18

Havana

Magdalena Torrente’s driver was a thin nervous man named Alberto Canto, a physician. He met her at the darkened airfield between Havana and San José de Las Lajas where her plane from Florida touched down. She hadn’t flown the small Piper herself. She had the experience to do it, but if she was having a hard time keeping herself under control, how could she expect to control an aeroplane? Besides, she knew nothing of the terrain, the destination. Both plane and pilot – a tough, leathery little man who worked in Havana as a tourist guide for Cubatur and pretended to be a happy Communist – had been provided by Garrido, who had made Magdalena’s travel arrangements with meticulous care, including the arrival of Canto in his small Lada automobile.

Garrido had pulled all the strings in Havana he still could. Old favours were called home; old friendships had new life breathed into them. Long-distance calls were made, surreptitious conversations took place, places and times were synchronised in Garrido’s own fastidious way. The process electrified the old man; the discovery of Rosabal’s treachery excited him in a manner he hadn’t felt since his heyday in Santiago. Instead of bickering with his fellow exiled democrats, and raising funds for a new revolution whose date had always been annoyingly vague, he had something concrete to deal with at last, something with a hard centre: Rosabal had betrayed everything and everybody, and there could only be one kind of justice.

Now, at the edge of the deserted, wind-blown airstrip, Magdalena stepped into the car and Alberto Canto rolled down the window as soon as he saw her produce a cigarette. She lit it anyway. Her hand trembled and she hoped Canto wouldn’t notice. She held Garrido’s green pouch in her lap, still unopened.

Canto said, “I will drop you as close to the place as I can. Sometimes there are extra police patrols in that neighbourhood. They make me uneasy. This whole undertaking upsets me.”

“So why did you agree to pick me up?”

“Because I’m on your side. Which is not to say that I have the constitution of a hero. Quite the contrary. I’m just a scared general practitioner. I don’t take risks. I don’t have the guts. I couldn’t do what you just did. I couldn’t fly illegally into a country in the dead of night. Especially a country like Cuba.”

You do what it takes, Magdalena thought. And sometimes it surprises you. She said nothing, looked from her window. Havana loomed up around her, neighbourhoods of small houses, shacks, apartments half-built, scaffolding and ladders and cement-mixers in disarray. Unkempt suburbs gave way to another Havana, the central part of the city where imposing buildings and monuments crowded the night sky. Here and there new architecture appeared among the old, the occasional dreary high-rise block overwhelming some decrepit colonial mansion.

Her memories of this place, which she’d last seen at the age of ten, were different from the present reality. What she recalled most were warm hazy nights and palm trees and crowds of students, usually arguing politics, strolling along San Lazaro Street. Nobody argued politics in public anymore. She remembered the stands that sold hamburgers and oysters on Infanta Street and the delicious smells that rose in the humid air. The stands were probably gone by now; the oysters almost certainly. She recalled enviably beautiful, well-dressed women on San Rafael and how she longed to grow up and enter that glamorous life, exclusive nightclubs and dance-halls with tuxedoed orchestras.

She glanced at Alberto Canto. Sweat ran down his neck and dampened the open collar of his white shirt. He took a linen handkerchief from his jacket and pressed it against his face.

“You’ve got a lot to lose if you’re caught in my company,” Magdalena said.

Canto looked grim. “I wonder if there’s anything left to lose in Cuba these days. Life doesn’t have much quality. It’s mostly dreary but one goes through the motions, because suicide isn’t an alternative. I’d like some joy, I think. Even a prospect of joy would do. Perhaps I should flee to Miami and play the exile game.”

Was that how Canto saw her and Garrido and all the others in the US – just players in a game? It was a bleak little thing to say, almost an accusation. Magdalena made no response. How could she object? She didn’t live here. Her Cuba hadn’t been the daily grinding reality of Canto’s; perhaps hers had been no more than a dream place, a state of mind, something she thought she could help shake and remake in quite another image.

A state of mind: was that all? A delusion? She wasn’t sure. She understood only how odd it was actually to be here in her native country after thirty years. Her sense of exile had always been strong and melancholic. What was more terrible than being forced out of your own country and obliged to live in another just because you disagreed with certain principles? Exile was a wretched condition – the yearning, the way you tried to laugh the longing off as some kind of silliness, but you were never convincing.

Now she smelled the Cuban night as if she’d never smelled anything before. This was where she belonged, the place Rafael Rosabel had promised her and then stolen. She was suddenly aware of his nearness: he was ten, fifteen minutes away, she wasn’t sure, her sense of direction had eroded with time, amnesia, confusion. What did she feel? what did she really feel? She didn’t know.

Canto slowed the car in the neighbourhood of Vedado. Under the outstretched branches of a palm in a dark street, he parked the Lada, turned off the lights but left the engine running.

“Go right at the next corner. Halfway down the street there’s a new apartment block. Very small. Exclusive. Rosabal lives there on the top floor. I understand there is usually a security guard in the entrance. However,” and Canto paused, wiped his face with the handkerchief again, “because we have a few friends here and there, somebody was able to persuade the usual guard to call in sick. Unhappily, his replacement never received the order to substitute for him. A bureaucratic oversight. One of many in Cuba.”

“Convenient.”

“We have our moments.” Canto stared through the windshield. Wind lashed suddenly through the fronds of the palm and they made hard slapping noises on the roof of the car.

“What about Rosabal’s wife? Does she live in the apartment?”

“I didn’t know he had a wife,” Canto said.

Welcome to the club, Magdalena thought.

She opened the passenger door.

“I’ll come back to this spot in ten minutes,” Canto said and looked at his watch. “If you’re not here, I’ll come back again in another ten minutes. If you still haven’t shown up, I’ll make one more attempt ten minutes later provided it’s safe to do so. If you’re here I’ll take you back to the airfield. If not … well, I prefer to be positive.”

Before she got out of the car Magdalena opened Garrido’s pouch. The gun inside was a loaded lightweight Fraser automatic with a handle of imitation pearl. She slipped the weapon in the pocket of her leather jacket, then reached inside the pouch again. She removed a small brown bottle that contained two unmarked white capsules, which puzzled her for a moment. And then she understood. Garrido, in a melodramatic gesture, had provided her with failure pills, suicide capsules. Swallow two, lie down, oblivion guaranteed. He obviously had no doubts about her business in Havana. It was all black and white to him. Either she’d do the job and come back to Miami, or she’d fail and be captured and take the pills. He didn’t see the complexity of emotions involved. He couldn’t imagine how there might be any indecision on her part. He didn’t want to know. As he got older so did his need grow to make the world more simple, more manageable.

She stuck the bottle in the pocket of her jeans, got out of the car. Canto drove away. She walked quickly, then paused in the shadows as if frozen.

