Mambo Page 40

  The Lada mounted the pavement and kept coming. On and on, doggedly, it kept rolling. Rosabal finally fired when the small car was about twenty feet from the BMW. The windshield shattered but the Lada wouldn’t stop. It struck the side of Rosabal’s car, swerved across the pavement and the passenger door was thrown open. Magdalena reached for the open door, then threw herself toward it with a gymnast’s grace; she managed to grab the edge and hang on as the Lada grazed the wall surrounding the apartment building. She closed her eyes. Air rushed against her. The little car bounced off the pavement and back into the street.

  Rosabal fired a second time. The sound of the pistol coincided with the roar of more thunder. You couldn’t tell one from the other.

  Magdalena slumped into the passenger seat. “You’re braver than you thought, Canto,” she said. Jesus, the pain. The swift knife-like pain.

  “I saw your predicament. What was I supposed to do?”

  Magdalena turned her face, looked back, saw Rafael on the pavement surrounded by a few inquisitive neighbours. “He’ll call the cops. He’s bound to. Can you stick to back streets?”

  “I can try,” Canto said.

  “Take me to the place where you found me,” she replied. She was breathing hard. “The airfield.”

  Canto glanced at her. “You sound terrible. Is something wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  He saw it then: blood stained the front of her shirt. She was holding a hand loosely over the place, as if trying to conceal it.

  “You’ve been hit.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s not important.”

  “You’re talking to a doctor. I decide what’s important.”

  “Take me to the airfield. That’s important.”

  “Not before I’ve checked your wound.”

  “What do you want to do? Stop the car right here in the middle of this street? Bandage me? Drive, Canto. You can fix me when we get to the airfield.”

  She stared through the windshield. Imagine Rosabal’s bullet didn’t hit you. Your lover’s bullet didn’t pass through your flesh. Imagine nothing happened. You’re well. Everything’s fine. You’re going back to the airfield. Intact. It wasn’t like that, though.

  She moaned, bent forward, held her hand over the wound. It wasn’t clean. It was soft and wet, ragged and appalling.

  “I’m going to pull over the first chance I get,” Canto said.

  “The hell you are.”

  “I have a stinking bedside manner at the best of times. Don’t argue with me.”

  She tipped her head back, closed her eyes, bit on her lower lip. She had a gloomy sense of futility, an emptiness in her heart. Had she come all the way to Cuba only to lose her life? Was this it? Was this the shitty sum of things?

  This miserable exit. What a way to go. She wanted another kind of ending. Now she wanted some justice. She wanted revenge the way Garrido had yearned for it. She realised she still loved Rosabal with all the intensity of a victim’s love – a pathetic compulsion, a deficiency of her character. She had no more control over the feeling than she would a virus in her blood. A victim’s love was not what she wanted. When you loved like that you could never know any freedom.

  There was only one way to be free from it.

  She opened her eyes and looked at Canto through her pain. “I’m a fighter, Canto. I always have been.”

  “Somehow I don’t doubt it,” Canto remarked, although he didn’t like the sound of her erratic breathing.

  Rain had begun to fall in huge drops when Frank Pagan reached his destination some forty-five minutes after Magdalena Torrente had gone. The street was quiet and empty by then. A badly dented BMW was parked outside the apartment building. Pagan, damp and not very happy, went into the lobby, passed the desk, headed for the stairs. He reached the top floor, took out his Bernardelli. First things first. Lightly he tried the door handle. Predictably locked.

  He knocked. He held the gun pointed at the door.

  The woman who came to answer was lovely and pale and indifferent. She held a white lace handkerchief, in which was wrapped an ice-cube, to the side of her head. The sight of Pagan’s gun made little impression on her. Pagan walked into the apartment.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked.

  “A little,” she shrugged. She took the ice-cube from her forehead. There was a marked swelling between ear and eye. “Where is Rosabal?” Pagan asked.

  “Gone.” Spoken without interest. “Solito. Nobody else is here. See for yourself.”

  Pagan looked inside the other rooms of the flat. They were empty. “Where did he go?”

  “What difference does it make to you where my husband goes?”

