Mambo (6 page)

“That must have bored him senseless. Some people can't settle after they've tasted war. Is there a record of him entering this country?”

Burr shook his head. “We don't know when he came in, nor how he got here. We don't know who employed him.”

“The same people who employed Gunther Ruhr. Who else?” Pagan plucked a purple grape from the bunch Burr had brought. He popped it in his mouth and bit into the soft skin.

“Whoever they are.” The Commissioner was morosely silent. Pagan had never seen him quite so dejected. He felt an enormous sympathy for Burr, who took the death of the policemen hard. Recent events had obviously been a heartbreak for him, visiting the widows, the fatherless kids, mouthing platitudes that amounted to nothing in the end. The Commissioner, a candid man who had no glib political skills, was not above genuine tears.

“I keep thinking about how our security was breached, Frank. I come back time and again to that. That aspect of the whole thing depresses me. It's not only the dead officers, although God knows that would be monstrous enough in itself.”

“Too many people knew the route,” Pagan said. “And somebody blabbered.”

“The itinerary was decided at the highest level. The Home Office was involved. It was decided by all parties that instead of an ostentatious escort we would transport Ruhr quietly by a highly secret route. An awful mistake, as it turned out.”

A secret was hard to keep in a world of committees, Pagan thought.

Burr made circles on the tiled floor with the tip of his cane. “I seem to remember you were the only one who raised the subject of air cover, Frank. I wish the rest of us had paid more attention.”

Pagan shrugged. None of the Commissioner's wishes could alter the past. Both men were quiet for a long time before Burr went on, “I'd like to think that if somebody gabbed out of turn then it was from sheer carelessness rather than outright treachery. I don't like the idea of a mole.”

“But it's a distinct possibility,” Pagan said.

Burr got up from the chair and walked to the window. He was a big man, wide-shouldered and heavy around the centre. He looked out into the sunlight and blinked. “Ten people knew the route, including ourselves.”

“I don't think you can stop at ten, Commissioner. If you include secretaries and assistants, who have an odd knack of getting wind of everything, the number's probably closer to thirty, thirty-five. And out of that lot somebody – by accident or design – had a connection with Ruhr's friends.”

Pagan paused. His mouth was very dry. He sipped some water before going on. “The trouble is, it's difficult to run a really thorough investigation of some thirty individuals, especially if it has to be done quickly. And since Ruhr's obviously up to something in this country – otherwise the big rescue makes no sense – time's a factor. He's not over here to sit around twiddling his thumbs for weeks, is he? He's an expensive commodity. Somebody paid for him to be here. That same somebody spent a lot of money on the rescue. I suspect we're looking at a matter of days before Ruhr does whatever he's here to do. Perhaps less.” Pagan hadn't spoken more than a couple of short sentences since his wound and now he was hoarse. There was an ache in his chest, a brass screw turning.

Burr stared at him. “If you're saying that our real priority is to find Ruhr and put the security breach on the back burner, I wholeheartedly agree. Easier said than done, alas. Half the police force of England is looking for him right now, Frank. We've had reports of the bugger in Torquay and Wolverhampton and York and all the way up to Scotland. In terms of false sightings, Gunther Ruhr rivals unidentified flying objects.”

Pagan had a mild Pethidine rush, a weird little sense of distance from himself. At times he floated beyond everything, spaced-out, drifting, a cosmonaut in his own private galaxy. It was a pleasant sort of feeling. It was easy to see how people became addicted to Pethidine. It relegated terrorists and dead policemen and gunshot wounds to another world.

Pagan shut his eyes and tried very hard to concentrate. “Ruhr specialises in destruction. The question is, what is he here to destroy? And why was he in Cambridge? What's so interesting about the place?”

“Not a great deal, Frank.” Martin Burr, an Oxford man with no high regard for the rival university, helped himself to a small glass of Lucozade. He drank, made a face, wondered about the masochism of whole generations of English that had sought good health in the oversweet liquid.

“What about the countryside around Cambridge? Aren't there a couple of military bases?” Pagan asked.

