Mambo Read online

  Suddenly the taxi was out over black water, suspended impossibly in the air. A bridge, of course. Pagan shut his eyes, fought off a certain dizziness that assailed him. The turbulent flight, a glass of awful Sauternes on the plane, the ache in his chest – all elements that had unsettled him.

  Marcel Foucault nodded toward a cluster of lights at the end of the bridge. “Zat’s Key Biscayne.”

  The night air rushing through the window helped Pagan feel better. He thought about Magdalena. What was she going to say when he turned up on her doorstep?

  He looked at the growing lights of Key Biscayne. Launches along the shoreline were tethered to private jetties that led to expensive houses. American opulence always impressed him; he thought Americans did wealth better than anybody else. They purchased more, collected more, stored more. They also produced more, ate more, drank more, and divorced more. Rich people here lived as if all America were a going-out-of-business sale.

  “Yo street, ami,” Marcel Foucault said. He stopped the cab outside a large house barely visible beyond dense shrubbery. Prolific plants obscured the yellow light burning beside the front doorway; thousands of moths threw themselves at the bulb, frenzied participants in mass suicide.

  Pagan, a little surprised that Magdalena lived in such a well-heeled neighbourhood, stepped out. Had he expected some crummy cellar filled with anti-Fidel radicals running a leaky old printing-press? He paid the driver, then watched the cab pull away. He was apprehensive now. Given that Magdalena knew anything, was she likely to tell him? What had seemed a good idea in London now felt insubstantial to him. He wondered if painkillers had fuelled this whole transatlantic crossing, if the idea had been inspired by the actions of the chemicals absorbed in his system – a junkie’s trip.

  Picking up his overnight bag, Pagan moved along the pathway to the front door. He rang the bell, waited, rang again. He was aware of the malicious little eye of the peephole: somebody was watching him from inside. He heard a chain drawn back, a bolt sliding, then the door was opened.

  “Frank.”

  She appeared in shadow, motionless only a second before she stepped forward and, to Pagan’s surprise, threw her arms around him. The embrace, unexpectedly fierce, threw him off balance. He supported himself against the door jamb even as Magdalena held on to him tightly. It was a welcome he could never have anticipated. In a black suede mini-skirt and white silk blouse, she was barefoot and delectable. She whispered his name very quietly almost as if she were afraid of breaking some spell.

  She led him inside, across a large tiled hall to a sitting-room. She switched on a soft light. The room was starkly furnished – a sofa, a chair, a table, the lamp. One of everything, he thought. She clearly didn’t use this room much. It had the waxen quality of a window-display.

  Still holding his hand, she led him to the sofa, then sat alongside him, curling her feet up under her body. He noticed some slight puffiness beneath her eyes, as if she might have been crying before.

  She took a cigarette pack from a pocket at the side of her skirt and lit one with a black Bic. He couldn’t remember seeing her smoke before and she did it in an unpractised way, like a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Something was wrong here, he thought, a sadness, a change. Her smile was a terrific effort, but it was more teeth than pleasure.

  “You don’t seem overwhelmingly surprised to find me on your doorstep,” he said.

  “The weird thing is, I just happened to be thinking about you. Lo and behold, here you are. Is it an omen?”

  There was a strangeness in her manner. She was present yet absent, here yet elsewhere. “What exactly were you thinking about me?” he asked.

  “How nice it would be to see you. How nice it would be to see a friendly face. I need one.”

  “Why so gloomy?” He laid a hand gently on her shoulder.

  “I’ve had better days.”

  She blew smoke up at the ceiling. She had a wonderful throat; lined a little now – what didn’t time touch? – it was still marvellous and feminine. It needed no adornment to make it enticing.

  “You didn’t come all this way just to see me,” she said.

  “Who else do I know in Miami?”

  “You must have some business here.”

  “Business and pleasure. The lines get blurred where you’re involved.”

