Mambo (9 page)

“Tell the young woman to shut up and get dressed,” Estrada said.

Caporelli shrugged. Either he defied the Major to impress the girl, or he obeyed Estrada and looked feeble in his own house.

The girl said, “Enrico, can't you get rid of these guys?”

Estrada said, “Why don't you do that, Enrico?”

Caporelli turned to look at the Major, who was smiling, enormously pleased with the situation. Then he faced the girl again, whose silk robe shimmered in the sun that streamed through a skylight above her. Angelic, Caporelli thought. How could he disappoint this angel?

He was about to say something when Estrada tried to press the piece of paper into his hand. It was of extreme importance to the Major to serve the document. He was a bailiff of La Revolution, a process server for the new order, and he took the task seriously.

“You must accept the paper,” he said. “As for the girl, tell her to get dressed and leave. She has no future here.”

From the top of the stairs the girl put a little whine into her voice and said, “Enrico, what the hell do these characters want? Can't you do something about them? They're tearing your house apart.”

Caporelli looked at the paper, refused to accept it. “Stick the document up your ass,” he told Estrada.

It was a moment in which Enrico Caporelli was pleased with the sheer beauty of defiance, a heightened moment wherein he had a sense of his own unlimited potential. He perceived himself through the eyes of the girl and he was beautiful and cocksure and eternal.

Major Estrada struck Caporelli across the face with his pistol. The girl screamed, a shrill noise that reverberated across marble surfaces. Nauseated by pain, embarrassed, Caporelli slipped to the marble floor. He couldn't remember now if he'd lost consciousness for thirty seconds or five minutes: there was a dark passage at the end of which was Estrada's hand holding the gun, pushing the barrel between Caporelli's lips.

Caporelli felt the warm gun against the roof of his mouth. He was aware of the smell of booze on the man's breath. Alcohol and revolutionary fervour. The Major was capable of anything. On the landing, the girl was holding the corner of her silk robe to her mouth. She'd believed Caporelli was protected by the powers in Cuba, that he had the kind of clout which made him impregnable. Last night he'd been tireless, a demon lover, coming at her time and again with a remorseless quality that was extraordinary even in her wide experience. Now he was reduced. He looked tiny to her down there in the entrance hall, and sad.

“Take the paper,” Estrada said, and released the safety catch. It was the most lethal sound Caporelli had ever heard. Nevertheless, he defied the Cuban again. He said
Piss off
, his tongue dry upon the steel barrel.

“
Payaso,
” Estrada said, and shoved the gun hard. Caporelli made pitiful retching noises. Later, he thought how little dignity there was in the situation. Stark fear diminished you, reduced you to nothing. Everything you imagined yourself to be was peeled away from you, and nothing else mattered but the proximity of the weapon and the fact that your heart was still beating and you were prepared to strike any kind of deal to keep it pumping. The presence of the girl was already forgotten. The idea that she witnessed this shameful incident meant nothing to him just then.

Estrada took a rosary from his tunic and ran the beads through the fingers of one hand. “God have mercy on you,” he whispered. “
Adios.
”

And then the little scene, poised so bleakly on the edge of death, dissolved in laughter as Estrada wrenched the gun out of Caporelli's mouth. The two soldiers, who had reappeared, were also laughing; it was the raucous laughter of drunks enjoying a great joke. Caporelli shut his eyes. His stomach had dropped. His mouth flooded with viscous saliva. He thought he felt a warm trickle of urine against his inner thigh, and he prayed it wouldn't show.

Estrada said, “Now, Enrico. Take the paper.”

Caporelli reached out without opening his eyes but Estrada, teasing, held the document away from the outstretched hand. The girl was immobile on the landing.

“Let me hear you beg a little, Enrico, or I stick the gun back in your mouth. Only this time no joke.”

“I beg,” Caporelli said. Although he couldn't see her, he was conscious of the girl moving now, the hem of her robe brushing the marble staircase.

“For what?”

There was dryness in Caporelli's mouth. “I beg you. Give me the paper.”

Caporelli's hand closed around the document. Estrada reached down, patted him on the head. Like a dog, a pet that had misbehaved and was now to be banished.

