Mambo (3 page)

He had a blinding moment when he registered the fact that his legs no longer existed and his heart had been yanked out of his chest; and another when he understood that this kind of pain was a reservoir of very hot tar in which he could only go down and down, round and round, drowning under a black surface.

2

Miami

Magdalena Torrente crossed Calle Ocho, the main street of Little Havana. She looked up once at the sky, which was clouding toward darkness and heavy with the possibility of warm October rain, then she headed west. She passed Eduardo's furniture store, a bright island of art deco sofas and lamps, an expensive anomaly in this neighbourhood of
farmacias
and little cafés selling
café cubano
in paper cups. She ignored the approving comments and whistles of men who stood outside the cafés and took time out from their constant preoccupation – how to assassinate that
barbudo hijo de puta
, Fidel Castro – to register and appreciate the beautiful, mature woman passing quickly in the humid twilight.

She made her way through traffic at an intersection where the air smelled of coffee and fried foods, and then turned right, entering a narrow street darker than Calle Ocho. Here windows were boarded and barred and small houses had the appearance of undergoing a siege; in this city of easy death and abundant drugs and murderous addicts who thought burglary every doper's birthright, it was a very real impression. She'd parked her car several blocks away at the Malaga Restaurant, thinking it best to move on foot in case her licence plate was noticed and remembered by one of the spies Fernando Garrido was always lecturing her about. Now, given the hazards of the district, she wondered if she'd made the right decision. The car would have been some kind of protection. Without it she felt vulnerable, despite the gun she carried in the pocket of her leather jacket.

From an open upstairs window a man shouted down at her “Hey, hey bebe,” and then laughed in a fractured drunken way – “ka ha ka ha,” a sound that dissolved in a cough like a baby's rattle. Latin music, fast, tropical, overheated, played from a radio in an open doorway where several shadowy figures, lost in the ether of drugs, stared out at her. She hurried now, pausing only when she reached the Casa de la Media Noche, a restaurant that specialised in Cuban food. It was said to serve the best
langosta enchiladas
in all Miami. Through the window she could see a crowd of diners, waiters bustling back and forth, busboys hurrying with carafes of ice water. Festive Cuban music was playing loudly on a jukebox.

Magdalena Torrente stepped into the alley that ran behind the restaurant. She knocked on the back door, which was opened by a tall man of about seventy. He wore a panama hat and a crisp white suit of the kind called a
dril ciel
, made from an Irish linen so special that only one mill in the Republic of Ireland still supplied it. Fernando Garrido took her hand and kissed it, a brushing of lips on flesh, a simple courtesy in a world grown weary of good manners and civilised behaviour. Then he led her toward a box-like room without windows, where cans of tomatoes and bags of beans formed pyramids in the middle of the floor.

“There's no place for you to sit, Magdalena,” Garrido said. He spoke Cuban Spanish, with its generous vowel sounds.

“It doesn't matter,” she said.

He shrugged, and she thought there was some small despair in the gesture, that of a man disappointed by the directions of his life. Once, in another world, Fernando Garrido had been the mayor of Santiago, the second largest city in Cuba. He'd had political ambitions. He'd dreamed vibrant dreams of replacing the sequence of malignant dictatorships, those dreadful reefs on which Cuba had foundered and rotted, with democracy and social justice. And then his notions had been overtaken by Castro's revolution, which he'd supported at first in a wary manner, more out of relief at the end of the dictatorship of Batista than any great faith in the stated ideals of Fidel, whom he'd never trusted and personally didn't like.

In July 1960, one year after the Revolution – which had accomplished nothing except to trade one set of gangsters for another – Fernando Garrido had been arrested by Castro's security forces. He was charged with the sort of “crime” so common in Communist societies, undefined and unfounded, absurd and yet sinister. It was a “crime” devised by dull Marxist imaginations and framed in such a vague way that it could never be grasped by its “perpetrator”. This kind of nebulous offence was often called “counter-revolutionary”, a term that had any meaning the regime attached to it. So far as Garrido could tell, his only misdemeanour was to have been a politician during the reign of the dictator Batista. Guilt by association – and for that he'd been imprisoned for seven long years on the Isle of Pines, severely beaten, given electric shocks, then released and expelled from the country without explanation! The experience had left him with a tremor in his hands, a recurring nightmare of violence, and a hatred of Castro that was acute and constant, like shrapnel in his heart.

