7

London

By mid-afternoon on his first full day of freedom, Frank Pagan had coaxed extra help from a variety of departments. Men had been called in to do extra shifts or work their day off. A few had been summoned from the twilight world of semi-retirement and sent out into the streets, grumbling yet grudgingly pleased to be useful. Officers travelled to a score of different places, Ealing and Wembley, Poole and Ramsgate, anywhere the names of those on the computer list had been located. It was a thankless undertaking, but what alternatives were there? Ignore the twenty-nine names? No. Pagan wanted to cover as many bases as he could. Later, there might be the consolation that he’d done everything possible and hadn’t skimped. He had three officers checking private airfields in the Home Counties for any evidence of the helicopter used in Shepherd’s Bush; another bloody long shot.

By four o’clock, Pagan had also sent two men to Cambridge to analyse potential targets in the area with the Chief Constable. Another five had been ordered to meet the security officers of military bases throughout East Anglia, from Colchester in the south to Hunstanton in the north, an area some eighty miles wide and sixty miles long. Bounded by The Wash and the North Sea, it was a region of waterways, leafy lanes, ancient churches. Villages, some of them surprisingly remote, still had timbered houses. Across this flat green landscape, Air Force jets screamed out of bases and left fading trails in the sky.

In Golden Square two officers were employed full time taking phone calls from people who claimed to have seen Ruhr. These came from every corner of England; The Claw had been observed by a lonely old man in Hull, a young drunk in Plymouth, a very proper lady in Sevenoaks, an octogenarian in Radlett. He had also been spotted on Westminster Bridge, and in a restaurant on the Grand Parade in Eastbourne by a short-sighted French waiter who’d never forgotten the humiliation imposed on France by the Germans at the Maginot Line. Ruhr, it seemed, was as common as hedgerow, and his movements just as tangled.

Even though officers were scurrying all over the place, and business was being conducted briskly, Pagan was still beset by a sense of having overlooked something very simple, except he wasn’t sure what. It was a flavour in his mouth he couldn’t name, a word he couldn’t get off the tip of his tongue. Too many Pethidine, too little sleep on the hideous office sofa. He had the feeling that his brain, knocked off-centre, was dealing with the German only in a peripheral way. And the deficiency of his muse had really nothing to do with insomnia or pain. Face it, Frank, he told himself in that stern inner voice he kept for self-honesty: you’ve been bollixed by the last name on the bloody list.

The twenty-ninth name. As he looked down into the darkening afternoon in Golden Square, he was uneasy.

He wished he could set the past aside, lock it inside a box labelled oblivion. But it was a sneaky intruder, and it came upon you with the quietness of a shadow. He thought that perhaps Foxworth hadn’t been able to track the person down, and maybe that would be a relief, but all the particles of his curiosity were wildly activated. Sometimes the urge to visit your own history was overwhelming and so you walked old neighbourhoods regardless. The reckless heart, Pagan thought. It went where it wanted to go, striding to its own timetable, and there was nothing you could do but follow, even if the journey took you into the red-light district of your memories.

Foxworth entered the office, whistling slyly. “Has anybody mentioned your resemblance to Quasimodo?” he asked.

Pagan shook his head. “I must be missing something.”

“It’s how you carry yourself, Frank,” Foxie said. “Like Charlie Laughton. All you need is a fair-sized hump.”

“I can’t think of any other way to be comfortable.” Pagan had placed all his weight on the left side of his body. His right arm hung rather uselessly, and the right shoulder was raised a little. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was an improvement on total discomfort.

“I’ll get you a bell for Christmas.”

“I’d settle for Gunther Ruhr.”

Foxworth stopped whistling. He took out his notebook, flipped the pages. He tore out a sheet, slid it across the desk to Pagan. “I found the individual you wanted. Wasn’t easy, actually. She checked into a hotel in Victoria two days ago, then promptly settled the bill and moved without explanation in the middle of the night. Arrived in a second hotel in Knightsbridge the day before yesterday. Did the same damn thing all over again. Paid the bill, arrivederci, upped and moved to the address you now have. Strange behaviour. One might say suspicious.”

“One might.” Pagan looked at the piece of paper, then tucked it in his pocket.

“You’ll need a driver,” Foxie said, thinking that what Frank really needed was a nurse and three weeks in a quiet room with an ocean view.

“And that might as well be you, Foxie.”

“I was hoping you’d ask.”

Pagan was silent and nervous in the car as Foxworth drove along Piccadilly and up through the clogged streets of Mayfair. Late afternoon yielded to evening. Feeble sunlight pierced the slate-coloured sky, laying a dirty amber streak across Berkeley Square. Park Lane loomed ahead, and Hyde Park beyond, where evening had already settled among the trees. Pagan folded his hands in his lap. His mouth was very dry. This visit wasn’t the most practical thing he’d ever done. He could have assigned somebody else, even Foxie, to make this call. But how could he have resisted and let the chance slip past and then have to kick himself in regret?

