Mambo (62 page)

Burr lowered his voice, as if the dark might be filled with eavesdroppers. “One hears the most appalling rumours of mass arrests, tortures, executions all over Cuba.”

Pagan shivered. Cold air rose up from the Channel. He wondered about Estela Rosabal and what had become of her as a consequence of her husband's ambitions.
Executions
, Burr had said. Was that her fate? Had she been propped before a firing-squad and gunned down? He recalled, with a clarity that saddened him, the way she'd looked when he'd seen her in Havana; the ruined innocence of beauty. Had Rosabal in all his life ever touched anything without destroying it?

Pagan was quiet for a moment. He heard the tide whisper coldly over stones. Then, as if to himself, he said, “I keep seeing that bloody missile. And I keep wondering if Rosabal intended to fire it. I can't get the damned thing out of my mind.”

Martin Burr shrugged. “If he did, what was his target?”

Pagan had no answer. He looked back into the mist, which seemed to him just then as inscrutable as Rosabal's intention. He imagined the missile on the truck, the way it changed angle, the eerie sense of disaster he'd experienced. And then he remembered Magdalena's doomed little plane and he wasn't sure if the missile had ever moved at all, or if it was something he'd created out of his own awful tiredness, an hallucination, a fanciful perception.

Burr said, “I rather thought Castro's speech might have shed some light on that question.”

“People like Castro aren't in the business of shedding light. They prefer darkness.”

“Perhaps,” said Burr.

Frank Pagan heard the mournful sound of a ship's fog horn, like the cry of something lost in the night. He turned from the Channel, glanced at the forlorn relic of the West Pier.
Magdalena's doomed little plane
, he thought. Lately he'd had the most unbearable dreams of her. There was always the small plane burning – not quickly, as it had happened in reality, but in a very slow way. Then the dream made that awful upward shift into nightmare when her face appeared in the yellow-red pyre of the cockpit and turned very slightly, sightlessly, mouth twisted open and lifeless, toward the trees under which he stood, and he saw an agonising look in her dark eyes before she was consumed. A horror, repeating itself three or four times during the last ten days.

He always woke with a sense of deep sorrow and depressing loss, as if there were an important word he couldn't quite remember, or a disturbed sensation he couldn't name. Whatever it was, it felt like something burrowing far inside him, something it would take time to destroy.

The fire that coursed suddenly through his chest made him double over against the promenade rail.

“Are you all right, Frank?” Burr asked.

Pagan took out the bottle of painkillers, uncapped it. He tipped one into the palm of his shaking hand. He stared at the pill. Did he need this? Would it really reach the place where the pain hurt most and kill it? He let the pill slip from his hand, then tossed the bottle through the air and watched the capsules vanish in the direction of the darkened beach below. They would fall among the pebbles where they'd lie concealed until the tide drew them back into the Channel and they disintegrated in brine.

“I'm fine, Commissioner,” was all he said.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Frank Pagan Novels

ONE

LONDON

B
RYCE
H
ARCOURT SAID GOOD NIGHT TO THE DUTY OFFICER
,
A BRISKLY
courteous young marine from Alabama, and stepped out of the American Embassy. In Grosvenor Square he was assaulted at once by the numbing chill of the early evening. It had been a winter of uncommon savagery across Europe. Ships locked and forlorn in ice-choked Baltic seaports, relentless blizzards in Germany and the Low Countries, scathing frost in the southern regions of Italy: nothing had escaped the ferocity of the arctic months. London, encased in ice, vandalized by rough winds, was a city embalmed.

Harcourt, hurrying to catch an Underground train, considered it a miserable place altogether, the grey parks immense and dismal, drones scuttling into buses and tubes to escape abrasive winds that snapped down the streets of Mayfair with the tenacity of hounds. It had been grim enough when the city had been adorned by Christmas lights – then at least you had an illusion of warmth and cheer – but the decorations were long gone and the first month of the new year had passed with no relief in sight.

Muffled in a heavy black overcoat, Harcourt had an intense longing for his native Florida, some burning Miami heat, palm trees and high blue skies and pastel buildings. He imagined himself in cotton shirt and bermudas on a balcony overlooking the sunlit ocean. He could taste a lime daiquiri in his throat. He saw flamingoes against a red sun and bronzed babes strutting across sands. A fantasy – but hell, it was one way of getting through these godawful times when the mornings were dark and the afternoons icy and short.

He shivered as he entered the Tube station. The rush-hour crowds thronged around him with the concentrated brutality of people anxious to get to their homes in the suburbs. He was jostled by the mob pushing toward the turnstiles. A city of moles, he thought. They had pinched, pale faces. They'd surrendered to the glum season, hostages of winter, yet they went about their business with that peculiarly English stoicism Harcourt could never understand. They waited in disgruntled silence for buses that were late or stood in Underground trains too crammed and overheated for human dignity. The Spirit of England, ho hum; an empire had disintegrated into incompetence and indifference.

Harcourt clutched his briefcase against his side and stepped on to the escalator, where he collided with a woman trying to rush past him. Her mouth was covered by a red wool scarf, but even so Harcourt was immediately struck by familiarity.

The woman stared at him, then was swept down the escalator by the crowds pushing at her back. Puzzled, Harcourt watched her disappear. He'd seen her before, he was sure of that. He couldn't remember where or when. He ran into a great many people through his work with the Embassy; he couldn't be expected to recall every one of them. He went to dinner parties and receptions and first nights. He was sought out by anxious matrons in Knightsbridge and Swiss Cottage when an amiable bachelor was required for dinner or as an escort. He was deliberately visible, a charmer known to enjoy the company of women.

