Mambo Page 47

  But pure speculation.

  He turned his face in the general direction of Havana Bay, and considered that stretch of water separating Cuba from its natural enemy. Over there, he thought. Over there was a whole arsenal of missiles, each doomed to be scrapped under the terms of a misconceived treaty between the Yanquis and the Soviets.

  Perhaps.

  Then he faced the crowd again. He didn’t see the lovely black-haired woman who stood beyond the barrier where the guards were massed.

  Estela Rosabal took the gun from her purse. She drew it up slowly from her hip, her arm jammed against that of the man with the tiny flag. And then she could bring the hand up no further unless the man moved. The pressure was intolerable. She tried to make herself smaller, slimmer, tried to create space for the pistol.

  She breathed deeply, drew her ribcage in, released the pinned arm. The man, who suddenly realised what the stranger beside him held in her hand, called out in alarm. Estela pointed the pistol at the platform, directly at the head of the Lider Maximo. The guards, who had been trained to that level of readiness which is almost paranoid, reacted at once. They rushed at her fiercely. She saw their massive shadows eclipse the sky as she was knocked over. And then she was being punched in the face and kicked in the stomach and the gun fell from her hand. It was funny how little she felt, how little pain from the boots and the nightsticks, as if she no longer had the capacity for it. Brutality could no longer touch or surprise her. She was dragged roughly along concrete. She saw, through swollen, half-shut eyes, the TV cameramen and press photographers who ignored her. She saw the receding face of the Lider Maximo, so lost in his own speculations that he paid no attention to the skirmish, handled so efficiently that it would never be mentioned in any newspaper, never seen on any TV screen.

  Another firework was lit, a rocket this time, which flew from the rooftop of a nearby building in a burst of orange smoke and went sailing past the Marti monument as it died. Estela, thrown inside a van without windows, noticed how the firework’s rich plumage exploded almost cheerfully in the sky before the door slammed shut and everything became black and smelled of sweat and urine and fear.

  The Lider Maximo, who in recent years had come to look for signs and omens as deliriously thirsty men seek oases, saw the firework too, and he smiled for the first time that day.

  A rocket, he thought. How appropriate.

  In the eight or nine days since Sir Frederick Kinnaird’s cremation and quiet funeral service, after the newspapermen and columnists and stringers had cobbled together a story out of alleged facts that were frequently no more than the kind of half-truths various government agencies in the United Kingdom and the United States saw fit to provide; days after Frank Pagan, weary of meetings with the Commissioner and interviews with surly men from security agencies he’d never before heard of, took a dreary train down to rainy Brighton for a few quiet nights at an off-season hotel; days after Castro had spoken to the people of Cuba about a capitalist plot against him; after Steffie Brough and her family, harried by newshounds, had gone into seclusion, and Allen Falk had entered hospital for the treatment of a hitherto inactive ulcer, a tiny bespectacled lawyer from Hamburg, Wilhelm Schiller, surfaced in the offices of a German tabloid in Frankfurt with an offer to sell the diaries and papers of his late client, Gunther Ruhr.

  Schiller, an unassuming man with a gentle manner, had been advised years before by his client to make certain matters public in the event of the client’s untimely death. And since such a circumstance had come, alas, to pass, Schiller was simply following Ruhr’s instructions. The sensitive material, which filled eight stout cardboard boxes and covered many years of Ruhr’s life and business dealings, would certainly have ruined various influential figures around the world who had used Ruhr’s services.

  But it never arrived at the editorial offices of the newspaper with whom Schiller had negotiated. Instead it vanished from the safe-deposit box in the Zurich bank where the lawyer had himself placed it.

  Horrified bank officials denied any kind of wrong-doing; they were discreet men whose business thrived on privacy and security. The disappearance of Ruhr’s papers scandalised them – officially at least. In reality, they had been obliged to turn the documents over to the Swiss government, which had been intensely pressured by its German counterpart. Two officials were dismissed by the bank for malfeasance, a scapegoat gesture. They were later quietly reinstated in different locations.