Garrido moved to the centre of the room, where a lightbulb hung from a old cord. To Magdalena Torrente he looked like a plantation owner in an old sepia picture, benign yet strict, generous but careful with his kindness. He took off his hat. His hair, dyed an incongruous brown and brilliantined, an old man's vanity, glistened under the light like a waxy skullcap. He had lived for almost thirty years in exile and the weight of that expulsion showed on his face. But his dreams, which would not lie still and let him savour in peace the fruits of his thriving business, were still powerful. He wanted the one thing all exiles crave and few achieve – a triumphant return to the motherland, a vindication.

“This neighbourhood,” he said. He appeared to lose his train of thought a moment. “It gets worse every day. Drugs. Violence. I remember when it was a good place to have a business. Now it gets too dangerous.”

Magdalena didn't want to listen to Garrido's regular complaints about how the massive influx of Cubans from Mariel in 1980 had altered the fabric of life in Miami for the worse. She already knew how Castro had shipped out all his undesirables, his criminals and addicts, his deranged and schizophrenic, and unloaded them upon an angry Florida. She already knew how drugs and murder had poisoned the Cuban community. She wanted to pick up what she'd come for and leave, but something about Fernando Garrido always made her linger. She knew what it was: he was a link to her father, the last one left to her. The thought made her feel lonely for a moment.

Garrido lit a small cigar and blew a stream of smoke up at the lightbulb. “Did anyone follow you here?”

It was his regular question. She shook her head. Her long black hair was thick and fibrous. “Nobody followed me.”

“You're a beautiful woman and very noticeable, Magdalena. You can never be sure. Castro's agents infiltrate very well. They're good at anything underhand. Never underestimate them.”

She said she didn't. She told him firmly that she didn't take chances. He smoked quietly, surveying her face, watching her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. She knew from his expression what he was going to say, and she was anxious to avoid the long, flowery comparisons with her dead mother. Garrido would reminisce about the old life in Cuba when they'd all been very young, himself and Humberto Torrente and the lovely Oliva, oh, they'd been a great threesome, an inseparable trio going everywhere together,
aieee
, beaches and restaurants and nightclubs. Garrido's Latin sentimentality, his ornate phrases, irritated Magdalena because the past wasn't what mattered to her any more. Then Garrido would always say the same thing half-jokingly:
Your mother's only fault was she married the wrong man in Humberto. Honourable as Humberto was, Oliva should have listened more closely to my entreaties
. And he'd smile and kiss Magdalena's brow, and sometimes there would be tears in his dark brown eyes.

She looked at her watch. She had hours before she was due at the airport but she wanted to give an impression of haste. There was laughter from the restaurant; the music grew louder.

“You're anxious to leave,” he said.

She nodded her head, glanced again at her watch. The small room was stifling. She watched him walk in the direction of some bare metal shelves where two pistols lay side by side. He removed a section of shelf in a very deliberate way, then set it on the floor.

“My secret place,” he said.

The wall had a concealed panel built into it. Garrido slid it aside, reached into the black space and took out a briefcase. “Before I give you this, I must ask a question you may find unpardonable,” he said. “Do you really trust him? After all, our association with him goes back four years. One might be pardoned for expecting results very soon.”

A tiny night moth fluttered against Magdalena's lips and she brushed it gently aside. “The question's perfectly understandable, Fernando, and the answer's simple. I trust him.” How could she not? she wondered. If you loved, you had to trust: one was a basic corollary of the other. A fact of life. “Besides, something this intricate takes time.”

Garrido tapped his fingernails on his front dentures, a
click click click
that indicated thought. “Do I detect something else? Something a little more than trust? If so, I caution you to go carefully.”

