Mambo (50 page)

“Yes.”

“Then I think he just arrived.”

Magdalena took her gun out, told Estela to sit down and be still.

“Why do you come here with a gun, for God's sake?” Estela asked.

Magdalena went to the door, stood there motionless, listened for the sound of footsteps. Instead what she heard was the quiet hum of a lift ascending.

“Why the gun?” Estela asked again.

Magdalena didn't answer.

“Are you going to shoot him?”

“Shut up.” Magdalena gestured with the gun and Estela, who had begun to rise, sat down again.

“Please. I beg you. Please don't shoot him.”

The lift stopped, a door slid open, closed again,
clang
. Silence. Somebody stood outside the apartment. There was the faint noise of a key-chain. The tumblers of the lock turned, the door opened.

Rafael came into the room wearing a dark-blue windjammer and jeans and sneakers; handsome as always, unbearably so. And cool. If the appearance of Magdalena shocked him, he didn't show it. A momentary apprehension perhaps, a quick dark cloud crossing the eyes, but hardly noticeable.

“What a pleasant surprise,” he said. His smile filled the room and lit it. He had the gift of illuminating a whole environment with that one white, spellbinding smile. Magdalena resisted an urge to put out her hand and touch his face.

“I assume you can explain,” Magdalena said. There was frost in her voice.

“Explain? Ah, you mean my marriage.”

“You didn't tell me,” Magdalena said.

“Why should I? What claims do you have on me?”

“Several million dollars worth. Let's start with that.”

Rosabal poured himself a small glass of sherry from a decanter. His hand was very steady. “I don't like guns pointed at me.”

“Too fucking bad,” she said. She hadn't meant to sound upset, hadn't wanted anything to show in her behaviour or language, she wanted to be as cool as Rafael.

“The money went to a worthy cause, dear.”

“Not the one for which it was intended,” she said.

“There are degrees of need,” Rosabal said. “I tried very hard to be equitable. A little here, a little there –”

“And a little in your own pocket for a rainy day.”

Rosabal shrugged in a rather puzzled way, as if he hadn't understood Magdalena's accusation. He said nothing; he looked silently offended. He sipped his sherry and she thought:
he has a good act, a terrific act. I fell for it time and again
.

From the corner of her eye she was conscious of a troubled expression on Estela Rosabal's face. Secret aspects of her husband's life were being uncovered; she was learning new, unwelcome things about the man she'd married.

“Do you intend to shoot me?” There was a patronising tone in Rosabal's voice. Magdalena remembered that same voice in other situations, in twisted bedsheets when it became a slyly satisfied whisper, in crowded restaurants when it made outrageous suggestions over the pages of a menu, at heights of passion when it spoke of love in a secret language.
God help me
, she thought,
I
still want him
.

“Keep this in mind, Magdalena,” he said. “Kill me, you kill the new revolution.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I vaguely remember the new revolution.
Our
revolution. But refresh my memory. I want to hear all about it. I'm sure your wife will be interested as well. And the people you cheated, they'd love to learn about the revolution they paid for.”

“You should give up sarcasm, dear. It's beneath you.” He paused, stared into her eyes with the same knowing look he always used on her. He said, “Castro will be dead within a few hours.”

“Castro dead?” Estela asked, apprehension in her tone of voice. She might have been expressing surprise and dread at the destruction of some ancient icon.

“Dead,” Rosabal said, without looking at his wife's frightened face.

“I don't believe you, Rafe,” Magdalena said. “You're lying about Castro. You've been lying all along. You've been doing nothing except stealing from people who trusted you.”

Rosabal made a small injured sound, as if the notion of somebody doubting him were preposterous. “On the contrary, dear heart. While you stand there and wave your gun in my face, officers of the Cuban armed forces have already taken decisive steps to prepare a successful overthrow of the
fidelistas
. You're looking at the next President of our nation.”