The monolithic hotels of Park Lane were ahead now, great slabs of glass and concrete that overlooked Hyde Park. Foxie parked the Rover outside one of the hotels and followed Pagan through the glass doors. Pagan inquired at the desk for the room number he wanted, then shuffled over the thick-piled carpet to the lifts.

“You go the rest of the way alone. Correct?” Foxworth asked.

“Correct,” Pagan said. Sometimes Foxie’s face was like a kid’s; he wasn’t very accomplished in the craft of concealment. He had been very curious about Pagan’s odd reaction last night, and he was even more curious today, and now he was to be denied direct access to the secret. Bloody Frank! he thought. Furtive bastard!

“Sit in the bar or something,” Pagan said. “I don’t expect to be very long.”

“I’m disappointed, Frank.”

“Those are the breaks, Foxie.” Pagan stepped inside the lift, pressed a button for the twelfth floor. When he got out in a corridor that was deserted and weirdly quiet, he had the urge to return to the lobby and leave. Empty corridors in hotels unnerved him.

How long had it been? Twelve years? Thirteen? If it had lain dormant that length of time, why disturb it now? It had turned first to dross, and then the years had refined it further, and now there was surely nothing left but dust. Dust, my arse! If that was all, why would you be here?

He moved along the corridor. He found room 1209 and knocked on the door. After a few moments it opened about half an inch. The gap was filled with darkness and Pagan could make out only the eyes at first, but that was all he needed to see. They were unmistakable, blacker than he’d remembered; sad and reflective and deep and lovely, they drew him down into them even as they’d done twelve, thirteen years ago. Down and down; all those years ago there had been bliss at the end of this fall. He smiled uncertainly. He was tense, knotted.

“Frank?” The voice was the same too. Perhaps a half-tone deeper, a little throatier. It was a voice made for risqué jokes and laughter in a bar just before closing time.

A ghost touched him. He had the overpowering desire to put his hand out and feel her – no innocent contact between his fingers and her cheek, nothing smacking of mere fondness, but a truly intimate touch, his fingers on her nipples, her belly, between her legs. This was how she’d always affected him, and time apparently hadn’t altered that. It was fascinating to find an old passion lodged in the blood still. Remembered love was the most tantalising of all, flavoured with things that might have been; small regrets, unfulfilled desires, sorrows.

“Frank Pagan. I can’t believe it.”

“Can I come in?” he asked.

A beat of hesitation. Then she said, “Could I stop you if I wanted to?”

He shook his head. There was a time, he thought, when I would have done anything for you. Rational, irrational, good, bad – these terms lost all meaning when love had you dazzled. He took a few steps forward. Curtains were drawn, a TV playing, no volume. A smell of cigarette smoke and perfume lay in the air. This was something new; she hadn’t smoked in the past.

She wore a green silk robe belted not at the waist but lower, slinking around the hips. She wore clothes like few other women. She gave them a personality entirely her own, smart, a little sluttish, conspiratorial in a way, because she wanted you, and only you, to know what soft secrets lay under the garments. She always looked as if she were about to disrobe, as if clothes fettered her natural urge to go naked, which gave her an edge of unpredictability. And Pagan, twenty-eight years of age at the time of his passion for this woman, had thrived on this brink even as it had threatened him. He’d known bottomless jealousy and terrifying insecurity; when you loved Magdalena you lived with fear of loss, but you lived gloriously just the same. She made all your nerve-endings taut and your blood never stopped singing strange and unfamiliar tunes. Siren, whore, lover, friend – she’d bewildered the young Pagan with her permutations.

“How did you know I was in London?” she asked.

“Your name’s on a list. Everything’s on a computer these days,” he said.

“A list? You make it sound very grim. I take it this isn’t a social call?” She sat on the unmade double bed and glanced past him across the room. The door to the bathroom was shut. A band of light glowed in the space between floor and door.

“Not entirely,” Pagan said. He wanted to go closer to her, but he stood some five or six feet from the bed, conscious of how his sharp remembrance of old intimacies made him feel awkward.

She pushed a hand through her marvellously thick hair. “How long has it been?”

“Thirteen years, give or take.”

“Sweet Jesus. I was a child back then.”

“You were twenty-six.”

“And naïve.”

“We were both naïve.”

“Yeah, but didn’t we have a time?” She smiled, reached for the bedside lamp, switched it on. He saw now, in the light that flooded her features, small lines beneath the eyes and around the corners of the mouth. But these minor incisions of time took nothing away from her. Quite the contrary, they gave her more depth and softened the beauty that had once been too perfect. She had the kind of looks that turned heads so quickly one could almost hear the separation of vertebrae.

Thirteen years ago Pagan’s world had been transformed by this woman. Before his marriage to Roxanne he’d played the field, but his encounter with Magdalena Torrente had reduced that field to a dried-out pasture, consisting as it did of pallid girls whose notion of passion was as thrilling as taffeta. Cups of tea in bed, biscuit crumbs, damp little flats and whining gas-fires. Magdalena Torrente, a creature from another world, had come in like a tropical storm, cutting through Pagan’s Anglo-Saxon cool with her ardour. And he’d lost control.

