Several days after the death of Frederick Kinnaird, the Lider Maximo spoke in the Plaza de la Revolutión in Havana. His speech started at two in the afternoon. If the past was any guide, he would not finish until six, perhaps six-thirty, and his audience would by then be numbed and hungry. The day was breezy and warm; flags busily flapped around the Plaza.
The crowd was estimated at three hundred thousand people, many of them bussed in from rural areas. Usually there were some who surreptitiously listened to tiny transistor radios relaying football games or pop music from the USA. But not today. Today there was an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty. Throughout the crowd plainclothes members of security forces mingled, took notes, eavesdropped, dragged away for interrogation anyone who struck them as odd. Security was more tight than anybody could remember – even veterans of these affairs, some of whom had listened to the Lider Maximo for thirty years and knew all the man’s nuances and could tell from experience when he was lying or when – the less frequent occurrence – he was telling the truth. There were metal detectors around the Plaza, and certain people were being searched, and scores were being herded inside police vehicles.
Nothing was normal now. Nothing predictable. During the last seven days there had been arrests on an unprecedented scale throughout Cuba. There had been “disappearances”. The Armed Forces had been purged by Raul Castro himself, who had hurried back from Angola with the indecent speed of an executioner anxious to use his newly sharpened axe. Everybody had at least one story to tell about a neighbour taken away, a son missing, or a daughter, a nephew, a cousin.
Estela Rosabal, who pushed her way through the warm crowd toward the platform because she needed to be as close to the Lider Maximo as possible, had more stories to tell than most. At first she’d been advised that Rafael had been taken prisoner; then two days later that he’d committed suicide. The next day she received a phone call from the Ministry of the Interior telling her that he was alive and well after all and she would be taken to see him. An hour or so later, when she was beginning to allow herself some limited optimism, the coffin was delivered to her apartment by men who said nothing and who wouldn’t look at her. They simply dragged it inside the living-room and left it there, lidded, loosely bolted, a long cheap pine box she couldn’t bring herself to open.
She had experienced nothing so cruel in her life as that. He’s alive, he’s dead, he’s alive, he’s dead again. They had known all along. They had played a malicious game with her because she was the traitor’s wife. Then they had interrogated her in a hot windowless room for almost twenty hours about her role in her husband’s treachery. Seemingly convinced she was innocent, they had released her. But she wasn’t fooled. They would come for her again. They would find “evidence”. They always did.
Now she pushed herself between a pair of young lovers who stood hip to hip, then past an old man with thick eye-glasses and one sleeve of his jacket hanging empty, then a bunch of fat women who smelled of fried food and beer.
The Lider Maximo rose on the platform to speak. His voice, carried by a sophisticated sound system, floated out beyond the Plaza itself and into adjoining streets. Television cameras relayed the event through the whole of Cuba, despite power failures, officially attributed to recent rebel activity, in the provinces of Holguin and Santiago.
The speech began quietly. The Lider Maximo’s face was bloated behind the greying beard. His garberdine fatigues were brand new and stiff; he wasn’t altogether comfortable in them. Observers noticed that his movements were somewhat erratic, as if his coordination had been affected by something. Age, many people thought in their secret hearts; he was too old, too rigid, too inflexible, he had to step aside. But who was going to say so to his face?
He gazed across the crowd and the fluttering flags. Chopping the air with one hand for emphasis, he spoke of an evil plot instigated by the imperialist government of the United States to overthrow him and replace him with a puppet regime, at whose head was to be the late Minister of Finance, Rafael Rosabal, assisted by General Capablanca, now arrested (actually dead in a cell even as Castro spoke, hanged by bedsheets from a ceiling beam, an official suicide), and a number of misguided officers in the Armed Forces. These men would have a fair trial because that was the Cuban way, the socialist way.