  So this was the wife, this was Magdalena’s rival for Rafe’s affections. Pagan wondered what had taken place in this apartment that had left her with such a vivid contusion. Was Rafe a wife-batterer as well as a philanderer?

  “I need to find him,” Pagan said. There was a shelf of photographs behind the woman. One, prominently displayed, depicted Rosabal in the company of Fidel. Both men were smiling polite smiles. It was posed, artificial.

  “Why?” the woman asked.

  “I’m looking for a child. I believe your husband can help me find her. She’s with a man called Ruhr.”

  Estela Rosabal walked to the photograph of her husband and Castro and picked it up. She studied it for a moment, then she dropped the picture to the rug and twisted her heel in the dead centre of it. Estela gazed at the slivers, the way Rafael’s face appeared imprisoned behind bars of broken glass.

  Then she looked at Pagan. “You’ve come a long way,” she said.

  “Yes. A long way.”

  “I will help you find the child.”

  She told him about La Mandadera, about Ruhr on board the vessel, about the destination in Santiago. Sometimes her voice dropped to a whisper and Pagan had to ask her to say things over again.

  “How can I get to Santiago?”

  “By road is too slow. You must fly there.” She told him it was about five hundred miles from Havana to Santiago. She wasn’t sure exactly.

  “How can I find a plane?” he asked.

  Estela Rosabal shut her eyes and did not answer for a long time, so long indeed that Pagan assumed she hadn’t heard the question.

  “I will help you with that too,” she said finally.

  19

  The Caribbean

  The storm that had begun in the Gulf of Mexico carved out a wide path as it rolled in a southerly direction. Around Havana winds measured forty miles an hour; over the Isla de la Juventud and south-east between the shoreline of Cuba and the Caymans they were fiercer, reaching fifty and sixty. Later in the morning, when the storm would move due west of Jamaica, hundred-mile winds would rage over the Caribbean.

  Had La Mandadera sailed from Cabo Gracias a Dios some two hours earlier, it could not have avoided the impenetrable black heart of the storm that would make the sea west of Jamaica a roiling nightmare; as it was, the ship still couldn’t escape brutally damaging gales and cold blinding rain squalls that assailed it after it had passed between the Caymans and Jamaica. Captain Luis Sandoval, whose experience of tempests had never lessened his fear of them, estimated the wind at between fifty-five and sixty miles an hour, ten on the Beaufort Scale.

  His ship lurched and plunged on huge swells. Leaden clouds darkened the early sun as they raced. Rain, sometimes turning to a hard hail, relentlessly scoured the decks. There was a deranged fusion here of elements and artifacts, weather and steel, cloud and smoke, one became the other in that dire place beyond boundaries. Day turned back to night within a matter of minutes, a weird compression of time, a suspension of natural laws.

  Steffie Brough lay on her bunk. The tiny cabin pitched and rolled as if on castors, and the ceiling rose and fell. Waves covered the small porthole. The battered ship creaked. In her imagination Steffie could see bolts and screws come loose and whole metal panels crash into the sea.

  She shut
her eyes and fought the urge to throw up. She clutched the side of her bunk and held on, thinking that with every pitch of the vessel it would surely capsize and sink to the bottom of the sea.

  Once, when she propped herself up on an elbow and tried to rise, she was thrown back against the wall and struck her head, which ached now. She hauled a blanket up over her face and tried to make herself very small – microscopic – as if she might go unnoticed by the vicious weather.

  She heard the cabin door open. Gunther Ruhr, soaked, hair plastered across his head, came inside. He was dripping; his feet squelched. She didn’t look at him. She kept her face under the blanket. She heard him dry himself with a towel, then he was so curiously silent for a long time that she sneaked a look.

  He was standing at the small sink, the mirror – sharpening something – swish, swish, swish, the sound of an old-fashioned razor on a leather strap – swish, swish, swish – she saw it was no razor, but his knife – and he was whistling under his breath, a whistle that was practically a throaty whisper, spooky and tuneless –

  The cabin shifted, spun round. She was back home, she was riding her mare across wintry fields, and she’d never gone near the old Yardley farm, it was just too dull and drab, it didn’t attract her, so instead she rode over Crossfields Hollow and into the village where she stopped by the ice-cream shop and had a chocolate cone and then and then and then …

  She felt Ruhr pull back the blanket. She turned her face away from him. He held his knife in one hand. Steffie drew herself back as far as she could until her spine was pressed to the wall. Ruhr looked the length of her leg to the place where his fingerprints had left bruises from before. She snatched the blanket, covered herself.

