16

Miami

On its descent into Miami the plane was buffeted like paper in a wind-tunnel. Pagan was the first person off. He entered the stuffy terminal, ploughed through customs and immigration, explained the gun and holster in his overnight bag to an ill-mannered officer who wanted to confiscate it, Scotland Yard or no Scotland Yard identification. A quick phone call was made to Lieutenant Philip Navarro of the Dade County Police, the name of Martin Burr was dropped, and Pagan was let through grudgingly.

He found a cab driven by a cheerful Haitian called Marcel Foucault, whose English was as thick as bouillabaisse. Pagan had Magdalena’s address from the forms she’d had to complete for British immigration. It was a house in Key Biscayne. Foucault, who howled appreciatively from his window at passing women, and shook with irrepressible mirth when they responded, claimed to know Miami like a native.

Pagan had never been in this city before. Downtown was bright – office blocks blazed and hotels rose like lit glass slabs. Palm trees, tropical shrubs alongside the road, these surprised him with their alien lushness. He rolled down his window, smelled the salt air. Small man-made islands, loaded with mansions, sat in the dark of Biscayne Bay: Palm Island, San Marco, Hibiscus.

Suddenly the taxi was out over black water, suspended impossibly in the air. A bridge, of course. Pagan shut his eyes, fought off a certain dizziness that assailed him. The turbulent flight, a glass of awful Sauternes on the plane, the ache in his chest – all elements that had unsettled him.

Marcel Foucault nodded toward a cluster of lights at the end of the bridge. “Zat’s Key Biscayne.”

The night air rushing through the window helped Pagan feel better. He thought about Magdalena. What was she going to say when he turned up on her doorstep?

He looked at the growing lights of Key Biscayne. Launches along the shoreline were tethered to private jetties that led to expensive houses. American opulence always impressed him; he thought Americans did wealth better than anybody else. They purchased more, collected more, stored more. They also produced more, ate more, drank more, and divorced more. Rich people here lived as if all America were a going-out-of-business sale.

“Yo street, ami,” Marcel Foucault said. He stopped the cab outside a large house barely visible beyond dense shrubbery. Prolific plants obscured the yellow light burning beside the front doorway; thousands of moths threw themselves at the bulb, frenzied participants in mass suicide.

Pagan, a little surprised that Magdalena lived in such a well-heeled neighbourhood, stepped out. Had he expected some crummy cellar filled with anti-Fidel radicals running a leaky old printing-press? He paid the driver, then watched the cab pull away. He was apprehensive now. Given that Magdalena knew anything, was she likely to tell him? What had seemed a good idea in London now felt insubstantial to him. He wondered if painkillers had fuelled this whole transatlantic crossing, if the idea had been inspired by the actions of the chemicals absorbed in his system – a junkie’s trip.

Picking up his overnight bag, Pagan moved along the pathway to the front door. He rang the bell, waited, rang again. He was aware of the malicious little eye of the peephole: somebody was watching him from inside. He heard a chain drawn back, a bolt sliding, then the door was opened.

“Frank.”

She appeared in shadow, motionless only a second before she stepped forward and, to Pagan’s surprise, threw her arms around him. The embrace, unexpectedly fierce, threw him off balance. He supported himself against the door jamb even as Magdalena held on to him tightly. It was a welcome he could never have anticipated. In a black suede mini-skirt and white silk blouse, she was barefoot and delectable. She whispered his name very quietly almost as if she were afraid of breaking some spell.

She led him inside, across a large tiled hall to a sitting-room. She switched on a soft light. The room was starkly furnished – a sofa, a chair, a table, the lamp. One of everything, he thought. She clearly didn’t use this room much. It had the waxen quality of a window-display.

Still holding his hand, she led him to the sofa, then sat alongside him, curling her feet up under her body. He noticed some slight puffiness beneath her eyes, as if she might have been crying before.

She took a cigarette pack from a pocket at the side of her skirt and lit one with a black Bic. He couldn’t remember seeing her smoke before and she did it in an unpractised way, like a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Something was wrong here, he thought, a sadness, a change. Her smile was a terrific effort, but it was more teeth than pleasure.

“You don’t seem overwhelmingly surprised to find me on your doorstep,” he said.

“The weird thing is, I just happened to be thinking about you. Lo and behold, here you are. Is it an omen?”

There was a strangeness in her manner. She was present yet absent, here yet elsewhere. “What exactly were you thinking about me?” he asked.

“How nice it would be to see you. How nice it would be to see a friendly face. I need one.”

“Why so gloomy?” He laid a hand gently on her shoulder.

“I’ve had better days.”

She blew smoke up at the ceiling. She had a wonderful throat; lined a little now – what didn’t time touch? – it was still marvellous and feminine. It needed no adornment to make it enticing.

“You didn’t come all this way just to see me,” she said.

“Who else do I know in Miami?”

“You must have some business here.”

“Business and pleasure. The lines get blurred where you’re involved.”

The telephone rang. Magdalena excused herself, rose from the sofa, and crossed the room. She turned her back to him as she picked up the receiver; when she spoke she used Spanish. The conversation was brief. She hung up, glanced at her watch, then walked back to the sofa. She didn’t sit this time. Instead, she kneeled on the cushion and faced him. She lit another cigarette. Her short skirt slid up her thigh. Her black eyes were blacker than ever before. You could see all manner of sorrows in them.

“You were saying something about business,” she said. There was a new note in her voice, perhaps a little impatience. Maybe the phone call had reminded her of an appointment.

He suddenly felt scattered, weary. “I need coffee. Do you mind?”

“I made some before. It’s probably still hot.” She went out into the kitchen, and returned with a cup. Pagan took it, sipped slowly.

“Now,” she said, and she touched the back of his hand. “Speak to me.”

