Mambo (48 page)

You do what it takes
, Magdalena thought.
And sometimes it surprises you
. She said nothing, looked from her window. Havana loomed up around her, neighbourhoods of small houses, shacks, apartments half-built, scaffolding and ladders and cement-mixers in disarray. Unkempt suburbs gave way to another Havana, the central part of the city where imposing buildings and monuments crowded the night sky. Here and there new architecture appeared among the old, the occasional dreary high-rise block overwhelming some decrepit colonial mansion.

Her memories of this place, which she'd last seen at the age of ten, were different from the present reality. What she recalled most were warm hazy nights and palm trees and crowds of students, usually arguing politics, strolling along San Lazaro Street. Nobody argued politics in public anymore. She remembered the stands that sold hamburgers and oysters on Infanta Street and the delicious smells that rose in the humid air. The stands were probably gone by now; the oysters almost certainly. She recalled enviably beautiful, well-dressed women on San Rafael and how she longed to grow up and enter that glamorous life, exclusive nightclubs and dance-halls with tuxedoed orchestras.

She glanced at Alberto Canto. Sweat ran down his neck and dampened the open collar of his white shirt. He took a linen handkerchief from his jacket and pressed it against his face.

“You've got a lot to lose if you're caught in my company,” Magdalena said.

Canto looked grim. “I wonder if there's anything left to lose in Cuba these days. Life doesn't have much quality. It's mostly dreary but one goes through the motions, because suicide isn't an alternative. I'd like some joy, I think. Even a prospect of joy would do. Perhaps I should flee to Miami and play the exile game.”

Was that how Canto saw her and Garrido and all the others in the US – just players in a game? It was a bleak little thing to say, almost an accusation. Magdalena made no response. How could she object? She didn't live here. Her Cuba hadn't been the daily grinding reality of Canto's; perhaps hers had been no more than a dream place, a state of mind, something she thought she could help shake and remake in quite another image.

A state of mind: was that all? A delusion
? She wasn't sure. She understood only how odd it was actually to
be
here in her native country after thirty years. Her sense of exile had always been strong and melancholic. What was more terrible than being forced out of your own country and obliged to live in another just because you disagreed with certain principles? Exile was a wretched condition – the yearning, the way you tried to laugh the longing off as some kind of silliness, but you were never convincing.

Now she smelled the Cuban night as if she'd never smelled anything before. This was where she belonged, the place Rafael Rosabel had promised her and then stolen. She was suddenly aware of his nearness: he was ten, fifteen minutes away, she wasn't sure, her sense of direction had eroded with time, amnesia, confusion. What did she feel? what did she really feel? She didn't know.

Canto slowed the car in the neighbourhood of Vedado. Under the outstretched branches of a palm in a dark street, he parked the Lada, turned off the lights but left the engine running.

“Go right at the next corner. Halfway down the street there's a new apartment block. Very small. Exclusive. Rosabal lives there on the top floor. I understand there is usually a security guard in the entrance. However,” and Canto paused, wiped his face with the handkerchief again, “because we have a few friends here and there, somebody was able to persuade the usual guard to call in sick. Unhappily, his replacement never received the order to substitute for him. A bureaucratic oversight. One of many in Cuba.”

“Convenient.”

“We have our moments.” Canto stared through the windshield. Wind lashed suddenly through the fronds of the palm and they made hard slapping noises on the roof of the car.

“What about Rosabal's wife? Does she live in the apartment?”

“I didn't know he had a wife,” Canto said.

Welcome to the club
, Magdalena thought.

She opened the passenger door.

“I'll come back to this spot in ten minutes,” Canto said and looked at his watch. “If you're not here, I'll come back again in another ten minutes. If you still haven't shown up, I'll make one more attempt ten minutes later provided it's safe to do so. If you're here I'll take you back to the airfield. If not … well, I prefer to be positive.”