  He sat down, placed the knife upon his thigh.

  He listened to the way the storm blasted the ship. If there were different kinds of weather to suit different personalities, storms were what most pleased Gunther Ruhr. They created chaos, they broke down peace and order. They raged for hours and drove the sea and the sky together in one cauldron of turmoil. They sank ships. They excited him; liberated him.

  Waves rose across the deck; up and down, down and up, the sea tossed La Mandadera as though it were a craft made from matchsticks.

  Ruhr laid a finger against the scar the girl had inflicted around his eye with her nail. Then he picked up his knife from his thigh and drew the blanket back from Steffie Brough’s body; she held the edge of the blanket tightly, resisted, refused to yield even when he slid the point of the blade gently across her cheek and drew to the surface of her skin a thread of blood. She would hold on forever if she had to, she’d struggle no matter what it took –

  Without any trouble, Ruhr hauled the blanket back and laughed. He cuffed the child and she cowered, huddling in the corner, staring at Ruhr with hatred and fear and hopelessness.

  The knife flashed just as there was a loud knock on the cabin door.

  In the dark hold one of the lashes that bound the missile had come undone. The cylinder, with its armed nose-cone, tipped forward at an angle of twenty degrees. A report had reached Luis Sandoval on the bridge that the weapon was listing in an alarming way. A simple man, he did not know that the missile would not explode accidentally. He believed there was every chance of a holocaust and so he sent an agile seaman, harnessed for his own safety, with an order for Gunther Ruhr to descend inside the hold and secure the proyectil.

  Santiago de Cuba Province

  The outer reaches of storm spread inland toward the province of Holguin, where General Capablanca was forced to postpone his diversionary manoeuvres; tanks were stuck on beaches, sodden soldiers sheltered beneath trees, aeroplanes were grounded, ships anchored unsteadily three miles out in the Atlantic.

  The ill-tempered gale blew over Bayamo and into the Sierra Maestra, where several hundred anti-Castro rebels sheltered in damp caves with their rifles. Then it slashed across Santiago itself, whipping the Bay, blowing down telephone lines, taking off the roof of the Leningrado Restaurant on San Juan Hill, flattening cabins at the Daiquiri Motel on Baconao Park Road, sinking a fishing-boat two miles out of Siboney Beach.

  From the rain-washed helicopter in which Frank Pagan uneasily sat, nothing could be seen of the ground below nor the sky above. The chopper, rocking in wild currents of air, was piloted by a blunt torpedo of a man Estela Rosabal had summoned – former Lieutenant Alejandro Bengochea, a sixty-three-year-old flyer retired from the Cuban Air Force.

  It was the worst ride in Pagan’s experience. He expected the flying machine to plummet down at any moment through rainy turbulence and explode on the landscape, but Bengochea, as if he had a special contract with gravity and air currents, kept the machine magically airborne. Bengochea, who wore an old revolver on his hip, spoke no English, nor did he appear to question his flying mission – it had come to him from none other than General Capablanca’s esteemed daughter, and that was good enough for him. Had Estela asked him to fly through a ring of fire or aim directly for the moon he would have done so.

  For most of his adult life, Bengochea had built his world around the Capablanca family. He was a courtier, Estela his princess. He had known her since she was a small child. He even had home movies, which he sometimes watched all these years later in his small empty apartment in Marianao. They depicted him with the princess riding on his shoulders at the age of seven or building sandcastles with her on the beach at Varadero. The Capablancas had been his only family in a life of unbroken solitude imposed upon him by a military career of complete dedication.

