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“If he's as smart as I'm always being told, how come he got himself in this godawful mess in the first place?” Caporelli posed questions with an authority that came from years of giving orders and having them obeyed. He had the often haughty dignity of a cardinal accustomed to having his ring kissed.

Rosabal shrugged. “He has tastes, peculiarities. Sometimes he gives in to them.”

“I don't want to know.” Caporelli raised a hand. He had no interest in the sexual foibles of other people. “A man that allows his tastes to overcome his head – I don't like that kind of man.”

“I saw him yesterday. He's in a safe place. I assure you the problem is under control.”

Caporelli spoke gravely, his voice without cadence, his accent an odd hybrid of Calabria and Long Island. “At great expense, I gave you the financial backing you said you would need for the operation. My generosity resulted in tragedy. Who likes dead policemen and hysterical newspaper headlines? I'm too old for anger, my friend. It's a drain. I only have so much energy. I want to spend it contemplating pleasant things.”

Rosabal plucked a cube of sugar out of the bowl and placed it on his tongue, an old habit. He was amused by the way Caporelli talked about his “generosity”, as if everything had been an act of charity, a personal donation from Enrico's private account, and there was going to be nothing in this for the Italian but a sense of well-being. San Enrico. All heart. The patron saint of terror.

“We got him back,” Rosabal said. “That's the important thing, Enrico.”

“We should never have been placed in such a position to begin with. Having to bail out a man who's supposed to be doing a job for us – tsssss, that's not how to do business.”

Rosabal silently cursed Gunther Ruhr's proclivity for strange sex. It was the only cavalier aspect of Ruhr's life, which was otherwise single-mindedly dedicated to terror. “Nobody else can deliver. That's the important thing to remember.”

All this violence made Caporelli touchy. He liked the idea that he was too civilised for violence. After all, didn't he own some of the world's finest paintings? Hadn't he invested in great sculptures and financed operas and symphonies and ballet companies? A number of cities in North America and Europe were unknowingly indebted to Caporelli for their cultural lives.

So it was no source of joy for him to be associated, even remotely, with men who were little better than animals, scum like this German who had had to be rescued four days ago in London. A goddam bloodbath, he thought. Who needed it? Even if this Kraut was the only man in the goddam known universe capable of doing the job, who needed the heartache?

When Rosabal had requested many thousands of dollars to rescue the German, Caporelli, turning the same blind eye he'd turned all his life whenever profit was threatened, had managed to convince himself that the cash was for a vast amount of grease,
la mordida
, bribes for prison officials, guards, cops. In his wildest fantasies he couldn't have come up with what the British newspapers were calling The Shepherd's Bush Massacre. He had developed a form of immunity to the realities of violence and an awesome capacity to distance himself from any personal culpability. Like many men whose hearts are basically vicious, Enrico Caporelli had discovered the ultimate hiding-place: denial.

He said quietly, “I don't like the idea of new widows. I hate it when women cry. I'm suckered by tears. Orphaned children eat my heart out.”

Hipócrita
, Rosabal thought. A few orphans, a few widows, what did these really matter to the Italian? Caporelli sometimes strutted the stage of his life as if it were a melodrama. Rosabal said, “I'm not delighted either. But it couldn't be avoided. The alternative was to dump Ruhr.”

“What I also don't like is this manhunt I read about. Every cop in the country is looking for Ruhr. He's too hot.”

“Nobody is going to find him.”

“Still. My gut tells me we should look elsewhere, get somebody else.”

The Cuban said, “From now on, no more accidents, Enrico. No more mistakes. Smooth,” and he planed the surface of the table with his palm for emphasis. “You have my word.”

Rafael Rosabal glanced at a nearby table where two middle-aged women drank tea. They had the furrowed brows and glazed eyes of habitual eavesdroppers and they bothered the Cuban, who regularly experienced the sensation that he was being watched or followed. In the Soviet Union recently he knew he'd been observed by the KGB, which was standard practice. Here, in Britain, there might be surveillance from the internal security arm of intelligence. He hadn't seen anyone suspicious, but that didn't mean he
wasn't
being watched. He leaned across the table, closer to Caporelli, whose fussy caution annoyed him. Rosabal understood that the stakes were too high for Enrico to abandon Ruhr at this stage. Caporelli would go with the German in the end, but first there had to be this song and dance.