“I’ve thought about you often,” Pagan said, and wondered at the banal language of reunions. Reunions and grief had that in common: a thin lexicon.

“Likewise,” she said.

“You look wonderful.”

“My hair’s a mess. No make-up.”

“When did you ever need it?”

“You’ve still got that silver tongue, Pagan.”

Pagan’s ribcage had begun to hurt. He had to sit down.

“You look sick,” she said.

He told her briefly about Ruhr, and the shooting. He sat in an armchair, swallowed a painkiller.

“How bad is it?”

“It comes and goes. Mostly it comes.”

“Poor Frank,” she said.

He liked the sympathy in her voice. For a moment he wished she’d get up and cross the space that divided them and perhaps hold him, baby him, soothe him. And then he was glad she didn’t touch him because when it came to Magdalena he’d never quite been able to get enough of her. She resisted complete possession. Her passions were real and intense, her heart sincere, but he always felt that she kept something in reserve, something unreachable despite all the intimacy between them.

“I behaved badly in those days, didn’t I?” he said.

“I don’t remember that, Frank.”

“I couldn’t take you at face value. I never quite knew how to behave around you. I wanted to own you.”

“But I played you like a guitar,” she said quietly. “I manipulated you. I was a self-centred monster.”

“I was just as bad. I remember we were in a restaurant, a place in Soho. I thought you were flirting with the waiter and I couldn’t stand it.”

“You didn’t talk to me all night long,” she said. “You sat in a huff. As I recall, I slid my foot into your crotch under the table, and you pretended nothing was happening.”

Pagan smiled at the memory. Water under the bridge, he thought. But it wasn’t swift-running; it passed under him sluggishly, giving him time to look down at reflections. “I’d never felt that kind of jealousy before. I couldn’t think straight.”

“I felt very powerful, Frank. Control over a hot-shot young cop! What an ego trip.” She stood up, smoothing the front of her green silk robe with the palms of her fine hands. She could perform the most simple manoeuvre and change it; the striking of a match could be transmuted into an erotic gesture, the application of eye-shadow as bewitching as a high-class strip show. She was theatre, and Pagan had been her willing audience.

“How long are you here for?” he asked.

“I leave tomorrow.”

Pagan wondered why Magdalena was still in her robe at this hour of the day, but he wouldn’t ask. “Do you have time for dinner?”

“There’s something I can’t cancel. I would if I could.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“I can’t, Frank. Sorry.”

“Why do I still feel a very old jealousy?”

“Because you’re crazy. Because you’re a romantic.”

“I’m not sure that’s how I like to be defined.”

“You’ll always be a romantic, Frank. You’ll always occupy a special place in my memory.”

Something sounded sad to Pagan, as if he existed in Magdalena’s mind only as a fossil, relegated to the museum where former lovers lay mummified. There was no question so far as he was concerned – he had once loved this woman in a way he’d never quite loved again, a tempestuous affair, probably self-destructive, but dramatic and more turbulently physical than anything else he’d ever experienced. She took him to his limits then pushed him beyond them, forcing him to soar through the barriers of his reserve and aloofness.

“Thirteen years.” She shook her head, as if the passage of time bewildered her. “I don’t think I’m over the surprise of seeing you yet. And the suspicion.”

“Suspicion?”

“You’re not here just to reminisce. You said it wasn’t exactly a social call.”

Pagan was silent. He wondered if he’d hoped for something that the situation couldn’t possibly yield, perhaps a brief rekindling of old sensations, a liaison even; but this was pure bloody fantasy. People moved on. They built other lives. They had other loves.

“The computer kicked out your name,” he said. Jesus, he didn’t want to talk about this.

“Does that mean I’m up shit creek?” She put a hand over her open mouth; mock horror.

“It depends on why you’re in London. The last time you were trying to buy weapons.”

She laughed. “Don’t remind me. I was naïve then.”

“Naïve enough to look for guns on the black market anyway. And get yourself arrested.”

“You were the nicest arresting officer I could have hoped for.”

“Are you still involved in the same cause? Still trying to buy guns?”

“Hey, look at me, Frank. I’m thirty-nine and mellow. Guns in the hands of some Cuban extremists isn’t the answer. I changed direction.”

Pagan stared at the TV a moment. A man was mutely reading the evening news. “What direction are you pointed in now, Magdalena?”

“We still want Castro out. That never changes. But I know it isn’t going to happen unless it comes from inside Cuba, and with only a minimal amount of force. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, Frank, but there are people in Cuba who believe in bringing democracy to the island. I’m a sympathiser.”

“How is this supposed to be achieved?” Pagan asked.

“What do you think?”

“A coup?”

She didn’t answer.

“Bloodless?” Pagan asked.

“I can’t see into the future.”

“How could it be accomplished without some bloodshed? And what exactly is a ‘minimal amount’ of force? How do you actually measure that?”

