Mambo Page 42

  Pagan slumped in the narrow seat, squashed alongside the child. His eyes stung from salt, his hair was plastered to his skull, his clothing and skin so completely soaked he had no idea where fabric ended and flesh began; the storm had welded him to his clothes. His skin was numb.

  “We’ve got to keep the ship in view,” he said to Bengochea.

  Bengochea appeared not to have understood. Pagan grabbed his arm, pointed down towards the sea. “The Mandadera. We’ve got to follow the bloody ship to Santiago. Understand?”

  Bengochea shook his head and pointed to the dials in front of him. “Necesito gasolina. Comprendo?”

  “Gasolina?”

  Bengochea rapped a dial in front of him with his fingertips. “See? Vacante. Comprendo?”

  The chopper lurched suddenly; the fading storm, as if made petulant by its failure to down the craft, seized the machine and gave it one final, terrible shake. The girl, stricken by panic, pressed her face into Pagan’s shoulder. The helicopter dropped rapidly, but then the storm, like a fist at last unlocking, released it; now there was only rain and a slight wind and a green rainswept landscape just beyond the shoreline ahead.

  Pagan stroked the girl’s wet hair. She was uncertain about his touch, but she tolerated it the way a suspicious animal might put up with a stranger’s caress.

  Bengochea flew directly toward the coastal road that linked Manzanillo with Santiago. On an airstrip outside Palma Soriano, forty miles from Santiago, he brought the craft down. He got out. Pagan watched him walk towards a one-storey building where he went inside. The girl, her face still pressed against Pagan’s shoulder, stared vacantly across the tarmac. She shivered, said nothing. Pagan looked out at the grey sky and listened to the way rain fell sharply on the roof of the cabin. He was bitterly cold, sneezed once or twice, longed for a good fire, warm clothes, dry shoes.

  Soon the Mandadera would reach the safe harbour of Santiago. Presumably Ruhr and the missile would go ashore there. In her rather glassy, dazed manner, Estela Rosabal had said that the missile – according to her husband – was intended to do nothing more than discredit Castro.

  Pagan mulled this over while he waited for Bengochea to return. A missile to discredit Castro, to make him look like a warmonger. To justify his overthrow. To justify the coup Magdalena had talked about. Fidel has a missile! Look! He intends to use it! He intends to blow up some part of the world! Crazy bastard! But Rosabal overthrows the old dictator in an heroic coup; nuclear holocaust averted by dashing new President of Cuba. Wasn’t that what Estela had whispered? Rafael believes he will be the next president.

  Question: What nation would be most threatened by a missile on Cuba?

  That was obvious. Ergo: by overthrowing Fidel and destroying the missile, Rosabal would be nothing less than a saint in American eyes. American aid would flood the island. American trade would bring riches. Rich tourists. The old guard would flock back to Havana: gamblers, call-girls, pimps, the drug-dealers, gunmen, low-lifers, outlaws, the dubious bankers and lawyers.

  Pagan sneezed again and lost his chugging train of thought. His chest throbbed. His eyes watered. His mind was a cold, numb place. What he wanted was dryness, and food, then sleep.

  Bengochea came out of the building and walked back towards the helicopter. He was smiling. He had clearly found a source of fuel. He looked up at Pagan and made a thumbs-up sign.

  “Abundancia,” he said cheerfully. “Immediatamente.”

  Rafael Rosabal had flown by jet through the edge of the storm from Havana to Santiago. There he’d been met by a half-dozen of Capablanca’s officers – two of whom carried expensive cameras to photograph the missile in the launch position.

  Followed by a truck containing a score of armed soldiers, Rosabal was driven by jeep out of the storm-swept city and along the coastal road toward Siboney. The nice irony did not escape him. It was from a farmhouse at Siboney that Castro had planned his first assault on the Batista regime in 1953, six years before his ultimate triumph. From this place Castro’s revolutionaries had carried out a failed attack, a comedy of errors and confused timing, on the garrison at Moncada. Now monuments to the dead rebels lined the roadside and the farm had become a shrine to deify El Viejo. It was one of Communism’s many hypocrisies: God was an unofficial entity, forbidden, but men like Castro could ascend to the vacant summits formerly occupied by the deity.