“We have to trust each other, Enrico,” Rosabal said. “I need to know that when I return to Cuba you won't change the way things have been set up. I need that assurance. If you drop Ruhr now, you abandon everything. That's the bottom line. Keep this in mind – we want the same thing. We have the same goals.”

The same goals, Caporelli thought. The rich, gravy-filled pie that was Cuba. He said, “I asked for this meeting because I wanted to find out what safeguards you could give me. But my cup of confidence isn't exactly overflowing, Rafael.”

Rosabal plucked another sugar cube from the bowl. “What would you have me do? Put Ruhr in a straitjacket until the time comes? He isn't going to be a problem. He's on his best behaviour. I give my word. I stand or fall by that. If my word isn't good enough for you … You want to drop the plan, tell me now. The first stage is only two days away.”

Caporelli pinched the bridge of his nose. What were two days when you weighed it against the thirty years that had passed since the barbarians had taken control of the island and given everybody the shaft with their so-called Revolution? Two days: if the first stage went without flaw then he and his associates would see things through to the end.

He looked at Rosabal and what he perceived in the young Cuban's face was bottomless determination and in those dark eyes an intensity of fierce ambition such as he hadn't seen in a long time. He liked these qualities. He liked this young man's conviction. In a world where trust was a debased currency, he trusted Rafael Rosabal, even if he had the feeling that the Cuban sometimes wasn't sure how to walk the fine line between restraint and impatience. A flaw of youth, that was all. A little too much fire in the belly.

“How is the Vedado these days?” he asked. The Vedado was his favourite part of Havana, where the large hotels and enormous private residences had been built. He'd always thought of it as his own sector of the city, his personal domain, and he'd ridden the streets with a proprietorial attitude. He'd been an intimate of former President Batista, who'd conferred honorary Cuban citizenship upon him. He still had a photograph of the ceremony. Government ministers had owed him favours.

He'd owned a magnificent baroque house near the University – cobbled courtyard with bronze statues, mango and pomegranate trees growing against the walls, the smell of the ocean through the open windows of the huge master bedroom. The bathroom had been built out of the finest Italian marble with gold taps, in the shape of gargoyles, created by the kind of proud craftsmen who no longer existed in Castro's shabby socialist paradise. He'd heard that his beautiful house, confiscated in 1959 on behalf of the bullshit Revolution, was now occupied by a department of MINAZ, the Ministry of the Sugar Industry, or one of those other godawful bureaucracies the
fidelistas
were so fond of creating.

He wanted that house again. He wanted it back so badly he ached. He lusted after it with an intensity that was beyond simple greed. It was
his
house; he had always imagined dying in it one day. He could hear the sound of his heels echo in the tiled entrance hall and the laughter of girls in the upstairs room. Tall women, huge breasts, invariably blonde, that was how he'd always liked them. Back then, he'd been blessed with amazing stamina and a lot of lead in his pencil.

But it was more than just the house
.

“The Vedado could use a coat of paint,” Rosabal said. “Like everything else in Cuba.”

Enrico Caporelli rose from his chair and took a pair of leather gloves out of the pocket of his black overcoat.

“Then we must see if we can give it one, Rafael,” he said. “Fresh paint is one of my favourite smells.”

The rainclouds over Glasgow grew darker and heavier as the limousine left the city and approached the coastal road to Ardrossan and then south to Ayr. On the Firth of Clyde, the stretch of water that eventually became the Irish Sea, the rain turned to mist, drawing a lacy invisibility over the Island of Arran and the imposing mountain called Goat Fell. Once, in a dramatic way, the peak pierced the mist like a fabulous horned creature, but was gone again before Caporelli was sure he'd seen it.

He dozed in the back of the big car, waking every so often to look out at the rainy green countryside or some small town floating past. At Ballantrae, fifty miles from Glasgow, the car turned away from the coast and headed inland on a forlorn road that was rutted and pocked. This narrow strip passed between tall hedgerows. Here and there, where the hedges parted, overgrown meadows sloped toward a distant stand of thick, misty trees. How could any place be this green? The darker the green, the more secretive the landscape. Caporelli had the sensation he was travelling into a kingdom of rainy silences. A secure kingdom, certainly; he saw at least two men with shotguns stalking the spaces between trees.