Magdalena Torrente said nothing.

“But you believe this coup is a possibility?” Pagan asked.

She didn’t answer directly. “The democratic underground in Cuba keeps growing. People are sick of deprivation. Communism has a big personnel problem. For every good man it attracts, it enlists a hundred bullies who don’t know Karl Marx from Harpo. Whenever there’s a new problem, which is ten times every day, they think rationing’s the answer. No shoes? No baby food? No drinking water? No fish to eat? Tough shit, those are all just mere inconveniences en route to the perfection of the state, which is coming. Maybe in a couple of centuries, but it’s coming. Meantime, we’re sorry we have to grind your face in the dirt.”

Pagan remembered taking Magdalena Torrente into custody after she’d been arrested in 1977 in a gun dealer’s flat on Baker Street. He’d been part of a team watching that place for weeks, listening to tapped phoned conversations, waiting for the precise moment to swoop on the dealer, a Belgian whose cover was that of a dealer in nineteenth-century Flemish art. When the raid happened, Magdalena was in the middle of bargaining over the price of one hundred FN rifles intended for a group of anti-Castro rebels in the Escambray region of Cuba. The guns would be channelled through Miami to Cuba by a Florida group who had run afoul of the FBI and therefore had to buy weapons abroad. So Magdalena had been dispatched to London with a huge sum of cash.

When she’d been arrested the money was confiscated. The judge, who thought Communism akin to rabies or a rattlesnake’s bite and believed democracy to be the British Empire’s one true gift to the planet, had lectured her in the fashion of a stern uncle but he’d refused to imprison or deport her. She had been “misguided by her own youthful zeal for liberty”, a nice judicial phrase, a kindness. Obviously, the good justice had been mildly infatuated with the beautiful young Cuban-American who stood in the dock before him.

After her acquittal, Frank Pagan defied protocol and good sense by spending ten days and nights with her. He’d known it wasn’t a bright career move to fraternise with your prisoner, even if she’d been discharged. But that was how she affected him. She made him blind to consequences.

“What brings you here this time, Magdalena?”

“I’m a tourist.”

“A very fussy one when it comes to hotels, I gather.”

She stared at him. She was capable of making her eyes seem like two hard stones, which stripped her face of all expression. She had masks that could be terrifying. “You’ve been spying.”

“No. You move so often we had trouble tracking you down.”

“I’m a hard woman to please. A hotel has to be comfortable.”

“Look at it from a police point of view. Maybe you’re up to something and you want to make it difficult to be followed. You take the precaution of moving around.”

“You can shove that one, Frank. I didn’t like the first two hotels. There’s nothing sinister in that. I don’t know what you’re fishing for. I was in Paris before London. Before that Rome. You know how superficial we Americans can be. Six hours in Barcelona and we’ve seen everything. Now it’s London’s turn. Three antique stores, Harrod’s, the Changing of the Guard, and I’m out of here.”

Pagan experienced one of those drugged moments in which the strip of electricity under the bathroom door seemed to vibrate. He rubbed his eyes, looked away.

“Do you have any more questions, Frank? Or are we through?”

There, he thought. A sliver of ice in her voice; a little frost. He said, “Look, I already told you your name had to be checked, that’s all. You haven’t been singled out especially. There’s a whole slew of names.”

“It’s got something to do with this character Ruhr?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t imagine for a moment that I’d ever be connected with anybody like that?”

“Of course not.”

“But you just had to see me.”

“I had to see you. Did you come here alone?”

“Sure. I often travel on my own. I’m reaching that stage – set in my ways. I like solitude.”

Something troubled him here. An element was wrong, a balance disturbed. Somehow he was having difficulty imagining Magdalena, gregarious Magdalena, travelling alone.

That isn’t quite it either, Frank.

He said, “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t gone back home thirteen years ago.”

“Do you think we ever really stood a chance, Frank? Do you think we’d still be together?”

“Tough question.” He remembered trips along the river to Richmond; strolling in Kew Gardens; walking hand-in-hand around the Serpentine. Bistros in Chelsea; antique shops on the Fulham Road; Petticoat Lane. He’d taken her to a cricket match at the Oval and she’d fallen asleep. Tourists and lovers in starry, brilliant London.

“And totally unanswerable,” she said. “You’re a British cop. I’m a Cuban democrat exiled in Florida. It’s a big divide.”

Pagan looked round the room. He didn’t want to leave. Screw divides, he thought. Why didn’t she ask him to stay a little longer?

He realised with a quiet little shock that he knew the answer to that question, that he’d known it for some minutes now, but hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. The light under the bathroom door shimmered like mercury, then seemed to expand. Of course! Bright light in a closed room. The mystery of Magdalena’s new-found love of her own companionship. The strange uneasiness he’d felt. It tumbled into place like so many coins slowly falling.

She was looking at her wristwatch on the bedside table; a surreptitious glance. “It was good to see you again, Frank. But I’m already late for my appointment. I’m sorry we don’t have more time. I hope you get your man.”

