Mambo Read online

  The Cessna began to come down more rapidly now. How Salgado knew where he was going to land mystified Pagan. There were no obvious markers, no well-defined runways. The airstrip, such as it was, had been hacked out of a tobacco field. Salgado’s guides were thin moonlight and instinct. He flew as if navigating blindfold. The wings of the plane brushed branches and shook foliage before it came finally, thankfully, to a safe landing.

  Pagan stepped down. There was a scent of tobacco in the air, strong and vaguely bitter. What was supposed to happen next? Did Salgado fly out and simply leave him here in this dark, lonely place? No sign of habitation anywhere, no lights, just unbroken night. In a few hours it would be dawn.

  Salgado came out of the cockpit. “This is goodbye, man. I gotta get back before that storm becomes real bad. Somebody’s gonna meet you here.”

  “When?”

  “This is Cuba, friend. Time ain’t measured by watches in this place. They got their own system.”

  “Terrific.” Pagan didn’t care for this information at all. He wanted to hear that Cubans were punctual and reliable and kept all their appointments.

  “Adios,” Salgado said.

  “Wait –”

  “Relax, man. Somebody’s gonna show. Count on it.”

  Pagan was silent. He watched Salgado climb back up into the cockpit. The Cessna turned around, stopped, then began its run, taking off over the field, skimming trees, vanishing, a black plane in a black sky. With the departure of Salgado the night was emptier than before, as if Pagan’s one thread back to safety had been snapped and here he was, stuck, uncertain, in an inhospitable country.

  The night yielded nothing. The call of disturbed birds, frogs croaking, the wind occasionally rushing through plants, nothing else. He felt blind, robbed of any sense of direction.

  Ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, passed before a lantern appeared on the edge of the field, swinging slightly as it came closer. It illuminated the broken-nosed face of a middle-aged man who wore a black shirt and blue jeans and a straw hat.

  “You are Pagan?” Pronounced pah-gan.

  Pagan said that he was. The man came closer, shining his lantern directly into Pagan’s eyes. The stench of kerosene was overwhelming. Pagan stepped away from the flame.

  “My instructions are to take you to the highway. A car waits for you there.” The Cuban, who said he was known as El Boxeador, spoke an English that was understandable if slowly enunciated.

  “How far is the main road?”

  “Two miles. Not far.”

  Pagan, wondering about the nature of the network that had made this trip possible, the collusion between Salgado and El Boxeador, walked behind the lantern. He decided they had to be part of some drug-smuggling ring that Navarro had exposed but chose, for his own reasons, not to prosecute.

  The air was stuffy. The ground underfoot became marsh-like. Here and there a darkened hut was visible, and once a dog barked inquisitively, but nobody appeared to investigate. El Boxeador, who said he was the former welterweight champion of all Cuba – he emphasised all with a sweep of an arm – explained that there were many Castro loyalists even in rural areas, some of them important members of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution – a name that caused him to hawk up a quantity of phlegm and spit with contempt.

  On and on they slogged, through fields and between trees and dense foliage. Pagan felt the familiar ache in his chest and pondered the notion of a painkiller, then decided against it. Now and then El Boxeador switched off his lantern when he heard a noise; then he had to relight it, which was a seemingly complicated task because either the wick was burned low or kerosene was running out, Pagan wasn’t sure which. Finally the highway was reached, a narrow, isolated road with a rough surface that had been patched time and again.

  Pagan looked along the highway, which twisted just into the blackness on either side of the road, half-expecting a military patrol, rifles, the indignity of arrest. But nothing moved, no traffic passed.

  Finally, they came to the place where a car was parked in a grove of trees. It was a late 1950s Oldsmobile, finned, rusted, painted many times, and, like the narrow highway, patched. It had once clearly been in a collision; a clumsy attempt had been made to fibreglass the hole in the boot, but it looked like a scar. There were still thousands of American cars in Cuba, relics of pre-Revolutionary times, loved and cared for by their devout owners.