Illuminated by a solitary streetlight, two men were talking together on the pavement opposite. One wore a uniform, the other a white guayabera. The uniformed man removed his cap, tossed his head back, laughed at something. He had a pistol at his hip and was obviously some kind of cop; she had no way of knowing who his companion might be. Both men laughed now, heads inclined together like conspirators. Then the cop turned and walked away with a wave of his hand. His companion went inside one of the houses on the street, an old baroque structure carved into expensive apartments. The riff-raff didn’t live in this neighbourhood.

Magdalena waited until the street was empty before she moved. The apartment building where Rafael lived was small and rather unassuming; presumably the Minister of Finance in an allegedly Communist society had to keep appearances down as much as possible.

Outside the entrance she stopped to gaze up the short flight of steps to the glass doors; there was a desk in the lobby, and a lamp was lit, but nobody was present.

She pushed the doors open, entered the lobby. There was an lift to her left, but she chose the stairs instead. She climbed quietly, swiftly, possessed by an odd light-headed feeling, as if this were not really happening and she was some kind of wraith and the real Magdalena Torrente was back in Key Biscayne. The gun in her pocket knocked dully upon her thigh as she moved. The fourth floor was at the top of the building. Since there was only one door on each floor, finding Rosabal’s apartment was easy.

She stepped toward the door, which had no number, no name-plate.

You will have the pleasure of killing him, Garrido had said.

You have earned that right more than anyone else.

She knocked on the door in a gentle way.

Then she waited.

Pagan drove uneasily on the central highway that linked Pinar del Rio with Havana. Yellowy moonlight on the range of the Sierra de los Organos rendered the landscape unreal. The Oldsmobile was more invalid that automobile, and had begun to make the kind of clanking sound common to terminal cars. But it hadn’t died yet.

Near San Cristobal – where in 1962 the Soviets had installed the SS-4 missiles that had led to the Cuban missile crisis – he parked the car beneath trees because a convoy of army trucks was lumbering past with no particular attention to the conventions of the road. They wandered from side to side on the highway, their dim lights menacing. When the last truck had gone past Pagan drove on.

On the outskirts of Havana he came to the district of Marianao. In a silent side-street he stopped the car, consulted the map he’d been given by El Boxeador. He played the dim flashlight over it; Rosabal lived in the Vedado district of the city which so far as he could tell lay in the streets behind the Malecon, the sea wall along Havana’s coast.

He drove past darkened houses and unlit shops, a Coppelia ice-cream parlour, a shuttered bar; Pagan had the fanciful thought that a plague might have closed the city down. There were no pedestrians save for a noisy clutch of women who came out of one tenement doorway and immediately entered another, leaving the sound of shrill drunken laughter behind.

Streetlights were practically non-existent and where he found them were about as bright as candles. Lush trees stirred in the dark; here and there large ornate buildings stood like neglected palaces. Some of them had been religious colleges or the business headquarters of dispossessed norte americano corporations or the homes of the exiled rich. He drove with uncharacteristic caution, hearing the way the worn tyrewalls, as delicate as membranes, screeched whenever he turned a corner.

He reached the avenue known as the Paseo, which was filled with trucks and private cars and people arguing over the cause of an accident in which a ’56 Chevy had ploughed into the side of a van. He didn’t like all this activity. He turned left, then right, crossed the Avenida de los Presidentes, found himself back in narrow streets again, some of them without names. Finally, inevitably, the Oldsmobile accomplished what it had been trying to do for the last fifty miles – it gasped and shuddered and came to a halt outside a vacant lot behind tenements. Pagan, struggling with a certain panic, pressed the starter button a couple of times. The engine wouldn’t even turn over.

Dead. What bloody timing.

He got out of the vehicle, kicked a front tyre in frustration. Then by flashlight he studied his map, trying to memorise the way to Rosabal’s street.

He walked for ten minutes, staying close to shadows as he anxiously sought street signs, landmarks, anything that might correspond to his map. Once, from a window over a butcher’s shop in which hung an unrealistic slab of plastic display beef, he heard the noise of a guitar playing lazily and a woman’s reedy voice singing “Una desgracia unfortunada” and elsewhere a caged bird squawked as if in competition. Down cross streets came the damp scent of the sea and very old stone and air that seemed to crackle with the sound of water dripping on salt. He passed under the signs of closed businesses. Farmacia. Casa Joyería. Restaurante Vegetariano.

Once or twice taxis went cruising past. A smell of bread drifted from some distant bakery, arousing Pagan’s hunger. When had he last eaten? On the flight from London to Miami. Now he couldn’t remember what the food had been. Something awful. The smell of bread teased him. He kept walking, concentrating on where he was going, staying close to walls and passing beneath trees. Sometimes a loud carousing wind blew with such ferocity that it took his breath away and he had to turn his face out of its path.

How much further? he wondered. Was he going in the right direction in this dismal city? Now he stopped, took out the crumpled map, examined it again. His flashlight, as jinxed as the car, flickered and went out. Did nothing work on this whole fucking island? He walked until he came to a streetlamp and he stood below it, staring at the map.

Bloody hell – nothing on the map matched his surroundings. According to the route he’d taken he should have reached a small park that was represented on the map by a tiny green square – instead, what faced him was a warren of narrow streets where the houses all looked dilapidated, not at all the kind of neighbourhood in which you might imagine the Minister of Finance to live.

Narrow streets led to others; old houses mirrored one another. A maze all at once, a territorial riddle, like something you might dream during restless sleep and force yourself abruptly awake into the familiar surroundings of your bedroom.

This was no dream, Frank. No chance of waking up from this.

Sweet Jesus, nothing was familiar here. He flapped the map again, examined it, blinked, remembering that he’d heard once how Communist countries deliberately printed devious maps to throw visitors off balance, to mislead them and prevent them from trespassing in places where they didn’t belong or from seeing something “sensitive” – be it a slum or a military camp or the headquarters of State Security. He also recalled hearing somewhere that street names were frequently being changed as one Party official fell from grace and another rose in prominence. Had Garcia Street, for example, become Munoz Street? Was that the kind of thing that happened? He had an urge to crumple the map and toss it, but even if it was misleading, even if it didn’t quite reflect reality, it was still the best shot he had of finding Rosabal.

He walked again. The narrow streets, houses oddly quiet, most of them unlit, threatened him in a way that was more than merely vague. Doorways, darkened and silent, suggested presences that observed him as he walked past. And now he remembered something he’d read once about how each neighbourhood in Cuba, each block, had its own organisation of snoops who watched from windows, who reported strangers to the authorities. He tried to force confidence into his step. He belonged here. He was a man going home late. That was all. There was nothing odd about his presence. Nobody would look at him twice. He whistled quietly, then became silent. What if you were lost here forever? he wondered. What if you could never find your way out of these streets? Round and round, up and down, never seeing a street name, a number, a familiar face. One bad fucking nightmare. One endless inner scream of panic.

