Mambo (61 page)

The Lider Maximo thumped the lectern with the flat of his hand. Cuba, he told the masses, will not be a pawn in anybody's game. He spoke of courage and bravery and loyalty with all the confidence of a man comfortable in a world of abstract nouns. The sun set over the Plaza and the Marti monument and the breeze died and the flags no longer stirred.

Estela Rosabal managed to get her handbag open. She found what she wanted inside, exactly where she'd placed it under a packet of tissues. How ordinary the gun seemed to her, surrounded as it was by lipsticks and a make-up compact, a bottle of eyeliner and coins. Everything was ordinary now, and yet oddly heightened, as if the commonplace contained more secrets than she'd ever realised. The smoothness of a lipstick tube, the fibre of the suit worn by the man standing beside her, the colours of his small flag – everything was sharp suddenly, and richly textured.

She managed to get her fist round the gun.

She looked up at the Lider Maximo, who was silent again.

He was thinking
.

He was thinking he knew a wonderful site for such a weapon. A site whose irony amused him. The missile would be placed east of the Peninsula de Zapata, and Play a Giron, where on April 17th, 1961, the last invasion force to make an effort to land on Cuba had provoked the great Cuban victory the Yanquis called The Bay of Pigs – it was the perfect place, and fitting, and comical in its own bleak way …

An old flame burned in him, an old taste, barely familiar but delectable still, filled his mouth. He stared out across the crowd, which was quieter now, but he didn't see it as a group of individuals. In the shadows each person had receded, diminished, shedding his or her particular characteristics: one great amorphous mass, controllable, manageable.

Such a weapon would never be fired, of course. It would be a useful negotiating strategy, a device to back up firm diplomacy, and it would give Cuba entry into the nuclear club, where by rights it belonged …

Then he wondered where could he acquire such a weapon and who could he get to steal one, if he made such a radical decision. And from where would it be stolen? Fascinating questions
.

But pure speculation
.

He turned his face in the general direction of Havana Bay, and considered that stretch of water separating Cuba from its natural enemy. Over there, he thought. Over there was a whole arsenal of missiles, each doomed to be scrapped under the terms of a misconceived treaty between the Yanquis and the Soviets.

Perhaps
.

Then he faced the crowd again. He didn't see the lovely black-haired woman who stood beyond the barrier where the guards were massed.

Estela Rosabal took the gun from her purse. She drew it up slowly from her hip, her arm jammed against that of the man with the tiny flag. And then she could bring the hand up no further unless the man moved. The pressure was intolerable. She tried to make herself smaller, slimmer, tried to create space for the pistol.

She breathed deeply, drew her ribcage in, released the pinned arm. The man, who suddenly realised what the stranger beside him held in her hand, called out in alarm. Estela pointed the pistol at the platform, directly at the head of the Lider Maximo. The guards, who had been trained to that level of readiness which is almost paranoid, reacted at once. They rushed at her fiercely. She saw their massive shadows eclipse the sky as she was knocked over. And then she was being punched in the face and kicked in the stomach and the gun fell from her hand. It was funny how little she felt, how little pain from the boots and the nightsticks, as if she no longer had the capacity for it. Brutality could no longer touch or surprise her. She was dragged roughly along concrete. She saw, through swollen, half-shut eyes, the TV cameramen and press photographers who ignored her. She saw the receding face of the Lider Maximo, so lost in his own speculations that he paid no attention to the skirmish, handled so efficiently that it would never be mentioned in any newspaper, never seen on any TV screen.

Another firework was lit, a rocket this time, which flew from the rooftop of a nearby building in a burst of orange smoke and went sailing past the Marti monument as it died. Estela, thrown inside a van without windows, noticed how the firework's rich plumage exploded almost cheerfully in the sky before the door slammed shut and everything became black and smelled of sweat and urine and fear.

The Lider Maximo, who in recent years had come to look for signs and omens as deliriously thirsty men seek oases, saw the firework too, and he smiled for the first time that day.

A rocket, he thought.
How appropriate
.