  El Boxeador gestured to the vehicle proudly and said that it ran like a campeón; a little quirky, maybe, but it had more than four hundred thousand miles on the clock and the Cuban expected it to run for the same distance again. The upholstery was torn. Springs came up through the seats, bypassing the greasy duct tape used to repair the material. Pagan, a hopeless lover of American cars, looked at the dashboard affectionately.

  “In the glove compartment, you will find a flashlight and a map,” El Boxeador said. “The address you need is there also.” He reached inside the car and pointed to a scrap of paper taped to the back of the glove box, where it was barely visible. “There is also a map of Havana. In the Vedado, Rosabal lives on the top floor of a new three-storey apartment building. A place for big shots, you understand. It is guarded usually by an armed man in the hallway, sometimes more than one. You will have to deal with that situation on your own, my friend.”

  Pagan didn’t want to anticipate trouble. If and when he encountered an armed guard he’d cope with it somehow. He shook the Cuban’s hand and then got behind the wheel.

  El Boxeador tapped the window and said, “The road goes all the way to Havana. Good luck!”

  Pagan forced a little smile of gratitude, then stared through the glass at the bleak highway ahead. He had come a long way, but suddenly it seemed to him that the three thousand miles behind him were nothing compared to the hundred that lay directly ahead. Neither tourist nor legitimate visitor, he had absolutely no rights in this country. He started the car, which hummed rather smoothly.

  This is it, he thought. A point of no return had been passed.

  In slightly more than an hour and a half he would be in Havana.

  Ohio

  Before dawn, Sheridan Perry had left Washington for what he considered his safe retreat, his private sanctuary. Now, terrified by last night’s murderous attack and the memory of how he and Kinnaird had fled the scene before the arrival of police, he sat in the back of a Cadillac limousine as it headed through autumnal Ohio. A monotony prevailed in the landscape, a sense of the year moodily turning. A great cold sun the colour of a brand-new penny appeared low on the horizon, sending chilly light across wasted fields and stubble.

  Perry, who saw Harry Hurt each time he shut his eyes and heard once again that dreadful gasp Hurt had made as he turned from the broken window and fell to the floor, his skull shattered like a hammered pumpkin, stared at the fields as if hypnotised. He asked his driver to stop at Youngstown because he wanted coffee. Accompanied by his overweight chauffeur and a stout bodyguard he’d hired from the entourage at Hurt’s apartment, he sat on a stool at the counter and listened to Raving Dave Dudley sing “Six Days on the Road” on the jukebox. Today was the day, Perry thought. Today was the day when things happened in Cuba. Too bad Harry Hurt wasn’t going to be around to see the fruits of his work.

  Perry finished his coffee. He got up from the counter. Shielded by chauffeur and guard, he walked back to the limo.

  North of Youngstown, in the vicinity of Ashtabula, was a house Perry had bought some years before, his secret place. Located on the shore of Lake Erie, the house was set amid dense trees and surrounded by an electrified fence. He’d never taken visitors there, never had a woman out at the house. Only a cleaning lady, a fastidious old bat from Ashtabula, and the Polynesian servant Paco, knew Perry lived there.

  Now, as he travelled north, Perry flicked through business papers he’d lately been neglecting, but found it hard to work up much interest in the cash-flow problems of a lumber company located in Vittoria Conquista, Brazil. He shut the
case, poured himself a small snifter of scotch from the bar, gazed back at the road again.

  The car was only twenty miles from Lake Erie. He began to feel more comfortable the closer he got to his home.

  The placid waters of Lake Erie appeared. It wasn’t the most beautiful stretch of inland water in the world, but just then it looked marvellous to Sheridan Perry.

  His house came in sight beyond stripped trees, mainly cottonwoods whose denuded branches suggested fragile clouds of smoke. The house, constructed of fine stained pine, stood on a knoll. A remote device opened the electrified gate in the fence and the limousine went through, then climbed the drive up to the front door.

  Perry was glad to be here. He stepped out of the car.

  Mrs Stakowski from Ashtabula appeared on the porch, and so did the manservant Paco in his snow-white jacket. They looked nervous. They never expected Perry to visit this house in late fall. Usually he came only in mid-spring, sometimes very early summer, because he disliked the climate during other months. He stepped up to the porch. The fat chauffeur and the stout bodyguard followed.