  Herr Schiller, outraged by the loss, promised to give an interview on German television in the course of which he would reveal at least some of the contents of Ruhr’s papers. That way, he would discharge a portion of his obligation to his late client; at the same time he intended to raise certain suspicions concerning the fate of the documents. He had guessed that no ordinary thief was behind their disappearance. Only governments – with instruments of legal blackmail at their disposal – had the power to force Swiss bankers to open safe-deposit boxes.

  But the interview did not take place; some hours before it was scheduled Herr Schiller was found dead in his room at the Frankfurterhof, an apparent victim of a heart attack. The death certificate was signed by two physicians, both of whom, as coincidence would have it, had begun vacations in remote places beyond the reach of telephones.

  The day after Schiller’s death, a group of men and women gathered in the private conference room of an expensive hotel in St Helier on the Channel Islands. These people, accompanied by aides and lawyers, represented the British Prime Minister, the President of the United States, the West German Chancellor, the President of France, the Prime Ministers of Italy and Japan, and assorted princes and potentates from the countries of the Middle East.

  The subject of their meeting was the disposal of Gunther Ruhr’s purloined records. An early perusal of the documents, undertaken with haste by an international panel of six lawyers, indicated that Ruhr had set down, in encyclopedic detail, the dates and places of his terrorist acts, the sums of money that had exchanged hands in return for his services, and the names of those who had employed him. It was the kind of record guaranteed to bring Ruhr a form of immortality, although that hadn’t been its principal purpose.

  Ruhr, scrupulous and smart, had kept his records diligently. It soon became clear to his readers, his team of auditors, that the late terrorist often knew more about his employers than they could ever have supposed. He investigated the men who hired him. He made careful inquiries. He was no casual extremist. He took extraordinary care. Sometimes he succeeded in penetrating the secrecy surrounding those who bought his services: sometimes he managed to go beyond the names of the lesser figures to the larger ones. Intermediaries gave way to principals, minor players to major ones. Men of high positions in government and financial circles who thought they had hired Gunther Ruhr from a safe distance, who believed themselves anonymous, had their names inscribed in his records.

  There were photostats of bank drafts, copies of money orders, numbers of bank accounts on small Caribbean islands; Ruhr’s manic eye for detail was evident at every turn. Nothing much had escaped him.

  It was an enormously damaging set of documents, in some instances shocking in its revelations. In what became known unofficially as the St Helier Accord, it was decided, within a matter of hours and hardly any debate, that the documents, to be kept from the press at all costs, would be divided among the parties with direct interests – the record of Ruhr’s involvement with Basque separatists, for example, would go directly to the Spanish government to deal with as it saw fit; the names of his employers in Japan who had him destroy a resort hotel would be handed immediately to Japanese officials. And so on.

  Six hours after it assembled, the conference ended.

  Two days later, Martin Burr travelled down to Brighton and walked with Frank Pagan along the promenade on a rainy night. They passed the disheartening ruin of the West Pier, which, in the English Channel mist, had the appearance of a ghost ship. In another age it had been graceful, an ele
gant edifice that had stubbornly withstood the demands of the sea. Neglected now, it was nothing more than a reminder to Martin Burr of a world that had become bored by the graceful – one that responded only to the quick and the crass. It was a world in which you could find crumpets inside frozen-food compartments and exquisite teas in mass-produced tea-bags.

  “You’re looking more like your usual self,” Burr said. “I’m glad to see that.”

  Frank Pagan didn’t mention the new course of antibiotics he’d just begun, or the ugly infection Ghose had discovered in the chest wound. These things were tedious inconveniences; they could be kept to oneself. He looked out at the Channel. The mist was magnificently damp and mysterious, crawling up over the pebbled beach. He put a hand in the pocket of his overcoat and fingered the bottle of painkillers there; the wound in his chest, agitated by infection, pierced him sharply. He tried to ignore it.

  Burr tapped the promenade rail with his cane and listened a moment to the quiet drumming sound he’d set up. “I have teams of people going through Kinnaird’s records – which are copious and complicated as befitted a man with a great deal to conceal.”