Pagan set his cup down. “It’s a tough one.”

“I’m a big girl.”

“It concerns Rosabal.”

“Rosabal?” She feigned innocence, her acting amateur and halfhearted.

“Ground rules,” Pagan said. “No bullshit. I know more than you think. If we can both tell the truth from the beginning, it’s going to save time.”

She was quiet a moment. “How long have you known about him?”

“Since you were in London,” Pagan said. “He was concealed – a little ignominiously, in my opinion – inside the bathroom in your hotel room.”

Magdalena smiled. “I thought that was amusing. But he likes anonymity. He didn’t want anyone to see him.”

“A few people did. Including British intelligence. He was followed. Not always carefully. But he was followed.”

Magdalena crushed out her cigarette in a small glass ashtray. “Okay. You know about Rafael and me. It still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

Pagan told her. He did so briefly, without incidental detail. He left out the deaths of Caporelli and his associates, sketching a mosaic in which certain pieces were omitted. Halfway through the narrative Magdalena walked to the unlit fireplace and stood, legs slightly apart, hands on hips, a defensive attitude.

She waited until Pagan was finished before she said, “One thing I always liked about you, Frank. You have more imagination than a cop should. But this time I think you’ve gone overboard, baby.” She smoked again. The small black lighter flashed; Magdalena’s cheeks hollowed as she drew smoke into her lungs.

“Overboard how?” he asked.

“Rafael and Ruhr. That’s a hell of a connection. What could Rafe have in common with that maniac? And I don’t see where a stolen missile fits Rafe’s life, Frank.” She sat down on the couch.

Rafe – the lover’s abbreviation, the intimacy. The magic word that opened doors on to private worlds. Pagan stood up. His circulation was sluggish. He walked round the room. On the mantel were photographs of a man and a woman, presumably Magdalena’s parents. Pagan glanced at them. Magdalena more closely resembled her father.

“When you were in London, you mentioned a coup of some kind in Cuba,” Pagan said. “Is Rosabal involved?”

“You misheard me, Frank.”

“Let me rephrase it. You hinted at a coup.”

“I don’t think so, Frank. You misunderstood.”

Pagan stepped toward her, looked down at where she sat on the couch. “We agreed. No games. No bullshit.”

“You agreed. You play by your own rules. I don’t remember saying I’d comply.”

“Don’t fuck around with me, Magdalena. I don’t have time for crap.”

“Keep talking rough. I like it.”

Pagan had to smile. His history with this woman, the passion locked in the past – how could he be anything other than transparent to her? How could he act demanding, and tough, and hope she’d be swayed?

She stood up, gazed into his face, then put her arms round him. Her body was limp. This was another little unexpected act. She was full of surprises tonight. What he detected in her was an unhappiness for which she hadn’t found the appropriate expression, and so she held him this way, clutched him for consolation, security, light in some dark place.

He said, “Look, there’s a hostage involved. A child who’s only fourteen years old. There’s a terrorist responsible for more deaths than I want to think about. He may hurt the kid. He may kill her, if he hasn’t already. Too many people have died, Magdalena. I want the kid back. I want to know what plans there are for the missile. And I want Gunther Ruhr. I’m betting Rafael knows where to find him. You might call it a long shot, but it’s better than nothing. I need to know what you know. I need anything you can give me.”

Magdalena Torrente was very quiet. She disengaged herself from Pagan and walked away. She stopped at the curtained window on the other side of the room, beyond the reach of the lamp. Her features were indistinct. Ash, untended, dropped from her cigarette to the rug. He may hurt the kid; she couldn’t stand that idea. She couldn’t take the notion of any more hurt.

Pagan went to her and touched the back of her hand. She didn’t look at him. She spoke in a voice filled with little catches, as though she were having trouble getting air to her lungs. Flatly, without tone, she said, “Okay, you’ve come a long way, you deserve to know something. I don’t know a damn thing about Ruhr or any missile. All I can tell you is how things were supposed to be. Army officers and their troops opposed to Castro were to seize various strategic barracks. This act was intended to galvanise the democratic underground – we’re talking about thousands of people, strikes, demonstrations, the occupation of public buildings, public disobedience, armed insurrection. Everything was supposedly well-orchestrated. Rafael was the leader, the organiser. The plan called for him to head the new government after Castro was deposed. The new democratic government, I should say. People, myself included, intended to return from exile to participate in this … this brave new Cuba. It was neat, simple, and it might have been relatively bloodless. But it changed.”

“How?”

“The information I have indicates that Rosabal betrayed the cause.” It was in her voice, her face, the burden of terrible disappointment. But more than that, Pagan thought, there was another emotion, and for want of a better word he called it grief. Magdalena wasn’t grieving only for a lost cause. She’d been cut where it pained her, in her heart.

Pagan had to press on, he had to get beyond her sorrow. He hadn’t come all the way to Miami to learn about the failure of a counter-revolution. He wasn’t interested. He didn’t give a shit about Cuba. The world stage didn’t enthrall him. His own world was small, and its boundaries well-marked, a specialised place in which wrongs were righted whenever that was possible and justice was more than a dry textbook notion.

He said, “Did Rosabal ever mention Ruhr to you?”

She shook her head. “Ruhr! You’re obsessed, Frank. I still don’t see how Ruhr comes into it. I’ve heard of people barking up wrong trees before now, but you get the blue ribbon.”

Pagan ignored this. “What other people did our pal Rafe meet in Britain?”

“I don’t have a clue, Frank.”

“Think hard.”

“I am thinking.”

Now there was an impatient edge in her voice; she was tired of questions. She’d been asking them of herself all day long, ever since the meeting with Garrido and Duran. Question after question; they distilled themselves into one simple inquiry – Why had Rafael betrayed her?

