Mambo Page 33

  “A late date?”

  “Something like that. You can stay here if you like.” She walked across the room to the stairs leading to the upper part of the house. After a few minutes she came back down, dressed now in a tan leather jacket and blue jeans and looking in her paleness rather fragile.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. She didn’t exactly look dressed for any commonplace date.

  “Out.” She had an ambivalent little smile. He noticed a slightly crooked molar, a tiny flaw he’d quite forgotten, and he remembered how he’d once been enchanted by this trifling imperfection because it humanised her beauty. Smile for me, come on: had he really said such things back then and loved her so insanely that the sight of a crooked tooth drove him out of his skull?

  “And I twiddle my thumbs? Wait for you to come back? I don’t have time for that.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. And I can’t help you. I can’t tell you any more than I already have, and even that was more than I wanted.”

  He was irritated by her furtive manner, her secrecy, the way she was dismissing him.

  She made to move past him. He placed himself in her way.

  “Why the great hurry?”

  “I’m sick of questions, Frank. I’m sick of the ones you’ve been asking and I’m sick of the ones I’ve been asking myself.”

  He moved to one side and she crossed the hall to unlock the door to the garage. Pagan followed her. There was a grey BMW in the garage.

  “I’m leaving alone, Frank. I don’t want company.”

  “And I don’t want to be stranded here.”

  “Call a cab.”

  “I’ll ride with you. Take me back to Miami. Drop me off at a hotel. I won’t get in your way.”

  She sighed. “You’re a determined bastard.”

  She got in on the driver’s side; Pagan slid into the passenger seat. The garage doors opened by remote control. They slid up, revealing the dark garden in front. She steered forward, the door closed behind her. Then she was out on the street, driving with a carelessness that didn’t thrill Pagan, who hated being the passenger anyway.

  The BMW approached an intersection, darkened houses, dim lamplights. Magdalena slowed just a little when a large Buick entered the intersection out of nowhere and wheeled straight toward the German car; surprised, Magdalena shoved her foot on the accelerator and the BMW thrust forward, avoiding the larger car by a couple of feet. Pagan turned his head, saw the Buick brake, swing in an arc, clamber up on the sidewalk in a series of small sparks, then come back again – directly at Magdalena’s car. She evaded the Buick a second time, but only just.

  “Jesus Christ!” Magdalena said. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Pagan didn’t answer. He looked back at the big, powerful Buick as it passed beneath a streetlight. Two figures occupied the sleek vehicle – a gunman and a driver. The gunman leaned from the passenger window. The weapon he held was a Magnum. A single shot cracked the air; it struck the rear bumper of the BMW, ricocheted.

  The Buick roared, veering from side to side in an attempt to draw level with the BMW, striking kerbs, scraping the sides of parked cars, propelled by one murderous purpose. The gunman was still hanging from the window, but the Buick was shuddering in such a way that accuracy was out of the question. When he fired a second time he hit the trunk of the BMW, a dramatic noise like that of a drum struck hard.

  Now Magdalena was approaching the Rickenbacker Causeway which linked Key Biscayne with Miami, a long stretch over black water. The Buick persisted, tracking the BMW at a distance of some fifteen or twenty feet. It had all the reality of a dream, Pagan thought – this absurd chase, the gunman and the salt wind that rolled through the open windows of the BMW. Indisputably real was the next gunshot, the bullet that smashed this time through the rear window and whined inside the BMW and passed between Magdalena and Pagan and departed by way of the windshield. As close as you want to come to death, he thought.

  There was other traffic on the bridge but sparse at this time of day. A few cars came to a halt as the BMW and the Buick screeched past. Halfway across the Causeway the Buick found reserves of speed and moved up alongside the BMW and the gunman fired directly through the passenger window. Pagan heard it, felt it, understood that this particular bullet might have had his name and number on it; but it ripped the air around his neck and sliced harmlessly past Magdalena, who gasped at the proximity of death.

