Mambo (38 page)

But when he saw the house he wasn't sure. He had somehow expected a farmhouse, at best an old Scottish lodge, perhaps a renovated manse, not this sandstone monstrosity, which seemed ill-defined, uncertain of its own boundaries. Turrets, by God! Neither house nor castle, it managed to suggest one of those late nineteenth-century follies erected by an ambitious whiskered Victorian as a monument to his own – and his age's – enlightenment. Foxworth smiled to himself as he turned the car into the long driveway.

Twilight blurred the edges of the unlit house. Now it looked positively spooky, a place of creaking floorboards and squeaking doors and secret passage-ways. Not your inviting prospect, Foxie thought. But policemen, like plumbers, were obliged to go where the job took them. You couldn't just say
I
don't like the look of the place, I refuse to go near it
.

Foxie parked the car. It was the only vehicle in sight. He stepped out. The house was deeply quiet. No TV sounds, no piano playing, no shadow at the window peering out.

An echo of Miss Wilkie's question came back to him.
Who'd want to live there
?

Aye, who indeed?

Foxie crossed the drive. He didn't approach the front door at once. He went instead to the side, wondering if there might be lights at the rear, some sign of life. But he found none. It was indeed possible, he thought, that the place was empty, in which case he'd go back to Ballantrae and ask at a local pub if anybody knew the name of the owner and where he might be found.

The sun slid behind trees, its last light diffused by wintry branches. Twilight was going rapidly. No soft, sweet lingering here. No nightingale tunes. Foxie moved between the bushes.

He neither saw nor heard the parting of bushes to his right. Nor did he hear the quietly hostile
skweeee
made by the barrel of a shotgun forced between resistant branches of shrubbery. Some instinct finally made him turn round. His heart felt like a ball dropped from the roof of a tenement, down, unstoppably down, a slave to gravity.

“I lost my way,” he said to the shadowy figure who stood half-hidden in the foliage.

The barrel of the gun, suddenly massive, came out of the bushes and was thrust against Foxworth's chest as if to say, with vigorous agreement,
You certainly have, chum
.

15

Cabo Gracias a Dios, Houduras

Steffie Brough, dreaming of her own death, woke when a spider crawled over a closed eyelid. She sat upright quickly and swatted the creature aside. Curled defensively inward, it created a huge black furry ball that flew across the air and struck the far wall of the tent then dropped in long-legged disarray. It took Steffie a moment to assemble her thoughts and remember where she was, and the recollection depressed her.
There were men here who wanted to kill her
.

She heard rain strike the canvas overhead. The tent sagged in the centre where it had gathered water during the hours of darkness. She got up, glanced at Ruhr who lay on the cot. She parted the flap, looked out, saw a dismal steamy morning. Rain weaved a mist in the trees and the density of the forest was overwhelming. Unseen insects kept up their constant click-clicking. How could she possibly have imagined escape last night? There was no way out of this place unless Ruhr said so. If she ran now he'd simply find her and bring her back. She was trapped.

Ruhr still slept quietly and yet she had the odd feeling he could wake at will, that he'd trained himself to sleep only in the most shallow way. Any unusual noise would bring him around.

Last night, when it had seemed inevitable that he'd overpower her after the pointless attempted escape, he'd suddenly and strangely lost interest, pushed her away, tossed her a blanket and told her to sleep on the floor. It was almost as if she were a game he didn't want to finish, something he needed to linger over because there was more pleasure in it that way. She clenched her hands and stood in the centre of the tent and realised that if she could see herself from a point outside she would probably look like some kind of animal with her stringy, dirty hair. I smell, she thought. I smell horrible.

Ruhr woke. Steffie had never seen anybody who rose quite like him. One minute asleep, the next fully awake, no transition between. He tossed his blanket aside and got up. He wore white underpants, white T-shirt. He dressed without talking, without even noticing her. He brushed his teeth, using water from an old pail, and spat toothpaste out on the floor. He combed his thinning hair and studied his face in a small corroded mirror. There was intense self-interest in the way he did this, a vanity.