Estela said, “The next President? You?” Rosabal silenced her with a swift, commanding gesture of his hand. She shut her eyes, turned her lovely face to one side and looked sad.

Magdalena reflected on the unexpected solemnity in Rosabal's voice. He'd changed course suddenly, going from alleged felon and confidence trickster to potential President within a matter of moments. It was a fast transformation, and it shouldn't have surprised her as much as it did. She should have been able to see directly into Rafael's heart by this time, but it remained unpredictable territory to her, by turns swamp and glacier, meadow and quicksand.

“Let's assume for a moment you're telling the truth. What happens to the exiles? What happens to Garrido? The people in Miami and New Jersey and California who gathered money for you – what role do they play?” she asked.

Rosabal sat on the arm of the sofa. He looked comfortable now, as if some minor crisis had just been overcome. “People like Garrido have an important function in my new Cuba. They will not be overlooked. You may remember I gave my word.”

My new Cuba
. The proprietary way he'd uttered this phrase bothered her, but she let it pass, just as she chose not to question the value of what Rosabal called his
word
. She was like an impoverished woman confronted with money she knows to be counterfeit and yet hopes, in the face of all the evidence, that it might still be real, it might still offer a way out from a lifetime of hardship.

“What about everything else?” she asked. “The new society. Democracy. All the things we ever talked about. The future we planned. What happens to all that? Does that still come into existence?”

Rosabal's smile was tolerant, like that of somebody obliged to explain the simple principles of arithmetic. “In time, my dear. Change can't be hurried. People have to be prepared. You know that as well as I do.”

In time, she thought. Yes, he was right, a whole society couldn't be changed overnight. Then she caught herself: goddam him, she was thinking the way he wanted her to think! She was blindly agreeing with him. Love had petrified her will. Step away from him, she thought, distance yourself, make believe you never loved him, fake the impossible.
Pretend he never asked you to marry him. Pretend there was never any planned future. Pretend the sun rises in the west and the moon comes out at midday
.

“After you throw out Castro's Communism, Rafe – what takes its place?”

Rosabal said, “I'll rule as fairly as I can. But don't expect me to be weak. I won't allow anarchy any more than I'll permit instant democracy. Down the road somewhere, perhaps five years from now, I may hold free elections.”

“
Five years? Five years
? I imagined free elections within a few months, six, nine at most.”

“Your optimism is touching. But the Cuban people aren't ready to control their own future.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we prepare the people for eventual democracy –”

“With you in total control –”

“Naturally.”

“And your five years might become ten. Fifteen. Twenty. What happens when you don't step down, Rafe? What happens if you don't want to relinquish power? Then nothing has really changed except the name of the dictator.”

Rosabal shook his head. “You're overreacting. Everything changes. No more Communism. No shortages. No more reliance on the Soviets. Cuba will be a free nation again.”

Magdalena turned away. It was better if she didn't have to look at his face. Even now he could be so convincing. A free nation, she thought. Was that what he'd said? But how could Cuba be free without elections? How was freedom to be achieved if Rafael Rosabal alone controlled the country's destiny? Dictators might all start from different points of view, some might begin with benign notions, even with charity, but in the end greed and power rotted all of them and they resorted to the same kind of apparatus that could be found in a score of countries around the world – secret police, political prisons, the disregard for basic human rights, torture.

She faced him again. He was watching her, counting on her to put the gun down and tell him she'd been mistaken, that she'd overreacted but still supported him.

Fuck you, Rafe
. All she wanted was to lash out at him.

She looked at Estela and in a voice that was both flat and uncharacteristically spiteful said, “He told me he'd marry me. We used to lie in bed together and plan our wedding. We used to meet in Acapulco. London. Barcelona once or twice. But I don't imagine he mentioned that kind of thing to you.”

It was a sleazy little shot intended to cause him discomfort, but he reacted only with a curious laugh, as if he were embarrassed for her. He didn't need to be. She had more than enough embarrassment for herself. Only the way Rosabal had hurt her could have made her sink so goddam low as to proclaim his indiscretions before his innocent young wife. Magdalena suddenly wanted to deny what she'd said. She felt a sense of shame.