He finally gave way to an impulse, pulled her towards him, perhaps just a little too sharply, and kissed her. He surprised himself, but she didn’t resist, she offered her open mouth and the tip of her tongue, and when he placed a hand inside her robe she didn’t immediately push him away. For a few seconds he forgot Ruhr, and the wound, and the way the world trespassed. He remembered what it was like to be inside this woman, that collision of flesh, and how her breasts tasted between his lips. The memory had all the odd luminosity of an hallucination and the poignancy of a dead love.

“Go,” she said.

He stepped into the corridor, turning once to look at her, seeing only one hand raised in farewell as the door closed on her. One hand. A fragment of Magdalena. It was somehow very fitting.

Downstairs in the lobby he found Foxworth sitting impatiently under a vast spidery plant. Foxie stood up.

“I want you to go up to the twelfth floor,” Pagan said.

“Oh?”

Pagan grunted and lowered himself cautiously into the sofa alongside his assistant. The plant created a dark green umbrella over his head. “The room number’s 1209. Keep an eye on it in a casual way. See if you can look like the house detective.”

“May I ask why?”

“I want to find out who’s hiding in the bathroom.”

“Bathroom? Can you fill me in slowly, Frank?”

Pagan looked in the direction of the lifts. “Later.”

Rafael Rosabal dried his face, then tossed the towel aside. “I didn’t know you had friends in this town.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said.

“Yeah? Poor Frank. I heard.” He opened the closet, removed a shirt, pulled it on. “It sounded like it was only yesterday.”

“You’re jealous. How wonderful! You’re actually jealous!”

Rosabal said nothing. He clipped his cufflinks neatly in place. Silver and diamond, they gleamed in the lamplight. He was fastidious about his appearance.

She went on, “You heard him. He came here on a routine matter. There’s a hunt going on for this German, whatever his name is. Pagan isn’t the kind of guy to cut corners. He sees stones, he turns them all over. Compulsive. I just happened to be one of his stones.”

“Was he also compulsive as a lover? Did he make love to you all the time? Was he insatiable?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You obviously still mean something to him. But does he mean anything to you?”

She laughed because she was enjoying this moment. She’d never seen him even remotely jealous before. “We’re planning to run away together. We lowered our voices when it came to that part so you wouldn’t overhear.”

Rosabal took her in his arms and held her. Had he really been jealous? He wasn’t sure. He thought about Pagan and Magdalena for a moment – a surprising little fluke, a trinket of fate, amusing the way all such concurrences can be, but it meant nothing in the end. There was no way the English policeman could link Magdalena to him; and even if Pagan made such a connection, what did it matter? How could the Englishman possibly discover any association between Rosabal and Gunther Ruhr?

“Is he likely to catch the German?” he asked.

“I don’t give a damn. I don’t want to spend our last half hour together wondering about some lunatic on the run. We’ve got better things to do.”

“I was just curious. If he’s compulsive, presumably he isn’t going to sleep until the man is caught.”

“Who cares? What difference does it make to you?” She unclipped his cufflinks, slid her hands up his arms and felt the fine hair stir as if touched by electricity. She undid the buttons of his shirt, then pushed him back across the bed; he was distracted.

“I’m just interested in the kind of man your former lover is,” he said. “Natural curiosity. Was he better than me?”

“Forget him. Nobody’s better than you.”

She lowered her face and kissed the hairs that grew across his chest. Where the hairs faded, his skin was brown and almost satin to the touch; she opened her eyes, studied a small blue vein that travelled crookedly just beneath the surface of flesh. She said, “I adore you. I wish I had words to tell you how much.”

Rosabal lay silent, his eyes shut. She felt his fingertips against the back of her neck, small indentations of pressure; he had powerful hands and sometimes he underestimated his own strength. She moved her head and his hands slackened and the pressure diminished.

She opened his fly slowly. She always knew how to arouse him and change his mood. “My sweet darling,” she said. Vida mia!

He saw her hair fall over his thighs. He shut his eyes and held his breath as if he meant to contain the explosion in his fashion, but he couldn’t. He heard the way she moaned joyfully, her hands cupped together under his testicles; he came with a surge that rocked him. She raised her face. A glistening thread of semen lay on her lip and she removed it with a fingertip. She held this frail memento towards the light, then it drifted away. There was a profound intimacy she had with Rafael that with any other man would have been unthinkable. Certainly she’d never known it with another lover. It excluded the rest of the world. She found herself doing things she’d never done before, thinking thoughts that would never have entered her mind until now. She looked at him. He was so beautiful at times he made her ache.

They lay together in silence.

Then she said, “I want to leave before you. I don’t like waiting behind after you’ve gone.”

“Of course.”

She shut her eyes very tightly. At the back of her mind she could already feel the sorrow that always came, like some vindictive wraith, whenever they parted. And there was always the same penetrating doubt, the heartache of wondering if, and when, they would meet again.

