Mambo (4 page)

He listened to the music that played on the jukebox and prayed Magdalena would take the same kind of care with her heart that she would with the contents of the case.

Magdalena Torrente drove her grey BMW from Calle Ocho to the Rickenbacker Causeway and then Key Biscayne. Here, on the shores of Biscayne Bay, were opulent houses protected by elaborate security systems and regular patrols which echoed the same state of siege that existed in the poorer neighbourhoods of Miami. It was as if the siege had simply risen several notches on the social scale, and the differences between Key Biscayne and areas like Little Havana were finally only cosmetic.

At eight-thirty she parked in the drive of the house she'd inherited from Humberto Torrente. Surrounded by lush palm and bougainvillaea and rubber trees, it was located some yards inland from the shore, where a motorboat was tied to a wooden slip. Magdalena unlocked the front door, went inside, crossed the tiled entrance hall, passed under a large skylight filled with stars. Across the living-room, an enormous bay window framed dark water. There was an unobstructed view of Miami, lights and neon, approaching aircraft, traffic on the silvery causeway: a glittering city trapped under a canopy of humidity.

She climbed the stairs. Her bedroom was plain. She had no taste for the bright shades, such as the gold curtains and red rugs, you often found in Hispanic homes; nor were there any of the customary religious artifacts, the gory Christs, the saints with their cartoon placidity, the prim Virgins, the whole panoply of blood and pain, chastity and redemption.

The only decoration in the bedroom was a black and white picture depicting Humberto Torrente in the uniform of a Colonel in the Cuban Air Force, taken in 1956 at some social function at the Havana Yacht Club. At his side stood his wife Oliva, dark-haired and exquisite, in a white cocktail dress. They looked prosperous, healthy, in love, and yet there seemed to be a glaze across their smiles, a sadness half-hidden, as if they knew that within six years of the snapshot both of them would be dead.

Magdalena gazed at the photograph for a time – 1956: she'd been five years old then. She was ten when her parents died their separate deaths. For her whole adolescence she was fated to a life of guardians, some of them nuns in boarding-schools, others widowed aunts in Miami Beach. She'd spent her fifteenth year in Garrido's custody at his big house in Coral Gables. Time and again he had explained his view of Cuban history, one of endless struggle, endless betrayal. He insisted that Humberto's death captured in miniature the tragedy of Cuba. Hadn't Humberto struggled for liberty with all his passion? And hadn't he been betrayed in the end?

Magdalena didn't buy all the way into Garrido's melodrama. Where Cuban politics were concerned, she tried to temper her passion with a certain objectivity. But it was the passion, inherited from Humberto, which had led her restlessly during her twenties and early thirties from one exiled group to another – to those with arsenals stashed in the Everglades and others who had bomb factories in South Miami and others still with safe houses in the Keys where semi-automatic weapons were converted to the real thing. She'd enjoyed the feel of guns in her hands and the idea of belonging to a secret army – the elaborate security precautions and the passwords and the intensity of the young men who trained with the kind of total concentration that made them good soldiers though poor lovers. She'd made love to many of them, and couldn't differentiate one from another now, those quick, silent boys, all of whom put the death of Castro above complete enjoyment of life. It was as if they were destined to live every day of their lives with a shadow of their own making across the face of the sun. So long as Fidel lived, there would always be this eclipse.

After ten years of association with one exile movement or another, Magdalena Torrente's experience of direct, anti-Castro action had consisted of an effort to dynamite crates of Soviet weapons in the heavily guarded Havana harbour (there were no weapons, only boxes of agricultural machinery; intelligence had been wrong), and the delivery of explosives to underground members in Pinar del Rio. She had flown the twin-engine Piper herself, a skill she'd learned from exiled pilots, while her three companions dropped the supplies by parachute to men and women waiting in darkened tobacco fields below.

Both sorties into Cuba had been thrilling, both heavy with the clammy menace of capture and death. Both had brought Magdalena closer to an understanding of what the cause meant. It was no mere abstraction, no games played in bomb factories, no simple rhetoric of freedom. It was life and death, and in particular her own life and death, that the cause demanded. And yet these adventures lacked something. She had the feeling of futility that might have dogged a person attacking an elephant with a can of mosquito repellent. One could sting Castro with nocturnal assaults, but they were never fatal.

