in an armed state.”

  Ruhr shook his head. “If you are unhappy, do it yourself.” He knew neither man could possibly perform the task. Even if they brought in an expert, the newcomer could not easily fathom the connections between the warhead and the missile because Ruhr, with the foresight of the survivor, had had the warhead built to his own specifications, which had been given to the Israelis, Levy and Possony. Changes in the wiring inside the missile were required to make it compatible with the warhead, which was a brilliant modification of the device known in the nuclear arms trade as the W84. A wrong connection, a minor mistake, and the fusing would burn out, rendering both missile and warhead useless. And Bosanquet knew that: Ruhr had once again made himself indispensable.

  Ruhr had acquired his extensive nuclear understanding from a homosexual West German technician employed by NATO at Wueschein, a base in Germany. He’d learned how the missile worked, and the principles behind it. He’d absorbed this with the ardour of a man in love with his subject. The technician, menaced by blackmail, had been a wonderful teacher, Ruhr an even more marvellous student. The arcane terms, the payload, the velocity, the range, the connections between warhead and missile – Ruhr took it all in without needing second explanations.

  Now Fuentes tore off his hat and flung it to the ground. “Tronco de yucca,” he said to Ruhr. “That’s what you are, Ruhr. A goddam tronco de yucca. Why don’t you do the goddam job now?”

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” Ruhr replied. He enjoyed Fuentes’ primitive display of irritation. “Is that a compliment?”

  “I don’t think it is,” Bosanquet remarked. He breathed deeply, staying calm. After all, did it really make a difference if Ruhr armed the missile here or on board the ship? So long as the device was ready to fly when it was placed in Cuba – that was the thing of consequence. Ruhr could make “the marriage” on the ship, if that was how he wanted it.

  “It’s okay,” Bosanquet said. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “I know it is,” Ruhr responded.

  He walked across the runway and back up through the long grass to his tent. Guns fired in the misty distance. Target practice. He entered the tent. The girl was lying on the camp bed, her eyes closed.

  He watched her. He was ready for her now.

  He moved towards her quietly, with a weightlessness years of stealth had taught him. He was about a foot from the bed when she opened her eyes and drew her hands out from under the blanket. She held a piece of broken mirror, a scabbard-shaped length she held like a dagger, and she thrust it at him. He stepped away, watching how the makeshift blade drew small reflections from within the tent – the girl’s lips, one of her determined eyes, Ruhr’s own face, fragmented images.

  She raised her weapon in the air and slashed again and this time he seized her wrist and slammed it down across his knee, forcing her hand to open and the length of mirror to fall to the ground. She wasn’t beaten even then. She pulled herself free of him, twisted, kicked, lashed air with a foot that had never been meant to inflict damage, a long foot, a dancer’s foot. He caught the ankle easily, and twisted it, and pushed her back across the bed.

  She lay there, breathing hard.

  He stood over her.

  And smiled.

  London

  The doctor, Ghose, examined Pagan’s chest with his head cocked, like that of a bird, to one side. He kept up an ongoing stream of chatter while he studied the stitches. The human body, Mr Pagan, is a miracle of design and efficiency. Consider for instance the lung, the robust delicacy of that organ, the bronchi, the bronchioles, the whole system of highways that we call alveolar ducts. Easily damaged, Mr Pagan, but they mend under the right circumstances. And these include bed rest, no needless activity. Think of yourself as sedentary for a while.

  Pagan liked Ghose and the cheerful manner in which the doctor chided him.

  “In future you will move, if at all, only slowly,” Ghose said. He replaced the damaged stitches after cleaning the wound thoroughly.

  Pagan disengaged himself from the proceedings by thinking about the report of Herr Kluger’s death in Paris. He’d translated it slowly on the plane back to London, skipping vocabulary he didn’t know. The gist of the thing was that Caporelli and a couple of his acquaintances – the detailed report named them as Harold Hurt and Sheridan Perry, American citizens – had witnessed the event. Were they simply out strolling, taking the night air, four old pals crossing a street when – wham – one of them is dragged under a truck? Perhaps they were headed somewhere, a meeting, a café. It was a dead-end. He could check out Hurt and Perry, which would take time unless they had records of some kind at the American Embassy or were otherwise noted in some central law enforcement computer – if they had ever broken any laws in their time. Time: there it was again, an intolerably demanding master.

  Ghose bandaged him. “There. Almost as good as new. I underline the almost. Now go home. Behave yourself. Don’t play in the streets. Cars are quicker than you, Mr Pagan.”

  Pagan told Ghose he was going directly to bed, but when he left the hospital he took a taxi, through clogged West End traffic, to Golden Square. It was after seven o’clock when he reached his office. He took the bottle of Auchentoshan from his desk, poured a very small shot into a glass. He sifted his messages. There was one from Foxworth, who hadn’t returned from Glasgow. Something about a car-hire company he was going to check out. Pagan could hardly read Billy Ewing’s handwriting. Steffie Brough’s mother had called, just checking. Just checking. This terse message, between whose lines lay a world of pain, caused Pagan to feel as if his heart had been squeezed. He glanced at the child’s picture pinned to the wall. The elfin features of the kid neither accused nor derided him for his failure to locate her. They seemed indifferent suddenly, as if resigned to exile.

