Mambo (41 page)

“So? What's so interesting about that?” Hurt asked.

Kinnaird was quiet a second. Then he said, “Magdalena Torrente is an intimate friend of Rosabal's.”

“Intimate?” Hurt asked, alarmed by this new connection. “How intimate? What does that mean?”

Kinnaird gazed at the shrunken heads. They really were monstrous little things. Their mouths hung open as if these were the faces of people who had died in unspeakable pain. “My dear Harry, I can only tell you what I read in the reports. And police reports are not renowned for their pornographic details. She's a friend, a close friend. Perhaps a lover.”

“What does she know? Did Rosabal tell her anything?”

Kinnaird shrugged. “I don't have the answers. My information isn't complete. Pagan won't tell me anything directly. And since he's not the quickest person when it comes to compiling reports for the Commissioner, I am sometimes not altogether
au courant
. But I rather doubt that Rosabal would confide in this woman anything so important as our undertaking, don't you?”

Hurt nodded, though a little uncertainly. “I don't like it anyway you cut it. The fact that Pagan's contact in Miami is an intimate friend of Rosabal – this is not good news, Freddie.”

Sheridan Perry said, “It's very simple. I've always followed the old line that it's better to be safe than sorry.”

“You mean what I think you mean?” Hurt asked.

Perry nodded but said nothing.

“You'd eliminate the pair?” Hurt asked.

“Eliminate's a good word,” Perry remarked.

Hurt wondered if Perry's suggestion, lethal and yet so simply phrased, was Sheridan's attempt to turn attention away from any suspicion of murderous betrayal that might have gathered around him. Kinnaird had deftly changed that subject a few minutes ago, putting into abeyance the question with which this meeting had begun. Sir Freddie, diplomat, smoother of tangled paths, had focused attention on another problem, one more easily solved than that of identifying the killer behind the murders of the Society members.

“Who would you get to do it?” Hurt asked.

Sheridan Perry shook his head. “Harry, come on. I don't have an inside track with the criminal fraternity. I thought you might know somebody. After all, you're the man with connections when it comes to guns and guys that know how to use them.”

Hurt had the feeling that Perry's last remark was a way of casting a little light of suspicion on Harry himself. It was undeniably true that he had contacts among ex-soldiers and mercenaries, men who considered killing as natural a function as, say, screwing. Hurt had kept some bad company in his time, also true. Was Perry trying to damn Hurt by association? Was he trying to say that Hurt was the logical candidate if the murders were an inside job?

Sweet Jesus
, Hurt thought. When you stepped on board that great rolling locomotive of doubt and suspicion it just gathered speed and kept moving, never stopping at any stations, it rattled and screamed past objectivity in its frantic journey to confusion and madness. He took a couple of deep breaths, seeking the calm centre of himself.

“I could make a call, I guess,” he said. Why deny it? He had the contacts.

“I wish there were some other way.” Kinnaird's voice was quiet.

“There isn't,” Perry said. “You let this character Pagan go where he pleases – what then? And if the woman happens to have information … No, Freddie. There's no other way. We can't afford to take chances now.”

Hurt stepped inside the kitchen. Kinnaird and Perry could hear him talking quietly on the telephone. He spoke for a few minutes, then he returned to the living-room.

“It's done,” he said flatly.

There was a silence in the room. In the entrance room, behind the closed door, one of the bodyguards coughed. Hurt strolled to the window. The view was breathtaking. There was more traffic on the river now: launches, yachts, one of which was strung like a Christmas tree. In the windows of other apartment buildings lights were dulled by drawn curtains or tinted glass.

He said, “Ever since we became involved in this Cuban business, we've had nothing but problems. I remember when everything was easy. Plain sailing. No clouds. Full membership. We didn't have deaths, killings. We weren't involved in all this …” He waved a hand. The appropriate word had eluded him. “Mainly, though, our associates were still alive and well.”

He stared across the expanse of the Washington night. Because of the vast electrical glow of the city, the stars were dimmed in the sky. He was about to turn his face back to the room when a bullet, fired from an apartment tower nearby, pierced the window in an almost soundless manner.