In the eight or nine days since Sir Frederick Kinnaird's cremation and quiet funeral service, after the newspapermen and columnists and stringers had cobbled together a story out of alleged facts that were frequently no more than the kind of half-truths various government agencies in the United Kingdom and the United States saw fit to provide; days after Frank Pagan, weary of meetings with the Commissioner and interviews with surly men from security agencies he'd never before heard of, took a dreary train down to rainy Brighton for a few quiet nights at an off-season hotel; days after Castro had spoken to the people of Cuba about a capitalist plot against him; after Steffie Brough and her family, harried by newshounds, had gone into seclusion, and Allen Falk had entered hospital for the treatment of a hitherto inactive ulcer, a tiny bespectacled lawyer from Hamburg, Wilhelm Schiller, surfaced in the offices of a German tabloid in Frankfurt with an offer to sell the diaries and papers of his late client, Gunther Ruhr.

Schiller, an unassuming man with a gentle manner, had been advised years before by his client to make certain matters public in the event of the client's untimely death. And since such a circumstance had come, alas, to pass, Schiller was simply following Ruhr's instructions. The sensitive material, which filled eight stout cardboard boxes and covered many years of Ruhr's life and business dealings, would certainly have ruined various influential figures around the world who had used Ruhr's services.

But it never arrived at the editorial offices of the newspaper with whom Schiller had negotiated. Instead it vanished from the safe-deposit box in the Zurich bank where the lawyer had himself placed it.

Horrified bank officials denied any kind of wrong-doing; they were discreet men whose business thrived on privacy and security. The disappearance of Ruhr's papers scandalised them – officially at least. In reality, they had been obliged to turn the documents over to the Swiss government, which had been intensely pressured by its German counterpart. Two officials were dismissed by the bank for malfeasance, a scapegoat gesture. They were later quietly reinstated in different locations.

Herr Schiller, outraged by the loss, promised to give an interview on German television in the course of which he would reveal at least some of the contents of Ruhr's papers. That way, he would discharge a portion of his obligation to his late client; at the same time he intended to raise certain suspicions concerning the fate of the documents. He had guessed that no ordinary thief was behind their disappearance. Only governments – with instruments of legal blackmail at their disposal – had the power to force Swiss bankers to open safe-deposit boxes.

But the interview did not take place; some hours before it was scheduled Herr Schiller was found dead in his room at the Frankfurterhof, an apparent victim of a heart attack. The death certificate was signed by two physicians, both of whom, as coincidence would have it, had begun vacations in remote places beyond the reach of telephones.

The day after Schiller's death, a group of men and women gathered in the private conference room of an expensive hotel in St Helier on the Channel Islands. These people, accompanied by aides and lawyers, represented the British Prime Minister, the President of the United States, the West German Chancellor, the President of France, the Prime Ministers of Italy and Japan, and assorted princes and potentates from the countries of the Middle East.

The subject of their meeting was the disposal of Gunther Ruhr's purloined records. An early perusal of the documents, undertaken with haste by an international panel of six lawyers, indicated that Ruhr had set down, in encyclopedic detail, the dates and places of his terrorist acts, the sums of money that had exchanged hands in return for his services, and the names of those who had employed him. It was the kind of record guaranteed to bring Ruhr a form of immortality, although that hadn't been its principal purpose.

Ruhr, scrupulous and smart, had kept his records diligently. It soon became clear to his readers, his team of auditors, that the late terrorist often knew more about his employers than they could ever have supposed. He investigated the men who hired him. He made careful inquiries. He was no casual extremist. He took extraordinary care. Sometimes he succeeded in penetrating the secrecy surrounding those who bought his services: sometimes he managed to go beyond the names of the lesser figures to the larger ones. Intermediaries gave way to principals, minor players to major ones. Men of high positions in government and financial circles who thought they had hired Gunther Ruhr from a safe distance, who believed themselves anonymous, had their names inscribed in his records.

There were photostats of bank drafts, copies of money orders, numbers of bank accounts on small Caribbean islands; Ruhr's manic eye for detail was evident at every turn. Nothing much had escaped him.

It was an enormously damaging set of documents, in some instances shocking in its revelations. In what became known unofficially as the St Helier Accord, it was decided, within a matter of hours and hardly any debate, that the documents, to be kept from the press at all costs, would be divided among the parties with direct interests – the record of Ruhr's involvement with Basque separatists, for example, would go directly to the Spanish government to deal with as it saw fit; the names of his employers in Japan who had him destroy a resort hotel would be handed immediately to Japanese officials. And so on.