  It was time to shoot back. He’d been delaying in the hope that Magdalena would outrun the other car and thus make it unnecessary for him to fire his gun – he hated the combustible mixture of stray bullets and innocent onlookers in their parked cars – but the Buick clearly had muscle and wasn’t going to be outmanoeuvred.

  The faces of the men in the American car were plainly visible to Pagan under the Causeway lamps. The gunman was square-jawed and blond; he might have been a man peddling door-to-door some religion or sectarian magazine – Mormonism or The Watchtower. The driver was a contrast, dark hair, a brutal little mouth.

  Pagan shoved his gun through the window and fired. He missed first time. His second shot must have struck the driver because the dark-haired man raised his hands from the steering-wheel as if it had become suddenly too hot to touch and the Buick, without guidance, skidded out of control. There was one heart-chilling moment in which the laws of physics appeared to have been contravened when the Buick went sliding toward the edge of the bridge and rose a couple of inches before rushing through the barrier and soaring out, like some doomed flying-machine from Detroit, into the air above Biscayrie Bay. With its horn sounding in panic, it twisted as it fell, as if trying to right itself in mid-air. It struck the spooky black waters, tossed up a vast white garland of foam, and then sunk bonnet-first into the wet darkness. Its tail-lights, lit still, went under like the red eyes of a creature resigned to drowning.

  Pagan sat back and caught his breath. He shut his eyes.

  At the end of the Causeway, Magdalena turned the car into a quiet street behind Brickell Avenue, a place of darkened office buildings. She laid her face upon the rim of the steering-wheel. Her knuckles were the colour of ivory. She was drained.

  “Were they after you or me?” she asked, a breathless quality in her voice.

  “I don’t know,” Pagan replied.

  Magdalena slumped back in her seat, turned her face toward him. “If they were after you, how did they know you were here? Did you tell anyone you were coming to Miami?”

  “Only the Commissioner.”

  “And you trust him?”

  “Beyond a doubt.” A leak, Pagan thought, even as he answered Magdalena’s question. A leak had led to the horror of Shepherd’s Bush. Perhaps the same mysterious source was behind the gunman, somebody no scrambled telephones could ever frustrate, somebody privileged, somebody with an inside track.

  “If nobody knows you’re here, it follows that I was the target,” she said.

  “Maybe. But who sent the hit man?”

  “Christ, I don’t even want to speculate,” she said. And she didn’t. Magdalena was afraid, but she didn’t like to show fear. She could collect herself only if she shut out of her mind the unpleasantness on the bridge. Her brain was running on empty. She’d done nothing but think and brood ever since she’d gone that morning to Garrido’s restaurant.

  Who could have wanted her dead anyway? The only candidate that came to mind was the last one she wanted to consider: Rafael. If he was really through with her, maybe his next step was to get her out of the way permanently. Maybe he thought her a potential embarrassment to him, a risk. She pushed these ideas aside. She had to believe that the intended target was Pagan, not her, to believe without question that Rafael had nothing to do with it.

  For his part Pagan was weary of puzzles; he yearned for solutions. Puzzles became jungles and he needed a pathway, a machete.

  “You can get out here,” she said. “You’ll find a hotel within a couple of blocks.”

  �
��Maybe we should stick together. The waterlogged pair in that Buick might have friends in the vicinity.”

  She reached across him, opened the passenger door. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just sorry you came all this way, Frank.” She kissed him quickly on the side of his face. “Good luck.”

  Pagan stepped out with great reluctance. No sooner had he moved than she pulled the door shut behind him and slipped the car into gear. He gazed at her face behind glass, thinking how forlorn she looked; she stared at him, smiling in an ungenerous way, a distracted little expression. He was irritated for having given in to her without an argument. He should have insisted, stayed with her no matter where she was headed.

  But how could he? There was an urgency in him still, a drive to explore his only other connection, even though he thought he might be too late. What had Magdalena told him anyway? Nothing he could use. Nothing that would bring him closer to what he sought.

  He watched her grey car pass under dull streetlamps until it turned a corner and disappeared.