  Just checking. Pagan imagined he heard death in those words. He felt as if he’d entered a memorial chapel to find Steffie’s mother looking down into her daughter’s coffin and whispering to herself those two dreadful words Just checking, just checking, a hand laid softly on the child’s cold cheek.

  I’ll get her back for you, Pagan thought. Some way.

  He called Billy Ewing, told him to run a check on Harold Hurt and Sheridan Perry. Ewing had some i
nformation of his own, which concerned the protocol of Frank Pagan interviewing the Cuban Minister of Finance. It required a shit-load of paperwork, Ewing reported. Reasons had to be spelled out, justifications given. Documents were then submitted to the Cuban attaché in London, with copies to the Foreign Office. The government in Havana would review the request in due course. To put it bluntly, said Ewing, it might take six months, perhaps a year, and even then it didn’t sound promising.

  Pagan thought about the great bureaucratic mire into which human intentions, reduced to paperwork, were sucked and invariably lost. He hung up. His next call was to the Commissioner. Pagan asked for a meeting as soon as possible, Burr agreed. They chose a pub in Soho because Burr had an engagement at a restaurant in Greek Street at eight. Pagan then made one other call, this time to an airline company.

  On his way out of his office, he encountered Billy Ewing, who had his face buried deep in a big white handkerchief.

  “By the way, anything new from Foxie?” Pagan asked.

  “Not yet.” Ewing came up for air from the folds of the handkerchief. “Bloody pollen.”

  “If he gets in touch I’ll be at the French pub.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “There goes a man of mystery,” Ewing said, more to himself than to his boss, as Pagan headed for the door with an agility Ghose would not have recommended.

  The French pub, so-called because in another incarnation it had been the headquarters for the French government in exile during World War II, was crowded with West End types, a few tourists, theatre-goers finishing drinks hurriedly, and some dubious characters Pagan recognised as having been acquainted with Her Majesty’s prisons at one time or another. He squeezed into the bar, careful to avoid potentially painful contact with anyone, and ordered a scotch.

  Quite suddenly he remembered having been in this same bar thirteen years ago with Magdalena Torrente. They’d drunk anis from a large glass urn on the counter and then they’d gone deeper into Soho, strolling hand-in-hand down Old Compton Street, up through the food stalls in the Berwick Street market. They’d eaten dinner at a small Greek restaurant on Beak Street. He’d got quite drunk that night. Drunk and passionate, and probably silly in his passion. The touching evening came rushing back to him in little particles of memory that had been scattered and overlooked.

  Martin Burr arrived five minutes after Pagan was served. Unlike Pagan, the Commissioner waded into the throng, nudging with his stick wherever appropriate. He was an imposing man. The eye-patch, the bulk of his body, gave him presence and set him apart. He didn’t want a drink. Since the place was crowded, he and Pagan went outside into the street. A snappy little breeze blew up from Shaftesbury Avenue and Pagan turned up the collar of his coat.

  “How is the wound?” Burr asked.

  “I’ll survive,” Pagan remarked. He drained his scotch and set it down on the window-ledge of the pub.

  “Don’t overdo it.”

  “I don’t know how, Commissioner.”

  Martin Burr smiled thinly. Frank was the kind who’d soldier on regardless. Either one admired this attitude or criticised it for being headstrong. Burr was never sure which side he took.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his tweed overcoat. “I’m getting flak, Frank. All the bloody time. This damned commission of inquiry has its first meeting tomorrow. I’m going to have to talk to them about the leak that led to the calamity in Shepherd’s Bush. What can I tell them? I know absolutely nothing new about it.” Burr looked up at the night sky over Soho, looking like a one-eyed country squire sniffing the air for weather changes. “I also just received some other news that may or may not have something to do with the bloody missile. According to an intelligence report that came to my desk, the Israelis have reported two of their most highly rated nuclear physicists as missing, as well as sufficient matériel to make a warhead compatible with the cruise missile. Both men are said to be somewhere in South America. The Israelis are blaming professional burn-out for the theft. Both men were said to be, and I quote, ‘highly strung’. But who knows? The information is vague.”

  “If there’s a connection with Ruhr, then the cruise might be armed by this time.”

  “It might be.”

  “Which makes the picture even more gloomy.”

  “Gloomy indeed. Who is going to blow up what, I wonder.” Burr slipped fingertips under his eye-patch and scratched. “If it weren’t for the fact that I’d feel like some rotten little bugger sneaking off a sinking ship, I’d tender my resignation in a twinkling. No messing about. But I’m like you, Frank. I keep going. Kinnaird’s been supportive, I must say. Which I appreciate.”