In her middle thirties she'd realised that to be a soldier was not enough in itself. You had to be closer to the centre, to the place where strategic decisions were made. You had to be near the power. To fire weapons in the Everglades or assemble guns in the Keys (from where, frustratingly, you could practically smell Havana on the wind) was useful; but useful wasn't enough. The ability to fire a gun or fly surreptitiously into Cuba were not going to keep a dream alive. So she had entered the political world of Fernando Garrido and his cronies. It was a tiresome group at times, one that squabbled endlessly in the Cuban way, but influential and rich and committed without question to the destruction of Fidel.

Magdalena had won a reputation in these political circles as an energetic voice, somebody to be listened to, someone whose role was less illusory, and perhaps more practical, than knowing the parts of an M-16 rifle. Here, too, she came to realise she had deeper ambitions than to scurry in and out of Cuba under cover of the dark. And so she attended committee meetings, and she whispered in the ears of powerful figures in the exile community, and she listened to the pulses that beat in the darkness and smelled the breezes that blew through Miami and tracked their direction – and she detected in herself an immeasurable impatience. She wanted things to change in Cuba quickly. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Now.

When Castro finally fell …

She touched the photograph of her parents, fingertips on glass, tentative, loving. She remembered her father as a serious man whose rare displays of levity were all the more precious for their scarcity. Sombre, hard-working, Humberto Torrente had been dedicated to a patriotic ideal. He'd chosen the wrong way to realise it, that was all. His mistake was to place all his hopes on American military assistance and he'd died for that false expectation in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, the B-26 he piloted shot down by Castro's artillery over San Blas in Cuba. What Humberto failed to realise was that outside forces alone could never have unseated Castro at that time. The Americans, led by a vacillating Kennedy, had chickened out at the Bay of Pigs, withholding air support and naval artillery, leaving Cuban freedom fighters stranded on beaches. No, outside assaults could be useful up to a point, but the successful overthrow of Castro could come only from within Cuba, from men who hated the whole suffocating regime and who had the means and the courage to replace it with a free society.

Magdalena's mother, Oliva, hadn't been interested in Humberto's goals. Her own world was limited, constructed as it was around husband, home and child. The way Magdalena had turned out would have shocked her. What good was a woman who hadn't borne children? who didn't know how to cook? who didn't have a man to keep house for? What good was this kind of woman?

Shortly before Christmas 1961, Oliva Torrente, unhinged by her husband's death, swallowed an overdose of barbiturates. As if to emphasise how little she cared for a world without Humberto, she'd elected the sin of suicide over the burden of living a widow's life.

Magdalena considered the past an irrelevant encumbrance. Only the future mattered, only the task ahead. She turned away from the photograph. She took the gun from her pocket, removed the leather jacket, locked the weapon in her bedside table. She put Garrido's briefcase on the bed, opened a closet, removed a full-length suede coat. She placed the chocolate-coloured coat beside the case, then opened the case. The money was tightly bundled. There were stacks of hundred dollar bills. Under these were other stacks in one thousand dollar denominations.

The total was close to a million dollars, collected throughout the Cuban community from donations made by respectable doctors and lawyers and bank officials, cash skimmed from the
bolito
games and jai-alai betting and gathered quietly in Cuban bars, illicit money from drug dealers whose astronomical profits had endowed them with an indiscriminating sense of charity. It came from all manner of sources and was amassed, as it had been for the last four years, in the Casa de la Media Noche by Fernando Garrido, head of the group that called itself the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Cuba, an organisation whose wealthy members preferred anonymity to public notoriety.

In a sense the cash was dream money, the money of ancient pains and grievances, dollars thrown up by the need for vengeance against a system that had broken families and plundered property, capital dampened by the blood of those who'd already been martyred in a cause growing old and impatient. The cash was destined for Cuba, there to be used by the democratic underground movement for its operating expenses, which included illegal radio transmitters, pamphlets and newspapers. It bought food and guns for those obliged to hide in the mountains. It clothed and fed the children of these fugitives. It also purchased explosives used in acts of internal sabotage. Counter-revolution was an expensive business.