  The street was now vaguely menacing like all empty streets that lie behind major thoroughfares. Pagan walked in the direction of Brickell Avenue, where it was brighter and busier and the shadows less complex. He found a hotel. As soon as he entered the vast lobby, where enormous palms and ferns reached up to a tall ceiling, he walked to the bank of public telephones beyond the registration desk.

  As he flipped through the pages of the phone directory, he realised he’d left his overnight bag at Magdalena’s house. What the hell. He still had his gun, wallet, passport, painkillers; the rest was just luggage.

  Havana

  Rafael Rosabal left his pleasantly spacious apartment in the Vedado at one a.m. His wife Estela, her long black hair undone and spread upon her lace pillow, woke when she heard him move quietly across the bedroom. She whispered to him, but he didn’t hear, or if he did he was in too much of a hurry to pay attention. They’d made love some hours before, Rosabal curiously mechanical, distracted, Estela unpractised and still shy with her own and her husband’s body. Sex was a disappointment to her; Rafael, who had known many women, loved her as though his mind and body were elsewhere.

  Now he was leaving and still she hadn’t mentioned the miracle of her pregnancy.

  She listened to the sound of a car arrive outside, then the front door of the apartment closed softly. Sometimes Estela suspected a mistress, someone to whom Rafael hurried, someone in whose heated embrace he found the passion he so clearly hadn’t discovered in his marriage. The thought terrified her, all the more so because she could never imagine this woman’s face. Once, waiting in this apartment for Rafael to come home, she’d envisaged a face without features, smooth and eyeless and terrible.

  At other times Estela believed her only true rival was Rafael’s ambition, a far more dangerous enemy than any woman would have been. He restlessly spurred himself on, pursuing furtive goals; there was that strange, secretive business involving her father, the General, and his intermediary Diaz-Alonso – who came to the apartment late at night to whisper with Rafael – but Estela, though she eavesdropped, pretended to have no interest in politics and all the intrigues and gossip it entailed.

  However, absolutely nothing that happened in this apartment escaped her. Everything she heard she stored away at the back of her mind. She was never noticed eavesdropping because she was never really noticed at all – she poured wine, made coffee; a walk-on role, a serving-girl, the Minister’s young and rather vapid wife. But she was smarter than anyone knew. She listened as thoroughly as any bug planted inside a telephone receiver or under the lip of a table or smuggled at the core of a rose, and she memorised what she heard. In a life that was mainly empty, rescued from total vacuity by visits to beauty parlours and hairdressers and those infrequent times when Rafael deigned to screw her, listening and storing up items of information were her principal pastimes.

  Whatever was going on, the quiet phone calls, the late-night conferences, the mysterious comings and goings, the talk of ships and military movements, and the mention of this man Ruhr, whose name was whispered as though it were too evil to pronounce aloud, made her uneasy. She worried about her husband; she worried too about her father, whose most recent utterances in her company were venomously anti-Castro.

  She despised Castro as much as anyone, but she understood the dangers involved in plotting against the fidelistas. People vanished abruptly in the middle of the night and were never heard of again; friends and acquaintances, even those who had once been close to Fidel himself – nobody was immune. She wanted nothing to happen to either Rafael or the General. Nobody had succeeded in overthrowing El Viejo, and Estela doubted that anyone ever could.

  She had been a young woman of privilege in a country that had officially abandoned elitism; unofficially, by rewarding those in favoured positions of power, the system had created a new set of iniquities, and Estela had benefited – a school in Switzerland, a year in France, a summer in Spain. She’d been exposed to freedoms in other countries, and ways unthinkable in Cuba, which she saw now as something of a silly little backwater, crude and unfashionable, a slab of miserably humid land in the Caribbean run by ruffians and gangsters and fought over as if it were El Dorado by men who put vanity before peace, martyrdom before liberty.

  But nothing in her experience had prepared her for this undertow of doom that racked her as she walked to the window and looked down. Absently she stroked her stomach, flat now but soon to be big like a flower newly opened; and yet even the notion of this beautiful baby did not diminish the sense of dark fate she felt. Moonlight lay across the surface of the swimming-pool. The lights of her husband’s car faded between palm trees, and then were gone out of sight. She crossed herself because she wanted divine protection for her husband.