Then, when he’d begun to feel a quiet despair, the streets became wider. The houses were larger now, richer, the foliage more dense. The warrens vanished behind him, the streetlamps became more generous. Across the way he saw it – the small park he’d been looking for before, his landmark. He felt a sense of enormous relief. A tiny darkened park, a scrap of greenery, nothing more, but for Pagan it was a major discovery. He consulted his map again; all he had to do was walk another few blocks north and he would come to Calle Santa Maria, which was where Rosabal lived – if the map was even approximately accurate.

For a moment his mood changed. He was elated. He’d come this far without impediment. Even when a car slowed alongside him he didn’t let this new frame of mind dissolve immediately. He continued to walk, didn’t look at the car, kept his face forward. But when he became conscious of a face perusing him from the window of the vehicle, he understood he was being tracked by a police car, and his sense of confidence slipped quickly.

Calm, Frank. Keep walking. Pay no attention. Pretend you’re strolling home after a night on the town – or what there is of it in this place.

The car accelerated, went past him. On the next corner it braked, came to a stop. Pagan kept walking. He saw the door of the car open and a bulky figure emerge just ahead of him. Can’t chat, sorry, got to keep moving. The cop stood in the centre of the pavement with his legs spread slightly apart; he clearly meant to halt Pagan. Perhaps some strange law existed about being on the streets after a certain time. Or perhaps Pagan simply looked suspicious, the late-night straggler whose presence was of universal interest to passing cops.

Shit. There would be questions in Spanish, a request for papers, documents, visas, the whole can of bloody worms. I am a deaf mute, Pagan thought. Would that act work?

Pagan didn’t slacken his stride. He’d come this far and he wasn’t about to be thwarted by any overweight Cuban cop. There was only one way through this, and it wasn’t bluff. He stared at the pavement as he moved, raising his face only when he was within reach of the policeman, smiling, looking nice, friendly, even innocently puzzled by the cop’s presence. He bunched one of his large hands when he was no more than seven or eight inches from the cop, who was already asking him a question in belligerent Spanish.

The punch was gathered from Pagan’s depths, coming up from a place level with his hip, up and up, a fine arc that carved through air, creating an uppercut the policeman saw but couldn’t avoid. The connection of knuckle on chin was painfully satisfying to Pagan, even though the overweight cop didn’t go down immediately. He staggered back and Pagan advanced, connecting with a second punch, this one – viciously unfair – directly into the thickness of flesh round the larynx, a hard sharp blow that caused the cop’s eyes to roll in his head. He went over this time, flat on his back with his legs wide.

Pagan hurried away, knuckles aching. He was pleased with the swift accuracy of the performance – he hadn’t lost his touch; but what troubled him was the effort it had involved and the way he felt drained as he quickened his stride through drab streets of a city strange to him.

Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras

Three hours before first light Tomas Fuentes gave the final orders for the evacuation of the camp; he brought together the squadron leaders and their men. In their neat khaki fatigues they looked smart and trim, fighting men. Fuentes, who had a very big pistol holstered on his left hip, spoke through a PA system. He wished his men well in events that lay just ahead.

Five hundred of them would be going on board two battleships that were presently anchored off the Cape. Six hundred more would be taking to the sea in frigates and transport ships. There would be extensive air cover from Skyhawks, Harriers and F-16s providing protection for amphibious landing-craft. The landing beaches would be unprotected; military manoeuvres had ensured the absence of Cuban troops, who were on the other side of the island. Bombing and strafing from the air would knock out any small pockets of Cuban air defences that were still manned; munitions stores and lines of communication would be destroyed quickly. Tanks and field-guns, unloaded from the ships, would be deployed on the road to Havana; beyond Santiago de Cuba there might be extensive fighting with the fidelistas. It was not expected to result in anything but victory for the forces of freedom, Fuentes declared. Besides – and here Tomas paused for effect – it was now known that Fidel was incapacitated and couldn’t lead his troops, which was certain to be a blow to Communist morale. This brought cheers from the assembly.

This invasion, Fuentes said, was different from before in every respect. This time they were prepared. This time they had amazing support from their freedom-loving brothers in the Cuban armed forces. This time there would be a popular revolt inside Cuba. This time Castro was hated. In 1961 he’d been revered – well, by God, all that was changed. Cuba was miserable and downtrodden and the people sick to death.

Fuentes looked at his watch. Within four hours, the missile would be in place in Cuba, where it would be made ready to fly upon Miami. Shortly thereafter landing-parties would arrive on the beaches and the first air strikes would occur against Communist bases and airfields. As soon as the freedom forces had established their control of Santiago and launched their initial advance along the Central Highway – joined by anti-Castro Cuban troops and the counterrevolutionary resistance – satellite photographs of the offensive missile would be released to every newspaper in the Western world. Fuentes imagined the headlines. Castro Planned Missile Strike on USA. Aborted By Invasion Force and Popular Cuban Uprising. Later, there would be pictures of technicians destroying the missile. Fuentes, who had a natural hunger for publicity, would make sure he got into these shots somewhere.

More than thirty years, Tomas said. It was too long a time. More than thirty dry years of wishing and wanting and longing and hating.

Libertad! he shouted. Viva Cuba Libre! His amplified voice tumbled away in the breeze.

He saluted his men, who broke ranks and headed in an orderly manner toward the beaches.

Tomas Fuentes, who would fly to Cuba on one of the F-16s and land as soon as the fighter-planes had done their demolition work, went inside his tent for the last time. After today, the whole camp would be a mere memory. Bosanquet followed him. Both men sat for a few minutes in silence. This quiet was broken by the noise of bulldozers churning over the pathways between tents, obliterating all traces of this small temporary city; soon the jungle would have ascendance again, the landscape would take back that which had been borrowed from it.

“I hate this goddam place, but I’ll miss it,” Fuentes said with the snarl in his voice of a man who considers sentimentality a weakness.

Bosanquet concurred. In a moment he’d rise and go to his own tent and there dismantle the radio. He wanted to wait until the very last moment to do so, because he had been expecting a message from Harry Hurt – a rousing speech, some fine words of encouragement – but the radio had been silent for many hours now.

Perhaps Harry maintained his silence for reasons of security.

Yes, Bosanquet thought. That had to be it.

Harry believed in security.

Havana

The woman who answered the door was the one Magdalena had seen in Duran’s photographs. She was pretty if you liked a certain fine-boned Castilian look. Her hair, which normally she would have worn pulled back like a skullcap and tied, was loose and lustrous and hung over her white shoulders; her deep-brown eyes, the colour of bitter-sweet chocolate, were her best feature. Her mouth was ample and she had a fine straight nose.

“Yes?”

Magdalena, who very lightly touched the gun concealed in her pocket, said nothing for a moment. She realised that she’d been floating along on the possibility that Duran’s photographs were fakes prepared by him for some vindictive reason of his own. She hadn’t wanted to believe in the existence of this woman, this Estela. Now, faced with the reality, she felt as if her blood had begun to run backward. Her voice was unsteady. “I want to see Rafael.”

