Mambo (51 page)

Rosabal gestured for silence again, but this time Estela ignored him and got up from the sofa. She approached Magdalena and asked, “What hostage? What girl? What are you talking about?”

Rosabal was irritated, his façade altered for the first time. His wife's small act of disobedience had undermined his
machismo
in Magdalena's eyes. “Mind your own goddam business,” he said.

Once again Estela ignored her husband. She looked at Magdalena and asked, “You're certain Ruhr has a child as a hostage?”

“Yes,” Magdalena said.

“What age is she?”

“Thirteen, fourteen.”

Estela Rosabal had read in Central American newspapers about Ruhr and the bestial way he was reputed to have attacked young girls in England and elsewhere. There were pictures of his alleged victims. Such sad faces. Such dead eyes. Estela had never been able to tolerate violence, far less the needless kind done to children. It was a crime against innocence, a violation of nature.

She turned quickly to her husband. Her jaw was firm, her eyes fiery. Aggression altered her features, tightening the skin, emphasising the solid strength of the cheekbones. She reached out, caught the sleeve of Rosabal's shirt. “What do you have to do with this?” she demanded. “What in the name of God do you have to do with the business of this child?”

“Child, what child?” Rosabal pulled his arm free.

“Tell me the truth, Rafael.”

Rosabal poured another small sherry. He didn't speak.

Estela asked, “Does my father know? Does the General know about this? I can't imagine him approving of a hostage situation with a child involved.”

“The General is in no position to withhold his approval of anything I choose to do,” Rosabal said.

“Shall I telephone him? Shall I ask his opinion?”

“Do what you like,” Rosabal said, but without conviction. The plain truth was that he needed the General, at least during the next twenty-four hours. And that stiff-backed old bastard, who had never approved of Ruhr to begin with and barely acknowledged the man's existence or his part in the plan, who would have preferred to believe that the missile had materialised out of thin air, was sure to become apoplectic at the idea of a hapless child held captive by the Claw. Rosabal couldn't alienate Capablanca at this stage. He couldn't risk losing the support of Capablanca and his officers. Things would fall apart if Estela contacted her father.

Estela reached for the telephone. She was bluffing. She had absolutely no idea of the whereabouts of her father or how to contact him. The General was frequently on the move and for years his staff had been under strict orders to keep his movements secret. He drew a very firm line between his private life and his soldierly one, a definite boundary that could not be crossed, no matter what.

Rosabal placed a hand over hers, preventing her from raising the receiver. “All right,” he said. “There's a kid. But I had nothing to do with it. It happened without my approval. Ruhr kidnapped the child –”

“Then you have to arrange for her release.”

“For God's sake, what difference does one child make anyway? It's one life, that's all. I'm talking about millions of lives, a new Cuba, new freedoms –”

Magdalena said, “That's not what you're talking about, Rafael. Do you really give a shit about freedoms in Cuba? You already said all the power will lie in your hands indefinitely. If all you intend to do is make some pointless cosmetic changes inside Cuba, the exile community in Florida will fight you the way it fought Castro –”

“You are both being foolish,” Rosabal said, suppressing the anger of a man suddenly assailed by two women who had formed a collaboration that baffled him. “You understand only this much,” and he held his thumb a quarter inch from the tip of his index finger. So attentive in such matters as kissing the back of a hand, so skilled in the bedroom, he consistently failed to take women seriously.

“Have the child released,” Estela said. “Do it now.”

“Don't ever tell me what to do and when to do it. I don't even know where the kid is.”

Estela reached once more for the telephone. Rosabal was quicker. He grabbed the instrument, ripped it from the wall, tossed it across the room. It struck a door and broke apart in useless little bits and pieces.

Estela was quiet for a moment before she turned to Magdalena and said, “There's a ship called
La Mandadera
. If the child is with Ruhr, then she's on board this ship. Because that's where Ruhr is.”

“Don't listen to her,” Rosabal said. “She knows nothing!”