  “I imagine,” Pagan said. He was genuinely interested on one level, that of policeman; but the recuperating tourist in him felt removed from Burr’s world. He’d go back into that world eventually, and he’d become immersed in it as he always did, but for the present he wanted to be nothing more than a man casually watching the secretive mist on a moist night in Brighton.

  Burr said, “Kinnaird’s phone calls are rather intriguing. Several were placed to an apartment in Acapulco, which turns out to have been the property of Rafael Rosabal. Kinnaird and Rosabal. Fine bedfellows.”

  Pagan saw a light out there in the folds of the Channel, a small passing ship perhaps. Then it was gone. He turned to look at Martin Burr. Dampness adhered to the Commissioner’s eyepatch, reflecting the lamps along the promenade.

  Burr stopped tapping his cane. “Freddie made phone calls to all the members of his little group. Caporelli, the others. Cocky sod, though. Didn’t even bother to take the trouble to make these calls from some public phone. He made them either from his house in Scotland or his apartment in The Albany. I daresay he thought he was above the law. Can’t get over the gall of the fellow.” Burr shook his head for a while; from his point of view the nefarious activities of Kinnaird and his associates were beyond any reasonable man’s comprehension, as was Kinnaird’s sense of impunity.

  Pagan turned away from the misty sea. He thought how Freddie and Rosabal must have decided to eliminate the others. Then Rosabal, who elevated avarice to chilly new heights, had taken it one step further and ordered the elimination of Freddie. They were charmers. Real princes.

  Burr drew his cashmere scarf up around his neck and shivered slightly. “What a bloody mosaic,” he said. “And it doesn’t end with Freddie’s unprincipled dealings either. I’ve just seen some of Gunther Ruhr’s papers.”

  Pagan, intrigued now, had heard about these notorious papers and the waves of utter terror they had set in motion through government circles in various countries.

  Burr said, “In his documents, Ruhr claims he was first approached by Rosabal more than three years ago. Then about twelve months ago in Mexico City he was given the green light. Steal the missile, he was told. Deliver it to Honduras, where an invasion force was waiting with tanks and fighter-planes. Amazing assortment of equipment from all over the place.”

  Steal the missile, Pagan thought. Just like that. He looked back out into the Channel, which smelled of winter, dead things. The night was as melancholic as his mood, which he hadn’t been able to shake for days. He reflected on the coup Magdalena had talked about, the democratic underground in which she’d had such faith, the uprising, but she’d never mentioned an invasion force. Maybe that was something else Rosabal had concealed from her. There were so many unanswerable questions. What had Burr called it? A bloody mosaic. Ambitions, lies, rapacity, warped patriotism, all the grubby little ingredients of the big picture, which was elusive still, and would perhaps remain so for a long time.

  Burr lowered his voice, as if the dark might be filled with eavesdroppers. “One hears the most appalling rumours of mass arrests, tortures, executions all over Cuba.”

  Pagan shivered. Cold air rose up from the Channel. He wondered about Estela Rosabal and what had become of her as a consequence of her husband’s ambitions. Executions, Burr had said. Was that her fate? Had she been propped before a firing-squad and gunned down? He recalled, with a clarity that saddened him, the way she’d looked when he’d seen her in Havana; the ruined innocence of beauty. Had Rosabal in all his life ever touched anything without destroying it?

  Pagan was quiet for a moment. He heard the tide whisper coldly over stones. Then, as if to himself, he said, “I keep seeing that bloody missile. And I keep wondering if Rosabal intended to fire it. I can’t get the damned thing out of my mind.”

  Martin Burr shrugged. “If he did, what was his target?”

  Pagan had no answer. He looked back into the mist, which seemed to him just then as inscrutable as Rosabal’s intention. He imagined the missile on the truck, the way it changed angle, the eerie sense of disaster he’d experienced. And then he remembered Magdalena’s doomed little plane and he wasn’t sure if the missile had ever moved at all, or if it was something he’d created out of his own awful tiredness, an hallucination, a fanciful perception.