She clenched her hands and strolled the room, confined by walls and ceilings. She’d gone over her relationship with Rosabal for hours, tracing it from the first meeting – Acapulco, instant attraction, common political convictions, sex marked as much by passion as by tenderness, the kind that grew, at least as far as she was concerned, into love – to the last encounter in London. I love him, she thought. And she wanted to believe, despite her weakening conviction, that he loved her, that he had justifiable reasons for his apparent treachery, that the democratic revolution was still a possibility. But the obstacles were so damned hard to overcome.

That day she’d walked the streets of Little Havana with dear old Garrido, arm-in-arm under the purple noon sun. Solicitous Garrido, old family friend. Kindly Garrido, his spindly hand wrapped around hers. He talked of love in an airy way, as if it were a book he’d read seventy years ago and all he recalled were pages of parchment now crumbled. He spoke of the manner in which love was often victimised, brutalised, how there were demarcation lines of the emotions across which warring lovers skirmished, leaving the losers battered.

This was not language to which Magdalena Torrente was accustomed. She was no loser. No victim. And she had no intention of becoming one so long as there was a chance still that Rafael loved her; and in that inviolate part of her free of shadows and doubts, her knowledge was certain: Rafael loved her.

The great trick was to keep reality from intruding.

In a situation like this, where trust has been so badly violated, there are not many choices; something has to be done, Garrido had said when they were drinking coffee in the Versailles restaurant. He had shrugged then, an eloquent gesture of disappointment and hatred, and yet there was nothing of surprise in it, as if he’d plumbed the human condition so deeply there were no astonishments left to him. He had been cheated, and his dreams abruptly ended.

Pagan held both her hands and said, “I wish I didn’t have to ask you all these bloody questions.”

“I don’t have answers, Frank.”

He was silent for a time. “How exactly did Rosabal betray you?”

“Begin with the matter of his wife.”

“Wives tend to be problematic. Maybe he intends to leave her. Who knows?”

“I’m told he only just married her, but I love you for your optimism, Frank.” Magdalena looked down at how her hands were firmly held by Pagan’s, and she enjoyed the sense of security in the touch. She raised her face, tiptoed, kissed the side of his mouth.

She said, “I’m just a casualty of the heart. Other people were shafted in their pocketbooks. He’s pretty generous when it comes to spreading treachery around. Over a period of three or four years, thousands of exiled Cubans in Miami and New Jersey contributed millions of dollars to the overthrow of Castro. Most of it ended up – guess where?”

“In Rafael’s pocket?”

“That’s what they tell me, Frank.”

“Here’s what I don’t get. If he’s a common embezzler, he’d take the money and that would be it. End of. But what the hell is he doing involved with Gunther Ruhr? And this whole missile affair – what is his part in that?”

She shrugged. “You’ve come three thousand miles for nada except to see a poor confused woman whose brain is scrambled eggs. I don’t have answers for you.”

Pagan stepped away from her, finished his coffee, set down the cup. He had a hollow moment of sheer fatigue. He went to the kitchen and poured another coffee, then returned. Magdalena stood in the centre of the floor, hugging herself as if she were cold. She seemed smaller now, diminished in a way, as if Rafe, Captain Charm, had stolen more than her love.

He sipped coffee. There was a key here, he was sure of it, a key that would unlock all the doors that puzzled him, that would allow him access to the room that contained Ruhr and Stephanie Brough. And that key was Rafael, pirate of people’s money, swindler of feelings.

Rafael had played along with this democratic underground in Cuba and the great outswelling of patriotic sentiment in the exile communities for his own ends, obviously.

But what were those ends?

Frank, what did all ambitious men seek, for God’s sake?

Control. Beyond money, that’s what they lusted after, dreamed of, salivated over, schemed and cheated for, maimed and killed for. That’s what obsessed them and drove some of them to an odd vindictive madness. They became possessed by the very thing they’d tried to own: solitary control, the chance to shape their little corner of the world to their own liking.

Was that it? Did Rafael want Cuba in such a way that he didn’t have to share it with any squabble of exiles who believed in something as primitive and muddle-headed as, heaven forbid, democracy? His own private sandcastle, his own fantasy, a place where he could rule the tides. Did it come down to that in the end?

Only Rafe would know.

Where did the missile fit? Where did Caporelli and Chapotin and Kluger come into this picture? Why were these men dying?

Missiles weren’t for firing in this day and age. They were playing-cards, toys owned by the richest kids on the block, useful when you needed to flex a little muscle, make a demand, or simply just threaten.

Pagan shut his eyes. Had Caporelli and friends wanted their bit of Cuba too?

In the late 1950s Caporelli already had a taste for the place; so, presumably, had Jean-Paul Chapotin. Maybe they liked the island the way it used to be – after all, hadn’t it made Caporelli wealthy? It probably hadn’t exactly hurt Jean-Paul either. But they couldn’t turn clocks back as long as Fidel ran the country.

Solution: get rid of Fidel. How?

A missile on the island would have the effect of –

Of what?

Of making a whole lot of people in this hemisphere rather unhappy.

So what?

Shit, it was slipping away from him.

Fatigued, he sat down on the sofa.

Magdalena sat beside him. “You look exhausted. Why don’t you rest for a while? Stretch out here.”

Pagan had the feeling again that he was missing something simple. But Rafe had the answer. Only Rafe.

“I don’t have time to rest,” he said. He stood up. Bones creaked: the small embarrassment of age.

She looked at her wristwatch. “I have to go out, Frank.”

“A late date?”

“Something like that. You can stay here if you like.” She walked across the room to the stairs leading to the upper part of the house. After a few minutes she came back down, dressed now in a tan leather jacket and blue jeans and looking in her paleness rather fragile.

“Where are you going?” he asked. She didn’t exactly look dressed for any commonplace date.

