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.

“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.

Finally Kinnaird led the way inside a room that resembled a corporate boardroom. Men sat at a large oval table and the air, thick with tobacco smoke, hung over their heads like ectoplasm. Velvet curtains had been drawn across the windows and little fringed lamps were lit, imparting an atmosphere of genteel clubiness. A liquor cabinet provided a variety of expensive Scotches and vintage brandy. What made this gathering different from any board-meeting was the fact that the table was bare. No papers, no notepads, no folders, no pens. The men here didn’t take notes. They were forbidden by their own statutes to create reminders or memoranda of these gatherings.

Enrico Caporelli moved to the empty chair at the top of the table, his place as Director. He sat down, looked round. There was uncertainty here, but Caporelli knew he could play his colleagues like an orchestra. In the past he’d steered them, by sheer force of personality and some theatrical ability, into decisions they’d been reluctant to make.

Apart from himself, there were six dark-suited men around the table; of this number, only the Americans presented any kind of real obstacle. The German, Rudolf Kluger, a sombre, bespectacled man with the smooth discretionary air of a banker from Frankfurt, usually agreed with Caporelli. The French representative, Jean-Paul Chapotin, who was a handsome silver-haired man in his late fifties, generally came into line after some initial Gallic posturing. Freddie Kinnaird, by his own admission, was a foregone conclusion. The thin, unsmiling Japanese member, Kenzaburo Magiwara, who had the appearance of a man who carries important secrets in his skull, frequently agreed with the majority because he believed there was strength through unity. Otherwise why had the Society of Friends endured? Caporelli reflected on how the Japanese had only recently been admitted, a gesture in the direction of changing times.

And then the Americans! Who could predict the reactions of Sheridan Perry and his companion, the gaunt man known as Hurt? They had that quiet arrogance found in some Americans. It was the understated yet persistent superiority of people who think they have invented the twentieth century and franchised it to the rest of the world.

Sheridan Perry, flabby in his middle age like some fifty-year-old cherub, and Harry Hurt, lean as only a compulsive jogger can look – how could they appear so dissimilar and yet both emit a quality Caporelli found slightly sinister? They were an ambitious pair with the ease and confidence of men who come from a reality in which ambition is to be encouraged and pursued. It was no dirty little word, it was a way of life.

Hurt was an athlete who had graduated from Princeton and then spent many years in the military, rising to the elevated rank of Lieutenant-General. Later, he’d been an advisor in such outposts as Nicaragua and El Salvador. He sometimes seemed to be issuing orders to invisible subordinates, men of limited mental capacity, when he talked. Perry, whose jowls overhung the collar of his shirt, came from old midwestern money: railroads and banks and farmlands. He had been educated at Harvard Business School but there was still the vague suggestion of the provincial about him. True sophistication was just beyond him, something that lay over the next ridge. He reminded Caporelli of a man who knew how to talk and how to choose his suits and shirts but in the final analysis some small detail always betrayed him, perhaps his cologne, perhaps his mouthwash.

Caporelli observed the two Americans a moment. He had himself spent many profitable years in the United States and still maintained homes on Long Island and in Florida. He had a great fondness for Americans despite his aversion to their rather unshakable conviction in the correctness of their own moral vision. In this sense, Hurt and Perry were typical. But this narrowness of perception, this self-righteousness, also made the two Americans good capitalists. Unfortunately, though, they tended to think of the Society as something they deserved to own.

Now Caporelli cleared his throat and ran quickly through some items of business that in other circumstances would have been considered important. The manipulation of South African diamond prices, the request of a deposed Asian dictator to launder enormous sums of stolen money, the opportunity to purchase a controlling interest in a score of troubled American savings and loans banks, the question of funding a weakening military junta in a South American republic notorious for political turbulence. These were the usual affairs with which the Society concerned itself during its long and sometimes argumentative half-yearly meetings.