The woman stared at Magdalena as if she’d been expecting her. “He’s out,” she said. “He should be back soon.”

“I’ll wait if you don’t mind.” Magdalena stepped into the apartment, which smelled of something very sweet, like lavender water. She hadn’t expected Rafael to be absent. She made absolutely sure the woman was telling the truth by strolling uninvited through the apartment. Estela, protesting, followed her. Artwork, reminiscent of old-fashioned Cubism, hung on the walls. The entire place was lit by dull table lamps which cast an odd yellow light through their shades. Magdalena went into the bathroom, then the kitchen. They were empty.

“What are you looking for?” Estela asked. “I didn’t ask you to come in. What do you want here?”

Inside the bedroom Magdalena saw crushed white sheets, a jar of skin lotion on the bedside table, a silk robe she recognised as Rafe’s lay across the bed. There was an intimacy here she couldn’t take. Rafael and his wife in this bed, bodies locked together: this dreadful picture reared up in her mind. Did he experience the passion with his wife that he did with her? Was it the same? How could it be? Nothing could have that scalding intensity.

Back in the living-room Estela said, “Are you satisfied now? What did you hope to find anyway?”

“Where is he?”

“He had business to attend to.” Estela sat down again and looked at an electric clock on a shelf. “Why do you want to see him?”

“Do you really want to know?” Magdalena asked.

“I’m not sure.” Estela was quiet. The clock made a slight humming noise. “I have a feeling about you. You and Rafael. A feeling. As soon as I saw you on the doorstep. And then the way you just walked through the apartment …”

“What kind of feeling?”

“Not a good one.”

Magdalena had one of those small vicious urges, experienced so rarely in her lifetime, to smack this young thing across the face, but she let the desire go. Was it Estela’s fault that she was the wife of Rafael? Estela probably knew nothing of Magdalena’s existence. Besides, there was something pleasant about Señora Rosabal, an unexpected intelligence in the eyes. This was no air-head, no mindless bimbo, to decorate Rafe’s arm. There were depths to Estela Capablanca Rosabal. This realisation only made Magdalena feel more endangered than before; Rafe could love this woman, and it would be almost understandable. It didn’t have to be a political marriage, a match of mere convenience: He might actually love this woman for her own sake.

Magdalena said, “We’re friends. I’ve known Rafe a long time.”

“No, you’re more than friends. I get the impression …” Estela didn’t complete her sentence. She made a small gesture with her hand, palm upturned, as if she despaired of words.

Magdalena was silent. She might have said Yes, yes, we fuck; we meet in foreign cities and we fuck our brains out, but she didn’t. She had come to confront Rafael, not his young bride.

Estela said a little sadly, “Sometimes I imagined there was another woman in his life. I didn’t know who. You’re very beautiful. What’s your name?”

Magdalena told the woman. Estela repeated the name quietly a couple of times. “It has a nice sound.”

Magdalena wandered to the window, drew back the curtain, looked down into the street. It was all too civilised, she thought. This meeting, the way Estela purred over her name and looks, the politeness. She wished Rafael would come back and she could get the confrontation over with one way or another. This apartment where Rafe lived with his young wife was making her feel weird, off-centre. Her head ached. Rafael doesn’t live here, she thought. Not the Rafael you know. It’s somebody else. A stranger.

“You love him?” Estela asked.

“Yes.” Despite it all, yes, yes, yes.

Estela Rosabal hesitated: “Does he love you?”

“He married you, not me.”

“He didn’t tell you he was married, did he?”

“What Rafael told me or didn’t tell me is none of your concern.”

“I think it is,” Estela laid her hands on her lap. The wedding ring flashed under lamplight. “Anything that involves my husband affects me too. That’s the way it is. Tell me why you have to see him.”

Magdalena gazed at the street. She could see a small swimming-pool, surrounded by a fence, to her left. A shimmering light burned under the surface of blue-green water.

How reasonable Estela sounded, how collected. What reserves of strength did she have that allowed her to handle her husband’s mistress with no displays of hysteria? It wasn’t fair, Magdalena thought. She could never have behaved with such dignity and resolve herself. The young woman had grace beyond her years. Magdalena was jealous now, and not just because of the insight she had into the life Rafe shared here with his wife. Something else. The other woman’s youth. Her enviable maturity. The quietly reasonable manner that concealed firmness and iron. These were qualities Magdalena realised she had recently lost in herself. In loving Rosabal she had given up more than she’d ever really imagined. I was going to be independent. My own person. When I married Rafe I was going to be more than just his wife. Married, dear Christ!

Something cold went through her. Below, wind altered the smooth surface of the pool, creating concentric circles of disturbance.

“Tell me why you need to see him,” Estela said. She got up from the sofa and stood some feet from Magdalena, her arms folded under her breasts. Perfect breasts, Magdalena thought. Perfect skin. Smooth and unblemished, unworried as yet by time. There would be no anxious scrutiny of that fine, strong, young face in mirrors, no depression when age made another unkind incision. In the future, sure; but when you were as young as Estela age was like death and disease – it never happened to you, always to somebody else.

Magdalena was filled with a sudden resentment of Estela so fierce it surprised her. The Señora had youth, she had Rafe, she shared his life, his world, the future in which Magdalena was supposed to figure so prominently. What was left to the rejected mistress? What was she supposed to do with this sense of loss?

A car drew up in the street below. Magdalena moved back from the window. “Does he have a BMW?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I think he just arrived.”

Magdalena took her gun out, told Estela to sit down and be still.

“Why do you come here with a gun, for God’s sake?” Estela asked.

Magdalena went to the door, stood there motionless, listened for the sound of footsteps. Instead what she heard was the quiet hum of a lift ascending.

“Why the gun?” Estela asked again.

Magdalena didn’t answer.

“Are you going to shoot him?”

“Shut up.” Magdalena gestured with the gun and Estela, who had begun to rise, sat down again.

“Please. I beg you. Please don’t shoot him.”

The lift stopped, a door slid open, closed again, clang. Silence. Somebody stood outside the apartment. There was the faint noise of a key-chain. The tumblers of the lock turned, the door opened.

Rafael came into the room wearing a dark-blue windjammer and jeans and sneakers; handsome as always, unbearably so. And cool. If the appearance of Magdalena shocked him, he didn’t show it. A momentary apprehension perhaps, a quick dark cloud crossing the eyes, but hardly noticeable.

“What a pleasant surprise,” he said. His smile filled the room and lit it. He had the gift of illuminating a whole environment with that one white, spellbinding smile. Magdalena resisted an urge to put out her hand and touch his face.

“I assume you can explain,” Magdalena said. There was frost in her voice.

“Explain? Ah, you mean my marriage.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Magdalena said.

“Why should I? What claims do you have on me?”

“Several million dollars worth. Let’s start with that.”

Rosabal poured himself a small glass of sherry from a decanter. His hand was very steady. “I don’t like guns pointed at me.”