“Out.” She had an ambivalent little smile. He noticed a slightly crooked molar, a tiny flaw he’d quite forgotten, and he remembered how he’d once been enchanted by this trifling imperfection because it humanised her beauty. Smile for me, come on: had he really said such things back then and loved her so insanely that the sight of a crooked tooth drove him out of his skull?

“And I twiddle my thumbs? Wait for you to come back? I don’t have time for that.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. And I can’t help you. I can’t tell you any more than I already have, and even that was more than I wanted.”

He was irritated by her furtive manner, her secrecy, the way she was dismissing him.

She made to move past him. He placed himself in her way.

“Why the great hurry?”

“I’m sick of questions, Frank. I’m sick of the ones you’ve been asking and I’m sick of the ones I’ve been asking myself.”

He moved to one side and she crossed the hall to unlock the door to the garage. Pagan followed her. There was a grey BMW in the garage.

“I’m leaving alone, Frank. I don’t want company.”

“And I don’t want to be stranded here.”

“Call a cab.”

“I’ll ride with you. Take me back to Miami. Drop me off at a hotel. I won’t get in your way.”

She sighed. “You’re a determined bastard.”

She got in on the driver’s side; Pagan slid into the passenger seat. The garage doors opened by remote control. They slid up, revealing the dark garden in front. She steered forward, the door closed behind her. Then she was out on the street, driving with a carelessness that didn’t thrill Pagan, who hated being the passenger anyway.

The BMW approached an intersection, darkened houses, dim lamplights. Magdalena slowed just a little when a large Buick entered the intersection out of nowhere and wheeled straight toward the German car; surprised, Magdalena shoved her foot on the accelerator and the BMW thrust forward, avoiding the larger car by a couple of feet. Pagan turned his head, saw the Buick brake, swing in an arc, clamber up on the sidewalk in a series of small sparks, then come back again – directly at Magdalena’s car. She evaded the Buick a second time, but only just.

“Jesus Christ!” Magdalena said. “What the hell’s going on?”

Pagan didn’t answer. He looked back at the big, powerful Buick as it passed beneath a streetlight. Two figures occupied the sleek vehicle – a gunman and a driver. The gunman leaned from the passenger window. The weapon he held was a Magnum. A single shot cracked the air; it struck the rear bumper of the BMW, ricocheted.

The Buick roared, veering from side to side in an attempt to draw level with the BMW, striking kerbs, scraping the sides of parked cars, propelled by one murderous purpose. The gunman was still hanging from the window, but the Buick was shuddering in such a way that accuracy was out of the question. When he fired a second time he hit the trunk of the BMW, a dramatic noise like that of a drum struck hard.

Now Magdalena was approaching the Rickenbacker Causeway which linked Key Biscayne with Miami, a long stretch over black water. The Buick persisted, tracking the BMW at a distance of some fifteen or twenty feet. It had all the reality of a dream, Pagan thought – this absurd chase, the gunman and the salt wind that rolled through the open windows of the BMW. Indisputably real was the next gunshot, the bullet that smashed this time through the rear window and whined inside the BMW and passed between Magdalena and Pagan and departed by way of the windshield. As close as you want to come to death, he thought.

There was other traffic on the bridge but sparse at this time of day. A few cars came to a halt as the BMW and the Buick screeched past. Halfway across the Causeway the Buick found reserves of speed and moved up alongside the BMW and the gunman fired directly through the passenger window. Pagan heard it, felt it, understood that this particular bullet might have had his name and number on it; but it ripped the air around his neck and sliced harmlessly past Magdalena, who gasped at the proximity of death.

It was time to shoot back. He’d been delaying in the hope that Magdalena would outrun the other car and thus make it unnecessary for him to fire his gun – he hated the combustible mixture of stray bullets and innocent onlookers in their parked cars – but the Buick clearly had muscle and wasn’t going to be outmanoeuvred.

The faces of the men in the American car were plainly visible to Pagan under the Causeway lamps. The gunman was square-jawed and blond; he might have been a man peddling door-to-door some religion or sectarian magazine – Mormonism or The Watchtower. The driver was a contrast, dark hair, a brutal little mouth.

Pagan shoved his gun through the window and fired. He missed first time. His second shot must have struck the driver because the dark-haired man raised his hands from the steering-wheel as if it had become suddenly too hot to touch and the Buick, without guidance, skidded out of control. There was one heart-chilling moment in which the laws of physics appeared to have been contravened when the Buick went sliding toward the edge of the bridge and rose a couple of inches before rushing through the barrier and soaring out, like some doomed flying-machine from Detroit, into the air above Biscayrie Bay. With its horn sounding in panic, it twisted as it fell, as if trying to right itself in mid-air. It struck the spooky black waters, tossed up a vast white garland of foam, and then sunk bonnet-first into the wet darkness. Its tail-lights, lit still, went under like the red eyes of a creature resigned to drowning.

Pagan sat back and caught his breath. He shut his eyes.

At the end of the Causeway, Magdalena turned the car into a quiet street behind Brickell Avenue, a place of darkened office buildings. She laid her face upon the rim of the steering-wheel. Her knuckles were the colour of ivory. She was drained.

“Were they after you or me?” she asked, a breathless quality in her voice.

“I don’t know,” Pagan replied.

Magdalena slumped back in her seat, turned her face toward him. “If they were after you, how did they know you were here? Did you tell anyone you were coming to Miami?”

“Only the Commissioner.”

“And you trust him?”

“Beyond a doubt.” A leak, Pagan thought, even as he answered Magdalena’s question. A leak had led to the horror of Shepherd’s Bush. Perhaps the same mysterious source was behind the gunman, somebody no scrambled telephones could ever frustrate, somebody privileged, somebody with an inside track.

“If nobody knows you’re here, it follows that I was the target,” she said.