He took his knife from under his pillow. He ran the tip of one finger along the blade, testing its keenness, then sheathed the knife and strapped it to his shin. Only then did he look at Steffie Brough, as if the weapon had reminded him of her existence.

“Hungry?” he asked.

She didn't say anything even though she was famished. Ruhr produced a plastic bag from which he took some dried fruit – God, that was all she'd had to eat since leaving England. He gave her two brown rubbery discs that might have been dehydrated apricot or pear, you couldn't possibly tell by their taste. They were awful, but she ate them anyway. When she was finished she understood she felt a vague, though sullen, gratitude toward Ruhr for the food.

But then she remembered how he'd touched her, that humiliating invasion of her privacy, his awful lips on her mouth, his hands all over her body, and her brief gratitude dissolved.

“More?” Ruhr asked.

She declined. She was still hungry but she didn't want him to know it. He had too much power over her already: why give him more? He took out a metal flask from a canvas bag. It contained lukewarm water. She drank. It was ghastly, gritty, tasted of iron.

“Things here are a little different for you,” he said. “You're used to something else.”

“Yes.”

“No pleasant bedroom. No nice bathroom for you here.” Ruhr smiled. He rubbed his face with the bad hand. Steffie barely noticed the deformity. She certainly wasn't repelled by it in quite the same way as before.
You can get used to anything
, she thought.

“You would like to go home,” Ruhr said.

Why had he said that? she wondered. There was some sly quality in his voice. He was teasing her, only he wasn't very good at it. He wasn't much good at any kind of social interaction, she'd noticed. Even when he moved he did so without poise, like a man who knows he's ugly and feels people are watching him critically. There was an aura about him of loneliness, the same pall she'd seen around those sad, solitary figures who sat for motionless hours in the draughty reading-room of her local library, sometimes leafing newspapers but more often staring into space at nothing. Steffie, raised by decent people who tended to see the best in the human race and the bright side of everything, almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

He kills, she thought. He kills casually. She remembered Trevaskis and his unfortunate kindness.

“Perhaps policemen will rescue you,” he said, still teasing in his awkward manner. He opened the flap of the tent. There was the pungent smell of wet canvas. “Perhaps even as we speak, some kind English policeman is closing in on us. Somebody good and cunning. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes, eh?”

“Perhaps,” she said.

“Hope is so wonderfully human, little girl. What person has not been completely betrayed by hope at least once in his or her lifetime?”

She sat on the floor, and hung her head. It was important to fight despair. Sometimes you couldn't find the strength to do so. Nobody was looking for her, nobody was closing in. It was stupid to think so.

He kneeled alongside her, cupped her chin in the palm of his hand. “Do not be so despondent, child. Keep hoping. What choice do you have?”

She hated him then more than ever before. The way he touched her under the face was awful in itself, but his words were the real killers –
don't give up hope. Don't be despondent
. Should I sing for you, Ruhr, and dance? She closed her eyes, blinked back tears and thought
Fuck you, you won't see me weep, you rotten bastard
.

He stood upright. She didn't look up at him. He said, “I have some business to attend to. You will stay here, of course. It would be pointless to run again. Where would you go in any case? I expect to be back very soon.”

She heard him push the open flap aside and then he was gone and the tent was silent save for the metronomic ticking of the rain.

The girl could wait. Delayed satisfaction only heightened anticipation. Ruhr walked down through long wet grass and mud to the landing-strip. The transport plane had gone at first light. He wondered briefly about Sweeney, but Ruhr wasn't sentimental about friendships. He simply didn't have any. All human relationships were inherently doomed, whether by death or declining interest. Why make any kind of commitment?

He had never loved in his life. On those few occasions when he'd felt the tremor of affection for another, he'd dismissed it as a chemical anomaly, a flaw in his system, something to be rooted out. It was simpler to destroy than to love. Destruction was quick and fevered and exciting. By contrast love, as he understood it, could be a protracted torture, a bundle of insecurities, a murderous game of the emotions.

