Mambo (28 page)

He took a handkerchief from a pocket, wiped sweat from his forehead. You had to control these memories. You had to fight them back, suppress them. They were dead and gone, they had nothing to do with you. You escaped from your childhood, from that dank brutality, from humiliation. Every now and again it reaches out darkly as if to drag you back to your beginnings, but it means nothing. It means absolutely nothing.

Thanks to the Revolution, to the opportunities given to you by Castro's regime, you fled your origins. The poverty. The futility.

The irony of this – his gratitude to the Revolution – was pointedly amusing. After all, he intended to destroy the same State that had educated and raised him at its own expense.

He was calm again as his chauffeur-driven black BMW rolled quietly toward him. He opened the back door and stepped inside where a young woman, who had the intense good looks of a flamenco dancer, smiled and reached out to him. She wore her very black hair pulled back tightly across her scalp and ribboned with red satin. Her lips, whose lipstick matched her ribbon exactly, pressed on his mouth, and she placed the palms of her hands lightly against the sides of his face. It was a gesture in part love, in part possessiveness.

“My darling,” she said, a little breathlessly.

Rafael Rosabal held the woman, but not with any great enthusiasm. Her skin smelled of a perfume called Diva, which he had brought back for her from Europe.

“Can we go home for lunch …?” She blew softly in his ear; she behaved as if the chauffeur didn't exist.

“We can go home for lunch,” he said, holding her hand between his own. Later, she would make love with a kind of serenity that was in total contrast to Magdalena, with whom sex was all fire and final damp exhaustion. Magdalena was like a magnificent whore, Rosabal thought. A wife never, a mistress always.

“Do I make you happy?” the young woman asked.

“Yes.”

“You regret nothing?”

“Nothing,” Rosabal said in an absent way.

The gold ring on the young woman's hand caught the light and glinted. She turned her hand over, studied the band from different angles. Until three months ago, the girl's name had been Estela Alvarez Capablanca, daughter of the General. From time to time Estela still thought of herself as bearing her unmarried name. She hadn't yet become accustomed to her change in marital status. Being the wife of Rafael Rosabal was a new condition for her, and one she thought fortunate. It had all happened so quickly, a fast courtship, a very quiet wedding unannounced in newspapers – because Rafael had wanted it that way – a brief honeymoon in Mexico.

Other Ministers' wives, who had sometimes contrived to play matchmaker for Rosabal in the past, considered them a marvellous couple who needed only a baby to make their marriage a perfect union. Certainly Estela wanted a child. She adored children. Sometimes she wept quietly when she read of atrocities enacted upon infants in the war zones of the world, or her heart ached when she saw some poor sad-eyed kid on the streets of Havana.

Every time she felt Rafael's sperm flood her womb, she prayed for fertility. And her prayers, it seemed, had been answered. Only fifteen minutes before her rendezvous with Rafael she'd gone to her doctor to learn that she was pregnant. Now, quietly joyful, she waited for the right moment to share this news with her husband, who was so often distracted these days.

A mother-to-be, yes, a clinging wife no. She wasn't at all the mindless little wife so many people, Rosabal included, perceived her to be. She had some private core to her, an independence she may have inherited from the General, a stubbornness, a native intelligence that was inviolate. She was domestic, in the sense that she enjoyed both the Havana apartment and the country house near Sancti Spiritus, but it would have been a gross underestimation to think that was the complete picture. Estela Rosabal was her own person. A fire burned inside her that few had ever seen.

For his part, Rosabal believed that being the son-in-law of General Capablanca was a profitable connection: it kept conspiracy in the family. It was a great match, even if it had been made more by power brokers and opportunities than by heaven and heart.

The weary man in the grey and blue plaid jacket carried a Canadian passport that falsely identified him as J. S. Mazarek. The document was a good forgery he'd been given in Miami. He had come to Havana on a cut-rate package tour from Montreal. The group with whom he'd travelled called themselves The Explorers' Association, mostly an alliance of single middle-aged men and women whose only interest in exploration seemingly involved one another's bodily parts. Mazarek had already had to avoid the energetic advances of an opera-humming, large-breasted widow from Trois Rivières.