“Tell me we’re going to win,” she said. This was another troublesome matter for her; she needed reassurances here too. Her love for Rosabal, her political beliefs, her desire to play a significant role in changing Cuba – these were bound together so tightly as to be inseparable.

“Do you doubt it?”

“I like to hear you say it, that’s all.”

He turned his face towards her. “We’re going to win. Nothing can stand in our way.”

Her face propped against the palm of her hand, she gazed at him. The ultimate victory. There were moments in which she could feel it as certainly as she might some fever in her blood – a raging flood of light and warmth. She had one such moment now as she studied her lover’s face. Her fears and doubts drifted away like so much steam.

She turned over on her back, looked up at the ceiling. She thought about the role she would play later, in the time after Castro. Rosabal had brought it up a year ago in Mexico City; the only true democracy, he’d said, was one based on elections that were not only free but fair. And with that delightful smile on his face which contained her future, he told her how he had come up with a special job for her, namely Minister of Elections, a post he’d create for her when the time came, a powerful position that would bestow upon her the responsibility of ensuring elections free of corruption and coercion, elections that would be untainted by fraud as they so frequently were in such countries as Panama and Chile. Cuban democracy would be a model for the rest of Latin America.

Besides, what damn good was a rotten democracy? he’d asked. What good was it if votes could be bought with money or threats of violence? People had to cast their ballots without fear. Her job, as Rafael had enthusiastically described it, would be more than merely overseeing the impartial counting of ballots; a whole nation accustomed to one antiquated system for which nobody had ever voted had to be re-educated, an enormous task that affected every stratum of society. Immense propaganda would have to be created in schools, factories, farms. Simple democracy; an alien concept for a whole generation of Cubans who had to be wakened, and shaken, and remade! And he had absolutely no doubt that she had the energy for this; she had the zeal, the dedication, there was no question.

The prospect, and Rafael’s faith in her, filled her with excitement; he intended to make her the principal architect of free elections in Cuba. In 1961, at the Bay of Pigs, scores of men, including her own father, had died in pursuit of that ideal. She shut her eyes. She said, “Do you know what makes me really happy? It’s not just the importance of this job – it’s the fact you understand what it means to me. Even after we’re married, you want me to have a life of my own.” She opened her eyes, looked at him.

He said, “You have too much to contribute. I wouldn’t expect you to give up your independence. I’ve told you that before. In any case, it’s part of your charm.” He smiled now. “Presidente Rosabal and his wife Magdalena,” he added, as if testing the coupling. “It sounds so very right.”

And it was; what could be more natural? she wondered. Rafael and Magdalena. Lovers. Husband and wife. President and Minister. All along the line they fitted smoothly together. Sometimes this realisation overwhelmed her. She, who had always looked upon marriage as a relic of a simpler age when women blindly entered into unfair contracts – she wanted to be this man’s wife; she wanted Rafael as her husband. He had asked her a year ago in Mexico City; her acceptance had been the most tranquil moment of her life. But she had known from the beginning that she’d never be just a decoration at Rosabal’s side, never window-dressing. She wanted more. And she was going to get it.

Rafael Rosabal was silent for a long time. Then he pointed his index finger, gun-like, at the ceiling, and made a clicking sound.

“Castro is a dead man,” he said in a toneless voice.

“Yes.” Magdalena Torrente laid her face upon her lover’s chest. “A corpse.”

Dover, Delaware

The house, overgrown with weeds and shrubbery, had no ostentation. It was large and anonymous, rather like its owner John Merkandome, who was known in intelligence circles as the Grim Reaper. Located a couple of miles from the Little Creek Wilderness Area, the house commanded some splendid views of Delaware Bay, but it was otherwise plain and unadorned. Merkandome paid very little attention to his surroundings. He enjoyed the indoor pool in which he presently floated, but, beyond that, he had no time for luxuries.

He breast-stroked to the side of the pool and hauled himself halfway out of the blue water, which dripped from his grey hair into his eyes. He was a lean man with an odd skin condition that caused his flesh to appear marbled. He sat down on a step and blinked as he said, “All our studies came to the same conclusion. Every single hypothesis led to the same result.”

“With tragic consequences in London.” The other person in the pool was a round-cheeked man called Allen Falk. Falk, who had wavy hair, oiled and styled in a way that suggested the mid-1950s, had advised the last two Presidents and the present incumbent on Central American matters. He was an influential counsellor whose love affairs were as public as his professional life was wrapped in mystery. He was said to have parlayed his leverage in The White House into a crucial role in defining CIA policy in Central America.

Nobody really knew the extent of Falk’s power. How far it reached was a matter of ongoing rumour. In his social and sexual life he dallied with actresses, lady novelists, and on one occasion a beautiful pop singer who later had a nervous breakdown. Falk’s fame was of a curiously American kind. Those things of substance he might have achieved played no part in it; only the margins of his life – his women, his cologne, the make of his sunglasses – were taken into account by the gods who decide the credentials of celebrity.