It penetrated his skull.

Harry Hurt put his hand up to his head, thinking for the shortest time possible, the kind of time only a sophisticated atomic clock might measure, that he had a migraine. It was his final perception, quicker than quicksilver. He neither heard nor saw Freddie Kinnaird and Sheridan Perry rush to the place where, face-down, he had fallen.

The Caribbean

The freighter, an old vessel badly in need of fresh paint, flew the red white and blue flag of Cuba. It was not of Cuban origin. Built in Newcastle, England, some forty years before, it was registered in Panama and named – at least for this voyage –
La Mandadera
. It was a vessel of formidable shabbiness. Rust seemingly held the ship together, creating brown bands around bow and stern.

The captain was a moustached Cuban-American called Luis Sandoval who lived in Florida. He had fled Cuba in 1964 with his wife and family at a time when rumours concerning the removal of children from Cuba to Russia had been rife on the island. It was said that Fidel was going to send Cuban kids to the Soviet Union to be educated and raised there as good little Communists. Luis, like thousands of others, had left Cuba for good. For more than twenty-five years he'd plied his trade as a fishing-guide around Miami, impatiently waiting for the moment of his return to the homeland.

Now he was in the vanguard of the liberation movement.

He stood on the bridge of
La Mandadera
, his binoculars trained on the dark shore five miles away. There was a half-moon and some low cloud and the sea was tranquil. Sandoval scanned the shoreline slowly. He wasn't nervous.

There! To his right he saw the sign he was looking for: a red-orange flare that ripped the darkness like a wound opening. It was followed by a constant flame, a bonfire burning on the beach. Luis Sandoval gave his crew the order to proceed. Within a mile of the place known as Cabo Gracias a Dios he would drop anchor and wait for history to take place. It did not escape his vanity that he was one of many co-authors helping to shape forthcoming events.

Twenty-three thousand miles above
La Mandadera, a
United States spy satellite, that until recently had been bugged by a mysterious malfunction, began to take photographs, hundreds of them, thousands, pictures that would be relayed back to a deciphering station deep in the green West Virginia countryside, where they would be processed and analysed and, like little coded mysteries from space, broken wide open. These same photographs also showed a stormy cloud formation, as menacing in its darkness as a black hole, moving across the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula toward the waters of the Caribbean.

16

Miami

On its descent into Miami the plane was buffeted like paper in a wind-tunnel. Pagan was the first person off. He entered the stuffy terminal, ploughed through customs and immigration, explained the gun and holster in his overnight bag to an ill-mannered officer who wanted to confiscate it, Scotland Yard or no Scotland Yard identification. A quick phone call was made to Lieutenant Philip Navarro of the Dade County Police, the name of Martin Burr was dropped, and Pagan was let through grudgingly.

He found a cab driven by a cheerful Haitian called Marcel Foucault, whose English was as thick as bouillabaisse. Pagan had Magdalena's address from the forms she'd had to complete for British immigration. It was a house in Key Biscayne. Foucault, who howled appreciatively from his window at passing women, and shook with irrepressible mirth when they responded, claimed to know Miami like a native.

Pagan had never been in this city before. Downtown was bright – office blocks blazed and hotels rose like lit glass slabs. Palm trees, tropical shrubs alongside the road, these surprised him with their alien lushness. He rolled down his window, smelled the salt air. Small man-made islands, loaded with mansions, sat in the dark of Biscayne Bay: Palm Island, San Marco, Hibiscus.

Suddenly the taxi was out over black water, suspended impossibly in the air. A bridge, of course. Pagan shut his eyes, fought off a certain dizziness that assailed him. The turbulent flight, a glass of awful Sauternes on the plane, the ache in his chest – all elements that had unsettled him.

Marcel Foucault nodded toward a cluster of lights at the end of the bridge. “Zat's Key Biscayne.”

The night air rushing through the window helped Pagan feel better. He thought about Magdalena. What was she going to say when he turned up on her doorstep?