Mazarek, a big man with hair the colour and texture of froth on a
cappuccino
, had been tracking his quarry along Obispo and Mercaderes Streets, surreptitiously taking photographs. He did this expertly because he'd been doing it for much of his life. Usually his cases involved errant husbands and wandering wives, who tended to be more paranoid than the cocksure Mr Smooth, whose face and movements rarely betrayed a sign of nerves.

Mazarek watched the Minister of Finance open the door of the BMW. Then he got off one more quick shot with his tiny camera. He had enough data on Rafael Rosabal. His employer would be satisfied, though perhaps not absolutely happy. In this line of work – often more a probe of men's hearts than mere detection – satisfaction wasn't always followed by contentment.

12

London

At nine o'clock in the evening Frank Pagan sat in his office and listened to the constant ringing of telephones and the clack of printers. Despite all this incoming information, he was frustrated. What had he learned after all? The answer that came back was disheartening: damn little. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair and pressed his fingertips against his tired eyes, ignoring the bothersome sparrow of pain pecking away at his chest.

Foxie came into the room with a bunch of papers in his hand. He took a sheet off the top and scanned it. “The chopper was stolen three weeks ago from the Moroccan Air Force, who assumed it was seized by West Saharan rebels. The crew members were Syrians. As you could predict, they didn't enter the country with a shred of legality. Known terrorists, according to the Syrian press attaché in London.”

A Moroccan Cobra helicopter, a Syrian crew; terrorism observed no boundaries. It was sovereign unto itself.

“The other men dead at the site were Richard Mayer, a native of Buffalo, New York, and one Roderigo Flavell, a citizen of Argentina. Mayer was trained by the US Army in the fine art of explosives and was renowned for his demolition skills. Flavell is wanted for questioning in connection with the bombing of a synagogue in Paris a couple of years ago. A merry sort of bunch, Frank.”

Pagan shifted his position. It was hard to concentrate on what Foxworth was telling him. His mind, or some dark aspect of it, kept pulling him away. Too many puzzles, each demanding his attention at the same time, nagged him.

Foxie said, “The prints we got from the Yardley farm belong to Ruhr, Mayer, and another American named Trevaskis, who has a police record in San Diego: extortion, conspiracy to sell explosives and firearms, gun-running into Mexico. Considered dangerous. We also found prints belonging to the late Flavell as well as a fellow countryman of his called Enrico Zapino. Zapino is also wanted by the French police. Same synagogue bombing.”

The Yardley Farm. Now there was one puzzle that kept coming back like a bad taste. He couldn't figure out the association between the man who had rented the place and Gunther Ruhr. Impatiently he looked at his watch; the tenant's wife had been sent for an hour ago – what was keeping her? She only had to come from The Connaught, which wasn't more than a ten-minute taxi-ride away. Pagan hoped she might be able to cast a little light on the dark area, if she ever arrived.

Since the gunshot wound he'd felt morose. Now he felt even more bleak about the fate of Steffie Brough. He'd met her parents before leaving Norwich, two very unhappy people trying to varnish their sorrow with good old-fashioned English stoicism and finding that the stiff upper lip wasn't all the advertising claimed it to be.

We'll do our best, Pagan had told them. We'll find her.

What makes you think so
? Mrs Brough had asked in that kind of ringing voice which is a cousin to outright hysteria. It was a question to which Pagan had no answer. In the policeman's almanac of platitudes, absolutely none was capable of creating a shield against grief. He kept seeing Mrs Brough's face, which resembled an older version of the Stephanie in the school photograph. Sheer anxiety had stripped her features of any expression other than desperation. Pagan was filled with helpless sorrow and an anger he laboured to control.

Billy Ewing appeared in the doorway, half in, half out of the office. He held a slip of thin yellow paper in one hand.

“Item, gentlemen,” he said.

“I hope it's good news,” Pagan said.

Billy Ewing shrugged. “Good, bad, I just deliver, Frank. You're the swami, you interpret. Now according to this little gem a transport plane was stolen this very morning from right under the vigilant nose of our Royal Air Force.”

“Stolen?” Pagan asked.

“That's what it says here. On a routine, approved flight from Fife to Germany, an American C-130, which had flown unspecified
matériel
into a base in Fife the day before, was apparently hijacked by persons unknown. The location of the craft is also unknown.”