Merkandome, who was approaching his fifty-seventh year, got out of the pool. He was in good shape for his age, better than Al Falk, who was slightly plump and relied on tailors more than exercise for his appearance. Falk swam in his ungainly way to the side of the pool. The stench of chlorine was heavy in the air.

Merkandome draped a towel round his shoulders. “Those are the accidents we learn to live with, Al,” he said in his New England accent. “Tragedies are an occupational hazard. You should know that by now. You should also know that no study can take into account every possible human factor. In this case, a sick German’s sexual peccadilloes. Incomplete input, Al, equals incomplete equation.”

Falk would personally have preferred another plan of action from the start, but Merkandome was the expert in plausibility studies, not he. It was the Grim Reaper who created models and ran them through computers in his private lab in a grubby building owned by a front called Dome Electronics in Wilmington, Delaware. The CIA knew the building well because Merkandome was a major consultant to the agency even though he was no longer on any official payroll these days. For thirty years he’d worked at Langley, an organisation man.

In 1961 he had been involved in planning the operation that turned out to be the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. For the rest of his life Merkandome lived with the idea that not only had he failed to bring down Castro but he had also provided that sonofabitch with one of his most glorious public relations victories – the chance to gloat over the defeat of American-backed forces.

“I pay bright young graduates from MIT a lot of money to run plausibility studies, Al. They don’t leave stones unturned. They’re smart fellows. More than that, though, they’re thorough. And give me thorough over smart every time.”

Al Falk climbed up out of the pool, reached for a towel, began to dry himself off. His pectorals sagged, a gloomy fact he noticed in an absent-minded way. “If we hadn’t needed the hardware, we wouldn’t have needed Ruhr,” he remarked. Falk hated conditionals. They cluttered a man’s life.

“Sure, but we needed the hardware,” Merkandome said. “Every single study came up with that, Al. Without hardware, there’s no good pretext to go in and get the job done. We worked it through from hundreds of angles. For example. We considered the phony kidnapping of a Senator’s son by Cuban agents. We played with the idea of poisoning the water-supply to the US base at Guantanamo and blaming it on Castro. We went through one scenario after another, Al. Some plausible. Some downright stupid. Most of them far too soft. You don’t have to hear them all. What it always came back to was the notion of our own shores being menaced. You threaten a fellow in his own back yard, and he becomes irate. Any action he takes to defend his life and property is justifiable. That was the strongest concept of all. But we didn’t figure Ruhr’s weakness into our equations. How could we? We didn’t know about it.”

Allen Falk tossed his towel aside. He looked up at the glass ceiling, beyond which sultry afternoon clouds clung to a weak yellow sun. “Apparently nobody knew,” he said.

“See? The human factor,” Merkandome remarked.

Fuck the human factor, Falk thought. Why weren’t things always cut and dry? Why were they so damned ragged? Falk, even though he was a master of court intrigue and knew how to play the byzantine game of White House politics, nevertheless longed for simplicity at times; a world in which all your plans actually worked – what a terrific place that would be. People always considered Falk a complicated man. They were wrong – he was a simple man in complex circumstances.

Falk got to his feet. He thought of the cops dead in that London suburb, the people injured, the property destroyed. The trouble was that everything had its price. Especially freedom. He had no intention of cancelling the programme now, even if he wanted to, and he didn’t. Too much was already involved, too much invested. And not just money.

He glanced at the Grim Reaper and said, “The show goes on.”

“They said you were a trooper, Al,” John Merkandome replied.

London

Shortly before midnight, at a well-preserved eighteenth-century house overlooking the Thames in Chelsea, Jean-Paul Chapotin slipped his key inside the lock, opened the door, stepped into a narrow hall carpeted in vile red. He placed his briefcase on the three-legged table in the hall, then entered the sitting-room, which might have been decorated by a fop. Eighteenth-century furniture was permissible, to be admired even, but Chapotin loathed the powder-blue walls and ceiling and the curtains the colour of a new moon.

He sat on the sofa, which was too narrow for a man of his bulk, but the whole house was too narrow and cramped. He made a telephone call to his wife Gabrielle in Paris. Gabrielle, who would be wearing whatever absurd garment had been mandated by the queens who ruled haute couture, answered in a voice made dreamy by tranquillisers.

“I have to stay here another day,” Chapotin said.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yes, yes.” Chapotin heard a floorboard creak at the top of the stairs. “Is everything well?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

Chapotin shrugged. Conversations with his wife had become impossibly dull over the years. What had once been wild adoration had dwindled during the course of their twenty-year marriage to the kind of mutual tolerance that communicates itself best in silence; and when silence failed, there were always domestic trivialities to crowd the minutes. The plumbing in the house near the Bois de Boulogne, the servant problem at the country estate in Provence, the drunken behaviour of a certain stable-hand at the stud farm in the Loire Valley.

“Will I pick you up at the airport?” she asked.

“Send a car.”

The conversation terminated. He was weary suddenly, and stretched his legs. He yawned. Once again, from the upper part of the house, he heard the creak of a floorboard.

