Mambo (10 page)

Pagan squeezed out a small smile and sat down. He went into a slump for a moment. Where the hell did you start? Where did you go to find Ruhr? It struck him as an overwhelming task. Looking for a terrorist in hiding was going to be the kind of thing where luck, that grinning bitch, would play a significant role. Or sheer doggedness. Pagan much preferred flair, the sudden insight, the flash of
knowing
, to all the humdrum police procedures of knocking on doors and slogging the streets and interviewing people who thought they were about to be arrested for old parking fines.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Foxie asked.

“Do me a favour, Foxie. Stop looking at me as if I'm going to collapse in a coma.”

“Sorry.”

“I'm not about to keel over. Understand?” Pagan rattled the print-out, just a little annoyed by the concerned look on Foxworth's face. Was he destined to be scrutinised at every turn by his fellow officers looking for signs of infirmity? “Where was I?”

“The list, Frank.”

“Right. The list. The trouble is, the people who rescued Ruhr aren't likely to show up on any damned list. The Australian didn't. Why should we expect any of the others to be co-operative enough to make an appearance? It's just not on. I don't think we can expect any leads to Gunther from the print-out. Besides, the people who rescued Ruhr might be home-grown talent, Foxie, and they wouldn't be on this index. The only import might have been the Aussie.”

“Could be.”

“What the hell, it's procedure, and we'll follow it, but I'm not getting my hopes up.” Pagan put the print-out aside, sipped his drink. He set the empty glass down. “Another thing, Foxie. I don't want any information leaving this office unless it's cleared by me personally. If there's a leak, I don't want it being traced back here. I want a scrambler on my line to the Commissioner's office.”

“Noted,” Foxworth said.

“Do you have reports on the search for Ruhr? Is there any pattern?”

Foxie shook his head. “The usual hysteria, Frank. The good people of the land peer from behind lace curtains and think, Ah-hah, Gunther the Beast is lurking in the shrubbery. The mass imagination. Wonderful thing.”

Pagan sighed. “Where does that leave us, Foxie?”

“There's the rub. Where indeed?”

Pagan gazed through the window again. He was thinking of the terrorist groups and their supporters in the darkness of this great city, loose clans of rightists, leftists, Leninists, Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, white supremacists, radicals who plotted to overthrow the monarchy (a notion with which Pagan sometimes had a modicum of sympathy), Libyans who sat in Mayfair and paid vast sums of money for explosives and weapons, Palestinians in Earl's Court scheming to get their homeland back – they were out there in the dark corners, murmuring, planning, talking to themselves, in an atmosphere of paranoia.

Pagan had had encounters with a great variety of them, from the silly groups that consisted of two or three very lonely people putting doomed homemade bombs together in garden sheds to groups like the Libyans, some of whom lived in bullet-proof apartments in the West End and controlled banks and had access to funds beyond reckoning. He knew their worlds. He knew that if there was to be any useful information about Ruhr and his associates it would be out there among the sympathisers and the financiers and fellow-travellers. It could be anything, an item of gossip, a whispered rumour, the kind of information that never percolated up from street level to official channels. And he wasn't going to get it sitting in Golden Square.

“I think I need a ride in the fresh air, Foxie. Will you get us a car?”

“A car?” Foxie thought that an early night would be the best thing for Pagan, but didn't say so.

“Car. Four wheels, chassis, internal combustion device – you remember?”

Foxie smiled, picked up the telephone.

The car was a Rover and Foxworth drove, following directions given to him by Pagan, who constantly consulted a small red notebook. This, Foxie realised, was Chairman Frank's famous Red Book, in which were said to be inscribed the names and addresses of all Pagan's connections in the terrorist network. It was Foxie's first sight of the legendary book.

They went first to an apartment belonging to Syrians in Dover Street, Mayfair, then to a Libyan house in Kensington, disturbing people who watched TV or prepared evening meals. At the Kensington house a black-tie party was going on, ladies in cocktail dresses, delicate little sausages on toothpicks. Pagan didn't care that his timing was terrible. He was, Foxie noticed, in full flight and for the moment at least like the Pagan of old. No formalities, no niceties of etiquette, were going to get in his way. He helped himself to coffee, swallowed a sausage, and looked around as if the dinner-party wasn't taking place at all. There was a lot of surly conversation, the kind that originates in suspicion and outright resentment.
We don't know Gunther Ruhr. We don't know anything about him or his friends. We are innocent of any illegal activities, Mr Pagan
–
kindly leave us in peace or speak to our lawyers
. They all had lawyers nowadays, Pagan thought. They all had smooth-faced men in pricey pinstripes who manipulated legal niceties for hefty fees. Lawyers appalled Pagan. They had the moral awareness of toadstools and the untrammelled greed of very small spoiled children.