“I'm always careful.” She raised a hand to her hair. His insight surprised her. Was she that obvious? Did she wear her feelings like a necklace? She was a little embarrassed. She'd always imagined she knew how to conceal herself from the world. But Fernando had been familiar with her since childhood; he'd become accustomed to reading her expressions. Defensively she said, “I don't mean to be rude, but my private life isn't really any of your business, Fernando.”

“You're right, of course. I shouldn't try to counsel you. If you trust him, that's good enough for me.” Garrido stepped closer to her. He pressed the handle of the case into the palm of her hand. Even though there was nobody else present in the room, the gesture was surreptitious. It was force of habit. Garrido had spent years living in fear of Castro's spies in Miami, years raising funds for nocturnal raids and acts of sabotage inside Cuba, blowing up power stations and electric pylons, dynamiting naval installations and airfields, or spraying beach-front tourist resorts with guns fired from sea-going craft. He'd participated personally in many of these manoeuvres until his nerve had gone. It was a game for the young and valiant.

Garrido inclined his face in a rather formal way, pressing his lips upon her cheek, an avuncular kiss. She smelled mint and tobacco and something else, something alcoholic, on his breath. She held the briefcase casually, as if it contained nothing of any importance. Then she stepped toward the door, but Garrido caught her by the wrist. His skin was damp.

“We have enemies,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“Even among our friends. Remember that.”

Garrido dropped his hand and backed away from her, smiling for the first time now. His dentures, the colour of his suit, gleamed. “But I don't need to tell you anything, do I? You're not a child any more. I have to keep reminding myself you're not Humberto's little girl.”

Humberto's little girl
. Garrido had a good heart, a heart as big as Cuba itself, but he could never overcome his old-fashioned patronising manner. Wouldn't he ever grasp the fact that she was thirty-nine years old, for God's sake? That she was dedicated to the same cause as himself and had an important voice in it? That the role she played in the political schemes of the exile community here in Miami was just as important as his own?

“I haven't fit that description for a very long time, Fernando.”

Garrido was very apologetic. “The trouble with growing old is that you don't want things to change. You want everybody to stay the same age because it means you don't grow old yourself. It's a nice folly. Forgive me for it.”

Magdalena reached the door. Well-mannered as ever, Garrido opened it for her. In the dark hallway a massive figure emerged from the shadows. Carlos, a taciturn giant from Las Tunas Province, Garrido's watchdog. He wore a shoulder-holster beneath his dark jacket. He moved slowly and quietly, his musculature evident under his clothes; a powerful man, sleek and silent. Magdalena thought there was something a little spooky about Carlos. He had the look of a man who has been involved in more than a few premature deaths.

“Where did you park, Magdalena?” Garrido asked.

“At the Malaga Restaurant.”

“Carlos will escort you there.”

She was about to say she had a gun, she didn't need protection, but she didn't utter a word. Carlos would follow her anyway. Garrido wasn't going to allow anybody to carry that briefcase through the streets of Little Havana without an armed escort.

She smiled her best smile, which dazzled Garrido, then she raised a hand as she left. Garrido, seemingly frozen in the doorway of the small square room, stood without moving for a long time. He listened to the silences that followed Magdalena's departure. Then he took a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and lit it.

Garrido, once known in politics as El Ganador, the winner, closed his eyes. He sucked smoke into the back of his throat and remembered how it had felt to be that man of victory. The man who controlled Santiago de Cuba in the early 1950s, the young reformer – ah, the golden naïvety of those years – who wanted to change a festering system. All that sweet energy, that devotion to his calling. How remote it all seemed to him suddenly, and Cuba so very far away; and yet, as if affected by some untreatable malaria of the heart, he could still shiver when he thought of going back to his homeland.

He shut the door of the room. He thought about Magdalena out there in the darkness, the long trip in front of her. Jesus! The way she trusted! He hadn't trusted anything in that uncluttered way for years! Nor would he do so now. Especially now. He would do precisely what had to be done, what should have been done a long time ago; and Magdalena might never need to know.