“Big shot, eh? Friend of Batista, eh? You think you own Havana! The Revolution is stronger than you and all your friends,
compañero
. The Revolution will bring you and your friends to their fucking knees! Now you've got ten minutes to get the hell out of here. Pack what you can carry in a small suitcase and go. Cuba doesn't need you. Cuba doesn't need your women.”

Caporelli listened to the sound of the three men strut across the courtyard. He remained on his knees for a long time afterwards, humiliated, ashamed by his failure of nerve. Why hadn't he gone on defying Estrada? Why had he caved in and begged? The answer was devastatingly simple: he'd been to a place he'd never visited before in his young life, the borderline between living and dying. It was a place without sunshine and women, a terrifying place where all your money and power didn't amount to shit. Life was better than death, even if humiliation was the price you paid.

When he stood up he saw the embarrassing trickle of urine on the marble, and he cleaned it with a white linen handkerchief monogrammed with the initials EC. The girl was standing over him.

She said, “Oh Enrico,” and then she was silent and he couldn't decide what was in her tone, whether disappointment or horror, embarrassment or sympathy.

Thirty years later, he could still hear the mocking laughter of the men. He could see Estrada's scarred face and the expensive handkerchief stained with piss. He could still feel the pistol against the roof of his mouth and smell the girl's perfume. He trembled with rage when he remembered Estrada's control of the situation, and his own disgrace in the presence of the girl.

He sat up, took his wallet from his jacket. He flipped it open, removed a crumpled sheet of paper. He smoothed it on the bed, his hand trembling the way it always did when he remembered Major Estrada. It was the document of transfer, the
traspaso de propiedad
. He had made up his mind a long time ago that he wasn't going to destroy this forlorn keepsake until he was back in Havana.

He closed his eyes. How could you count what Cuba had cost him? In monetary terms he'd been robbed of three million dollars in 1959, worth about seventy million thirty years later. But he had a melancholy sense of having lost something other than money: Estrada had stripped him of honour. But Estrada wasn't the real culprit. It was Castro, whose shadow fell like that of a great dark vulture across Cuba. It was Castro who had robbed him and it was Castro against whom he would have his revenge.

5

London

Frank Pagan's unit, officially known as SATO, the Special Anti-Terrorist Operation, occupied two floors of an anonymous building in Golden Square in Soho. The unit had come into existence in 1979 as a specific response to Irish terrorism. In the middle of the 1980s it had been disbanded and integrated into the structure of other Scotland Yard departments. Last year, however, at the direction of Martin Burr, the unit was revived and its charter expanded beyond Irish matters. Pagan, despite internal opposition at Scotland Yard from men who resented the publicity he'd generated in his career, had been named officer in charge. Small minds, Burr had said. Small people. Pagan had a screw you attitude to these gnomes who criticised his personal style, his fashionable suits and coloured shirts, the American Camaro he drove, the rock and roll he favoured. He did not fit comfortably into the Yard hierarchy, which was not known for its flexibility in any case. He possessed a streak of energetic individuality, considered very close to anarchy by those who disapproved of him.

On this cold evening in October, Pagan sat at the window of his office and looked down into the darkness of Golden Square. He had secured his release from hospital that same afternoon by the simple if painful expedient of rising from the bed, dressing in the clothes brought to him by his assistant Foxworth, and strolling past the nurses' station. He'd been assailed at once by the matron, a bollard of a woman who ruled the wards with a tyrant's flair. She'd prevented Pagan's exit until Dr Ghose could be summoned. When the physician arrived, he'd berated Pagan for taking things into his own hands, but he'd seen a strong resolve in the Englishman that was outside his experience. What else could he do but permit Pagan freedom on condition that he change his bandage once every day, take his painkillers and antibiotics, refrain from any energetic activity, and return within three days for a check-up?

Loaded with gauze and bandages, armed with prescriptions, uttering lavish promises, Pagan stepped out into the late afternoon a free man. The adrenalin rush of liberty hadn't lasted long before he discovered that his freedom wasn't from pain. Inside the taxi on the way to Golden Square he doubled over, clutching his chest and alarming Foxie, who didn't know what to do. Pagan swallowed a painkiller and the fit passed shortly thereafter, but it drained him, leaving him paler than before.