  The telephone rang. Magdalena excused herself, rose from the sofa, and crossed the room. She turned her back to him as she picked up the receiver; when she spoke she used Spanish. The conversation was brief. She hung up, glanced at her watch, then walked back to the sofa. She didn’t sit this time. Instead, she kneeled on the cushion and faced him. She lit another cigarette. Her short skirt slid up her thigh. Her black eyes were blacker than ever before. You could see all manner of sorrows in them.

  “You were saying something about business,” she said. There was a new note in her voice, perhaps a little impatience. Maybe the phone call had reminded her of an appointment.

  He suddenly felt scattered, weary. “I need coffee. Do you mind?”

  “I made some before. It’s probably still hot.” She went out into the kitchen, and returned with a cup. Pagan took it, sipped slowly.

  “Now,” she said, and she touched the back of his hand. “Speak to me.”

  Pagan set his cup down. “It’s a tough one.”

  “I’m a big girl.”

  “It concerns Rosabal.”

  “Rosabal?” She feigned innocence, her acting amateur and halfhearted.

  “Ground rules,” Pagan said. “No bullshit. I know more than you think. If we can both tell the truth from the beginning, it’s going to save time.”

  She was quiet a moment. “How long have you known about him?”

  “Since you were in London,” Pagan said. “He was concealed – a little ignominiously, in my opinion – inside the bathroom in your hotel room.”

  Magdalena smiled. “I thought that was amusing. But he likes anonymity. He didn’t want anyone to see him.”

  “A few people did. Including British intelligence. He was followed. Not always carefully. But he was followed.”

  Magdalena crushed out her cigarette in a small glass ashtray. “Okay. You know about Rafael and me. It still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

  Pagan told her. He did so briefly, without incidental detail. He left out the deaths of Caporelli and his associates, sketching a mosaic in which certain pieces were omitted. Halfway through the narrative Magdalena walked to the unlit fireplace and stood, legs slightly apart, hands on hips, a defensive attitude.

  She waited until Pagan was finished before she said, “One thing I always liked about you, Frank. You have more imagination than a cop should. But this time I think you’ve gone overboard, baby.” She smoked again. The small black lighter flashed; Magdalena’s cheeks hollowed as she drew smoke into her lungs.

  “Overboard how?” he asked.

  “Rafael and Ruhr. That’s a hell of a connection. What could Rafe have in common with that maniac? And I don’t see where a stolen missile fits Rafe’s life, Frank.” She sat down on the couch.

  Rafe – the lover’s abbreviation, the intimacy. The magic word that opened doors on to private worlds. Pagan stood up. His circulation was sluggish. He walked round the room. On the mantel were photographs of a man and a woman, presumably Magdalena’s parents. Pagan glanced at them. Magdalena more closely resembled her father.

  “When you were in London, you mentioned a coup of some kind in Cuba,” Pagan said. “Is Rosabal involved?”

  “You misheard me, Frank.”

  “Let me rephrase it. You hinted at a coup.”

  “I don’t think so, Frank. You misunderstood.”

  Pagan stepped toward her, looked down at where she sat on the couch. “We agreed. No games. No bullshit.”

  “You agreed. You play by your own rules. I don’t remember saying I’d comply.”

  “Don’t fuck around with me, Magdalena. I don’t have time for crap.”

&nb
sp; “Keep talking rough. I like it.”

  Pagan had to smile. His history with this woman, the passion locked in the past – how could he be anything other than transparent to her? How could he act demanding, and tough, and hope she’d be swayed?

  She stood up, gazed into his face, then put her arms round him. Her body was limp. This was another little unexpected act. She was full of surprises tonight. What he detected in her was an unhappiness for which she hadn’t found the appropriate expression, and so she held him this way, clutched him for consolation, security, light in some dark place.

  He said, “Look, there’s a hostage involved. A child who’s only fourteen years old. There’s a terrorist responsible for more deaths than I want to think about. He may hurt the kid. He may kill her, if he hasn’t already. Too many people have died, Magdalena. I want the kid back. I want to know what plans there are for the missile. And I want Gunther Ruhr. I’m betting Rafael knows where to find him. You might call it a long shot, but it’s better than nothing. I need to know what you know. I need anything you can give me.”