When he stepped off the escalator he saw the woman again. Her black hair was cut very short and side-parted. She had a strange white-tinted shock on the right of her skull, a touch of punk. Kinky even. She wore small round glasses. Attractive, Harcourt thought, in spite of the curious hair style. An idiosyncratic loveliness, high-cheekboned, bold, intelligent.

There was more than appreciation to Harcourt's reaction. Something buried and forgotten, an old bone. His memory was normally a sharp instrument and this unexpected failure concerned him.

For a second she looked round, caught his eye through the crush. He thought he saw recognition in her expression, perhaps even an element of anticipation, as if she expected him to approach and engage her in conversation.
Don't I know you from somewhere?
But the very idea of stopping to talk was crazy. He had no choice except to keep moving, squeezed towards the platform by the single-minded momentum of the moles. Maybe she'd get on the same train and stand very close beside him, which would be a good opportunity to clarify this feeling of familiarity in circumstances of forced intimacy. A captive audience, so to speak. She might even be obliged to press against him, especially when the train lurched.

Where have we met before?
he'd ask. It was a bad line, but you did what you could to divert yourself from the horror of the Underground rush hour. And maybe she'd remind him, and they'd strap-hang together, and her breasts would touch his arm, and who could predict where that might lead …

The air in the tunnel was hot and unbreathable. The train would be even worse, a clammy ordeal, a sauna on wheels. He wondered about the woman. He wondered why, out of nowhere, he was at once filled with uneasiness. Was it a result of his own nervous state?

Lately he hadn't been sleeping well. The apparent calm he demonstrated daily at the Embassy was all surface. He'd been smoking too many cigarettes, sitting up late at night scanning magazines in the fretful manner of a man whose aids to sleep – brandy and downers – couldn't quite push him over the edge. Insomniac moments, pockets of drowsiness, and then before dawn the blessed vacuum of sleep, albeit shallow and chaotic with dreams. Sometimes Jacob Streik was in these dreams, fat and scared.

Whenever he dreamed of Streik, Harcourt always woke tired. The weary mind, that prankster in the head, played games after a time. You started to imagine things, you were being followed or your phone was bugged. And then you reached a point where you couldn't tell the real from the illusory.

The woman. In which compartment of his life did she belong? Or was this mere imagination, the result of fatigue? She was memorably good-looking and she appeared to recognize him. How
could
he have misplaced her?

The train was heard rolling in the darkness of the tunnel. The crowd moved expectantly toward the edge of the platform. Harcourt was urged forward. He felt powerless. A stick on a tide.

He saw the train appear and slide to a halt. The carriages were already overcrowded, every seat taken, every strap seized, aisles packed. He wondered why he hadn't tried to catch a taxi home, instead of suffering this. He'd begun to vary his routine during the past few weeks – bus, Tube, taxicabs, his Mercedes; although the Merc was presently off the road, courtesy of some recent vandalism.

He didn't travel the same way two days running. Given the uncertain nature of his situation, it was a simple precaution. Sometimes he thought Streik's decision had been correct, and that he should have followed Jacob into obscurity. But there were many differences between himself and Streik. He had a position to maintain at the Embassy, Streik didn't. He was also less prone to panic than the fat man. Streik jumped at the least thing, yielded to intimations of doom, and saw devils after his fourth martini. The last time they'd met, four weeks ago underneath an ancient viaduct in Camden Town – the fat man had a thing about unusual settings – Streik had said:
They are going to kill us, Bryce. They are going to put us on ice
. Jacob had been drunk that day, and desperate, possessed by dark menace.

Why would they kill us, Jake?
Harcourt had asked.

Because we know too much
.

What do we really know, Jake? We shuffled some papers, that's all. That's all we did
.

Streik guzzled vodka.
We didn't just shuffle papers, Bryce. Get your head outta the clouds Chrissakes. It was money, Bryce. Cash. These guys play for keeps. If they think we know too much, that's good enough for them. I'm being followed. Some pretty weird things are going on. I think we've kinda outlived our usefulness and now, shit, we're a threat
.

Streik had never expanded on the nature of these pretty weird things he'd mentioned. He'd been drunk and babbling. The rest of the conversation had drifted off into vagueness.

Later, Harcourt had thought about the money. It had been irregular, sure, but he'd done as he was asked, nothing more. You took orders. You didn't probe, didn't raise needless questions. But it had begun to trouble him since Streik had seen fit to vanish, and only a few days ago he'd asked for an appointment with the Ambassador, William J. Caan, who wasn't always approachable. So Harcourt had been shuffled into Al Quarterman's office and Al, the Ambassador's lackey, had seemed impervious to his misgivings.
It comes with the territory, Bryce. You should know that by now. It's a bit late in the day to be having qualms, don't you think?

Qualms, Harcourt thought.

Now, briefcase jammed against his chest, he was forced into the carriage, thrust against a tall West Indian girl and a man attempting to hold a fragile bunch of flowers aloft. Harcourt had always been acutely conscious of smells, and they came to him now in a clamour – roses, sweat, bad breath, damp clothing. Bit late in the day, he thought. Quarterman's words had seemed to contain some kind of inner warning, as if locked inside a very simple statement was something deeply sinister.

More paranoia, Harcourt thought.

The fluorescent tubes in the carriage flickered a moment. He thought: Terrific. A power failure. All we need is for the train to stall and the lights go out. All we need is anarchy.

He twisted his head in the direction of the doors. He saw the woman with the red wool scarf on the edge of the platform, watched her thrust out her hand as the sliding doors began to close, saw a dark leather purse fall from her fingers and drop inside the carriage. She made no effort to recover the purse, showed no sign of panic or loss. Instead, she hastily withdrew her hand before the doors finally shut. And then the train lurched forward and Harcourt saw her staring at him from the platform. She drew her scarf from her mouth and smiled at him as the carriage pulled away and she was drawn slowly out of sight.