“Too fucking bad,” she said. She hadn’t meant to sound upset, hadn’t wanted anything to show in her behaviour or language, she wanted to be as cool as Rafael.

“The money went to a worthy cause, dear.”

“Not the one for which it was intended,” she said.

“There are degrees of need,” Rosabal said. “I tried very hard to be equitable. A little here, a little there –”

“And a little in your own pocket for a rainy day.”

Rosabal shrugged in a rather puzzled way, as if he hadn’t understood Magdalena’s accusation. He said nothing; he looked silently offended. He sipped his sherry and she thought: he has a good act, a terrific act. I fell for it time and again.

From the corner of her eye she was conscious of a troubled expression on Estela Rosabal’s face. Secret aspects of her husband’s life were being uncovered; she was learning new, unwelcome things about the man she’d married.

“Do you intend to shoot me?” There was a patronising tone in Rosabal’s voice. Magdalena remembered that same voice in other situations, in twisted bedsheets when it became a slyly satisfied whisper, in crowded restaurants when it made outrageous suggestions over the pages of a menu, at heights of passion when it spoke of love in a secret language. God help me, she thought, I still want him.

“Keep this in mind, Magdalena,” he said. “Kill me, you kill the new revolution.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I vaguely remember the new revolution. Our revolution. But refresh my memory. I want to hear all about it. I’m sure your wife will be interested as well. And the people you cheated, they’d love to learn about the revolution they paid for.”

“You should give up sarcasm, dear. It’s beneath you.” He paused, stared into her eyes with the same knowing look he always used on her. He said, “Castro will be dead within a few hours.”

“Castro dead?” Estela asked, apprehension in her tone of voice. She might have been expressing surprise and dread at the destruction of some ancient icon.

“Dead,” Rosabal said, without looking at his wife’s frightened face.

“I don’t believe you, Rafe,” Magdalena said. “You’re lying about Castro. You’ve been lying all along. You’ve been doing nothing except stealing from people who trusted you.”

Rosabal made a small injured sound, as if the notion of somebody doubting him were preposterous. “On the contrary, dear heart. While you stand there and wave your gun in my face, officers of the Cuban armed forces have already taken decisive steps to prepare a successful overthrow of the fidelistas. You’re looking at the next President of our nation.”

Estela said, “The next President? You?” Rosabal silenced her with a swift, commanding gesture of his hand. She shut her eyes, turned her lovely face to one side and looked sad.

Magdalena reflected on the unexpected solemnity in Rosabal’s voice. He’d changed course suddenly, going from alleged felon and confidence trickster to potential President within a matter of moments. It was a fast transformation, and it shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did. She should have been able to see directly into Rafael’s heart by this time, but it remained unpredictable territory to her, by turns swamp and glacier, meadow and quicksand.

“Let’s assume for a moment you’re telling the truth. What happens to the exiles? What happens to Garrido? The people in Miami and New Jersey and California who gathered money for you – what role do they play?” she asked.

Rosabal sat on the arm of the sofa. He looked comfortable now, as if some minor crisis had just been overcome. “People like Garrido have an important function in my new Cuba. They will not be overlooked. You may remember I gave my word.”

My new Cuba. The proprietary way he’d uttered this phrase bothered her, but she let it pass, just as she chose not to question the value of what Rosabal called his word. She was like an impoverished woman confronted with money she knows to be counterfeit and yet hopes, in the face of all the evidence, that it might still be real, it might still offer a way out from a lifetime of hardship.

“What about everything else?” she asked. “The new society. Democracy. All the things we ever talked about. The future we planned. What happens to all that? Does that still come into existence?”

Rosabal’s smile was tolerant, like that of somebody obliged to explain the simple principles of arithmetic. “In time, my dear. Change can’t be hurried. People have to be prepared. You know that as well as I do.”

In time, she thought. Yes, he was right, a whole society couldn’t be changed overnight. Then she caught herself: goddam him, she was thinking the way he wanted her to think! She was blindly agreeing with him. Love had petrified her will. Step away from him, she thought, distance yourself, make believe you never loved him, fake the impossible. Pretend he never asked you to marry him. Pretend there was never any planned future. Pretend the sun rises in the west and the moon comes out at midday.

“After you throw out Castro’s Communism, Rafe – what takes its place?”

Rosabal said, “I’ll rule as fairly as I can. But don’t expect me to be weak. I won’t allow anarchy any more than I’ll permit instant democracy. Down the road somewhere, perhaps five years from now, I may hold free elections.”

“Five years? Five years? I imagined free elections within a few months, six, nine at most.”

“Your optimism is touching. But the Cuban people aren’t ready to control their own future.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we prepare the people for eventual democracy –”

“With you in total control –”

“Naturally.”

“And your five years might become ten. Fifteen. Twenty. What happens when you don’t step down, Rafe? What happens if you don’t want to relinquish power? Then nothing has really changed except the name of the dictator.”

Rosabal shook his head. “You’re overreacting. Everything changes. No more Communism. No shortages. No more reliance on the Soviets. Cuba will be a free nation again.”

Magdalena turned away. It was better if she didn’t have to look at his face. Even now he could be so convincing. A free nation, she thought. Was that what he’d said? But how could Cuba be free without elections? How was freedom to be achieved if Rafael Rosabal alone controlled the country’s destiny? Dictators might all start from different points of view, some might begin with benign notions, even with charity, but in the end greed and power rotted all of them and they resorted to the same kind of apparatus that could be found in a score of countries around the world – secret police, political prisons, the disregard for basic human rights, torture.

She faced him again. He was watching her, counting on her to put the gun down and tell him she’d been mistaken, that she’d overreacted but still supported him.

Fuck you, Rafe. All she wanted was to lash out at him.

She looked at Estela and in a voice that was both flat and uncharacteristically spiteful said, “He told me he’d marry me. We used to lie in bed together and plan our wedding. We used to meet in Acapulco. London. Barcelona once or twice. But I don’t imagine he mentioned that kind of thing to you.”

It was a sleazy little shot intended to cause him discomfort, but he reacted only with a curious laugh, as if he were embarrassed for her. He didn’t need to be. She had more than enough embarrassment for herself. Only the way Rosabal had hurt her could have made her sink so goddam low as to proclaim his indiscretions before his innocent young wife. Magdalena suddenly wanted to deny what she’d said. She felt a sense of shame.

Estela started to say something but another gesture from her husband quieted her at once. She hated his habit of silencing her with that bossy, chopping motion of his hand. Did he think he could shut her up any time he liked? Despite her calm appearance she wasn’t really any better equipped to deal with this situation than Magdalena, for whom she felt an unexpectedly strong pity. How could she not? Crushed, Magdalena had lost all composure. Only a heart of clay could fail to be touched.

It was obvious he’d lied to this woman who was clearly the mistress Estela had often imagined. And he’d betrayed his own wife. Without apparent shame. Without remorse.