  The jeep took Rosabal to a site about two miles from Siboney, a secluded meadow, ringed by trees and sheltered somewhat from the wind, where the missile would be placed. A house – in the possession of a farmer sympathetic to the new revolution – had been placed at Rosabal’s disposal. Rosabal sat silently with Capablanca’s officers on the screened porch and listened to what was left of the storm and waited.

  He would have preferred better weather, but the storm was gradually diminishing; the Mandadera would surely reach its destination. The missile would get here. Delayed, but it would still get here.

  Rosabal looked at his watch every so often. Now and again he rose and walked up and down the porch and stared out across the meadow, watching rain sweep through the trees. He was tense. The moment he’d worked for was almost here. The time he’d dreamed about for so long was almost upon him. How could he remain perfectly cool?

  He thought about Magdalena Torrente.

  He was positive he’d hit her with his second shot. He’d seen a look of pain go across her face before she vanished inside the unexpected Lada. When she’d disappeared, he had telephoned influential friends at the Ministry of the Interior, who immediately set in motion an intensive search of Havana for the Lada and its occupants. At Rosabal’s insistence, the search, though widespread, was being conducted with a certain discretion. Delicate matters of state, Rosabal had explained, were involved. Make no noise. Do not arrest people carelessly. When the occupants of the Lada were discovered, the female passenger was to be shot on sight.

  Magdalena Torrente meant nothing to him anyway. Nor had she ever. She was somebody he fucked, somebody who brought him bundles of cash contributed by the misguided. It was almost as if he were being paid exorbitant sums of money for servicing her.

  Rosabal sat down. Suddenly he could feel building inside him the kind of doubts he so rarely entertained these days. What if everything went wrong? What if Magdalena Torrente survived and informed the fidelista authorities about Rosabal’s revolution? What if this, what if that? He had to keep cool, serene, maintain a calm centre. The poor boy, the cane-cutter’s son from Guantanamo, still lived somewhere inside him, that undernourished child who felt he did not deserve any kind of success. He was angry all at once with the ghost of his upbringing. A familiar darkness clouded his vision. It was not the time to be insecure. It was time for resolve, for confidence. It was time to assassinate the past.

  Rain pelted the windows, but the heavy skies were less ominous now. The officers smoked cigarettes, studied the rain, said nothing. They too were tense. Now and then a vehicle passed on the road nearby, at which times Rosabal always stared at the meadow expectantly. But the truck carrying the missile did not appear.

  When the telephone rang Rosabal’s first reaction was one of unease: bad news, he was sure of it. Perhaps the scheme had been discovered and already those forces aligned against Castro had been routed and arrested, and the names of the conspirators given to Castro loyalists.

  An officer picked up the phone. The caller wanted the Minister. Rosabal took the receiver and heard the voice of a certain Captain Sanchez of the political police in Havana. The connection was terrible. Sanchez’s voice echoed.

  “We found the car in San José de las Lajas driven by a certain Alberto Canto. A physician, Minister.”

  “And?”

  “He was taken for questioning.”

  “Has he spoken? Did he mention the woman?”

  “He said she was badly wounded. He claims she was going to make her way to Matanzas. It seems she intended to arrange some kind of black-market transportation back to th
e United States. He didn’t think she could possibly survive. The wound is deep.”

  “Shoot the physician. Concentrate on the woman. It can’t be impossible to find a wounded woman in the fifty miles between San José and Matanzas.”

  “We’re looking, Minister.”

  “Look harder. Report to me the moment you have killed her.”

  Rosabal put the receiver down. So she was wounded, badly so. Poor, ambitious Magdalena, who thought she had it all. He shook his head. Ambition could sometimes be a deceiver. Rosabal smiled to himself, then turned to look across the meadow.

  There it was. At last. There it was.

  The big truck carrying the tarpaulined missile and the control module came slowly across the muddy path that traversed the meadow. It was followed by a van in which sat a group of technicians who were here to disarm the missile. Gunther Ruhr was visible behind the windshield of the large truck. Next to him was a driver provided by the General.