Today Caporelli dispensed with all this quickly. He knew there was only one real item on the agenda and the members were impatient to get to it. He spoke in the kind of voice he reserved for wakes. He summarised the situation, moving nimbly over recent “unhappy events in London” and insisting on the need to look at the larger picture. He reiterated his faith in the plan that had been concocted years before. Why tinker with running clockwork? He admitted Ruhr had brought a volatile element into the situation, but Rafael Rosabal, a trustworthy man, had pledged his word: everything was in place. And the timing was ah, perfetto. How long could the Soviets go on funding Castro’s private little reality at a time when they were tightening their purse strings all over the globe? Cuba, already an economic leper, was certain to be disowned by its niggardly Russian masters. An orphaned Cuba, weak, neglected. Who could wish for a better opportunity?

When he saw doubtful expressions on the faces of some members he became eloquent, reminding them of the prize to be won. An island paradise presently run by “animals”, Cuba was a prime piece of Caribbean real estate, a tropical delight, a licence to print money. His delivery was good, his manner confident. As a final gesture in the direction of the Americans, Caporelli spoke of the moral imperative involved in the plan. What could be more right than the end of a corrupt regime?

He sat down. He sipped from a glass of water. Not such a bad performance, he thought.

Sheridan Perry spoke in one of those flat voices in which you could hear two things: the winds of the Great Plains and an underlay of Harvard Yard. He said, “As you point out, Enrico, the elements are present. But how can you be sure Ruhr is under control?”

Enrico Caporelli shrugged. “I can’t say with one hundred per cent certainty he’s going to be a pussycat, Sheridan. There’s never such certainty in anything.”

Sheridan Perry had a nice smile and perfect little teeth. “Ruhr screwed up with the hooker in England and God knows he might do it again. Why didn’t you let him rot in jail? Why compound the problem by giving the go-ahead to some completely reckless rescue – planned, incidentally, by Rosabal, your man of honour?”

“I exercised my judgment as Director. There were excesses.”

Sheridan Perry raised his eyebrows. “Judgment, Enrico? Excesses? The London incident has shocked all of us in this room. The Society can’t condone that kind of violence. Matter of interest, how much did your Shepherd’s Bush extravaganza cost us?”

Enrico Caporelli mentioned a figure that was in excess of two hundred thousand pounds. “A drop in the ocean,” he added. “Compared with what’s at stake.”

Harry Hurt talked now in his patient, slightly professional way. “Money aside, we don’t kill defenders of law and order, because it promotes anarchy. The Society has never done that. We stabilise regimes. We don’t undermine them. Unless they’re run by bandits.”

“Like Cuba,” Sheridan Perry said.

In spite of Perry’s hostility, Caporelli had the feeling the Americans would support the plan finally, but they were after something in return. He’d known Perry and Hurt for too many years not to recognise the signs: the air of collusion, the sense that they’d rehearsed their position before the meeting. Caporelli remembered Perry’s father from fifteen years ago, a banker with a rough tongue who’d imparted both his position in the Society and his self-righteousness to Sheridan.

“We want your word.” Sheridan Perry stared at Caporelli with an evangelical look, very sincere, as if he had salvation to sell. “We want your solemn word, Enrico. If Ruhr blows it again, you’ll offer your resignation. We want that promise.”

So that was it. Caporelli wasn’t entirely surprised. Perry lusted after the Director’s chair, which he’d missed by only two votes last time.

“I give it gladly,” Caporelli said. The Directorship didn’t enthrall him. It had some advantages. It gave one a certain freedom to make a decision on one’s own. But that same freedom was also a heavy responsibility and he wasn’t intrigued by titles these days anyway. All he really wanted was what was owed him – with interest. Accounts had to be balanced before they could be closed, and his Cuban account had gone unsettled for far too long.

Caporelli solicited the other members around the table. A vote was taken: the plan would proceed. If the first stage wasn’t completed, the scheme would be aborted. The Director’s promise of resignation was noted.

Caporelli, who felt he’d won a tiny victory, looked at Hurt. “Let’s go on to the next item of business – Harry’s report on the situation in Central America.”