“There's a NATO installation about forty miles away in Norfolk. Also a number of RAF bases within a forty-mile radius of Cambridge, plus a couple of army camps. We've been doing a spot of map-reading.”

“I thought the NATO base was going out of business.”

Martin Burr nodded. “To a large extent. The terms of the American-Soviet disarmament treaty call for mid-range ballistic missiles to be removed from bases, shipped back to the United States and then destroyed – with Russian observers on hand to ensure fair play. There's a laughable contradiction in terms. I've yet to hear of a Bolshevik who understood fair play.”

Pagan rarely paid attention to the Commissioner's bias against Communism. It was a facet of Burr's personality: a form of phobia, and really quite harmless.

“Any one of those places is a candidate for Ruhr,” Pagan said.

“They've all beefed up security heavily in the last few days for that very reason. They wouldn't be easy targets for our German friend.”

“Is there anything else that might attract him to the area?”

“I've been thinking about that too. Ruhr's target could be a person rather than a place. Or a group of people. In which case, where the devil do we begin? At least three international conferences are coming up in the next week or so in Cambridge. The city's going to be filled with all kinds of experts. Environmentalists, meteorologists, chemists – and that's only in Cambridge. What if Ruhr's target lies in Northampton? Or Bury St Edmunds? What then?”

Pagan considered the Commissioner's remarks for a moment. Ruhr had become endowed with almost supernatural powers: he was everywhere, and capable of anything. “Here's another possibility to make things a little more complicated: Ruhr was just passing through Cambridge on the way to somewhere else – London, Birmingham – and he stopped to have some fun, if you can call it that.”

Pagan remembered the girl who had been with Ruhr at the time of his capture. A skinny little thing, anaemic, small-breasted. Her name was Penny Ford and she lived in a one-room flat where she'd taken Ruhr after a casual encounter in a pub. When Pagan had interviewed her she'd said that she wasn't in the habit of inviting strange fellows home, you understand, but Ruhr had been, well, bloody persistent and anyhow he didn't have a place to stay, and she was only human after all. And her rent was almost due into the bargain and she was a bit short of the readies. She'd imagined a straight screw, Pagan thought. Uncomplicated sex, a quick exchange of money, end of the matter. Ruhr had other notions.

Penny Ford hadn't been able to tell Pagan why Ruhr was in Cambridge or how he had travelled there or where he was living. She knew nothing about him. She was informative only when it came to his sexual demands. Pagan remembered the girl's quiet voice.
We had sex, and I thought that was the end of it … I went inside the lavatory and when I came back he was sitting up on the edge of the bed and looking at me … well, in a funny kind of way … And he was making this dry whistling sort of noise, you know, tuneless like, but weird, like he wants to whistle only he doesn't know how … He asks me to come over. Which I did, because I thought he wanted another go. He asks me to sit on his knee. Which I also did
.

And then?

He has this terrible disfigured hand, of course. That made me sympathetic to him at first. I see him take something out of his jacket, which is hanging on the back of a chair. It's a metal contraption with a leather strap, strangest thing I ever saw. And ugly as sin
.

Ugly as sin, Pagan thought. What had so spooked Penny Ford was an unusual artifact consisting of a strap and two long steel protuberances, both sharpened at the end. At first glance the contraption had no apparent function, until you realised – as Penny Ford did – that it was the prosthetic device Ruhr fastened over his deformed hand. The two sharp metal columns, each about six inches long, took the place of the missing fingers.

He wants me to spread my legs so he can stick that bloody thing inside me, honest to God … Can you imagine what that sharp steel
would have done to me? I mean, sex is one thing, but that was evil
…

Evil: Pagan remembered thinking it was an impressive word. Penny understandably resisted Ruhr's request and the German had become threatening, catching her by the hair and trying to force her to obey him. She'd struggled and screamed. Ruhr might have been able to silence the girl and slip away easily, but by sheer chance two plainclothes detectives were already inside the house questioning a first-floor tenant about a recent burglary. They responded to the screams immediately, imagining at worst a domestic dispute. They hadn't expected to corner the world's most wanted terrorist with his trousers hanging round his knees and his underwear at half-mast. Pagan had found this image very entertaining before. In the shadow of recent events it didn't seem remotely amusing now. Ruhr was sick and vicious. Worse, he was also at liberty, and Frank Pagan was not.