Next, a basement flat in Chelsea occupied by a group of very intense men who called themselves The Iranian Revolutionary Front aka TIRF. Acronyms were like test-tubes in which radicals appeared to spawn. If you didn't have a decent acronym you didn't have an image, and without an image no new recruits. TIRF opposed both the new Ayatollah
and
American imperialism. Pagan tried to goad them by asking about the ideological confusion in such a position but they didn't want to be drawn into a dialogue with a reactionary policeman, the representative of a monarchy. They'd suffered under the Shah and to them the Queen of England might have been Pahlevi's wicked sister. The Iranians barely raised their faces from their bowls of rice, avoiding eye-contact with both Pagan and Foxworth. A sulky zero there.

Across the river after that, to a house overlooking Battersea Park where a bald West German in a velvet smoking-jacket spoke in a knowledgeable manner about the terrorist connections between Europe and Northern Ireland.
Perhaps Ruhr's working for the Irish, Mr Pagan
, the German suggested. Why import Ruhr? Pagan wondered. The Irish had their own gangsters.

From Battersea to Wandsworth. In a prim semi-detached house a lovely young Czech woman, who had been arrested once for her membership in a gang of terrorists that had made an elaborate attempt to bomb the Russian Embassy in Bonn, brewed cups of herbal tea and denounced Gunther Ruhr for “excessive violence”. She didn't know where to find him, nor had she any idea who had rescued him. In pursuit of the quiet life, she'd lost touch with her former associates. Now she grew organic vegetables and consulted the
I
Ching
and breast-fed a baby that had begun to cry in an adjoining room. Like everyone else encountered during this strange tour of Pagan's London, she knew nothing, heard nothing. All was blind silence and frustration. Houses in Camberwell and White-chapel, inhabited by Lebanese and Palestinians respectively, brought similar results. Absolutely no information about Gunther Ruhr or his employers or his rescuers made the underground circuit. Final.

On the way back to Golden Square Pagan said, “A waste of bloody time.”

“At least you put the word out,” Foxie said.

“A fat lot of good, Foxie. Whoever employs Ruhr works in complete secrecy. And the rescue operation might have been carried out by phantoms. Nobody knows a damn thing.”

Pagan and Foxworth rode in the lift, an ancient iron coffin that clanged and rocked up to the second floor. Inside his office Pagan had another small taste of Auchentoshan and settled down behind his desk. He was out of breath. He'd gone beyond mere fatigue. He was in another world where you couldn't quite trust the evidence of the senses. It was like jet-lag magnified, almost as if you saw the world reflected in bevelled mirrors. He stared at the darkened window, listening to the faint whirring of the three computers on the floor below. It was just after midnight and the silence of the streets accentuated the noise of the electronics, which were sinister to Pagan because he had no affinity with them.

I got up from my deathbed for you, Ruhr, he thought. I got up and I walked. You could at least provide me with a hint. You could at least tell me how much time I have left before you do something monstrous. The time factor! It was unsettling to be adrift on a planet whose only clock belonged to Gunther Ruhr.

Foxworth came into the office with a computer print-out. “This is what you wanted. Our computers analysed all four hundred and seventeen names on the Home Office list, all people who arrived in the United Kingdom in the last month. Out of that lot, there are twenty-nine on whom we have active files of our own.”

Pagan scanned the sheets with blurred eyes. Twenty-nine match-ups. That was practically a crowd. He had only eight investigators at his disposal. It wasn't possible to conduct twenty-nine investigations simultaneously. Even if he managed it somehow, by borrowing men from other departments, how could he be sure he wasn't wasting manpower and time? Since it was almost a certainty that neither Ruhr nor his associates had entered the UK legally, the names on the list would yield nothing. Twenty-nine!