  Magdalena Torrente was very quiet. She disengaged herself from Pagan and walked away. She stopped at the curtained window on the other side of the room, beyond the reach of the lamp. Her features were indistinct. Ash, untended, dropped from her cigarette to the rug. He may hurt the kid; she couldn’t stand that idea. She couldn’t take the notion of any more hurt.

  Pagan went to her and touched the back of her hand. She didn’t look at him. She spoke in a voice filled with little catches, as though she were having trouble getting air to her lungs. Flatly, without tone, she said, “Okay, you’ve come a long way, you deserve to know something. I don’t know a damn thing about Ruhr or any missile. All I can tell you is how things were supposed to be. Army officers and their troops opposed to Castro were to seize various strategic barracks. This act was intended to galvanise the democratic underground – we’re talking about thousands of people, strikes, demonstrations, the occupation of public buildings, public disobedience, armed insurrection. Everything was supposedly well-orchestrated. Rafael was the leader, the organiser. The plan called for him to head the new government after Castro was deposed. The new democratic government, I should say. People, myself included, intended to return from exile to participate in this … this brave new Cuba. It was neat, simple, and it might have been relatively bloodless. But it changed.”

  “How?”

  “The information I have indicates that Rosabal betrayed the cause.” It was in her voice, her face, the burden of terrible disappointment. But more than that, Pagan thought, there was another emotion, and for want of a better word he called it grief. Magdalena wasn’t grieving only for a lost cause. She’d been cut where it pained her, in her heart.

  Pagan had to press on, he had to get beyond her sorrow. He hadn’t come all the way to Miami to learn about the failure of a counter-revolution. He wasn’t interested. He didn’t give a shit about Cuba. The world stage didn’t enthrall him. His own world was small, and its boundaries well-marked, a specialised place in which wrongs were righted whenever that was possible and justice was more than a dry textbook notion.

  He said, “Did Rosabal ever mention Ruhr to you?”

  She shook her head. “Ruhr! You’re obsessed, Frank. I still don’t see how Ruhr comes into it. I’ve heard of people barking up wrong trees before now, but you get the blue ribbon.”

  Pagan ignored this. “What other people did our pal Rafe meet in Britain?”

  “I don’t have a clue, Frank.”

  “Think hard.”

  “I am thinking.”

  Now there was an impatient edge in her voice; she was tired of questions. She’d been asking them of herself all day long, ever since the meeting with Garrido and Duran. Question after question; they distilled themselves into one simple inquiry – Why had Rafael betrayed her?

  She clenched her hands and strolled the room, confined by walls and ceilings. She’d gone over her relationship with Rosabal for hours, tracing it from the first meeting – Acapulco, instant attraction, common political convictions, sex marked as much by passion as by tenderness, the kind that grew, at least as far as she was concerned, into love – to the last encounter in London. I love him, she thought. And she wanted to believe, despite her weakening conviction, that he loved her, that he had justifiable reasons for his apparent treachery, that the democratic revolution was still a possibility. But the obstacles were so damned hard to overcome.

  That day she’d walked the streets of Little Havana with dear old Garrido, arm-in-arm under the purple noon sun. Solicitous Garrido, old family friend. Kindly Garrido, his spindly hand wrapped around hers. He talked of love in an airy way, as if it were a book he’d read seventy years ago and all he recalled were pages of parchment now crumbled. He spoke of the manner in which love was often victimised, brutalised, how there were demarcation lines of the emotions across which warring lovers skirmished, leaving the losers battered.

  This was not language to which Magdalena Torrente was accustomed. She was no loser. No victim. And she had no intention of becoming one so long as there was a chance still that Rafael loved her; and in that inviolate part of her free of shadows and doubts, her knowledge was certain: Rafael loved her.

  The great trick was to keep reality from intruding.

  In a situation like this, where trust has been so badly violated, there are not many choices; something has to be done, Garrido had said when they were drinking coffee in the Versailles restaurant. He had shrugged then, an eloquent gesture of disappointment and hatred, and yet there was nothing of surprise in it, as if he’d plumbed the human condition so deeply there were no astonishments left to him. He had been cheated, and his dreams abruptly ended.