  Had Rafael seen her, he might have mocked her idiot superstition.

  The car, driven by Rosabal’s chauffeur, went as far as Havana harbour, where Rosabal got out. He carefully descended a flight of old stone steps, slippery, studded with barnacles. He paused where the water lapped this ancient stonework. The boat that awaited him was a black, high-speed cigarette-boat, the kind favoured by gun-runners and dope smugglers. It was occupied by two men in shirtsleeves; Rosabal recognised them as attachés to Capablanca. They seemed undignified out of uniform.

  He stepped into the boat. The motor started. The craft speeded across the harbour. Rosabal looked up at the sky; the moon was behind clouds. A brisk wind cuffed the surface of the sea. He turned to gaze back at Havana, which was mainly dark. Now and again measures were taken to save electricity. Lifts failed, streetlights went out, homes were deprived of power. This, Rosabal thought, was Communism in the late twentieth century, a compendium of broken promises and lies, a putrefaction held together by the weakening glue that was fidelisma.

  No more. Before this day was out it would be boxed for burial, with nobody to weep for it.

  President Rafael Rosabal. He liked the sound of it. Rosabal’s regime would be neither democratic nor, like that of Castro, puritanical and prohibitive. It would be a benign dictatorship, at least in the beginning; somewhere along the way, years from now, there might be a measure of popular participation. But first the people had to be weaned from the mindlessness in which Castro had raised them, they had to be freed from the shop-worn cant of Marxism. The citizens were like little kids who’d never chewed on anything but the mush provided to them by Fidel. They had to be led to the table and shown how to use a knife and fork and eat real food.

  Those disgusting agencies of grass-roots espionage, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, would be abolished and their leaders jailed. The ministries, bureaucracies gone mad with that special insanity of paperwork, would be stripped to nothing and the ministers demoted or incarcerated. He would be cautious at first about the use of firing-squads: why alienate the West as Fidel had done thirty years ago? The nightclubs would open again and there would be gambling and if a man wanted a prostitute in Havana,
that was his own business; the government would take its cut. Sin would be highly taxed.

  American and European investors would be courted avidly, Soviet advisors ejected. Nor would Rosabal be blackmailed by the demands of the United States for representative democracy and human rights legislation; in any event, the Americans would be so gratified, at least for years to come, by the end of Cuban Communism, that political and social “irregularities” would be overlooked.

  Rosabal thought of Cuba as a big dark arena; and he had his hand on the generator that would set it brilliantly alight. His hand, nobody else’s. And because he controlled the generator, he had access not only to light but wealth, great wealth, obscene wealth, the kind of riches that a boy from Guantanamo Province should not even dream about. He’d milk Cuba; he’d plunder it as it had never been plundered before. And he’d do it with a benefactor’s smile on his face for an exultant populace that considered him a hero, the one who had rid Cuba of Castro.

  Havana dwindled, the shoreline receded. Twelve miles out a yacht appeared, a dark-hulled fifty-footer, equipped with communications hardware and a mass of antennae. A light blinked three times. Rosabal knew the signal. He was to board the yacht, La Danzarina del Mar.

  The cigarette-boat moved alongside La Danzarina. Rosabal reached for the rope ladder that hung from the side of the yacht and climbed nimbly up to the deck.

  “Rafael, my friend.”

  The man who stepped toward Rosabal had a pleasant smile, although not one that Rosabal readily trusted. Despite the fact it was night, he wore tinted glasses. He was dressed in a double-breasted blazer and smart grey flannels and expensive sneakers which looked as if they’d never been worn before. They squeaked on the teak deck.

  Hands were clasped, warmly shaken. Both men walked along the deck; in the shadows white-shirted crew members kept careful watch, as if they expected a murderous assault from the ocean. Rosabal leaned against the handrail. Havana was almost imperceptible now. There were brief flickers of lightning from the Gulf of Mexico, far to the west.