Agents of the Defence of the Revolution moved through the crowd and acted as cheerleaders, whipping up enthusiasm with their menacing manners. Estela Rosabal had come to a stop where the crowd was jammed together so tightly it created a solid wall of flesh and bone. She couldn’t get through. The Lider Maximo’s voice boomed in the air all around her, but she wasn’t paying any attention. She heard both her husband and father mentioned in a hateful way, but it was background noise, no more. Her father’s fate was probably the same as Rafael’s anyhow, and how much more grief did she have? Frustrated by the mass of people, she moved in another direction, where eventually she found a way forward between a group of slick young men in fresh white guayaberas and blue jeans. They made appreciative noises as she pushed among them, and one laid a hand on her thigh, but she slipped away without looking back. She was lost again in the density of the crowd, surrounded by strangers, and all the while the voice went on and on, now droning, now rising to an hysterical pitch.
Up on the platform the Lider Maximo, his head filled with the approving roar of the audience, closed his eyes a moment; sweat slid from his brow into his eyelids and he wiped it aside. He drifted away, remembering other times, other speeches, when he had stood in this very spot and addressed his people, when La Revolutión had been young and glamorous, when he had been filled with vigour and the kind of self-confidence that belongs only to youthful believers.
He spoke of how he had been poisoned by his trusted doctor, Zayas, whose task it was to weaken the Lider Maximo, to confuse him with tranquillisers and tiny doses of a slow-acting poison. That way he could be manipulated and made to believe anything he was told.
There were gasps from the crowd.
But the Lider Maximo was strong the way the Revolution was strong! The Lider Maximo survived the way the Revolution survived!
The crowd cheered again and again.
The Lider Maximo pointed to his bloated face as if by way of proof. His very appearance was the result of Zayas’ infamous medications!
Now he condemned treacherous civilians, those who would see the Revolution dismantled, who would see the course of Cuban history altered. Nothing can stop the course of history, he said. Nothing could prevent the destiny of the Cuban people, which was socialism and freedom.
A drunk in the crowd whispered to Estela Rosabal: Sure, but will we have the freedom to leave socialism? And he winked at her, but she hardly noticed, because she was still trying to get closer to the platform, pushing, pushing, squeezing between two crones who looked half-dead, wrinkled, their flaccid breasts hanging loose behind cheap floral print dresses. She thought of Rafael’s child in her womb. The baby should have been her priority, but somehow it wasn’t, not any longer. It lay inside her, a tiny, unformed stranger whose meaning was lost to her. So many things had become lost to her lately.
The Lider Maximo continued to use his hand as a cleaver, a gesture of emphasis. He stared upward into the mid-afternoon sun which was pleasantly warm against his face. He wished he could sit down, and not stand the way he always did, but to sit was a weakness. He had to remain upright; he had to look down from the platform across the multitudes. It was important to maintain the image of standing in a high place.
He spoke about ungrateful civilians who worked against the Revolution. They were scum, murderous scum, with their secret printing-presses, and their illegal radios, and their hidden caches of American rifles. But they would be rooted out and destroyed. And here his mind strayed again and he remembered how Batista had made similar speeches about La Revolutión more than thirty years ago, and how the dictator had sent his armies into the Sierra Maestra to kill the rebels. There was a world of difference, of course, between himself and the evil Batista, who had been an American mannequin: immoral, indecent, corrupt.
He praised the bravery of loyal Cuban troops who had rounded up treacherous officers and their men swiftly. He praised the officers and men of the reservists who had brought a dangerous situation under control and had captured illegal weapons in the hands of those who misguidedly called themselves rebels and freedom-fighters.
Estela Rosabal didn’t think she could get any closer. Strained, sweating, she had come within a hundred and fifty feet of the platform. Behind ropes stood armed guards and security agents with black glasses and all kinds of uniformed men. She fanned the listless air with her hand. She could hardly breathe; the weight of the crowd pressed down on her ribs. Her eyes watered. A streak of mascara slithered down one cheek.