“Maybe. But who sent the hit man?”

“Christ, I don’t even want to speculate,” she said. And she didn’t. Magdalena was afraid, but she didn’t like to show fear. She could collect herself only if she shut out of her mind the unpleasantness on the bridge. Her brain was running on empty. She’d done nothing but think and brood ever since she’d gone that morning to Garrido’s restaurant.

Who could have wanted her dead anyway? The only candidate that came to mind was the last one she wanted to consider: Rafael. If he was really through with her, maybe his next step was to get her out of the way permanently. Maybe he thought her a potential embarrassment to him, a risk. She pushed these ideas aside. She had to believe that the intended target was Pagan, not her, to believe without question that Rafael had nothing to do with it.

For his part Pagan was weary of puzzles; he yearned for solutions. Puzzles became jungles and he needed a pathway, a machete.

“You can get out here,” she said. “You’ll find a hotel within a couple of blocks.”

“Maybe we should stick together. The waterlogged pair in that Buick might have friends in the vicinity.”

She reached across him, opened the passenger door. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just sorry you came all this way, Frank.” She kissed him quickly on the side of his face. “Good luck.”

Pagan stepped out with great reluctance. No sooner had he moved than she pulled the door shut behind him and slipped the car into gear. He gazed at her face behind glass, thinking how forlorn she looked; she stared at him, smiling in an ungenerous way, a distracted little expression. He was irritated for having given in to her without an argument. He should have insisted, stayed with her no matter where she was headed.

But how could he? There was an urgency in him still, a drive to explore his only other connection, even though he thought he might be too late. What had Magdalena told him anyway? Nothing he could use. Nothing that would bring him closer to what he sought.

He watched her grey car pass under dull streetlamps until it turned a corner and disappeared.

The street was now vaguely menacing like all empty streets that lie behind major thoroughfares. Pagan walked in the direction of Brickell Avenue, where it was brighter and busier and the shadows less complex. He found a hotel. As soon as he entered the vast lobby, where enormous palms and ferns reached up to a tall ceiling, he walked to the bank of public telephones beyond the registration desk.

As he flipped through the pages of the phone directory, he realised he’d left his overnight bag at Magdalena’s house. What the hell. He still had his gun, wallet, passport, painkillers; the rest was just luggage.

Havana

Rafael Rosabal left his pleasantly spacious apartment in the Vedado at one a.m. His wife Estela, her long black hair undone and spread upon her lace pillow, woke when she heard him move quietly across the bedroom. She whispered to him, but he didn’t hear, or if he did he was in too much of a hurry to pay attention. They’d made love some hours before, Rosabal curiously mechanical, distracted, Estela unpractised and still shy with her own and her husband’s body. Sex was a disappointment to her; Rafael, who had known many women, loved her as though his mind and body were elsewhere.

Now he was leaving and still she hadn’t mentioned the miracle of her pregnancy.

She listened to the sound of a car arrive outside, then the front door of the apartment closed softly. Sometimes Estela suspected a mistress, someone to whom Rafael hurried, someone in whose heated embrace he found the passion he so clearly hadn’t discovered in his marriage. The thought terrified her, all the more so because she could never imagine this woman’s face. Once, waiting in this apartment for Rafael to come home, she’d envisaged a face without features, smooth and eyeless and terrible.

At other times Estela believed her only true rival was Rafael’s ambition, a far more dangerous enemy than any woman would have been. He restlessly spurred himself on, pursuing furtive goals; there was that strange, secretive business involving her father, the General, and his intermediary Diaz-Alonso – who came to the apartment late at night to whisper with Rafael – but Estela, though she eavesdropped, pretended to have no interest in politics and all the intrigues and gossip it entailed.

However, absolutely nothing that happened in this apartment escaped her. Everything she heard she stored away at the back of her mind. She was never noticed eavesdropping because she was never really noticed at all – she poured wine, made coffee; a walk-on role, a serving-girl, the Minister’s young and rather vapid wife. But she was smarter than anyone knew. She listened as thoroughly as any bug planted inside a telephone receiver or under the lip of a table or smuggled at the core of a rose, and she memorised what she heard. In a life that was mainly empty, rescued from total vacuity by visits to beauty parlours and hairdressers and those infrequent times when Rafael deigned to screw her, listening and storing up items of information were her principal pastimes.

Whatever was going on, the quiet phone calls, the late-night conferences, the mysterious comings and goings, the talk of ships and military movements, and the mention of this man Ruhr, whose name was whispered as though it were too evil to pronounce aloud, made her uneasy. She worried about her husband; she worried too about her father, whose most recent utterances in her company were venomously anti-Castro.

She despised Castro as much as anyone, but she understood the dangers involved in plotting against the fidelistas. People vanished abruptly in the middle of the night and were never heard of again; friends and acquaintances, even those who had once been close to Fidel himself – nobody was immune. She wanted nothing to happen to either Rafael or the General. Nobody had succeeded in overthrowing El Viejo, and Estela doubted that anyone ever could.

She had been a young woman of privilege in a country that had officially abandoned elitism; unofficially, by rewarding those in favoured positions of power, the system had created a new set of iniquities, and Estela had benefited – a school in Switzerland, a year in France, a summer in Spain. She’d been exposed to freedoms in other countries, and ways unthinkable in Cuba, which she saw now as something of a silly little backwater, crude and unfashionable, a slab of miserably humid land in the Caribbean run by ruffians and gangsters and fought over as if it were El Dorado by men who put vanity before peace, martyrdom before liberty.

But nothing in her experience had prepared her for this undertow of doom that racked her as she walked to the window and looked down. Absently she stroked her stomach, flat now but soon to be big like a flower newly opened; and yet even the notion of this beautiful baby did not diminish the sense of dark fate she felt. Moonlight lay across the surface of the swimming-pool. The lights of her husband’s car faded between palm trees, and then were gone out of sight. She crossed herself because she wanted divine protection for her husband.