Now, sitting at the window of his office, he poured himself a small shot of Auchentoshan, a Lowland malt whisky of unsurpassed smoothness he'd begun to drink lately. Combined with Pethidine, it banished all misery. It encased the brain in a velvet envelope.

“How do you feel?” Foxworth asked. He sat on the opposite side of Pagan's desk. He was a tall man, the same height as Frank Pagan. His bright red hair was cut short, but it still resembled an unmanageable bush.

“I feel like something a dog might throw up. But I thank my lucky yaw I'm still alive,” Pagan replied.

“A good yaw's priceless,” Foxie remarked. He'd been Pagan's assistant during SATO's first incarnation. Pagan had recently rescued him from the Forgery squad to bring him back into the fold. Foxie had been horrified by the shooting in Shepherd's Bush. Pagan's wounding in particular was too close to home, too unnerving. A darkness had coursed through the whole unit at the news. Detectives, even those who disliked Pagan, moped in their partitioned offices, awaiting hospital bulletins.

Now that Pagan had come back work was in progress again, but Foxie thought his return premature. Frank was pallid, and the diet of malt whisky and drugs wasn't likely to be beneficial, no matter how strong his constitution might be. It was vintage Pagan. He couldn't keep away. Gunther Ruhr was preying on him, burning a hole in his brain.

Foxie studied his superior a moment. There was a new gauntness about Frank's features. He looked like a bleached-out holograph of himself, as if he were on the edge of fading away entirely. There was the usual flinty light of determination in Pagan's grey eyes but it seemed faintly manic to Foxworth.

Pagan stood up. His shadow fell across the massive pop-art silk-screen of Buddy Holly that dominated the wall behind him, a splash of extraordinary colour in a room that was otherwise white walled and merely functional. “Let's start with this dead Australian,” he said.

“I'm a little ahead of you, Frank,” Foxworth said. He reached for Pagan's in-tray and retrieved a telex that had come from Sydney only that morning. “It's not exciting.”

Pagan stared at the report. It said only that the man killed in Shepherd's Bush was one Ralph Masters, age fifty, a former sergeant in the Australian Army. There was a brief mention of the man's mercenary activities, but no criminal record. He lived alone, no known relatives. “A bloody bore,” Pagan remarked. “Is that the best they can send us? Excuse me if I nod off.”

“I'll follow it up by telephone later,” Foxie said.

Pagan looked across the square. It was eight-thirty and the streets were quiet and a faint mist adhered to the lamps. By altering his angle slightly he could see taxis cruise along Beak Street. In the other direction he could see the glow from the harsh, frosted lights of Piccadilly.

“I'll need the usual list.”

“It's already hère,” Foxie said, patting the in-tray. “Updated this very morning.”

“You're fast, Foxie.”

“Greased lightning. That's me.”

Pagan stared at the lengthy computer print-out Foxworth passed to him. Prepared by the Home Office and available to a variety of law enforcement agencies, it was a list of people who had entered the United Kingdom recently, and whose names appeared on the Home Office data base under the category “questionable”. This included visitors involved in political activity in their homelands, alleged radicals, Communists, businessmen employed in dubious concerns (for example, suspected of having narcotics connections), anti-monarchists, and assorted others. The list showed a high preponderance of Libyans, Irishmen, Iranians, Palestinians and Colombians. None of those named had been denied entry into the country. They weren't considered “undesirable” enough for that measure. The “undesirables” belonged on another catalogue altogether and were usually detained, interviewed, then deported before they had more than a couple of lungfuls of British air.

“Have you run these names through our own computers?” Pagan asked. The length of the print-out depressed him. There must have been more than four hundred individuals. Was all the world's riff-raff cheerfully entering this green land?

“It's being done even as we speak,” Foxie said.

“You're really on top of things here, aren't you? I should have stayed in hospital.”

“Which would have shown remarkable judgment, Frank.”