  Nothing scared Alejandro Bengochea. Notions of immortality were for the very young. He’d fought against the Yanquis at the Bay of Pigs, flown helicopter missions in Angola ten years ago, been imprisoned and tortured in the time of the Batista regime, he had even fallen out of favour with Castro’s government in the early 1970s (he was “a reactionary”, they said), only to be spared imprisonment by the intervention of General Capablanca. What was there to be afraid of? His body was scarred everywhere, one eye had been partially blinded under the ministrations of Batista’s thugs. Now he wore black glasses as if they were fixtures never to be removed, not even in sleep. He was a human being living beyond his span. Lucky Alejandro he was called. But he knew how to fly this helicopter with amazing skill, how to keep it aloft in gales.

  Here and there, between squalls when the wind withdrew, the beaten landscape could be seen – beaches, a shoreline, sand dunes, visible only for seconds then swallowed again. Pagan shut his eyes. The roar of the helicopter was stunning, thudding inside his head. What he’d seen of the ocean appalled him. White, frenzied, it seethed and foamed furiously over sand and sea-walls. He would not have been surprised to see it reach up and drag the helicopter down into its demanding depths.

  The storm caught the chopper, raised it in the sky like a leaf. Alejandro Bengochea enjoyed it. The weather challenged, even amused him, as if this were a personal test between himself and the vicissitudes of the planet. He took the chopper up and up, forcing it beyond the reaches of pandemonium into a momentary calm, an oasis in the sky.

  Through another brief window in the ragged rain squall Pagan saw that the helicopter was directly over water now. Land was no longer visible. Fall from this place and you were a dead man; in that frightening, tumultuous sea your body might never be found.

  He constantly scanned the waters. How was it possible to spot anything down there in that fury? And if you stared long enough and hard, you could even begin to hallucinate the appearance of small islands, or whales, or sea-troubled freighters – greys imposed on greys, and nothing distinguishable. Pagan, whose usual determination was weakening, felt the search was hopeless. But Bengochea loved this sea-hunt with all the devotion of a bird-watcher on the trail of a rare species. He wouldn’t give up and go back to the shore.

  The chopper rocked, lost height, Bengochea laughed; he had a relationship with destiny quite alien to Pagan. Down and down the helicopter went, until it seemed inevitable it would plunge into
the water.

  “There!” Pagan pointed downward.

  A freighter, camouflaged by the sea, pitched. Waves frothed over the deck. The ship looked appallingly insubstantial on the swell, something that might have been set on a pointless journey by a child’s hand.

  Blinding rain and spray rose up. There was nothing to see, no world beyond violent water, no sky, no ship, nothing.

  The freighter seemed to have vanished entirely, leaving Pagan to wonder if, after all, he’d seen anything.

  The intensity of the storm overwhelmed Captain Luis Sandoval. His radio had ceased to function, his navigational equipment was useless. Locked in his sightless, airless bridge, a glass prison, he guessed he was some nine miles from Santiago. His first mate was an experienced old seaman named Zaldivar, but even this seasoned mariner had no idea of the exact location of the freighter. The storm reduced perceptions, destroyed instincts, threw men back on guesswork.

  Luis Sandoval cursed this weather, this tormenta. When he looked up he prayed for a break, a sign of sunlight – but the rains kept coming and the decks were submerged. From the engine room had come an ominous report that about nine inches of water had collected below and that the pumps were labouring. This goddam bitch of a boat! Sandoval thought. This puta!

  Zaldivar, his white beard grizzly, his face etched by the acid of too many suns, was a superstitious man who blamed the presence of Ruhr and el proyectil malvado for the freighter’s predicament. Without the crippled alemán, none of this would have happened. Hadn’t the day begun quietly? Hadn’t there been a clear sky and a quiet sea? Aiee, it was the fault of the freak with the vile hand. There could be no disputing Zaldivar’s nautical logic, grounded as it was in a system that transcended the empirical. The sea operated under the laws of its own gods, who were furious beyond all reason.

  Sandoval ceased to listen to the old man’s babblings. He peered from the bridge. Along the deck he saw, as if it were a figure from an hallucination, Gunther Ruhr moving toward the hold. A rope was tied round his waist and snaked behind him to some safe point. He was going to secure the missile. Zaldivar rubbed his beard and shook his head as Ruhr opened the hold and vanished into darkness.