Before she got out of the car Magdalena opened Garrido's pouch. The gun inside was a loaded lightweight Fraser automatic with a handle of imitation pearl. She slipped the weapon in the pocket of her leather jacket, then reached inside the pouch again. She removed a small brown bottle that contained two unmarked white capsules, which puzzled her for a moment. And then she understood. Garrido, in a melodramatic gesture, had provided her with failure pills, suicide capsules.
Swallow two, lie down, oblivion guaranteed
. He obviously had no doubts about her business in Havana. It was all black and white to him. Either she'd do the job and come back to Miami, or she'd fail and be captured and take the pills. He didn't see the complexity of emotions involved. He couldn't imagine how there might be any indecision on her part. He didn't want to know. As he got older so did his need grow to make the world more simple, more manageable.

She stuck the bottle in the pocket of her jeans, got out of the car. Canto drove away. She walked quickly, then paused in the shadows as if frozen.

Illuminated by a solitary streetlight, two men were talking together on the pavement opposite. One wore a uniform, the other a white
guayabera
. The uniformed man removed his cap, tossed his head back, laughed at something. He had a pistol at his hip and was obviously some kind of cop; she had no way of knowing who his companion might be. Both men laughed now, heads inclined together like conspirators. Then the cop turned and walked away with a wave of his hand. His companion went inside one of the houses on the street, an old baroque structure carved into expensive apartments. The riff-raff didn't live in this neighbourhood.

Magdalena waited until the street was empty before she moved. The apartment building where Rafael lived was small and rather unassuming; presumably the Minister of Finance in an allegedly Communist society had to keep appearances down as much as possible.

Outside the entrance she stopped to gaze up the short flight of steps to the glass doors; there was a desk in the lobby, and a lamp was lit, but nobody was present.

She pushed the doors open, entered the lobby. There was an lift to her left, but she chose the stairs instead. She climbed quietly, swiftly, possessed by an odd light-headed feeling, as if this were not really happening and she was some kind of wraith and the real Magdalena Torrente was back in Key Biscayne. The gun in her pocket knocked dully upon her thigh as she moved. The fourth floor was at the top of the building. Since there was only one door on each floor, finding Rosabal's apartment was easy.

She stepped toward the door, which had no number, no name-plate.

You will have the pleasure of killing him
, Garrido had said.

You have earned that right more than anyone else
.

She knocked on the door in a gentle way.

Then she waited.

Pagan drove uneasily on the central highway that linked Pinar del Rio with Havana. Yellowy moonlight on the range of the Sierra de los Organos rendered the landscape unreal. The Oldsmobile was more invalid that automobile, and had begun to make the kind of clanking sound common to terminal cars. But it hadn't died yet.

Near San Cristobal – where in 1962 the Soviets had installed the SS-4 missiles that had led to the Cuban missile crisis – he parked the car beneath trees because a convoy of army trucks was lumbering past with no particular attention to the conventions of the road. They wandered from side to side on the highway, their dim lights menacing. When the last truck had gone past Pagan drove on.

On the outskirts of Havana he came to the district of Marianao. In a silent side-street he stopped the car, consulted the map he'd been given by El Boxeador. He played the dim flashlight over it; Rosabal lived in the Vedado district of the city which so far as he could tell lay in the streets behind the Malecon, the sea wall along Havana's coast.

He drove past darkened houses and unlit shops, a Coppelia ice-cream parlour, a shuttered bar; Pagan had the fanciful thought that a plague might have closed the city down. There were no pedestrians save for a noisy clutch of women who came out of one tenement doorway and immediately entered another, leaving the sound of shrill drunken laughter behind.

Streetlights were practically non-existent and where he found them were about as bright as candles. Lush trees stirred in the dark; here and there large ornate buildings stood like neglected palaces. Some of them had been religious colleges or the business headquarters of dispossessed
norte americano
corporations or the homes of the exiled rich. He drove with uncharacteristic caution, hearing the way the worn tyrewalls, as delicate as membranes, screeched whenever he turned a corner.

He reached the avenue known as the Paseo, which was filled with trucks and private cars and people arguing over the cause of an accident in which a '56 Chevy had ploughed into the side of a van. He didn't like all this activity. He turned left, then right, crossed the Avenida de los Presidentes, found himself back in narrow streets again, some of them without names. Finally, inevitably, the Oldsmobile accomplished what it had been trying to do for the last fifty miles – it gasped and shuddered and came to a halt outside a vacant lot behind tenements. Pagan, struggling with a certain panic, pressed the starter button a couple of times. The engine wouldn't even turn over.