“I think I'll stretch out on the sofa,” he said. “Get some of the weight off my feet.”

Foxworth frowned. “Wouldn't you be better off going home, Frank? Happy to drive you.”

Pagan shook his head.

Determined bastard, Foxie thought. Frank had to have the constitution of a Clydesdale.

Pagan walked very slowly to the couch in the corner of the office. It was an old horsehair piece, overstuffed and creaky and cratered. Even though he lay down with great care, a shaft of pain pierced him and he moaned slightly. When you thought you had it silenced for the night, back it came just to remind you you're no longer master of your own system.

“I'd like a map,” Pagan said. “A decent one that covers the whole Cambridge area.”

“I have one in my own office.”

“Bring it in here and pin it above my desk, will you?”

“Right away.” Briskly, eager to please, even to pamper him, Foxie stepped out.

Flat on his back, Pagan raised the computer print-out above his eyes and squinted at the list of names. Beneath each name was nationality, followed by the reasons why the person had been entered in SATO's computers in the first place. There was a Dutchman called Vanderberg known for his skill in building custom rifles, an American who had some questionable connections in the Lebanon, an Italian journalist notorious for his radical left-wing sympathies and his “exclusive” interviews – florid and sycophantic – with fugitive terrorists. If Pagan couldn't find the time and manpower to run a check on the people who had access to the allegedly secret route used on the night of the Shepherd's Bush disaster, how could he justify the investigation of these twenty-nine, not one of whom suggested a plausible bridge to Gunther Ruhr?

And yet how could he know for sure? Thoroughness was a bloody dictator. If you were Frank Pagan, you were imprisoned by your own exactitude. Everyone on the list would have to be contacted, interviewed, even if only briefly, or watched. The likely outcome was that all twenty-nine would be eliminated from having any association with Gunther Ruhr. End of the matter. Heigh-ho. The joys of police work. The enviable glamour.

He was about to set the print-out aside, and ponder the matter of delegating the inquiries to cops purloined from some other department, when he noticed a name at the foot of the second page.

It blinded him at first. He thought he'd hallucinated it, a set of letters created by the morphine-like effect of Pethidine. He shut his eyes, hearing Foxie come inside the room, hearing Foxie say something about a map, noises off-stage, off-centre, as if Foxworth had stepped toward the outer limits of the world and could barely be heard. Pagan opened his eyes. It was still there. Unchanged.

Dear Christ, how many years had passed
?

Pagan turned his face toward Foxworth, who was standing on a chair and tacking the map to the wall.

“Foxie,” Pagan said.

Foxworth stepped down from the chair and moved across the room to the sofa. He thought Frank looked very odd all at once, as if more than pain troubled him.

“What's the matter? Is something wrong?” he asked.

Pagan pointed to the name on the sheet. Foxie looked closely. It meant nothing to him.

“I'd like to know where this person can be found, Foxie.”

“It may take a little time.”

“Do it.”

There was an uncharacteristic note in Pagan's voice, the grumpy irritability of somebody confronted by a puzzle he couldn't understand, one he thought he'd solved a long time ago.

Foxie wrote the name down.

From the window of her hotel room, Magdalena Torrente saw the expanse of darkness that was Hyde Park. Black and whispering, it created a shadow at the heart of London. It was a long time since Magdalena had been in England. It would be pleasant to come one day as a tourist, spend some time, see sights. This trip, like the last one, was going to be brief.

The last time here: she didn't want to think about that.

She shut the window, looked at her watch. It was two a.m. She moved across the room, pushed the bathroom door open, saw her own reflection in the fluorescent glare of the tiled room, dark circles under her eyes and colourless lips. She considered make-up, but he didn't like her in cosmetics. A real woman, he sometimes said, doesn't need to paint herself into falsehood.

She lay on the bed. The lift rumbled in the shaft along the corridor. It stopped; the doors slid open. Magdalena closed her eyes and listened carefully. The thick carpet in the hallway muffled the movement of anyone passing.
Do you trust him
? She wondered why Garrido's objectionable question came back to her now. Old men knew how to ask tiresome questions. Old men with ambitions, like Garrido, could be especially taxing. Running out of time, they needed answers in a hurry. All their questions were blunt ones.
Do you trust him
?