He looked at the growing lights of Key Biscayne. Launches along the shoreline were tethered to private jetties that led to expensive houses. American opulence always impressed him; he thought Americans did wealth better than anybody else. They purchased more, collected more, stored more. They also produced more, ate more, drank more, and divorced more. Rich people here lived as if all America were a going-out-of-business sale.

“Yo street, ami,” Marcel Foucault said. He stopped the cab outside a large house barely visible beyond dense shrubbery. Prolific plants obscured the yellow light burning beside the front doorway; thousands of moths threw themselves at the bulb, frenzied participants in mass suicide.

Pagan, a little surprised that Magdalena lived in such a well-heeled neighbourhood, stepped out. Had he expected some crummy cellar filled with anti-Fidel radicals running a leaky old printing-press? He paid the driver, then watched the cab pull away. He was apprehensive now. Given that Magdalena knew anything, was she likely to tell him? What had seemed a good idea in London now felt insubstantial to him. He wondered if painkillers had fuelled this whole transatlantic crossing, if the idea had been inspired by the actions of the chemicals absorbed in his system – a junkie's trip.

Picking up his overnight bag, Pagan moved along the pathway to the front door. He rang the bell, waited, rang again. He was aware of the malicious little eye of the peephole: somebody was watching him from inside. He heard a chain drawn back, a bolt sliding, then the door was opened.

“Frank.”

She appeared in shadow, motionless only a second before she stepped forward and, to Pagan's surprise, threw her arms around him. The embrace, unexpectedly fierce, threw him off balance. He supported himself against the door jamb even as Magdalena held on to him tightly. It was a welcome he could never have anticipated. In a black suede mini-skirt and white silk blouse, she was barefoot and delectable. She whispered his name very quietly almost as if she were afraid of breaking some spell.

She led him inside, across a large tiled hall to a sitting-room. She switched on a soft light. The room was starkly furnished – a sofa, a chair, a table, the lamp. One of everything, he thought. She clearly didn't use this room much. It had the waxen quality of a window-display.

Still holding his hand, she led him to the sofa, then sat alongside him, curling her feet up under her body. He noticed some slight puffiness beneath her eyes, as if she might have been crying before.

She took a cigarette pack from a pocket at the side of her skirt and lit one with a black Bic. He couldn't remember seeing her smoke before and she did it in an unpractised way, like a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Something was wrong here, he thought, a sadness, a change. Her smile was a terrific effort, but it was more teeth than pleasure.

“You don't seem overwhelmingly surprised to find me on your doorstep,” he said.

“The weird thing is, I just happened to be thinking about you. Lo and behold, here you are. Is it an omen?”

There was a strangeness in her manner. She was present yet absent, here yet elsewhere. “What exactly were you thinking about me?” he asked.

“How nice it would be to see you. How nice it would be to see a friendly face. I need one.”

“Why so gloomy?” He laid a hand gently on her shoulder.

“I've had better days.”

She blew smoke up at the ceiling. She had a wonderful throat; lined a little now – what didn't time touch? – it was still marvellous and feminine. It needed no adornment to make it enticing.

“You didn't come all this way just to see me,” she said.

“Who else do I know in Miami?”

“You must have some business here.”

“Business and pleasure. The lines get blurred where you're involved.”

The telephone rang. Magdalena excused herself, rose from the sofa, and crossed the room. She turned her back to him as she picked up the receiver; when she spoke she used Spanish. The conversation was brief. She hung up, glanced at her watch, then walked back to the sofa. She didn't sit this time. Instead, she kneeled on the cushion and faced him. She lit another cigarette. Her short skirt slid up her thigh. Her black eyes were blacker than ever before. You could see all manner of sorrows in them.

“You were saying something about business,” she said. There was a new note in her voice, perhaps a little impatience. Maybe the phone call had reminded her of an appointment.

He suddenly felt scattered, weary. “I need coffee. Do you mind?”

“I made some before. It's probably still hot.” She went out into the kitchen, and returned with a cup. Pagan took it, sipped slowly.

“Now,” she said, and she touched the back of his hand. “Speak to me.”