He paused on the edge of the runway, enjoying the rain against his face. Then he crossed the concrete, passing the missile that sat in the truck at the edge of the runway. The green waterproof tarpaulin, running with rain, still covered the weapon. In the distance, their sounds muted by foliage, soldiers went through tedious drills designed simultaneously to dull the critical faculties and raise the temperature of enthusiasm. Pumped up for the overthrow of Castro, they would set sail with an effervescent sense of purpose and a determination sharpened by weeks of preparation here. The idea of discipline, with its unambiguous rules and codes pleased Ruhr.

He went up the slope to the place where Fuentes' tent was situated. Tommy was inside with the Englishman, Bosanquet. They sat on either side of a card-table on which a map was spread. Ruhr ducked his head, went inside. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Inverted lids of old coffee jars were being used as ashtrays by the chain-smoking Fuentes.

Fuentes looked up. Bosanquet took off his reading-glasses.

“His majesty,” Fuentes said. “See how he condescends to visit us in my humble dwelling, Bose
old bean
. Are we flattered? Beat the drums. Roll out the red carpet. The king comes!”

Bosanquet, who thought poorly of Fuentes' heavy-handed sarcasm, stared at the German. He was really a disgusting shit as far as Bosanquet was concerned. Up there with the schoolgirl in his tent – very bad form. It was child-molesting, no two ways about it. He would gladly have cut out Ruhr's throat, and in other circumstances might have done just that. As it was, it was the child who would have to die, because that was how the order had come down from Harry Hurt. In Bosanquet's scheme of things, whatever was sent down the pipeline from Harry had top priority. Harry signed the paycheques and Bosanquet's loyalty was the commodity he bought with them.

“You didn't appear last night,” Bosanquet said. “We waited for you. You were supposed to perform a task and you failed to show up, which is unforgivable.”

“I fell asleep,” Ruhr said drily. He enjoyed the Englishman's restrained display of temper. “I had had a busy day, you may recall.”

“What about the girl?”

“What about her?”

“Is she alive?”

“For the moment,” Ruhr said.

“For the moment,” Bosanquet remarked. He really had no stomach for the idea of the girl dying. He got to his feet. Her death wasn't his business. Nor was the murder last night of one of Ruhr's henchmen. These things were Ruhr's own affairs. He changed the subject. “Are you ready to do the work you should have done last night?”

“It's raining,” Ruhr said, as if this might prevent him working.

“Does that make a difference?” Bosanquet rubbed his sweaty face with his red bandanna. He remembered how Harry Hurt had said that the German's needs were to be met at all times, because he was a very important part of the operation. Presumably this order included pandering somewhat to the German's sense of his own shattering superiority.

“Perhaps not,” Ruhr said. “The tools.”

“Of course.” Fuentes removed a canvas bag from under his card table. It rattled as he handed it to Ruhr. “Everything you have requested is in there.”

Ruhr unzipped the bag, looked inside, apparently satisfied.

All three men walked to the airstrip. Ruhr glanced at the covered missile on the truck and the large tarpaulined rectangle that contained the weapon control system. He had no intention of doing the work under the eyes of the other two.

The key to survival was the same as it had always been: he had to be indispensable. He'd known all along that this point would be reached, this place where his future was in the balance. It was always this way. Many of his employers had tried to shaft him in the past, to cheat him after the event. None had ever succeeded. He was always prepared, always kept something in hand. He had the documents in the care of the lawyer Herr Schiller in Hamburg, of course, but Ruhr liked to take out even more insurance policies. In this case, he was essential to Fuentes and Bosanquet and Rafael Rosabal and their scheme because of his specialised knowledge. That was the key and neither of the other men possessed it. Only Ruhr.

Fuentes pointed to a wooden crate, sheltered from wetness by sheets of plastic. He said, “This is what the Israelis delivered.”

Ruhr glanced at the box, then turned away from it. For the moment he wanted to look at the missile. He unrolled the green tarpaulin a few inches, revealing the blunt grey canister. Without the nose cone the weapon lacked a dimension. Armed, it would have a range of approximately fourteen hundred miles; it could travel at five hundred and fifty miles an hour.