  Rosabal stepped from the porch. Magnetised by the missile, unmindful of the rain – softer now – that fell upon his eyelids, he hurried across the glistening grass to the place where the truck had come to a halt.

  20

  Santiago de Cuba

  Alejandro Bengochea’s optimism about refuelling quickly was unfounded. It took almost an hour for a fuel truck to show up and another fifteen minutes during which he haggled with the driver and a bribe was eventually negotiated. Pagan, an impatient man at the best of times, was sorely tested by the length of the transaction. He had images of Gunther Ruhr and the missile disappearing from the face of the earth.

  Then, at the conclusion of the deal, the chopper would not start. Plugs and cables in the engine were damp, electrical connections failed to make contact. It took Bengochea another hour of patient labour to bring the machine back to life and fly the forty miles from Palma Soriano to the city of Santiago. He cursed for a while, muttering about low-grade plugs and cables without waterproofing, thieves and cheats and black-marketeers who profited from the re-sale of state petrol.

  In the grey morning light the storm’s path was evidenced by fallen trees and upturned huts and cars that had been tossed on their sides. Inside the city itself were houses without roofs and statues that had been blown ingloriously down and small parks where everything had been flattened – plants, trees, fences. Rain thudded against the skin of the helicopter, but the wind had died to fifteen, twenty miles an hour.

  Pagan saw the docks come in view below the railway station. A score of ships were anchored there. They flew a variety of flags – South American, East European, Scandinavian, Panamanian. Alejandro Bengochea directed the chopper up and over the harbour, while Pagan, conscious of the silent child who sat directly behind him breathing in a shallow, monotonous way, scanned the vessels below. Rain blew over unloaded cargo; discoloured crates littered the docks, unpacked agricultural machinery lay exposed; brand new trucks, recently unloaded, filled up with rainwater.

  The Mandadera was docked between a Norwegian freighter and a Venezuelan tanker. Bengochea steered the chopper over her deck. There was no sign of life. Ruhr and the missile had already gone.

  Bengochea was undismayed by the ship’s emptiness. He flew back over the city, surveying the streets, eyes narrowed; how could a missile be hidden from view? Since the ship could only recently have docked, the missile couldn’t have gone far. It wasn’t the kind of cargo a truck could transport quickly and easily. Bengochea took the chopper up higher, following the line of the coast that led out of Santiago in an easterly direction.

  Pagan had the nagging feeling that he should cut his losses and somehow get the girl back home and forget Ruhr and the nuclear hardware. But how could he simply take Steffie Brough back to London and leave Ruhr and the weapon behind? No: he couldn’t go back, not now, not after all this; besides, he had the belief, common to men who are more optimist than cynic, that the deeper the shit one had to go through to get to it, the happier the ending had to be.

  Hold the thought, Frank.

  Bengochea flew out of the city in a northerly direction. He passed over a rum factory and a flour mill and an oil refinery. There was no sign of a truck carrying a missile through the streets. He turned the helicopter around and flew south-west, back in the direction of the sea. Donde? he kept asking. Donde? Shaking his head in frustration, he flew the chopper low along the shoreline. Then he swung away from the water’s edge and back through the rainy haze. The Sierra Maestra mountains, forlorn and unwelcoming, could be seen in the distance.

  “It’s got to be some bloody place,” Pagan said. The nuclear needle in the haystack.

  Bengochea may not have understood the words, but he recognised Pagan’s tone. He shrugged sympathetically, then lowered the chopper so that it barely skimmed the tops of trees.

  Bengochea turned the aircraft round again. He flew directly over Puerto Siboney, then swung inland away from the beaches, over farmlands and a coffee plantation.

  And then the missile was suddenly visible in a meadow surrounded by tall trees. It sat on the back of a long truck and looked incongruous in this rainy pastoral setting. Pagan saw it too. He wanted Bengochea to bring the chopper down into the field, his first quick impulse, but there were too many people on the ground. From a height of fifteen hundred feet Pagan could see men work around the missile, which was being raised by hydraulic jacks into a launch position on the back of a long truck. Uniformed soldiers stood guard in the grassy field.