Six hours after it assembled, the conference ended.

Two days later, Martin Burr travelled down to Brighton and walked with Frank Pagan along the promenade on a rainy night. They passed the disheartening ruin of the West Pier, which, in the English Channel mist, had the appearance of a ghost ship. In another age it had been graceful, an elegant edifice that had stubbornly withstood the demands of the sea. Neglected now, it was nothing more than a reminder to Martin Burr of a world that had become bored by the graceful – one that responded only to the quick and the crass. It was a world in which you could find crumpets inside frozen-food compartments and exquisite teas in mass-produced tea-bags.

“You're looking more like your usual self,” Burr said. “I'm glad to see that.”

Frank Pagan didn't mention the new course of antibiotics he'd just begun, or the ugly infection Ghose had discovered in the chest wound. These things were tedious inconveniences; they could be kept to oneself. He looked out at the Channel. The mist was magnificently damp and mysterious, crawling up over the pebbled beach. He put a hand in the pocket of his overcoat and fingered the bottle of painkillers there; the wound in his chest, agitated by infection, pierced him sharply. He tried to ignore it.

Burr tapped the promenade rail with his cane and listened a moment to the quiet drumming sound he'd set up. “I have teams of people going through Kinnaird's records – which are copious and complicated as befitted a man with a great deal to conceal.”

“I imagine,” Pagan said. He was genuinely interested on one level, that of policeman; but the recuperating tourist in him felt removed from Burr's world. He'd go back into that world eventually, and he'd become immersed in it as he always did, but for the present he wanted to be nothing more than a man casually watching the secretive mist on a moist night in Brighton.

Burr said, “Kinnaird's phone calls are rather intriguing. Several were placed to an apartment in Acapulco, which turns out to have been the property of Rafael Rosabal. Kinnaird and Rosabal. Fine bedfellows.”

Pagan saw a light out there in the folds of the Channel, a small passing ship perhaps. Then it was gone. He turned to look at Martin Burr. Dampness adhered to the Commissioner's eyepatch, reflecting the lamps along the promenade.

Burr stopped tapping his cane. “Freddie made phone calls to all the members of his little group. Caporelli, the others. Cocky sod, though. Didn't even bother to take the trouble to make these calls from some public phone. He made them either from his house in Scotland or his apartment in The Albany. I daresay he thought he was above the law. Can't get over the gall of the fellow.” Burr shook his head for a while; from his point of view the nefarious activities of Kinnaird and his associates were beyond any reasonable man's comprehension, as was Kinnaird's sense of impunity.

Pagan turned away from the misty sea. He thought how Freddie and Rosabal must have decided to eliminate the others. Then Rosabal, who elevated avarice to chilly new heights, had taken it one step further and ordered the elimination of Freddie. They were charmers. Real princes.

Burr drew his cashmere scarf up around his neck and shivered slightly. “What a bloody mosaic,” he said. “And it doesn't end with Freddie's unprincipled dealings either. I've just seen some of Gunther Ruhr's papers.”

Pagan, intrigued now, had heard about these notorious papers and the waves of utter terror they had set in motion through government circles in various countries.

Burr said, “In his documents, Ruhr claims he was first approached by Rosabal more than three years ago. Then about twelve months ago in Mexico City he was given the green light. Steal the missile, he was told. Deliver it to Honduras, where an invasion force was waiting with tanks and fighter-planes. Amazing assortment of equipment from all over the place.”

Steal the missile, Pagan thought. Just like that. He looked back out into the Channel, which smelled of winter, dead things. The night was as melancholic as his mood, which he hadn't been able to shake for days. He reflected on the coup Magdalena had talked about, the democratic underground in which she'd had such faith, the uprising, but she'd never mentioned an invasion force. Maybe that was something else Rosabal had concealed from her. There were so many unanswerable questions. What had Burr called it?
A bloody mosaic
. Ambitions, lies, rapacity, warped patriotism, all the grubby little ingredients of the big picture, which was elusive still, and would perhaps remain so for a long time.