Had Rafael seen her, he might have mocked her idiot superstition.

The car, driven by Rosabal’s chauffeur, went as far as Havana harbour, where Rosabal got out. He carefully descended a flight of old stone steps, slippery, studded with barnacles. He paused where the water lapped this ancient stonework. The boat that awaited him was a black, high-speed cigarette-boat, the kind favoured by gun-runners and dope smugglers. It was occupied by two men in shirtsleeves; Rosabal recognised them as attachés to Capablanca. They seemed undignified out of uniform.

He stepped into the boat. The motor started. The craft speeded across the harbour. Rosabal looked up at the sky; the moon was behind clouds. A brisk wind cuffed the surface of the sea. He turned to gaze back at Havana, which was mainly dark. Now and again measures were taken to save electricity. Lifts failed, streetlights went out, homes were deprived of power. This, Rosabal thought, was Communism in the late twentieth century, a compendium of broken promises and lies, a putrefaction held together by the weakening glue that was fidelisma.

No more. Before this day was out it would be boxed for burial, with nobody to weep for it.

President Rafael Rosabal. He liked the sound of it. Rosabal’s regime would be neither democratic nor, like that of Castro, puritanical and prohibitive. It would be a benign dictatorship, at least in the beginning; somewhere along the way, years from now, there might be a measure of popular participation. But first the people had to be weaned from the mindlessness in which Castro had raised them, they had to be freed from the shop-worn cant of Marxism. The citizens were like little kids who’d never chewed on anything but the mush provided to them by Fidel. They had to be led to the table and shown how to use a knife and fork and eat real food.

Those disgusting agencies of grass-roots espionage, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, would be abolished and their leaders jailed. The ministries, bureaucracies gone mad with that special insanity of paperwork, would be stripped to nothing and the ministers demoted or incarcerated. He would be cautious at first about the use of firing-squads: why alienate the West as Fidel had done thirty years ago? The nightclubs would open again and there would be gambling and if a man wanted a prostitute in Havana, that was his own business; the government would take its cut. Sin would be highly taxed.

American and European investors would be courted avidly, Soviet advisors ejected. Nor would Rosabal be blackmailed by the demands of the United States for representative democracy and human rights legislation; in any event, the Americans would be so gratified, at least for years to come, by the end of Cuban Communism, that political and social “irregularities” would be overlooked.

Rosabal thought of Cuba as a big dark arena; and he had his hand on the generator that would set it brilliantly alight. His hand, nobody else’s. And because he controlled the generator, he had access not only to light but wealth, great wealth, obscene wealth, the kind of riches that a boy from Guantanamo Province should not even dream about. He’d milk Cuba; he’d plunder it as it had never been plundered before. And he’d do it with a benefactor’s smile on his face for an exultant populace that considered him a hero, the one who had rid Cuba of Castro.

Havana dwindled, the shoreline receded. Twelve miles out a yacht appeared, a dark-hulled fifty-footer, equipped with communications hardware and a mass of antennae. A light blinked three times. Rosabal knew the signal. He was to board the yacht, La Danzarina del Mar.

The cigarette-boat moved alongside La Danzarina. Rosabal reached for the rope ladder that hung from the side of the yacht and climbed nimbly up to the deck.

“Rafael, my friend.”

The man who stepped toward Rosabal had a pleasant smile, although not one that Rosabal readily trusted. Despite the fact it was night, he wore tinted glasses. He was dressed in a double-breasted blazer and smart grey flannels and expensive sneakers which looked as if they’d never been worn before. They squeaked on the teak deck.

Hands were clasped, warmly shaken. Both men walked along the deck; in the shadows white-shirted crew members kept careful watch, as if they expected a murderous assault from the ocean. Rosabal leaned against the handrail. Havana was almost imperceptible now. There were brief flickers of lightning from the Gulf of Mexico, far to the west.

“It doesn’t look like much from here, does it, Rafael?”

Rosabal agreed.

“Just the same, a whole lot of people have gone to a whole lot of trouble over that island, Rafael. A speck on the globe, nothing more. And it gets all kinds of people in a lather.”

“A hundred thousand square kilometres of real estate,” Rosabal said.

“Which makes people very greedy.”

“As you say.”

The man took off his tinted glasses. “Are you going to give me what I want, Rafael?”

“Of course. You have my word.”

“No Communist experiments. No flirting with the Soviet bloc. You want loans, you want agricultural machinery, you want certain types of weapons, you want technical advisors, you come to Washington. I don’t expect you to smell like a rose, Rafael. You’re going to be a very rich man, and very rich men never smell quite right somehow. But I expect you to play fair with me and my government. We’re prepared to overlook some things – after all, you’ve got a long teething period to go through. Just don’t overdo it. No excesses, no blatant transgressions, and we’ll all be happy.” The man was silent, gazing toward Cuba with a proprietorial air. “Let’s face it, the Caribbean is America’s swimming-pool, Rafael. Nobody wants litter in their pool, do they? Nobody wants to swim in dirty water.”

“We have a firm agreement. I will not go back on anything.” Rosabal looked closely at the other man. He noticed for the first time a flesh-coloured strip of Bandaid at the side of the man’s forehead.

“Been in the wars, Allen?”

Allen Falk patted the back of Rosabal’s hand. “Your people got their timing wrong.”

“I heard about it. What can I say? They’re zealous men.”

“They blew up the limo before they were supposed to. I happened to be a spectator. It’s nothing.”

Rafael Rosabal smiled. “We made amends, of course. Harry Hurt was shot some hours ago in Washington.”