Pagan sat upright. “Christ, I want out of here.”

Martin Burr shook his head. “There are persons in the morgue with more colour than you. Accept your fate and be still.”

“I need some fresh air, that's all.”

Burr smiled. “Even if you were able to leave, you don't have anything here to wear. When they brought you in, your suit was totally ruined.”

“Ruined?”

“Bloodstained and torn.”

The suit, made specially for him by a tailor with basement premises in Soho, had cost Frank Pagan a month's salary. In normal circumstances he would have lamented the wreckage of a fashionable beige linen suit, but not now. “I'll leave in a bloody bedsheet if I have to.”

“Frank Pagan wandering the West End in a bedsheet. The mind is boggled.”

“All I do is lie here and feel useless. Sometimes Ghose teaches me new words. I just learned ‘haemothorax', and that's the highlight of the whole day.” Pagan looked at Martin Burr with disarming intensity. “I need to be in on this one. You know that.”

Martin Burr ignored Pagan's plea and took a pocket watch from his waistcoat. He flipped the silver lid open. “I must be running along, Frank. Busy busy. Things to do. I'll see if I can come back again tonight. Can't promise.”

“And I stay right here?”

“Exactly.”

Pagan watched Martin Burr go toward the door. “Is that an order, Commissioner?”

Martin Burr sailed out of the room neither answering Pagan's Mambo question nor acknowledging it, even though he must have heard it. Was it some sly tactic on the Commissioner's part? Was he telling Pagan to take total responsibility if he discharged himself? Pagan listened to the click of Burr's cane as it faded down the tiled corridor. Then he lay very still for a time before he smiled and reached for the telephone at the side of the bed.

4

Glasgow

Two men sat in the glass-walled conservatory of the Copthorne Hotel overlooking that heart of Victorian Glasgow called George Square, a large open space dominated by statues and the massive edifice of the City Chambers. On this rainy afternoon in October the Chambers, built in the Italian Renaissance style, looked vaguely unreal and uninhabited, as if the local government officers who were its usual occupants had fled in a scandalous hurry. The whole rain-washed square gave the same empty impression despite the occasional pedestrian hurrying under an umbrella.

The older of the two men, a small white-haired figure called Enrico Caporelli, gazed pensively through the wet glass. Every five minutes or so he could see his black limousine pass in front of the conservatory while the driver killed time circling the area. Caporelli, five feet tall and sixty years of age, swung his dainty little feet in their expensive Milanese shoes a half-inch off the floor.

Everything about the Italian was tiny, except, it was said, his cunning and his sexual organ. He'd been legendary for his dalliances with showgirls in his old Havana days. Whenever he thought of the floor shows at the Tropicana or the Nacional – before the
barbudos
had come down from the hills and screwed everything and everybody on Cuba – he remembered them with fondness and loss. He rubbed his hands, which were smooth as vellum, and said, “I've always enjoyed the statues here. Things were built to last back then. They were expected to be
doorable.
”

The younger man nodded, although the statues in the square didn't appeal to him. They lacked flair. Passion, uncommon in damp presbyterian climates, was missing.

Caporelli gazed at Queen Victoria a moment, then turned his face away from the drenched stone likeness of the monarch. He changed the subject suddenly. “Nobody on God's earth is worth such a price.”

“Normally I would agree with you. But not in this case. Believe me.” The younger man, Rafael Rosabal, was tall and muscular, handsome in a manner that was particularly Latin. He had the kind of face, symmetrical and perhaps a little too perfect, that at first beguiles most women, then later begins to trouble them in some indefinable way.

Rosabal was cold in this climate. He'd been cold ever since he'd left Havana ten days ago. Despite the heavy woollen overcoat he'd purchased in Moscow, he was still uncomfortable. He wondered why Caporelli always chose unlikely cities for their meetings. Saint Etienne, Leeds, now Glasgow. Presumably Caporelli had business interests in these places.