  Burr said, “I rather thought Castro’s speech might have shed some light on that question.”

  “People like Castro aren’t in the business of shedding light. They prefer darkness.”

  “Perhaps,” said Burr.

  Frank Pagan heard the mournful sound of a ship’s fog horn, like the cry of something lost in the night. He turned from the Channel, glanced at the forlorn relic of the West Pier. Magdalena’s doomed little plane, he thought. Lately he’d had the most unbearable dreams of her. There was always the small plane burning – not quickly, as it had happened in reality, but in a very slow way. Then the dream made that awful upward shift into nightmare when her face appeared in the yellow-red pyre of the cockpit and turned very slightly, sightlessly, mouth twisted open and lifeless, toward the trees under which he stood, and he saw an agonising look in her dark eyes before she was consumed. A horror, repeating itself three or four times during the last ten days.

  He always woke with a sense of deep sorrow and depressing loss, as if there were an important word he couldn’t quite remember, or a disturbed sensation he couldn’t name. Whatever it was, it felt like something burrowing far inside him, something it would take time to destroy.

  The fire that coursed suddenly through his chest made him double over against the promenade rail.

  “Are you all right, Frank?” Burr asked.

  Pagan took out the bottle of painkillers, uncapped it. He tipped one into the palm of his shaking hand. He stared at the pill. Did he need this? Would it really reach the place where the pain hurt most and kill it? He let the pill slip from his hand, then tossed the bottle through the air and watched the capsules vanish in the direction of the darkened beach below. They would fall among the pebbles where they’d lie concealed until the tide drew them back into the Channel and they disintegrated in brine.

  “I’m fine, Commissioner,” was all he said.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Frank Pagan Novels

  ONE

  LONDON

  BRYCE HARCOURT SAID GOOD NIGHT TO THE DUTY OFFICER, A BRISKLY courteous young marine from Alabama, and stepped out of the American Embassy. In Grosvenor Square he was assaulted at once by the numbing chill of the early evening. It had been a winter of uncommon savagery across Europe. Ships locked and forlorn in ice-choked Baltic seaports, relentless blizzards in Germany and the Low Countries, scathing frost in the southern regions of Italy: nothing had escaped the ferocity of the arctic months. London, encased in ice, vandalized by rough winds, was a city embalmed.

  Ha
rcourt, hurrying to catch an Underground train, considered it a miserable place altogether, the grey parks immense and dismal, drones scuttling into buses and tubes to escape abrasive winds that snapped down the streets of Mayfair with the tenacity of hounds. It had been grim enough when the city had been adorned by Christmas lights – then at least you had an illusion of warmth and cheer – but the decorations were long gone and the first month of the new year had passed with no relief in sight.

  Muffled in a heavy black overcoat, Harcourt had an intense longing for his native Florida, some burning Miami heat, palm trees and high blue skies and pastel buildings. He imagined himself in cotton shirt and bermudas on a balcony overlooking the sunlit ocean. He could taste a lime daiquiri in his throat. He saw flamingoes against a red sun and bronzed babes strutting across sands. A fantasy – but hell, it was one way of getting through these godawful times when the mornings were dark and the afternoons icy and short.

  He shivered as he entered the Tube station. The rush-hour crowds thronged around him with the concentrated brutality of people anxious to get to their homes in the suburbs. He was jostled by the mob pushing toward the turnstiles. A city of moles, he thought. They had pinched, pale faces. They’d surrendered to the glum season, hostages of winter, yet they went about their business with that peculiarly English stoicism Harcourt could never understand. They waited in disgruntled silence for buses that were late or stood in Underground trains too crammed and overheated for human dignity. The Spirit of England, ho hum; an empire had disintegrated into incompetence and indifference.

  Harcourt clutched his briefcase against his side and stepped on to the escalator, where he collided with a woman trying to rush past him. Her mouth was covered by a red wool scarf, but even so Harcourt was immediately struck by familiarity.