“
La Mandadera
is on its way to Santiago,” Estela said. “It is expected to arrive there soon. Within two, perhaps three hours. Rafael is supposed to meet the ship when it docks. I listen to everything. My husband thinks I'm asleep when he sits here and conspires with his associates. But I don't sleep, I hear everything. What else am I supposed to do when I'm lonely? I heard about Ruhr, about the ship –”

Enraged, Rosabal struck his wife across the side of her head. Her legs buckled dreadfully and she almost slid to the floor. She clutched the arm of the sofa for support and looked at her husband in astonishment. Magdalena, shocked by the sudden act of violence yet oddly impressed by this show of force, raised the gun and pointed it at him. Shoot him, she thought.
Shoot him now
.

He held his hand out. He was marvellously cool again, smiling as if nothing had happened. He had the ability to change everything with charm. He looked quite incapable of violence now. All the tension in his handsome face had dissolved. “Enough,” he said. “Give the gun to me.” He took a step toward her.

“Stay away from me, Rafe.”

“Magdalena. We aren't enemies, you and I. We've been too close for all this hostility.”

“Don't move.” She tried to stop the hand that held the gun from trembling. He took another step. He stood about three feet from her, calmly running a fingertip over his forehead. His sun-tanned skin glistened. His perfect mouth continued to smile, infuriating and seductive at the same time.

“We can still be together,” he said. “Our plans don't have to be thrown away.”

“Bullshit, Rafe.”
She wasn't going to fall for any of it
.

“Be with me. Support me.”

“Rafe –”

“We can talk our problems over. We can resolve them, Magdalena. Or else you can shoot me. You can kill me.”

“There's nothing to talk about –”

“On the contrary, there's everything.” He closed his eyes a moment. Lamplight glowed on his eyelids and his long lashes. He did something strange then. He repeated her name a couple of times to himself, as if it were a sound he'd never uttered before, one he found unexpectedly enchanting.

Estela said
Pay no attention to him
but Magdalena didn't hear, she was concentrating on Rafael, whose voice had become a soft whisper, almost an hypnotic caress. And she remembered how they'd undressed each other in hotel rooms in various cities of the world, the thrillingly indecent haste of their love, she recalled the ritual of the sugar cubes and how once, in a moment of erotic splendour she would savour for the rest of her life, he had slid a cube between the warm lips of her vagina and licked it away, crystal by crystal,
dulzura, dulzura
, drawing it out with the tip of his tongue, then playfully pushing it back inside. She remembered intimacies that terrified her because they exposed her, times when she couldn't dream of her world without Rafael Rosabal. Nor could she contemplate such a world even now. It was a barren place, a planet devoid of life.

“Let us put the gun aside, Magdalena,” he said. His tone was firmer now. “We'll go somewhere and talk.”

“No –”

He stretched out his hand. “We can work things out, I promise you. But we can't make any progress so long as you hold the pistol,” and he shrugged, as if to say further talk was pointless, and he was disappointed by her.

“Rafe,” she said quietly. She didn't want to weaken. But he overwhelmed her the way he always did. She saw how deeply she needed him, a fact of nature, incontrovertible.

He ran his strong fingers through his hair, then took one more step toward her.

“Rafe …”

She had the curious feeling that her peripheral vision had been destroyed, and she could see nothing but his face in front of her. It dominated the room, throwing everything else into shadow. She was sick from the fever of love, and she knew, with all the certitude of her own addiction, that she could no more shoot this man than she could stop loving him. She'd known it all along, from the moment he'd first entered the apartment. She'd find a way to forgive him for the theft of the money, his marriage, how he'd altered the shape of the new revolution and changed the dream, everything.
Shoot him
, she thought. How could you shoot the thing you loved most? Who was she trying to fool?

She lowered the pistol to her side, a movement she performed as if she had no volition. She was no longer listening to her own warning system; the voice of reason had been struck dumb inside her. Even as Rosabal took the weapon out of her hand and put it in the pocket of his jacket, a part of her knew she should have resisted. And when he spoke she infused his words with a warmth nobody else would have heard.

In a voice that might have persuaded birds to come down from trees, he said, “We'll go someplace quiet now, Magdalena. We'll talk in private.”

Yes, yes, she thought. The idea of intimacy excited her. She wanted to be alone with him.