Harry Hurt had jogged all round Kinnaird’s estate earlier. Then he’d showered, and meditated for twenty minutes, and now he exuded the glow of sheer good health. He sat at the table like a human lamp. “There are no problems. Everything’s primed. Officially, the Hondurans accept the story we’re constructing a resort fifty miles from Cabo Gracias a Dios. Unofficially, they know we’re doing something else. It’s costly to bridge that gap between the official and unofficial perception in Central America. Everybody’s schizophrenic down there. We forge ahead, greasing palms as we go. The airstrip’s finished. We’re rolling.”

“How many men are assembled now?” Chapotin asked.

“Twelve hundred,” Hurt said.

“And what will the total commitment be?” Magiwara asked.

“Fifteen. But we could go with twelve.” Hurt smiled his jogger’s angular grin. “In point of fact, we could take the whole goddam Caribbean first thing in the morning and still have time for ham and eggs in Key West. If we wanted.”

The room was silent. Caporelli looked at the faces, waiting for further questions or comments. Harry Hurt always spoke with such authority that he left no doors open. When it came to military matters, he was the resident expert. It was known that he had friends in high places in Washington who had assisted, if only indirectly, in the creation of the military force in Honduras.

Caporelli stood up slowly. He declared the meeting adjourned.

He left the room as drinks were being poured and chairs pushed back. The formality of the meeting diminished in more relaxed small talk. What Freddie Kinnaird had called “the holocaust in London” had already been assimilated by the members and subjugated to the prospect of profit, as if it were nothing more than a delayed cargo or an adverse stock market or a foreign currency plummeting, just another item of business. The Society of Friends had absorbed many shocks in its history. It had always survived them.

Freddie Kinnaird, a gracious host, had placed a bedroom at Caporelli’s disposal. Perched at the top of a tower, it was round with slit-like windows. Caporelli removed his suit and silk underwear and lay down naked, listening to the relentless rush of wind and rain on the tower. He closed his eyes.

He remembered Cuba.

He remembered that April morning in 1959 when the three barbudos had come to his house in the Vedado. They wore green fatigues. With their beards they might have been cloned from a sliver of Fidel’s flesh. They carried revolvers and their boots thudded on the Italian marble entrance. They’d been drinking, still celebrating Fidel’s success. It was a twilight time, Caporelli recalled, between hope and fear of disappointment. Soon the Revolution would deteriorate in mass arrests, firing-squads, disgusting show-trials, expulsions, Communism. For the moment it was still something to celebrate, if you were a fidelista. The barbudos were led by a man who called himself Major Estrada, a fat man with a black beard and a face pitted with old acne. He wore green-tinted glasses. Even now, Caporelli could envisage him with astonishing clarity: the pockmarks, the flake of spinach or parsley lodged in the beard, the brown teeth, the black eyes hidden behind cheap green glass.

Major Estrada flashed a crumpled piece of paper under Caporelli’s face, a “document of transfer” so hastily printed the ink was still damp. It was as if the Revolution had rushed to bestow legality on itself. In the name of the Revolution, all Caporelli’s property was to be confiscated. This included the house in the Vedado, the Hotel St Clara located on Aguir Street near the Havana Stock Exchange, the apartment buildings on A Street and First, the large General Motors dealership at the corner of 25th and Hospital. They wanted it all.

Major Estrada took his revolver from his belt and waved it in the air. Caporelli, he said, was little better than a parasite sucking the blood of the poor. Caporelli had been thirty years old at the time, brashly confident that his powerful associates could clarify this misunderstanding quickly. But he’d misread the Revolution. Those of his friends who hadn’t left the island had smelled the wind and were busy stashing such money as they could before Castro took it from them.

Caporelli made futile phone calls while Estrada’s two soldiers ransacked the house. They created a destructive passage through the place – broken glass, mirrors, overturned vases, silk curtains hauled from windows, statues riddled with gunfire.

The American girl asleep in the upstairs bedroom, a dancer called Lynette, a passionate young woman Caporelli had stolen from a floor show, was wakened by the noise of the soldiers. Caporelli remembered hearing her swear at them and then she appeared, wrapped in a peach-coloured silk robe, at the top of the stairs.

“What the hell’s going on, Enrico?”

“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.