  A roar of buses was blown on the breeze from Shaftesbury Avenue and the theatre district. This was a transient, brightly lit little corner of London, streets filled with drifters, people who idled in the Haymarket and around Piccadilly Circus and wandered toward Leicester Square.

  “Kinnaird’s the conscientious sort,” Pagan said.

  “Calls me three, four times a day, Frank.” Burr looked as if he were wearied by the Home Secretary’s attentions. “What did you want to see me about?”

  Pagan arranged his thoughts. He expected an argument from the Commissioner, or at least an objection. He talked quickly, hoping Burr wouldn’t interrupt him. He went lightly on the details, his past relationship with Magdalena. He talked about the connections between Rosabal and Ruhr, the evidence of the rented farmhouse. He sketched his conjectures, trying to give them solid weight, about the threads that linked Caporelli and Chapotin to Rosabal, and thus to Gunther Ruhr. En passant, he spoke about the deaths of Caporelli and the others. Now, if there was only the vaguest possibility that the stolen missile was armed, it gave the whole investigation even more urgency.

  “There are some iffy bits in there,” Burr said.

  Pagan agreed and muttered something about the nature of all hypotheses. He glanced down the busy street.

  “What do you propose, Frank?” Burr asked. Sometimes he adopted an attitude toward Pagan similar to one that might be held by an uncle toward a favoured, if slightly wilful, nephew. He was tolerant, bemused, gently critical; he knew that Pagan always did his best no matter the circumstances.

  Pagan said what he had in mind.

  Martin Burr put one hand up to his dark-green eye-patch. “Are you really sure that this person – this Magdalena – will tell you anything, even if she’s in a position to do so?”

  Pagan wasn’t sure. He thought about the mysterious coup she’d been so reluctant to discuss: if he knew more about that, there might be progress. “She’s the only real connection I have to Rosabal. And I think the road to Ruhr leads through the Cuban.”

  “You could travel a long way and have nothing to show for it.”

  “I could also sit on my arse around London and have even less.”

  “True,” Burr said. A certain look sometimes came to Frank Pagan’s face, and the Commissioner recognised it now, determined, and hard, the slight forward thrust of the jaw, aggressive. “May I remind you, Frank, that you’re not in great shape for travelling? On top of that, your activity in Paris today hasn’t improved your condition.”

  “I feel fine,” Pagan said. And, for the moment, that was true enough. How long this transitory well-being would last was another matter. He had the feeling he was held together by nothing more substantial than Ghose’s stitches.

  Burr said, “Very well. Make arrangements to go.”

  “I already made them.”

  Burr smiled. “I should have known.” He was quiet a moment. Pagan’s confidence was sometimes an impressive thing. “There’s an old contact of mine in Dade County. A certain Lieutenant Philip Navarro. You might need him. He knows his way around.”

  Pagan memorised the name.

  “I hope you bring something back, Frank. God knows, we could use a break.”

  The Commissioner shook Pagan’s hand, then turned and walked in the direction
of Old Compton Street. Pagan didn’t watch him leave. He didn’t have time to linger. He had to go to his apartment, toss a few things together, get his passport and his gun, and be at Heathrow Airport within the next two hours. He was pleased to have the Commissioner’s blessing, the official imprimatur.

  With or without it, he’d have gone anyway.

  Washington

  Harry Hurt kept an expensive apartment in an area of Washington that afforded a splendid view of the Potomac. It was a rich man’s view, designed to instil in its owner a sense of unbridled superiority. High above the riff-raff, Hurt indulged his patriotism, which fostered the illusion that anyone – anyone at all – could rise to wealth and prominence in these United States. Any Appalachian dirt farmer’s boy, any steelworker’s son from Bethlehem, PA, could – God, hard work, and the machine willing – ascend to the highest offices in the land. Harry Hurt believed this without question. While he was not an innocent in world affairs by any means, he was nevertheless naive when it came to some areas of understanding. His romanticised America eclipsed the hard reality.

  The apartment had an exercise-room fitted with an electronic bicycle, stretching devices, a Nautilus machine, a variety of weights and a rowing simulator. In this room Hurt burned off calories and kept himself tight and lean.

  A spartan bedroom with a certain Polynesian flavour adjoined the mini-gymnasium, and beyond was a large living-room where he sometimes entertained people. A glass-panelled cabinet, centred against the main wall of the living-room like a shrine, contained a variety of weapons – automatic rifles, shotguns, pistols – as well as photographs of Hurt in crumpled fatigues and black glasses when he’d been a “military advisor” in Central America. A clutch of shrunken heads, gathered in Central American villages, hung alongside the cabinet like a spray of discoloured garlic bulbs. All were reminders of his glory days.

  The door of the living-room led into a vestibule furnished in soft white leather chairs and sofas. This room was presently occupied by new guards Hurt had hired. There were three in all, one a former Secret Serviceman. They wore dark-blue suits.