  As a ruse to discredit Castro, Pagan thought, it was elaborate and convincing, right down to the detail of the missile being cranked into a firing position. Somebody down there would have the responsibility of taking pictures, of course. Photographers, not scribes, were the true recorders of history. Nothing in this world was so persuasive as a striking image, one the masses might digest easily: here was Castro’s dangerous missile in true living colour, proof of his nuclear calumny. Universal recognition – you didn’t even have to be able to read to grasp the horrifying potential of it. And Rosabal would have himself snapped with the missile in the background, naturally. The hero. The saviour. The man who rid the world of crazy old Fidel.

  Pagan gestured for Bengochea to circle the meadow again. Looking down, he saw two figures approach the missile-truck. One was Gunther Ruhr. The other might have been Rosabal. Bengochea flew round a couple of times, dropping as low as he thought prudent.

  But now there was gunfire from the soldiers in the field. It came uncomfortably close to the cabin. Bengochea pulled the chopper up deftly, but he wasn’t swift enough to avoid several shots slamming into the fuselage. Steffie Brough, silent for the last hour, whimpered when she realised the helicopter was being fired upon. Pagan tried to comfort her with some soothing words, but he’d never been very good with kids.

  Bengochea went higher as a spray of bullets pierced the window of the cabin and continued past his skull and exited through the roof. Then he took the chopper up beyond the range of gunfire.

  Looking down, Pagan saw Rosabal and Ruhr move toward the control module. Was Ruhr about to show Rosabal what the machine was made of? A sightseeing tour? Pagan shuddered at the notion of those two fine upstanding characters controlling a missile. He wished for a grenade, something that would wipe out both Ruhr and Rosabal and render the missile utterly useless at the same time.

  He gazed down from a height of three thousand feet into the trees. Think. There must be some course of action to take. He concentrated, but couldn’t come up with anything. He understood only that he couldn’t ask Bengochea to fly back in again, because he couldn’t risk Steffie Brough’s life a second time.

  In the rain, Gunther Ruhr and Rosabal watched the chopper retreat above the trees, then hover for a time at a safe distance.

  “Who is in that goddam helicopter?” Rosabal asked.

  Gunther Ruhr said, “A man called Frank Pagan.”

  “Pagan?”

  “An English cop. You know him?”

  “By reputation. We can
take care of him,” Rosabal said.

  “Don’t underestimate him.”

  Rosabal made a dismissive gesture. Pagan was a dogged bastard. How in God’s name had he managed to come all the way here? But what did it matter now? Pagan didn’t worry him. Automatic rifle fire would either bring the chopper down or drive it away if it returned. Rosabal had no time to be bothered by anything so trivial as an English policeman in a helicopter. He absent-mindedly watched one of the cameramen take photographs of the weapon.

  Gunther Ruhr looked at the missile. It was beautiful in the rain. “It’s time for me to leave. The missile is delivered and armed. That’s what my contract called for.”

  Rosabal raised his face, looked at the sky. The chopper was hovering beyond the trees about a mile away. Then he turned to Ruhr, whose colourless face and lips offended him; for a second his attention was drawn down to the ugly hand, which hung at the German’s side.

  “Don’t rush away, Gunther,” he said.

  “Why should I wait? Is there some problem? I was promised air passage to Haiti after delivery. I was also promised a considerable sum of money when I reach Port-Au-Prince. I hope you are not thinking of double-crossing me. If anything happens to me, I can guarantee you the kind of exposure that will bring your little world down around your ears.”

  Rosabal smiled. “Nobody is going to double-cross you, my friend. Relax.”

  “So why are you asking me to stay?”

  “Because this intrigues me. Because I want to know more. Because you’re obviously a splendid teacher.” Rafael Rosabal, adept at flattering men whose lives had inspired very little approbation, smiled a warm smile. We’re friends, Gunther, we are in this together, the smile said.

  Rosabal indicated the rectangular control module, from which the wet tarpaulin had been removed. Both men climbed up on to the truck. The door of the module was opened; they squeezed inside.