She thought about the coffin again even though she had resolved never to do so. She remembered sitting in her living-room and looking at the thing hour after hour, remembered the sun rising and falling and the shadows thickening, remembered her hands clasped upon her stomach – and the smell that had begun to emerge from the coffin and fill the room, something she couldn’t name, didn’t want to identify, that awful charred smell like nothing in her experience. And she had thought about the barbarism in the world, a cruelty beyond her understanding, and how it numbed her.
She fumbled with her handbag, which was jammed against her side because of the pressure of people around her. How was she ever going to open it? She suddenly wanted to scream in sheer frustration. What could she accomplish here? Nothing. Nothing. She should go back. Go home. She had been so scared avoiding the metal detectors and now her nerve was going to collapse entirely.
She wouldn’t let it. She would be strong.
The Lider Maximo had become quiet, surveying the crowd; the shadow of the tall obelisk known as the José Marti monument fell across the Plaza. It rose some four hundred feet in the air, a monument to a famous independence fighter, the Lider Maximo’s hero. Its shape was faintly reminiscent of a rocket. The Lider Maximo gripped the edge of his lectern with both hands. He was assailed by a dizzy sensation. He was thinking of the nuclear weapon destroyed outside Santiago.
Something about the notion of a missile on the island had created pleasing echoes inside him …
He coughed into his hand. He talked quietly now, and his hands were still. He talked about the weapon that had been brought to Cuba by imperialists and traitors, and assembled in a field outside Santiago, and made ready to fly. To discredit the Revolution! he roared. To make us appear like warmongers! But it was destroyed by the quick actions of the Cuban Air Force. He was allowed to bend the facts and shape them as he saw fit because nobody contradicted his view of reality, they merely adapted to it.
The Lider Maximo’s mind wandered back to the missile again because it reminded him of those glorious days when Cuba stood at the centre of the world, when Kennedy and Khrushchev almost went to war, when the Lider Maximo commanded international respect, when he was a hero and did not have to curry favour with anyone or beg …
He struggled to focus his attention on the crowds again. Why did he keep drifting? Why was it so hard to concentrate during his speeches these days? Now he leaned forward, speaking rapidly, spitting as he spoke in denunciation of those enemies of peace who had brought such a monstrous device to Cuba. The crowd, aroused, prodded like animals in a vast holding-pen, cheered louder than ever.
Estela Rosabal felt she was trapped inside the noise, like an atom surrounded by other reverberating atoms. She was overpowered by the sounds of so many people. The well-dressed man alongside her, eyes glazed from alcohol, had a tiny flag he waved now and again. She stared at him, looked away, glanced up towards the platform at the face of the Lider Maximo, that face with which she’d been familiar from the very day of her birth – posters, photographs, history textbooks, newspapers. He was everywhere always. He was the great endless noise that surrounded and overwhelmed her. He was the noise of Cuba.
He was a monster. But he wasn’t immortal.
The Lider Maximo thought: he hadn’t had so much attention in years, every journalist in the world wanted to talk to him about the nuclear weapon, he had almost forgotten how good such power felt … and all because of one stolen missile.
He raised his hands, shaking both fists at the sky. This was his response to the cheers of the crowd and suddenly it was almost like the old days, a dialogue between the Lider Maximo and the people who loved him, back and forth, give and take. He didn’t see the agents milling through the swarms, didn’t see the prompters and persuaders and those who coaxed and menaced the appropriate responses from people who had lived for a whole generation on promises, promises, promises.
How hard would it be to steal a missile? he wondered. How much planning had gone into it? How long had it taken the conspirators to grab the weapon? It was an idle line of harmless speculation, of course. But interesting just the same …
The Lider Maximo swayed very slightly. The breeze grew in strength, the flags shook, plastic bunting creaked. Somebody set off a firecracker and was immediately dragged away by security agents. The Lider Maximo hadn’t heard the noise, didn’t see the scuffle in the crowd.