He rose, walked into the hallway, looked up the flight of stairs.

“Melody?” he said.

It was a silly name, he thought. The only thing remotely musical about Melody was her love of the noise made by cash-registers ringing, the song of money, Chapotin’s money. But, dear God, the little English débutante was beautiful in a way Chapotin, normally a sensible man of moderate inclinations, found irresistible.

She appeared on the landing, a vague, skinny girl whose large blue eyes, alas empty, dominated her features. She wore an ostrich boa – selected, no doubt, from one of the “junk” shops in the neighbourhood and charged to Chapotin’s account – and a 1920s flapper dress with shimmering fringes. She had on very bright pink shoes. Her taste in clothing and interior design was, charitably, eclectic. Her moussed hair was pressed down on her skull and artfully arranged around her ears.

“Ahoy,” she said.

Chapotin was always in two minds about his mistress. The accountant in him wanted to dump her; but the libertine couldn’t bear to part with this vacuous, sexy girl. She came down the stairs slowly, trailing the boa behind her.

“Kiss kiss.” She stood on the bottom step.

Chapotin kissed her. She tasted of baby soap and vermouth and was completely desirable.

“Take me places, Chappie. You never take me anywhere. Fly me to new continents.”

“Where would you like to go?” he asked. He could hardly wait to undress her and have her; the lust he experienced was impossible.

“Paree,” she said. “Naturellement.”

“I have a little problem with that one, chérie.”

“Melly’s stuck in boooooring old London while Chappie jets all over creation,” she said.

“Soon we’ll go to Hawaii.”

“Luaus chill me. Grass skirts demoralise me. I’m not thrilled.”

“Then where would you like to go?”

Melody shrugged and trailed the boa inside the sitting-room. Chapotin went after her. Why did he put up with this child? What kink did he have in his character? It came down to something really quite simple. His regular life was so demandingly sombre and filled with stress that he’d forgotten how to play and have sheer fun – until Melody, like a creature from some far planet, had crashlanded on his staid, tightly buttoned little world.

She sat down on the sofa. Her white stockings had a lacy design. She wore very black eye make-up. Chapotin sat beside her. He laid one hand on her wrist.

“I’ll take you on a world cruise.” When would he ever find the time?

“Ocean waves! I would vomit constantly.”

Chapotin wondered how his fellow Society members would react to this girl if they ever met her – which, of course, could never be allowed to happen: the Society did not permit private lives to touch its affairs. Enrico Caporelli, who had a roving eye, might be charmed by the girl’s odd sexuality, but the others – especially those prudish Americans and the slightly sinister Magiwara – might sniff with disdain.

Chapotin understood that his devotion to this child would be considered by some a weakness, but he had a romantic’s incurable heart and a lust that gripped him like a hot fist.

He put his hand on her knee.

“We’ll come to some accommodation,” he said.

Melody blinked her long false lashes. “We shall see what we shall see, Chappie. In the meantime, I may order new curtains and new rugs to match.”

Chapotin had the gruesome feeling that his mistress would one day come to resemble his wife, that his whole life would be one long barrage of domesticity. Curtains! Plumbing! Carpets! What he needed was the escape route of Melody’s sweet young flesh. He lunged towards her but she was as slippery as the material of her dress, and she glided out from under his hands.

“Ah-hah,” he said.

“Ah-hah yourself, Jaypee. No foreign junket, no fuckee.”

Chapotin lunged again. Melody nimbly stepped aside. He was amused. He liked the hunt.

“You can’t catch me,” she said, and laughed.

Jean-Paul Chapotin struck out his hand and grabbed the dress, which ripped as soon as she whirled away from him, revealing the extraordinary sight of Melody Logue’s pale and lovely inner thigh. A tattooed robin, red-breasted, wings spread, nestled close to her vulva. It was so lifelike it had quite startled Chapotin the first time he’d seen it.

“Leave her royal bloody highness and live with me,” she said.

“Leave my wife?”

Yes, he thought. Yes, yes, yes. To get at that bird he’d do anything, anything at all. Chapotin stretched out one trembling hand but Melody slipped away again.

“Say the word and win the bird!”

Chapotin laughed. This romping eighteen-year-old nincompoop who blessed his life – how could he leave Gabrielle for this? On the other hand, how could he not?

He heard the sound of glass breaking, muffled by the thickness of the curtains. Without thinking, Chapotin caught the girl and dragged her to the floor with him. He barely registered the two orbs that rolled across the carpet. He knew what they were, but recognition didn’t prompt an instant response. It was a joke, an execrable joke, it wasn’t real. The girl clutched him and said Oooo just as the grenades exploded.

Chapotin had time only to reflect how strangely quiet the whole thing was, like a noise inside a vacuum. Shrapnel pierced the girl’s neck. Her skin-tissue flew through the air into Chapotin’s eyes, blinding him. He tried to raise his hands to his face. Severed at the wrists by the hot blast of metal, they were gone.