The house came finally in view, a large sandstone edifice built in the early part of the twentieth century, although its style echoed much earlier times. Circular towers suggested fortresses of the late sixteenth century. Darkened by rain, the house had shed some of its red stone warmth, and looked uninviting. The limousine entered the driveway and came to a stop at the ornate front door, which was immediately opened by Freddie Kinnaird, whose florid face appeared to float through the rain like a balloon escaped from a child's hand.

Caporelli waited until the chauffeur, a taciturn man called Rod, had opened the door for him before he got out. Then, ducking under an umbrella Rod held, he stepped toward the house where Freddie Kinnaird shook his hand vigorously. “Welcome to Kinnaird's folly.”

They were improbable associates, the beefy red-faced Englishman with hair the colour of sand and the tiny white Italian. Kinnaird placed a hand on Caporelli's elbow and steered him inside the enormous flagstoned hall of the house where a fire burned in the baronial fireplace. Caporelli spread his palms before the flames, thinking he didn't much care for the size of this room or the stuffed animal heads that hung high on the walls – elks, boars, deer. They had the glassy, haunted look of all animals slain before their time.

“Why did you buy this place, Freddie? Did you need something small and intimate?”

Freddie Kinnaird poured two small sherries from a decanter and smiled a generous white-toothed smile. “It has some obvious benefits. One hundred and twenty acres of thick green countryside, spot of nice fishing, no inquisitive neighbours, which makes security inexpensive. I picked the whole thing up for a song a few years ago. Upkeep's high, but it makes a splendid change from the hurly-burly of dear old London.”

Caporelli took one of the glasses and clinked it lightly against Kinnaird's. There was the standard Society toast, the simple
To the success of friendship
. No matter the language – English, Italian, German or, more recently, Japanese – the form never varied. Freddie Kinnaird tossed a log on the fire and it blazed at once, sending sparks up into the chimney.

“The others are upstairs.” Kinnaird raised his face and looked up at the mahogany gallery. Constructed halfway between floor and ceiling, it ran the length of the wall. “The Americans arrived half an hour ago.”

“Good,” Caporelli said.

“What did Rosabal say?” Kinnaird set down his empty glass.

“He gave me assurances. I accepted. I like this Rosabal. He's so desperate to deliver I can smell it on him. There's no scent so strong as the musk of sheer goddam ambition. And I trust him. After all, he provided us with the locations of Cuban military defence units and their strength and only an ambitious man, a man who knows what he wants, would go to that kind of trouble. For him it's a simple equation. If he keeps Ruhr under control, he stands a chance of getting his hands on the political machinery of Cuba and all the benefits and patronage that go with the job. President Rosabal. He's in love with the sound of that title. As for us, if the first act doesn't play, we withdraw. We take our losses, check out alternatives.”

“Not a notion I relish. The mere idea of starting all over again overwhelms me.”

The Italian smiled. “I don't think we'll have to.”

Kinnaird picked up his empty glass and studied it, looking like a professor of archaeology surprised by some odd find. “Before we go up, Enrico, you should be prepared for some opposition to Ruhr.”

Caporelli dismissed the threat. “Tssss. I think I can convince them to wait and see. Where do you stand, Freddie?”

“With you,” Kinnaird said. “But the holocaust in Shepherd's Bush has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. Nobody expected that, least of all me.”

“You can do one of two things with a bad taste,” Caporelli said. “Swallow it. Or spit it out. What you can't do is gargle it, Freddie.”

“What have you done with yours?” Kinnaird asked.

“I swallowed the sonofabitch.”

They climbed upstairs to the gallery and moved through a warren of rooms, most of them unfurnished and only half-decorated. Ladders and rolls of wallpaper and paint cans were scattered everywhere. Plaster had been stripped, revealing lathe underneath. Kinnaird made excuses for the state of things. Local workmen were slow, and supplies sometimes had to be ordered from Glasgow or London. There was more than a touch of
mañana
in this part of the world. Caporelli followed his host, noticing how the high ceilings were lost in shadow. Long windows were rattled by rain squalls. Outside, trees shuddered in the black wet wind.