If there was a nuclear missile on Cuba what would the consequences be? Respect? Prestige? Would Cuba then have a strong voice to which others in the hemisphere would be obliged to listen? And how would the Yanquis react? Would they risk invasion? Would they retaliate with force? Not if the missile was pointed, for the sake of argument, at Miami Beach … No, they would talk and bargain, they would want to sit down and negotiate the removal of such a missile, because that was their way, all capitalist politicians loved to deal, and something very favourable could come out of it all – say, the removal of the missile in exchange for the return to the Cuban people of the Guantanamo US naval base, which was Cuban soil after all …
The Lider Maximo thumped the lectern with the flat of his hand. Cuba, he told the masses, will not be a pawn in anybody’s game. He spoke of courage and bravery and loyalty with all the confidence of a man comfortable in a world of abstract nouns. The sun set over the Plaza and the Marti monument and the breeze died and the flags no longer stirred.
Estela Rosabal managed to get her handbag open. She found what she wanted inside, exactly where she’d placed it under a packet of tissues. How ordinary the gun seemed to her, surrounded as it was by lipsticks and a make-up compact, a bottle of eyeliner and coins. Everything was ordinary now, and yet oddly heightened, as if the commonplace contained more secrets than she’d ever realised. The smoothness of a lipstick tube, the fibre of the suit worn by the man standing beside her, the colours of his small flag – everything was sharp suddenly, and richly textured.
She managed to get her fist round the gun.
She looked up at the Lider Maximo, who was silent again.
He was thinking.
He was thinking he knew a wonderful site for such a weapon. A site whose irony amused him. The missile would be placed east of the Peninsula de Zapata, and Play a Giron, where on April 17th, 1961, the last invasion force to make an effort to land on Cuba had provoked the great Cuban victory the Yanquis called The Bay of Pigs – it was the perfect place, and fitting, and comical in its own bleak way …
An old flame burned in him, an old taste, barely familiar but delectable still, filled his mouth. He stared out across the crowd, which was quieter now, but he didn’t see it as a group of individuals. In the shadows each person had receded, diminished, shedding his or her particular characteristics: one great amorphous mass, controllable, manageable.
Such a weapon would never be fired, of course. It would be a useful negotiating strategy, a device to back up firm diplomacy, and it would give Cuba entry into the nuclear club, where by rights it belonged …
Then he wondered where could he acquire such a weapon and who could he get to steal one, if he made such a radical decision. And from where would it be stolen? Fascinating questions.
But pure speculation.
He turned his face in the general direction of Havana Bay, and considered that stretch of water separating Cuba from its natural enemy. Over there, he thought. Over there was a whole arsenal of missiles, each doomed to be scrapped under the terms of a misconceived treaty between the Yanquis and the Soviets.
Perhaps.
Then he faced the crowd again. He didn’t see the lovely black-haired woman who stood beyond the barrier where the guards were massed.
Estela Rosabal took the gun from her purse. She drew it up slowly from her hip, her arm jammed against that of the man with the tiny flag. And then she could bring the hand up no further unless the man moved. The pressure was intolerable. She tried to make herself smaller, slimmer, tried to create space for the pistol.
She breathed deeply, drew her ribcage in, released the pinned arm. The man, who suddenly realised what the stranger beside him held in her hand, called out in alarm. Estela pointed the pistol at the platform, directly at the head of the Lider Maximo. The guards, who had been trained to that level of readiness which is almost paranoid, reacted at once. They rushed at her fiercely. She saw their massive shadows eclipse the sky as she was knocked over. And then she was being punched in the face and kicked in the stomach and the gun fell from her hand. It was funny how little she felt, how little pain from the boots and the nightsticks, as if she no longer had the capacity for it. Brutality could no longer touch or surprise her. She was dragged roughly along concrete. She saw, through swollen, half-shut eyes, the TV cameramen and press photographers who ignored her. She saw the receding face of the Lider Maximo, so lost in his own speculations that he paid no attention to the skirmish, handled so efficiently that it would never be mentioned in any newspaper, never seen on any TV screen.