  Pagan held both her hands and said, “I wish I didn’t have to ask you all these bloody questions.”

  “I don’t have answers, Frank.”

  He was silent for a time. “How exactly did Rosabal betray you?”

  “Begin with the matter of his wife.”

  “Wives tend to be problematic. Maybe he intends to leave her. Who knows?”

  “I’m told he only just married her, but I love you for your optimism, Frank.” Magdalena looked down at how her hands were firmly held by Pagan’s, and she enjoyed the sense of security in the touch. She raised her face, tiptoed, kissed the side of his mouth.

  She said, “I’m just a casualty of the heart. Other people were shafted in their pocketbooks. He’s pretty generous when it comes to spreading treachery around. Over a period of three or four years, thousands of exiled Cubans in Miami and New Jersey contributed millions of dollars to the overthrow of Castro. Most of it ended up – guess where?”

  “In Rafael’s pocket?”

  “That’s what they tell me, Frank.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get. If he’s a common embezzler, he’d take the money and that would be it. End of. But what the hell is he doing involved with Gunther Ruhr? And this whole missile affair – what is his part in that?”

  She shrugged. “You’ve come three thousand miles for nada except to see a poor confused woman whose brain is scrambled eggs. I don’t have answers for you.”

  Pagan stepped away from her, finished his coffee, set down the cup. He had a hollow moment of sheer fatigue. He went to the kitchen and poured another coffee, then returned. Magdalena stood in the centre of the floor, hugging herself as if she were cold. She seemed smaller now, diminished in a way, as if Rafe, Captain Charm, had stolen more than her love.

  He sipped coffee. There was a key here, he was sure of it, a key that would unlock all the doors that puzzled him, that would allow him access to the room that contained Ruhr and Stephanie Brough. And that key was Rafael, pirate of people’s money, swindler of feelings.

  Rafael had played along with this democratic underground in Cuba and the great outswelling of patriotic sentiment in the exile communities for his own ends, obviously.

  But what were those ends?

&n
bsp; Frank, what did all ambitious men seek, for God’s sake?

  Control. Beyond money, that’s what they lusted after, dreamed of, salivated over, schemed and cheated for, maimed and killed for. That’s what obsessed them and drove some of them to an odd vindictive madness. They became possessed by the very thing they’d tried to own: solitary control, the chance to shape their little corner of the world to their own liking.

  Was that it? Did Rafael want Cuba in such a way that he didn’t have to share it with any squabble of exiles who believed in something as primitive and muddle-headed as, heaven forbid, democracy? His own private sandcastle, his own fantasy, a place where he could rule the tides. Did it come down to that in the end?

  Only Rafe would know.

  Where did the missile fit? Where did Caporelli and Chapotin and Kluger come into this picture? Why were these men dying?

  Missiles weren’t for firing in this day and age. They were playing-cards, toys owned by the richest kids on the block, useful when you needed to flex a little muscle, make a demand, or simply just threaten.

  Pagan shut his eyes. Had Caporelli and friends wanted their bit of Cuba too?

  In the late 1950s Caporelli already had a taste for the place; so, presumably, had Jean-Paul Chapotin. Maybe they liked the island the way it used to be – after all, hadn’t it made Caporelli wealthy? It probably hadn’t exactly hurt Jean-Paul either. But they couldn’t turn clocks back as long as Fidel ran the country.

  Solution: get rid of Fidel. How?

  A missile on the island would have the effect of –

  Of what?

  Of making a whole lot of people in this hemisphere rather unhappy.

  So what?

  Shit, it was slipping away from him.

  Fatigued, he sat down on the sofa.

  Magdalena sat beside him. “You look exhausted. Why don’t you rest for a while? Stretch out here.”

  Pagan had the feeling again that he was missing something simple. But Rafe had the answer. Only Rafe.

  “I don’t have time to rest,” he said. He stood up. Bones creaked: the small embarrassment of age.

  She looked at her wristwatch. “I have to go out, Frank.”