  Home, Perry thought. Here he had his computers, his modems and fax machines, and current stock-market prices flashed across his TV screens, he had his sizeable hot-tub and vibrating bed and his library of pornographic movies from the Philippines, he had his electronic games and his collection of rifles.

  “Welcome,” said the houseboy.

  Mrs Stakowski opened the door for Perry to enter. She did so with noticeable reluctance and a slight frown whose meaning Perry could not read. The room was dim; he couldn’t make out anything but the shapes of three men who stood near the fireplace. Perry dropped his briefcase. He heard Mrs Stakowski groan and say she was sorry, but she hadn’t had any choice, the strangers were armed; then there was a flash of white as Paco scampered across the porch and headed for the woods. Perry, terrified, turned toward the open door, the porch beyond, where the overweight chauffeur stood motionless.

  Sheridan Perry was cut down by gunfire from automatic pistols. It was over in seconds. He was shot in the throat and chest and groin and although he made a valiant effort to turn and flee, the attempt was hopeless; he staggered on to the porch, slipped and fell against the thigh of the chauffeur, rose again with a kind of instinctive strength, then toppled over the porchrail into a pile of raked leaves.

  Mrs Stakowski was shot once through the skull and fell to the bottom of the steps. The chauffeur tried to flee and was shot in the back of the neck. The bodyguard freed his pistol from a shoulder-holster and returned the fire into the dim recess of the house, but he was caught by several bullets in the windpipe and one in the eye.

  The three killers conferred in Spanish. It was decided that the houseboy, Paco, was barely worth pursuing. What could he tell the authorities anyway? Besides, as the Cuban killers guessed, he’d never go to the cops for one simple reason: he had no green card.

  Santiago de Cuba Province, Cuba

  Before daylight, the first Cuban troops began to move through the countryside around the city of Santiago. They travelled in Soviet trucks. The convoys passed under the shadows of the Sierra Maestra mountains where, more than thirty years ago, Fidel Castro had gathered his revolutionaries together for their assault on the regime of Batista. In the dark before dawn these mountains seemed indomitable and mysterious, lost in shadows and vapours, legends and myths, more iconography than geography.

  The troops, a battalion of them in fifty-three trucks, went by road through the ancient city of Bayamo, where the vibrations of the vehicles rattled shop windows and stained-glass and trembled the old bell in the tower of San Juan Evangelista. The convoys, enlarged at Bayamo by thousands of reservists from the Territorial Troops Militia, passed propagandist billboards with pictures of the blue-uniformed teenagers of the Youth Brigade and captions like En La Educatión Y La Salud. From Bayamo the convoys would eventually reach Holguin, where manoeuvres would begin near Guardalavaca Beach, which would be closed to visitors and tourists for a day or two.

  At the same time as the convoy rumbled through the countryside, four battleships of the Cuban Navy – built in Odessa twenty years ago and obsolete by Soviet standards – sailed around Guantanamo towards Guardalavaca Beach. Shortly after dawn, ten aeroplanes, modified versions of Russian MIGs, flew over Santiago towards Holguin. These too were to play a role in the manoeuvres.

  Thus was the province of Santiago de Cuba laid defenceless. And the site for the placement of the cruise missile, a mere fifteen miles from the historic Morro Fortress on Santiago’s shoreline, was occupied by a score of anti-Communist officers and more than two hundred men, some of them Soviet-trained missile technicians, who had remained behind on the specific orders of General Capablanca. They would be joined later by the invasionary force from Honduras with its sophisticated weaponry and advanced fighter aircraft that would destroy Castro’s air force on the ground; and later still, on the road to Havana, by other disaffected officers and their battalions, a number that Capablanca estimated would total more than ten thousand fighting men. Backed by popular support, by peasants prepared to take up arms against Castro, by disenchanted men and women willing to strike and block main roads and occupy public buildings, by the whole underground movement Rosabal said was firmly in place and ready to rise, how could there be any doubt about the outcome?