Falk slid his hands into the pockets of his blazer. He looked like an amateur yachtsman readying himself for a photograph. “Poor Harry and that goddam society of his. Greedy men. Men like that always want more. They don’t know when to stop.”

“They were very useful. They served a purpose.”

Both men were silent. The wind blew again, flapping Falk’s pants against his legs, tossing Rosabal’s collar up against his cheek, shaking the antennae on board.

Rosabal enjoyed how he’d played the Society for all it was worth, how he’d borrowed men from General Capablanca’s Secret Service, his private corps of élite killers; shadowy, lethal men who had all the feelings of machines, how they’d murdered the members of the Society – each of whom thought his membership such a big secret – one by one. Now the Society was dying, and with it all its hopes of controlling Cuba. Hurt and Caporelli and the others had been used, deceived in the most brutal way; they’d financed an army, stolen a missile, purchased a counter-revolution – and for what?

So that Rafael Rosabal could become the new President of a new Cuba.

Falk said, “There was one tiny fruit-fly in our nice shiny apple, Rafael. A British cop called Pagan.” Falk looked at his watch, a slender disk on his wrist. “He wanted to talk to you about Gunther Ruhr, as I understand. Keen sort of guy. Anxious to get Ruhr.”

“Pagan,” Rosabal said, thinking of London, of Magdalena, the hotel room. He remembered Frank Pagan. “I notice you use the past tense.”

Al Falk, city dweller, accustomed only to the copper-tinted broth of pollution, took an exaggerated lungful of sea air. “One of Harry Hurt’s last acts was to arrange for Pagan’s demise. He knew all these Soldier of Fortune nuts who kill for five hundred bucks. Frank Pagan is probably dead by this time.”

Rosabal frowned. Why did he feel a small cloud cross his mind just then? He thought of Magdalena and wondered if she had been a source of information for the English policeman – but what could Magdalena possibly tell Pagan anyhow? Nothing that could ever be proved. She could at best babble about how democracy was on its way to Cuba, and perhaps how she had ferried money for the new revolution, and the part she expected to play in Cuba’s future; that was it, that was all. Silly chatter. Balbuceo, nothing more. And Magdalena was good at it; she was just as good at babbling about her Cuban dreams as she was in bed.

He asked, “How did Pagan connect Ruhr to me?”

Falk drummed a hand on the rail and said, “It’s my understanding that you rented a house for the German. You were remembered. Bad move, Rafael. You could have found somebody else to rent the place on your behalf.”

“There wasn’t anybody else. Who could I have trusted? In any case, it had to be done quickly. There was no time to think. Every policeman in Britain was looking for Ruhr.”

Rosabal remembered the haste with which he had to find an isolated house where Ruhr could be hidden. He’d been moving too fast to think with any real clarity. When he’d rented the farmhouse, he did so under Jean-Paul Chapotin’s name, believing that if the police discovered Ruhr’s hiding-place, they would never associate Gunther with the Cuban Minister of Finance. Instead, they might dig into Chapotin’s life and find their way into the Society of Friends, which would have served its purpose by that time and become excess baggage. One of those moments, rare in Rosabal’s life, when he’d mistaken quick thinking for cleverness; the crazy old broad who’d rented the place to him had a sharper memory than he’d thought. She must have described him at least well enough for him to be identified.

But none of this mattered now.

In a few short hours, dawn would be breaking.

Falk said, “What about Freddie Kinnaird?”

Rosabal was quiet for a moment, as if he were deciding, in the manner of an emperor, Kinnaird’s fate. “Freddie has been very helpful. He always kept us informed of the Society’s plans and the members’ movements. Friends in high places are usually useful.”

“I hear a but, Rafael.”

“Your hearing’s good. It has to come to an end for Freddie. It’s over. I’ll issue the order personally.”

“He expected a generous slice of Cuba,” Falk said.

“Then his expectations are not going to be fulfilled. He knows too much. A man with his kind of knowledge can be a nuisance.”

Falk paused a moment, as if Kinnaird’s fate troubled him. Then he said, “Speaking of friends in high places, your friends in Washington send their greetings and look forward to your success.”

“I’m grateful,” Rosabal said.

He turned his face to Florida. Miami was where those troublesome idiotas gathered, those roaring political dreamers who banged their drums for freedom and talked in the cafés in Little Havana and in large houses in Key Biscayne about taking Cuba back. They were fools, and potentially bothersome to Rosabal. Men like Garrido and his large network of cronies, the bankers and politicians and restaurateurs, the TV station proprietors and Hispanic newspapermen and rich doctors, all the money men who were in the vanguard of the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Cuba – they were his future enemies. After all, he had stolen from them; and what he had taken was more than just cash.

Were they likely to leave him alone after Castro had been toppled?

Of course not. They would turn against him when they understood he had no intention of bringing their kind of democracy to Cuba. Left to themselves, they would go on raising funds and promoting their moronic ideals and stirring up endless trouble for him; they wouldn’t leave him in peace.

And Magdalena. Don’t forget Magdalena.

She would come to haunt him in time. When she discovered how she had been betrayed, she’d find a way somehow to make his life difficult. These were not guesses; these were certainties he had understood from the very beginning.

He couldn’t allow anyone to trouble him. He had come too far. Everything was within his grasp; he had only to reach a little further.

Falk said, “We have detailed satellite photographs in our possession. All we need now are photographs of the missile in situ on Cuba. I don’t want anything that looks faked. I want good clear pictures of the missile on its launcher. I don’t want anybody to be in a position to accuse us of doctoring anything, if such a situation should ever arise.”

“You’ll have wonderful pictures,” Rosabal said.