“How did it take so damned long to provide us with that item?” Pagan said.

“Injured pride,” Foxie suggested. “The RAF is awfully sensitive.”

“I suppose,” Pagan said, but without conviction. There was no real co-ordination at times between law enforcement agencies and branches of the military. Each was its own little dominion of egotism.

“Lose big plane, look very foolish,” said Billy Ewing.

“How can they lose a big plane?” Pagan asked. “I can see the hijacking. Fine. Anything can be hijacked if you want it bad enough. What I don't see is the failure to find the thing.”

With the authority of a man who is halfway to attaining his pilot's licence, Foxie said, “First, bad weather. Clouds, Frank. And many of them. Second, it's a big sky, and one plane is very tiny in it, no matter how big it looks on the ground. Third, the Air Force has only a limited number of interceptors at its disposal. And where do they look? The North Sea? The English Channel? The Atlantic? If the transport plane's flying low enough, radar's no help.”

“Do you think the RAF has informed the Americans?” Pagan asked.

Billy Ewing said, “What a scene. The Air Marshal going on his knees to the Americans.” Ewing assumed a sharp English accent, upper-class, accurate. “
Sorry, old boy. One of your planes got away from us. Damndest thing
.”

Pagan rose from his chair very slowly. He walked across the room and turned on a small portable radio. He wanted something raucous and mind-clearing, something to shake up the synapses and cover the quiet drumming noise panic made inside his head. If Steffie Brough was still alive, she was inside an aeroplane with Ruhr and nobody knew where. In his imagination he saw Ruhr skywriting the words
Find Me, Frank
.

Little Richard's “Long Tall Sally” roared into the room. The sound, which to some might have been torture – Foxworth, out of Pagan's vision, winced – was balm to Pagan's troubled heart. Like most great rock music, it was meaningless if you thought about it. But meaning wasn't the point. Rock hypnotised you into a condition where you didn't need to think. That was the beauty of it. Pagan, an old rock buff, knew such arcane things as the names of the original Shirelles, the first hit song recorded by Gene Vincent, and the date and place of Buddy Holly's death.

Billy Ewing left. His musical tastes went no further than Peter, Paul and Mary and his own whisky-inspired version of Auld Lang Syne every New Year's Eve.

Pagan returned to his desk. He couldn't remember when he'd last slept. His eyelids felt heavy. He needed a brisk infusion of coffee. He was about to ask Foxworth to bring a cup of very strong brew, when the woman suddenly appeared in the doorway.

She was in her middle forties and had reached that condition known as her prime. To look at Gabrielle Chapotin was to understand the word in a way no dictionary could ever define. She had a calm confidence about her, and a style found only in women who have both the means and ambition to haunt the salons of high fashion and those expensive clinics where clever cosmetologists concoct creams and lotions to halt the ruin of the flesh. She had the air of a fortress against whose buttresses decay and deterioration may batter but make little headway.

She was beautiful in a daunting way. The high cheekbones, the hollows in the cheeks that suggested a sour lozenge of candy in her mouth, the long, groomed red-brown hair, the tailored trouser-suit that was pinstriped and authoritative; she was a woman who knew herself very well. She reminded Pagan of a former fashion model, somebody of well-trained elegance.

“Frank Pagan?” she asked in very good English.

“You must be Gabrielle Chapotin.” Pagan rose, walked to the radio, turned it off.

Foxie scurried with a chair for her. She nodded to him as she would to all servants, then sat down with a very straight back. She gazed up at the big silk screen of Buddy Holly, as if she were amused.

“My regrets,” Pagan said. He extended a hand. Gabrielle's clasp was slack and quick. She wanted out of here in a hurry.

“Regrets?” she asked.

“Your husband. The tragedy.”

“Some marriages are in name only, Mr Pagan,” she said.

Madame Frost, Pagan thought. He cleared his throat, asked Foxworth for coffee. Gabrielle declined, saying she couldn't drink what passed for coffee in England. Pagan made a mild joke about the similarity between British coffee and transmission fluid, but Madame didn't even smile politely. Foxworth brought coffee in a plastic cup and Pagan sipped. The temperature of the room had fallen; the woman had ushered in a brisk chill.