  West Virginia

  The near-sighted technician at the isolated tracking-station, which was dome-shaped and stood in wooded privacy like a very large boiled egg, had analysed the early photographs transmitted from the satellite twenty-three thousand miles above the earth. Magnified many times, enhanced by computers, these images depicted various blobs that to any untrained eye would suggest absolutely nothing. The technician was skilled, however; he also knew what he was looking for.

  He telephoned a number in Washington DC. A young lady named Karen answered in a silken voice that made the lonely technician experience a certain sexual longing. She asked for the pictures to be sent at once by courier to the office of Allen Falk. The technician, who spent far too many hours without human company, and who found Karen’s voice delightful, offered to deliver them personally.

  18

  Havana

  Magdalena Torrente’s driver was a thin nervous man named Alberto Canto, a physician. He met her at the darkened airfield between Havana and San José de Las Lajas where her plane from Florida touched down. She hadn’t flown the small Piper herself. She had the experience to do it, but if she was having a hard time keeping herself under control, how could she expect to control an aeroplane? Besides, she knew nothing of the terrain, the destination. Both plane and pilot – a tough, leathery little man who worked in Havana as a tourist guide for Cubatur and pretended to be a happy Communist – had been provided by Garrido, who had made Magdalena’s travel arrangements with meticulous care, including the arrival of Canto in his small Lada automobile.

  Garrido had pulled all the strings in Havana he still could. Old favours were called home; old friendships had new life breathed into them. Long-distance calls were made, surreptitious conversations took place, places and times were synchronised in Garrido’s own fastidious way. The process electrified the old man; the discovery of Rosabal’s treachery excited him in a manner he hadn’t felt since his heyday in Santiago. Instead of bickering with his fellow exiled democrats, and raising funds for a new revolution whose date had always been annoyingly vague, he had something concrete to deal with at last, something with a hard centre: Rosabal had betrayed everything and everybody, and there could only be one kind of justice.

  Now, at the edge of the deserted, wind-blown airstrip, Magdalena stepped into the car and Alberto Canto rolled down the window as soon as he saw her produce a cigarette. She lit it anyway. Her hand trembled and she hoped Canto wouldn’t notice. She held Garrido’s green pouch in her lap, still unopened.

  Canto said, “I will drop you as close to the place as I can. Sometimes there are extra police patrols in that neighbourh
ood. They make me uneasy. This whole undertaking upsets me.”

  “So why did you agree to pick me up?”

  “Because I’m on your side. Which is not to say that I have the constitution of a hero. Quite the contrary. I’m just a scared general practitioner. I don’t take risks. I don’t have the guts. I couldn’t do what you just did. I couldn’t fly illegally into a country in the dead of night. Especially a country like Cuba.”

  You do what it takes, Magdalena thought. And sometimes it surprises you. She said nothing, looked from her window. Havana loomed up around her, neighbourhoods of small houses, shacks, apartments half-built, scaffolding and ladders and cement-mixers in disarray. Unkempt suburbs gave way to another Havana, the central part of the city where imposing buildings and monuments crowded the night sky. Here and there new architecture appeared among the old, the occasional dreary high-rise block overwhelming some decrepit colonial mansion.

  Her memories of this place, which she’d last seen at the age of ten, were different from the present reality. What she recalled most were warm hazy nights and palm trees and crowds of students, usually arguing politics, strolling along San Lazaro Street. Nobody argued politics in public anymore. She remembered the stands that sold hamburgers and oysters on Infanta Street and the delicious smells that rose in the humid air. The stands were probably gone by now; the oysters almost certainly. She recalled enviably beautiful, well-dressed women on San Rafael and how she longed to grow up and enter that glamorous life, exclusive nightclubs and dance-halls with tuxedoed orchestras.

  She glanced at Alberto Canto. Sweat ran down his neck and dampened the open collar of his white shirt. He took a linen handkerchief from his jacket and pressed it against his face.

  “You’ve got a lot to lose if you’re caught in my company,” Magdalena said.