Dead. What bloody timing.

He got out of the vehicle, kicked a front tyre in frustration. Then by flashlight he studied his map, trying to memorise the way to Rosabal's street.

He walked for ten minutes, staying close to shadows as he anxiously sought street signs, landmarks, anything that might correspond to his map. Once, from a window over a butcher's shop in which hung an unrealistic slab of plastic display beef, he heard the noise of a guitar playing lazily and a woman's reedy voice singing “
Una desgracia unfortunada
” and elsewhere a caged bird squawked as if in competition. Down cross streets came the damp scent of the sea and very old stone and air that seemed to crackle with the sound of water dripping on salt. He passed under the signs of closed businesses.
Farmacia. Casa Joyería. Restaurante Vegetariano
.

Once or twice taxis went cruising past. A smell of bread drifted from some distant bakery, arousing Pagan's hunger. When had he last eaten? On the flight from London to Miami. Now he couldn't remember what the food had been. Something awful. The smell of bread teased him. He kept walking, concentrating on where he was going, staying close to walls and passing beneath trees. Sometimes a loud carousing wind blew with such ferocity that it took his breath away and he had to turn his face out of its path.

How much further? he wondered. Was he going in the right direction in this dismal city? Now he stopped, took out the crumpled map, examined it again. His flashlight, as jinxed as the car, flickered and went out. Did nothing work on this whole fucking island? He walked until he came to a streetlamp and he stood below it, staring at the map.

Bloody hell – nothing on the map matched his surroundings. According to the route he'd taken he should have reached a small park that was represented on the map by a tiny green square – instead, what faced him was a warren of narrow streets where the houses all looked dilapidated, not at all the kind of neighbourhood in which you might imagine the Minister of Finance to live.

Narrow streets led to others; old houses mirrored one another. A maze all at once, a territorial riddle, like something you might dream during restless sleep and force yourself abruptly awake into the familiar surroundings of your bedroom.

This was no dream, Frank. No chance of waking up from this.

Sweet Jesus, nothing was familiar here. He flapped the map again, examined it, blinked, remembering that he'd heard once how Communist countries deliberately printed devious maps to throw visitors off balance, to mislead them and prevent them from trespassing in places where they didn't belong or from seeing something “sensitive” – be it a slum or a military camp or the headquarters of State Security. He also recalled hearing somewhere that street names were frequently being changed as one Party official fell from grace and another rose in prominence. Had Garcia Street, for example, become Munoz Street? Was that the kind of thing that happened? He had an urge to crumple the map and toss it, but even if it was misleading, even if it didn't quite reflect reality, it was still the best shot he had of finding Rosabal.

He walked again. The narrow streets, houses oddly quiet, most of them unlit, threatened him in a way that was more than merely vague. Doorways, darkened and silent, suggested presences that observed him as he walked past. And now he remembered something he'd read once about how each neighbourhood in Cuba, each block, had its own organisation of snoops who watched from windows, who reported strangers to the authorities. He tried to force confidence into his step. He belonged here. He was a man going home late. That was all. There was nothing odd about his presence. Nobody would look at him twice. He whistled quietly, then became silent. What if you were lost here forever? he wondered. What if you could never find your way out of these streets? Round and round, up and down, never seeing a street name, a number, a familiar face. One bad fucking nightmare. One endless inner scream of panic.

Then, when he'd begun to feel a quiet despair, the streets became wider. The houses were larger now, richer, the foliage more dense. The warrens vanished behind him, the streetlamps became more generous. Across the way he saw it – the small park he'd been looking for before, his landmark. He felt a sense of enormous relief. A tiny darkened park, a scrap of greenery, nothing more, but for Pagan it was a major discovery. He consulted his map again; all he had to do was walk another few blocks north and he would come to Calle Santa Maria, which was where Rosabal lived – if the map was even approximately accurate.