Estela clasped her hands, folded them across her stomach. She was afraid. Afraid of her husband, afraid of what she’d heard in this room. It was more than the personal revelations that scared her, the deceptions of love. After all, she knew these things happened to people every minute of every day, and they brought pain, but life went on because it had to, and people recovered in time if they had resilience, and old scars faded. What scared her on some other level was the understanding that Castro was to be killed and Rafael was to become the new President of Cuba.

This was the secret matter in which Rafael and General Capablanca and that solterón Diaz-Alonso were involved. This was what the late-night meetings amounted to. In Cuba, politics was the domain of men, and they were welcome to its animosities and hatreds. She wanted no part of that hazy world. But she knew Castro would not die easily. He would fight. He was a survivor. He’d outlived most of his rivals. She had a terrible image of roads filled with tanks and guns, corpses in ditches, fields of sugar cane blazing, neighbour fighting neighbour, small children suffering as they always did in the world of grown-up violence. Cuba would turn into another Salvador, a Nicaragua. How could the ambitions of men like her husband and her father threaten to engulf the island in destruction? What if their revolution failed? What if Castro emerged victorious? Rosabal would be branded a traitor and she would be guilty by association. And the baby, this nameless infant inside her, what would become of it then? She felt sadness, then the kind of anger that always grew in her slowly.

“If you don’t want to talk about your proposals of marriage, Rafael, why don’t we talk about the missile instead? That ought to be an easier topic for you.” Magdalena decided to come in at Rosabal from another angle now. Her fist was clenched tightly around the butt of the pistol.

How close was she to firing? she wondered. It scared her that she didn’t know. But she no longer had any familiarity with the limits of her own behaviour. It was as if an unpredictable stranger lived inside her. She understood that she wanted to keep after Rosabal, haranguing him, paining him if she could, but she also wanted the opposite, to hold and comfort, to love him. Unhealthy, Magdalena. How sick am I? “I suppose you’re going to lie about that too. I suppose you’re going to say you didn’t arrange to have Gunther Ruhr steal it.”

Rosabal set his empty glass down and ran a fingertip drily round the rim. He looked very calm. “You have some useful sources of information, Magdalena. I’m impressed. I’m not going to deny there’s a missile. But it isn’t real. It’s make-believe. A ruse, a nice ploy to discredit Castro, nothing more. It’s merely for show. It’s quite harmless.”

“For show?”

He began to explain how the missile would be disarmed and Castro overthrown. His voice took on the kind of enthusiasm he’d always used to sweep her along, as if she were no more than an object floating on his energetic tide.

She interrupted him as soon as she understood. “You disable the weapon and the whole world loves you for your heroism. Right?”

“Why not? The world loves heroes. We’re in short supply, after all.”

You’re good, Rafe, she thought. You lie, you tell the truth, you go back and forth between the two so often that the only outcome is the one you want most: confusion. How much of what he’d said was true, how much false?

“Okay,” she said. “So there’s a missile, and it’s only for show. Let’s take that at face value for the time being and move on. Let’s discuss something else. The girl. The hostage. What becomes of her in Ruhr’s hands?”

“A girl? What girl?” Estela Rosabal asked. The conversation had gone into baffling areas. Missiles, hostages, things she knew nothing about.

Rosabal gestured for silence again, but this time Estela ignored him and got up from the sofa. She approached Magdalena and asked, “What hostage? What girl? What are you talking about?”

Rosabal was irritated, his façade altered for the first time. His wife’s small act of disobedience had undermined his machismo in Magdalena’s eyes. “Mind your own goddam business,” he said.

Once again Estela ignored her husband. She looked at Magdalena and asked, “You’re certain Ruhr has a child as a hostage?”

“Yes,” Magdalena said.

“What age is she?”

“Thirteen, fourteen.”

Estela Rosabal had read in Central American newspapers about Ruhr and the bestial way he was reputed to have attacked young girls in England and elsewhere. There were pictures of his alleged victims. Such sad faces. Such dead eyes. Estela had never been able to tolerate violence, far less the needless kind done to children. It was a crime against innocence, a violation of nature.

She turned quickly to her husband. Her jaw was firm, her eyes fiery. Aggression altered her features, tightening the skin, emphasising the solid strength of the cheekbones. She reached out, caught the sleeve of Rosabal’s shirt. “What do you have to do with this?” she demanded. “What in the name of God do you have to do with the business of this child?”

“Child, what child?” Rosabal pulled his arm free.

“Tell me the truth, Rafael.”

Rosabal poured another small sherry. He didn’t speak.

Estela asked, “Does my father know? Does the General know about this? I can’t imagine him approving of a hostage situation with a child involved.”

“The General is in no position to withhold his approval of anything I choose to do,” Rosabal said.

“Shall I telephone him? Shall I ask his opinion?”

“Do what you like,” Rosabal said, but without conviction. The plain truth was that he needed the General, at least during the next twenty-four hours. And that stiff-backed old bastard, who had never approved of Ruhr to begin with and barely acknowledged the man’s existence or his part in the plan, who would have preferred to believe that the missile had materialised out of thin air, was sure to become apoplectic at the idea of a hapless child held captive by the Claw. Rosabal couldn’t alienate Capablanca at this stage. He couldn’t risk losing the support of Capablanca and his officers. Things would fall apart if Estela contacted her father.

Estela reached for the telephone. She was bluffing. She had absolutely no idea of the whereabouts of her father or how to contact him. The General was frequently on the move and for years his staff had been under strict orders to keep his movements secret. He drew a very firm line between his private life and his soldierly one, a definite boundary that could not be crossed, no matter what.

Rosabal placed a hand over hers, preventing her from raising the receiver. “All right,” he said. “There’s a kid. But I had nothing to do with it. It happened without my approval. Ruhr kidnapped the child –”

“Then you have to arrange for her release.”

“For God’s sake, what difference does one child make anyway? It’s one life, that’s all. I’m talking about millions of lives, a new Cuba, new freedoms –”

Magdalena said, “That’s not what you’re talking about, Rafael. Do you really give a shit about freedoms in Cuba? You already said all the power will lie in your hands indefinitely. If all you intend to do is make some pointless cosmetic changes inside Cuba, the exile community in Florida will fight you the way it fought Castro –”

“You are both being foolish,” Rosabal said, suppressing the anger of a man suddenly assailed by two women who had formed a collaboration that baffled him. “You understand only this much,” and he held his thumb a quarter inch from the tip of his index finger. So attentive in such matters as kissing the back of a hand, so skilled in the bedroom, he consistently failed to take women seriously.

“Have the child released,” Estela said. “Do it now.”

“Don’t ever tell me what to do and when to do it. I don’t even know where the kid is.”

Estela reached once more for the telephone. Rosabal was quicker. He grabbed the instrument, ripped it from the wall, tossed it across the room. It struck a door and broke apart in useless little bits and pieces.

Estela was quiet for a moment before she turned to Magdalena and said, “There’s a ship called La Mandadera. If the child is with Ruhr, then she’s on board this ship. Because that’s where Ruhr is.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Rosabal said. “She knows nothing!”