Estela pressed a hand to the side of her head where she'd been hit. “Where are you going?”

Rosabal didn't answer. Estela watched him go out of the apartment. This was not the man who had courted her with such bewitching charm. This was not the beautiful man who had observed all the elaborate etiquette of courtship, who had come with flowers and Swiss chocolates and cosmetics and such obvious affection in his eyes.

Rosabal ushered Magdalena to the stairway. She took his hand, clasping it tightly. It would work out, it had to, there was no other option.

“This way, my dear,” he said to her.

When they went down to the empty lobby, the wind was screaming round the building. The glass doors flapped and palm trees creaked. The night was becoming furious.

She turned to look at him. He smiled, then touched the side of her face with an open hand. The contact was tender. She wanted to make love to him here and now, the place didn't matter. She kissed him, sliding a hand under his jacket. She heard the wind rage at the building and one of the glass doors was blown open, but these were sounds from another world far removed from her. He was hard against her.
He wanted her
. She felt his need and it justified her. Giving up the gun had been the right move.

“Not here,” he said. “This is too public.”

“I love you,” she said, and drew away from him reluctantly.

“And I love you. But we must find a more intimate place.”

They went outside where the air was filled with electricity and moisture, like a damp sheet stretched across the city.

“My car,” he said. He held her by the elbow as he led her toward the kerb.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I have a place in mind.”

“And after we make love –”

“After we make love, we settle our differences, if we still have any by then,” and he laughed in an oddly nervous little way. He opened the passenger door for her.

Something made her hesitate, perhaps his uncharacteristic laugh, perhaps a sudden insight into how witless her feelings had made her, perhaps the lightning that flared with stunning brilliance. She had the unsettling sensation of coming out of a sweet dream into a menacingly real world.

“Get in the car,” he said.

She didn't want to. She looked at him. His lips were narrow and uncharitable, his eyes curiously bright, and not with love. Something else, something she couldn't quite read.

“The car,” he said again.

She opened her mouth, which was suddenly very dry. He had the pistol in his hand, aimed at her stomach.

“Why are you pointing that at me, Rafe?” She couldn't get this situation into focus. It was slipping away from her, and she felt panicked.

“Get in the car,” he said.

“Not until you put the gun away.”

He pressed the weapon into her flesh with such ferocity that she gasped. The abrupt chill of understanding she felt horrified her. He was going to kill her, she hadn't seen it coming, she'd been as careless and dumb as any fifteen-year-old girl in love for the first time. “Rafe, for God's sake –”

“Do as I say.”

“Dear Christ, Rafe –”

“Let me tell you how it really is, Magdalena. You would be a problem to me. Today, tomorrow, a problem. You know too much about me. You know about my connection with Ruhr. Too much. So now we go to a quiet place. It won't take more than a second. A fraction of a second. Painless.”

Painless
, she thought. He sounded like a dentist making a promise to a nervous client, but he was talking about murder, her murder. His tone of voice was utterly reasonable, a calm she found even more frightening than the gun. There was a madness in him, and she'd been blind to that the way she'd been blind to everything about him. He didn't want her, didn't need her. She was a problem, therefore she had to be eliminated. He might even have sent the killer after her in Miami.

The notion devastated her. She couldn't breathe, couldn't swallow. Paralysed, she was only vaguely aware of lightning over the city. The thunder when it came was the kind that clapped and echoed inside her head in a mocking way.

“Get in the car,” Rosabal said again. “I am running out of time, Magdalena. Hurry. Hurry.”

A small vehicle moved slowly along the street. It took Magdalena a second to recognise it as Alberto Canto's Lada. It began to pick up speed. Rosabal turned his face toward the car, which was closing in on his BMW in such a way that a collision was unavoidable. As he levelled the pistol at the Lada, he experienced a moment of indecision. He was beset by doubts about firing the gun in the street. Neighbours. Police. His ministerial status would almost certainly afford him immunity from a murder investigation if he killed somebody, but these were sensitive hours, and he couldn't take the chance of having to answer questions of any kind. Too much time had been wasted already. He should have been on his way to Santiago by now. The clocks were running.