Estela started to say something but another gesture from her husband quieted her at once. She hated his habit of silencing her with that bossy, chopping motion of his hand. Did he think he could shut her up any time he liked? Despite her calm appearance she wasn't really any better equipped to deal with this situation than Magdalena, for whom she felt an unexpectedly strong pity. How could she not? Crushed, Magdalena had lost all composure. Only a heart of clay could fail to be touched.

It was obvious he'd lied to this woman who was clearly the mistress Estela had often imagined. And he'd betrayed his own wife. Without apparent shame. Without remorse.

Estela clasped her hands, folded them across her stomach. She was afraid. Afraid of her husband, afraid of what she'd heard in this room. It was more than the personal revelations that scared her, the deceptions of love. After all, she knew these things happened to people every minute of every day, and they brought pain, but life went on because it had to, and people recovered in time if they had resilience, and old scars faded. What scared her on some other level was the understanding that Castro was to be killed and Rafael was to become the new President of Cuba.

This was the secret matter in which Rafael and General Capablanca and that
solterón
Diaz-Alonso were involved. This was what the late-night meetings amounted to. In Cuba, politics was the domain of men, and they were welcome to its animosities and hatreds. She wanted no part of that hazy world. But she knew Castro would not die easily. He would fight. He was a survivor. He'd outlived most of his rivals. She had a terrible image of roads filled with tanks and guns, corpses in ditches, fields of sugar cane blazing, neighbour fighting neighbour, small children suffering as they always did in the world of grown-up violence. Cuba would turn into another Salvador, a Nicaragua. How could the ambitions of men like her husband and her father threaten to engulf the island in destruction? What if their revolution failed? What if Castro emerged victorious? Rosabal would be branded a traitor and she would be guilty by association.
And the baby, this nameless infant inside her, what would become of it then
? She felt sadness, then the kind of anger that always grew in her slowly.

“If you don't want to talk about your proposals of marriage, Rafael, why don't we talk about the missile instead? That ought to be an easier topic for you.” Magdalena decided to come in at Rosabal from another angle now. Her fist was clenched tightly around the butt of the pistol.

How close was she to firing? she wondered. It scared her that she didn't know. But she no longer had any familiarity with the limits of her own behaviour. It was as if an unpredictable stranger lived inside her. She understood that she wanted to keep after Rosabal, haranguing him, paining him if she could, but she also wanted the opposite, to hold and comfort, to love him.
Unhealthy, Magdalena
. How sick am I? “I suppose you're going to lie about that too. I suppose you're going to say you didn't arrange to have Gunther Ruhr steal it.”

Rosabal set his empty glass down and ran a fingertip drily round the rim. He looked very calm. “You have some useful sources of information, Magdalena. I'm impressed. I'm not going to deny there's a missile. But it isn't real. It's make-believe. A ruse, a nice ploy to discredit Castro, nothing more. It's merely for show. It's quite harmless.”

“For show?”

He began to explain how the missile would be disarmed and Castro overthrown. His voice took on the kind of enthusiasm he'd always used to sweep her along, as if she were no more than an object floating on his energetic tide.

She interrupted him as soon as she understood. “You disable the weapon and the whole world loves you for your heroism. Right?”

“Why not? The world loves heroes. We're in short supply, after all.”

You're good, Rafe
, she thought.
You lie, you tell the truth, you go back and forth between the two so often that the only outcome is the one you want most: confusion. How much of what he'd said was true, how much false
?

“Okay,” she said. “So there's a missile, and it's only for show. Let's take that at face value for the time being and move on. Let's discuss something else. The girl. The hostage. What becomes of her in Ruhr's hands?”

“A girl? What girl?” Estela Rosabal asked. The conversation had gone into baffling areas. Missiles, hostages, things she knew nothing about.