“La Mandadera is on its way to Santiago,” Estela said. “It is expected to arrive there soon. Within two, perhaps three hours. Rafael is supposed to meet the ship when it docks. I listen to everything. My husband thinks I’m asleep when he sits here and conspires with his associates. But I don’t sleep, I hear everything. What else am I supposed to do when I’m lonely? I heard about Ruhr, about the ship –”

Enraged, Rosabal struck his wife across the side of her head. Her legs buckled dreadfully and she almost slid to the floor. She clutched the arm of the sofa for support and looked at her husband in astonishment. Magdalena, shocked by the sudden act of violence yet oddly impressed by this show of force, raised the gun and pointed it at him. Shoot him, she thought. Shoot him now.

He held his hand out. He was marvellously cool again, smiling as if nothing had happened. He had the ability to change everything with charm. He looked quite incapable of violence now. All the tension in his handsome face had dissolved. “Enough,” he said. “Give the gun to me.” He took a step toward her.

“Stay away from me, Rafe.”

“Magdalena. We aren’t enemies, you and I. We’ve been too close for all this hostility.”

“Don’t move.” She tried to stop the hand that held the gun from trembling. He took another step. He stood about three feet from her, calmly running a fingertip over his forehead. His sun-tanned skin glistened. His perfect mouth continued to smile, infuriating and seductive at the same time.

“We can still be together,” he said. “Our plans don’t have to be thrown away.”

“Bullshit, Rafe.” She wasn’t going to fall for any of it.

“Be with me. Support me.”

“Rafe –”

“We can talk our problems over. We can resolve them, Magdalena. Or else you can shoot me. You can kill me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about –”

“On the contrary, there’s everything.” He closed his eyes a moment. Lamplight glowed on his eyelids and his long lashes. He did something strange then. He repeated her name a couple of times to himself, as if it were a sound he’d never uttered before, one he found unexpectedly enchanting.

Estela said Pay no attention to him but Magdalena didn’t hear, she was concentrating on Rafael, whose voice had become a soft whisper, almost an hypnotic caress. And she remembered how they’d undressed each other in hotel rooms in various cities of the world, the thrillingly indecent haste of their love, she recalled the ritual of the sugar cubes and how once, in a moment of erotic splendour she would savour for the rest of her life, he had slid a cube between the warm lips of her vagina and licked it away, crystal by crystal, dulzura, dulzura, drawing it out with the tip of his tongue, then playfully pushing it back inside. She remembered intimacies that terrified her because they exposed her, times when she couldn’t dream of her world without Rafael Rosabal. Nor could she contemplate such a world even now. It was a barren place, a planet devoid of life.

“Let us put the gun aside, Magdalena,” he said. His tone was firmer now. “We’ll go somewhere and talk.”

“No –”

He stretched out his hand. “We can work things out, I promise you. But we can’t make any progress so long as you hold the pistol,” and he shrugged, as if to say further talk was pointless, and he was disappointed by her.

“Rafe,” she said quietly. She didn’t want to weaken. But he overwhelmed her the way he always did. She saw how deeply she needed him, a fact of nature, incontrovertible.

He ran his strong fingers through his hair, then took one more step toward her.

“Rafe …”

She had the curious feeling that her peripheral vision had been destroyed, and she could see nothing but his face in front of her. It dominated the room, throwing everything else into shadow. She was sick from the fever of love, and she knew, with all the certitude of her own addiction, that she could no more shoot this man than she could stop loving him. She’d known it all along, from the moment he’d first entered the apartment. She’d find a way to forgive him for the theft of the money, his marriage, how he’d altered the shape of the new revolution and changed the dream, everything. Shoot him, she thought. How could you shoot the thing you loved most? Who was she trying to fool?

She lowered the pistol to her side, a movement she performed as if she had no volition. She was no longer listening to her own warning system; the voice of reason had been struck dumb inside her. Even as Rosabal took the weapon out of her hand and put it in the pocket of his jacket, a part of her knew she should have resisted. And when he spoke she infused his words with a warmth nobody else would have heard.

In a voice that might have persuaded birds to come down from trees, he said, “We’ll go someplace quiet now, Magdalena. We’ll talk in private.”

Yes, yes, she thought. The idea of intimacy excited her. She wanted to be alone with him.

Estela pressed a hand to the side of her head where she’d been hit. “Where are you going?”

Rosabal didn’t answer. Estela watched him go out of the apartment. This was not the man who had courted her with such bewitching charm. This was not the beautiful man who had observed all the elaborate etiquette of courtship, who had come with flowers and Swiss chocolates and cosmetics and such obvious affection in his eyes.

Rosabal ushered Magdalena to the stairway. She took his hand, clasping it tightly. It would work out, it had to, there was no other option.

“This way, my dear,” he said to her.

When they went down to the empty lobby, the wind was screaming round the building. The glass doors flapped and palm trees creaked. The night was becoming furious.

She turned to look at him. He smiled, then touched the side of her face with an open hand. The contact was tender. She wanted to make love to him here and now, the place didn’t matter. She kissed him, sliding a hand under his jacket. She heard the wind rage at the building and one of the glass doors was blown open, but these were sounds from another world far removed from her. He was hard against her. He wanted her. She felt his need and it justified her. Giving up the gun had been the right move.

“Not here,” he said. “This is too public.”

“I love you,” she said, and drew away from him reluctantly.

“And I love you. But we must find a more intimate place.”

They went outside where the air was filled with electricity and moisture, like a damp sheet stretched across the city.

“My car,” he said. He held her by the elbow as he led her toward the kerb.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I have a place in mind.”

“And after we make love –”

“After we make love, we settle our differences, if we still have any by then,” and he laughed in an oddly nervous little way. He opened the passenger door for her.

Something made her hesitate, perhaps his uncharacteristic laugh, perhaps a sudden insight into how witless her feelings had made her, perhaps the lightning that flared with stunning brilliance. She had the unsettling sensation of coming out of a sweet dream into a menacingly real world.

“Get in the car,” he said.

She didn’t want to. She looked at him. His lips were narrow and uncharitable, his eyes curiously bright, and not with love. Something else, something she couldn’t quite read.

“The car,” he said again.

She opened her mouth, which was suddenly very dry. He had the pistol in his hand, aimed at her stomach.

“Why are you pointing that at me, Rafe?” She couldn’t get this situation into focus. It was slipping away from her, and she felt panicked.

“Get in the car,” he said.

“Not until you put the gun away.”

He pressed the weapon into her flesh with such ferocity that she gasped. The abrupt chill of understanding she felt horrified her. He was going to kill her, she hadn’t seen it coming, she’d been as careless and dumb as any fifteen-year-old girl in love for the first time. “Rafe, for God’s sake –”

“Do as I say.”