He turned his face away from Florida. Lightning came out of the west again, illuminating sea and sky with bright silver. Rosabal enjoyed the stark brightness, the light-show. A storm was gathering in that direction and the wind that sloughed round the yacht was stronger than before. He thought briefly of the signed order, purportedly from the Lider Maximo, that Capablanca had in his possession. The signature was a forgery, but what did that matter? Good forgeries went undetected as long as people were desperate to believe they were the real thing. How many forged paintings hung in museums? How many fake historical documents lay in glass display cabinets?

Falk said, “As soon as the pictures are taken, I expect to receive your message that the missile has been destroyed.”

“I see no problem with that. It’s exactly as we agreed.”

“I’m still just a little worried about your technicians, Rafael,” Falk replied.

“Why? They know how to disarm a nuclear warhead. After all, they learned something from their Soviet masters. They’re good men. They know exactly what to do. Believe me. Besides, what is the alternative? To send in some American technicians? Direct US involvement?”

Falk, his hair made unruly by wind, leaned against the rail. Open US involvement was not an option. If Rafael was convinced of his technicians’ qualifications, why should he bicker and worry? He said, “Expect the full media treatment, Rafael. The man who dismantled Castro and his missile. You’ll be a hero.”

Rosabal said, “I expect nothing for myself. Only for Cuba.”

Bullshit, Falk thought. “A certain amount of fame is inevitable, Rafael.”

“Possibly,” Rosabal said. “But Cuba comes first.”

Falk looked toward the island. His heart fluttered in his chest, as if he’d been given his first French kiss; after more than thirty years of longing, and watching, and waiting, he was going to see Castro fall. In the intensity of his desire he was blind to any other possibilities; failure was not even a consideration. Everything was going to fit together and function. He believed in cycles of history; the circle in which Castro would be crushed was almost closed.

He turned his face back to Rosabal, remembering now how they had first met during a conference of the Organisation of American States in Costa Rica five years ago. The subject of the conference had been the economics of Central American republics, and the massive debts most of them had incurred. Far from the public arena, from the podium where delegates made their angry official speeches and railed at the unjust practices of the World Bank, they discovered a common interest in the future of Cuba after Fidel. They spent many hours together in a quiet resort hotel near the coast, enjoying the excellent pina coladas, the late-night visitations of exquisite call-girls, and – above all else – a sense of conspiracy that was aphrodisiacal. Although both men were initially discreet, circumspect to the point of obscurity, their mutual confidence grew and they talked more openly as the days passed; it was vividly clear to each of them that unless Fidel were “removed” then Cuba was doomed.

It started with that simple notion: the replacement of Castro with a non-Communist, democratic regime in which bankers and investors might have faith. If the proposition were simple, the execution was not. It required all of Falk’s cunning and patience to hammer together the strategy that would bring down Castro and elevate Rosabal. It required financial partners, men like Harry Hurt and Sheridan Perry and their Society, money men whose greed could always be counted upon to overwhelm their misgivings. Hurt and the others had to be brought into the scheme in such a way that they might eventually credit themselves with the glorious idea of bringing down Castro in the first place. But the plan required more than Hurt’s merry gang – there had to be co-operation in certain Government and intelligence agencies, there had to be a force in Cuba itself that Rosabal could galvanise when the time came. So many elements, so many different instruments; but Falk, concert-master, conductor, knew how to syncopate the music and make it coherently sweet.

Falk stared back in the direction of Cuba. He was under no illusion that Rosabal’s regime would exist three or four years from now. All Cuban administrations, no matter how sound in the beginning, sooner or later deteriorated into ill-tempered factions and violence and corruption of a kind the United States could not officially tolerate. But, in the meantime, President Rosabal would be tolerable, and friendly, and the honeymoon between the US and Cuba would vibrate with fresh enthusiasms and some satisfying intercourse. A pro-American government, corrupt or otherwise, was forever preferable to Communism in any form.

Rosabal looked at his watch. “It’s time for me to leave. When we meet again, Allen, it will be in Havana.”

“I look forward to that,” Falk said.

“A new Havana,” Rosabal added, smiling his best and brightest smile, which flashed in the dark.

Miami

Magdalena Torrente parked her car behind the Casa de la Media Noche in Little Havana. The restaurant was closed for the night, although lights were still lit in the dining-room and the jukebox was playing a mambo and a fat man was dancing with a hesitant skinny woman between the tables. Magdalena stepped into the alley behind the building. Garrido, who had been expecting her, opened the door before she knocked. In his white suit he seemed to shimmer. An hallucination, she thought. Like everything else that had happened.

He held the door open for her, then closed it. They went inside the windowless box-room stacked with cans of tomatoes and sacks of rice. She suddenly longed for a view of something, anything at all. A vista. She clenched her hands and said, “I love him. I’ve worried it every way I can and I come to the same conclusion every goddam time. I love him.”

Garrido nodded his head. “I know,” he said quietly. He thought: It is your love that makes you the only choice, Magdalena. It is your love and pain. He was filled with melancholy suddenly, as if he were remembering the lost love of his own life, Magdalena Torrente’s mother Oliva; it was all so long ago, ancient history. Just the same, he was glad there was so little resemblance between the dead woman and her daughter.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I’m fine, really I’m fine.”

Garrido caressed her hair with his hand. A small electric shock flashed across his palm. “Are you sure? Absolutely sure? Do you have the energy, querida?”

For a second she gazed up into the bare lightbulb that illuminated the room. She remembered the lights of the Buick on the causeway, the way they burned in her rear-view mirror; she heard again the noise of the big car going through the barrier and over the side.

She blinked, then looked at Garrido. She said, “I’m sure.”

He went to his secret compartment in the wall behind the shelves. He removed a green pouch, which he handed to her. “Some things you may need.”

She took the pouch but didn’t open it.

Garrido kissed her on the forehead; the touch of his lips was dry and avuncular, his cigar breath and the scent of brilliantine on his hair not exactly pleasant. But she had the thought that at least there was no betrayal in the old man’s gesture.