Magdalena undid the buttons of the coat. The lining, specially prepared for her by a seamstress in Hialeah, was divided into a series of pockets, each of which would hold a large number of bank-notes. It was skilful tailoring. There was no way a casual observer could tell the coat contained anything other than the body of the person who wore it; a smuggler's garment, designed for one purpose only.

Magdalena transferred notes from the briefcase to the lining of the suede coat. It took her twenty minutes to empty the case. She tried the coat on: weighty but tolerable. She looked at herself in a mirror. She didn't appear in any way different, no artificial plumpness, no unseemly bulges. She would be nothing more than a beautiful black-haired woman travelling alone on a long flight. Her looks – the way her thick hair fell mysteriously on her shoulders and how the lean line of her jaw emphasised a delightful mouth, the eyes that were knowingly dark and secretive, like those of a torch-singer – would draw attention as they always did. But the coat wouldn't cause anybody a second glance, which was all that mattered.

From the closet she removed a small suitcase she'd packed that morning. She went down the stairs, turned off the lights. Outside, the night was heavy with moisture. Over the Rickenbacker Causeway silver lightning flashed, then thunder crackled as if the sky were a vast radio receiver picking up static. Magdalena stepped inside her car, backed it out of the drive.

Across the street, Carlos sat in a black Pontiac parked under a twisted rubber tree. When she drove past she gave him a thumbs up sign, then for amusement tried to lose him in traffic, but Carlos, with his watchful black eyes and unsmiling features, was an expert at bird-dogging. Slipping coolly through traffic, he managed to stay directly behind her all the way to Miami International Airport.

Norfolk, England

It was dawn, and cold, when the girl rode the chestnut mare to the top of the rise. The ground was hard with frost and the horse's hoofs thumped solidly. The animal's breath hung on the chill air, tiny clouds turned red by the first touch of sunlight. The girl rode with all the confidence of someone who has been mounting horses since early childhood. This particular mare was a special favourite, a big mellow horse that loved to be ridden.

The girl reined the animal at the top of the rise and looked out across the countryside. This corner of England, more than a hundred miles from London, was almost exclusively flat, fields stretching toward a horizon that seemed very far away. Here and there isolated antique villages of the kind so adored by tourists interrupted the monotony of the furrows; occasionally a marsh or pond seeped up through meadowland and created a watery diversion. The girl, whose name was Stephanie Brough, had lived all her fourteen years in this vicinity. The nearest cities were Norwich to the north and Ipswich to the south, and in between, as she sometimes phrased it, was
sheer bloody boring nothing
.

She dismounted in a stand of thin birch trees. The rise sloped down to bare fields that would become muddy as soon as the frost melted. She liked all this – riding in the early dawn, avoiding the
awful
breakfasts with her parents and that twit of a brother Tim (who sometimes flicked pellets of soggy Corn Flakes at her when he thought nobody was looking;
Timmy Twit
, she thought. Everybody expected
him
to go up to
Oxford
in two years! He couldn't find his way to the bloody
loo
without a map! And her parents doted on him in such a sickening way:
Tim's so clever, oooh, fawn and scrape)
. She liked the huge secrecy, the feeling that the world belonged only to her at this time of morning before school.

A casual onlooker would have seen a slim, pretty girl, trim in her blue jeans and white cotton sweater, her small breasts barely evident, her yellow hair cut very close to her scalp in a fashion that was almost boyish. But nobody was watching Stephanie Brough, not at this hour of the morning.

She gazed down the slope. She had a clear view of the place she'd come to see. About three hundred yards from where she stood was the whitewashed farmhouse that belonged to a family called Yardley. Old Man Yardley had died last year and his sons, delighted they didn't have to work the land for the old tyrant, had upped and left for London. (Such smart buggers, she thought.) Ever since then the place had been empty. Steffie had supposed it would always remain that way – who'd want to rent or buy that old dump with the black fields surrounding it? It was isolated and rundown and the willow trees that drooped around it made it look creepy.