“Dear Christ, Rafe –”

“Let me tell you how it really is, Magdalena. You would be a problem to me. Today, tomorrow, a problem. You know too much about me. You know about my connection with Ruhr. Too much. So now we go to a quiet place. It won’t take more than a second. A fraction of a second. Painless.”

Painless, she thought. He sounded like a dentist making a promise to a nervous client, but he was talking about murder, her murder. His tone of voice was utterly reasonable, a calm she found even more frightening than the gun. There was a madness in him, and she’d been blind to that the way she’d been blind to everything about him. He didn’t want her, didn’t need her. She was a problem, therefore she had to be eliminated. He might even have sent the killer after her in Miami.

The notion devastated her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. Paralysed, she was only vaguely aware of lightning over the city. The thunder when it came was the kind that clapped and echoed inside her head in a mocking way.

“Get in the car,” Rosabal said again. “I am running out of time, Magdalena. Hurry. Hurry.”

A small vehicle moved slowly along the street. It took Magdalena a second to recognise it as Alberto Canto’s Lada. It began to pick up speed. Rosabal turned his face toward the car, which was closing in on his BMW in such a way that a collision was unavoidable. As he levelled the pistol at the Lada, he experienced a moment of indecision. He was beset by doubts about firing the gun in the street. Neighbours. Police. His ministerial status would almost certainly afford him immunity from a murder investigation if he killed somebody, but these were sensitive hours, and he couldn’t take the chance of having to answer questions of any kind. Too much time had been wasted already. He should have been on his way to Santiago by now. The clocks were running.

The Lada mounted the pavement and kept coming. On and on, doggedly, it kept rolling. Rosabal finally fired when the small car was about twenty feet from the BMW. The windshield shattered but the Lada wouldn’t stop. It struck the side of Rosabal’s car, swerved across the pavement and the passenger door was thrown open. Magdalena reached for the open door, then threw herself toward it with a gymnast’s grace; she managed to grab the edge and hang on as the Lada grazed the wall surrounding the apartment building. She closed her eyes. Air rushed against her. The little car bounced off the pavement and back into the street.

Rosabal fired a second time. The sound of the pistol coincided with the roar of more thunder. You couldn’t tell one from the other.

Magdalena slumped into the passenger seat. “You’re braver than you thought, Canto,” she said. Jesus, the pain. The swift knife-like pain.

“I saw your predicament. What was I supposed to do?”

Magdalena turned her face, looked back, saw Rafael on the pavement surrounded by a few inquisitive neighbours. “He’ll call the cops. He’s bound to. Can you stick to back streets?”

“I can try,” Canto said.

“Take me to the place where you found me,” she replied. She was breathing hard. “The airfield.”

Canto glanced at her. “You sound terrible. Is something wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

He saw it then: blood stained the front of her shirt. She was holding a hand loosely over the place, as if trying to conceal it.

“You’ve been hit.”

“It’s nothing. It’s not important.”

“You’re talking to a doctor. I decide what’s important.”

“Take me to the airfield. That’s important.”

“Not before I’ve checked your wound.”

“What do you want to do? Stop the car right here in the middle of this street? Bandage me? Drive, Canto. You can fix me when we get to the airfield.”

She stared through the windshield. Imagine Rosabal’s bullet didn’t hit you. Your lover’s bullet didn’t pass through your flesh. Imagine nothing happened. You’re well. Everything’s fine. You’re going back to the airfield. Intact. It wasn’t like that, though.

She moaned, bent forward, held her hand over the wound. It wasn’t clean. It was soft and wet, ragged and appalling.

“I’m going to pull over the first chance I get,” Canto said.

“The hell you are.”

“I have a stinking bedside manner at the best of times. Don’t argue with me.”

She tipped her head back, closed her eyes, bit on her lower lip. She had a gloomy sense of futility, an emptiness in her heart. Had she come all the way to Cuba only to lose her life? Was this it? Was this the shitty sum of things?

This miserable exit. What a way to go. She wanted another kind of ending. Now she wanted some justice. She wanted revenge the way Garrido had yearned for it. She realised she still loved Rosabal with all the intensity of a victim’s love – a pathetic compulsion, a deficiency of her character. She had no more control over the feeling than she would a virus in her blood. A victim’s love was not what she wanted. When you loved like that you could never know any freedom.

There was only one way to be free from it.

She opened her eyes and looked at Canto through her pain. “I’m a fighter, Canto. I always have been.”

“Somehow I don’t doubt it,” Canto remarked, although he didn’t like the sound of her erratic breathing.

Rain had begun to fall in huge drops when Frank Pagan reached his destination some forty-five minutes after Magdalena Torrente had gone. The street was quiet and empty by then. A badly dented BMW was parked outside the apartment building. Pagan, damp and not very happy, went into the lobby, passed the desk, headed for the stairs. He reached the top floor, took out his Bernardelli. First things first. Lightly he tried the door handle. Predictably locked.

He knocked. He held the gun pointed at the door.

The woman who came to answer was lovely and pale and indifferent. She held a white lace handkerchief, in which was wrapped an ice-cube, to the side of her head. The sight of Pagan’s gun made little impression on her. Pagan walked into the apartment.

“Do you speak English?” he asked.

“A little,” she shrugged. She took the ice-cube from her forehead. There was a marked swelling between ear and eye. “Where is Rosabal?” Pagan asked.

“Gone.” Spoken without interest. “Solito. Nobody else is here. See for yourself.”

Pagan looked inside the other rooms of the flat. They were empty. “Where did he go?”

“What difference does it make to you where my husband goes?”

So this was the wife, this was Magdalena’s rival for Rafe’s affections. Pagan wondered what had taken place in this apartment that had left her with such a vivid contusion. Was Rafe a wife-batterer as well as a philanderer?

“I need to find him,” Pagan said. There was a shelf of photographs behind the woman. One, prominently displayed, depicted Rosabal in the company of Fidel. Both men were smiling polite smiles. It was posed, artificial.

“Why?” the woman asked.

“I’m looking for a child. I believe your husband can help me find her. She’s with a man called Ruhr.”

Estela Rosabal walked to the photograph of her husband and Castro and picked it up. She studied it for a moment, then she dropped the picture to the rug and twisted her heel in the dead centre of it. Estela gazed at the slivers, the way Rafael’s face appeared imprisoned behind bars of broken glass.

Then she looked at Pagan. “You’ve come a long way,” she said.

“Yes. A long way.”

“I will help you find the child.”

She told him about La Mandadera, about Ruhr on board the vessel, about the destination in Santiago. Sometimes her voice dropped to a whisper and Pagan had to ask her to say things over again.

“How can I get to Santiago?”

“By road is too slow. You must fly there.” She told him it was about five hundred miles from Havana to Santiago. She wasn’t sure exactly.

“How can I find a plane?” he asked.

Estela Rosabal shut her eyes and did not answer for a long time, so long indeed that Pagan assumed she hadn’t heard the question.

“I will help you with that too,” she said finally.