Another firework was lit, a rocket this time, which flew from the rooftop of a nearby building in a burst of orange smoke and went sailing past the Marti monument as it died. Estela, thrown inside a van without windows, noticed how the firework’s rich plumage exploded almost cheerfully in the sky before the door slammed shut and everything became black and smelled of sweat and urine and fear.
The Lider Maximo, who in recent years had come to look for signs and omens as deliriously thirsty men seek oases, saw the firework too, and he smiled for the first time that day.
A rocket, he thought. How appropriate.
In the eight or nine days since Sir Frederick Kinnaird’s cremation and quiet funeral service, after the newspapermen and columnists and stringers had cobbled together a story out of alleged facts that were frequently no more than the kind of half-truths various government agencies in the United Kingdom and the United States saw fit to provide; days after Frank Pagan, weary of meetings with the Commissioner and interviews with surly men from security agencies he’d never before heard of, took a dreary train down to rainy Brighton for a few quiet nights at an off-season hotel; days after Castro had spoken to the people of Cuba about a capitalist plot against him; after Steffie Brough and her family, harried by newshounds, had gone into seclusion, and Allen Falk had entered hospital for the treatment of a hitherto inactive ulcer, a tiny bespectacled lawyer from Hamburg, Wilhelm Schiller, surfaced in the offices of a German tabloid in Frankfurt with an offer to sell the diaries and papers of his late client, Gunther Ruhr.
Schiller, an unassuming man with a gentle manner, had been advised years before by his client to make certain matters public in the event of the client’s untimely death. And since such a circumstance had come, alas, to pass, Schiller was simply following Ruhr’s instructions. The sensitive material, which filled eight stout cardboard boxes and covered many years of Ruhr’s life and business dealings, would certainly have ruined various influential figures around the world who had used Ruhr’s services.
But it never arrived at the editorial offices of the newspaper with whom Schiller had negotiated. Instead it vanished from the safe-deposit box in the Zurich bank where the lawyer had himself placed it.
Horrified bank officials denied any kind of wrong-doing; they were discreet men whose business thrived on privacy and security. The disappearance of Ruhr’s papers scandalised them – officially at least. In reality, they had been obliged to turn the documents over to the Swiss government, which had been intensely pressured by its German counterpart. Two officials were dismissed by the bank for malfeasance, a scapegoat gesture. They were later quietly reinstated in different locations.
Herr Schiller, outraged by the loss, promised to give an interview on German television in the course of which he would reveal at least some of the contents of Ruhr’s papers. That way, he would discharge a portion of his obligation to his late client; at the same time he intended to raise certain suspicions concerning the fate of the documents. He had guessed that no ordinary thief was behind their disappearance. Only governments – with instruments of legal blackmail at their disposal – had the power to force Swiss bankers to open safe-deposit boxes.
But the interview did not take place; some hours before it was scheduled Herr Schiller was found dead in his room at the Frankfurterhof, an apparent victim of a heart attack. The death certificate was signed by two physicians, both of whom, as coincidence would have it, had begun vacations in remote places beyond the reach of telephones.
The day after Schiller’s death, a group of men and women gathered in the private conference room of an expensive hotel in St Helier on the Channel Islands. These people, accompanied by aides and lawyers, represented the British Prime Minister, the President of the United States, the West German Chancellor, the President of France, the Prime Ministers of Italy and Japan, and assorted princes and potentates from the countries of the Middle East.
The subject of their meeting was the disposal of Gunther Ruhr’s purloined records. An early perusal of the documents, undertaken with haste by an international panel of six lawyers, indicated that Ruhr had set down, in encyclopedic detail, the dates and places of his terrorist acts, the sums of money that had exchanged hands in return for his services, and the names of those who had employed him. It was the kind of record guaranteed to bring Ruhr a form of immortality, although that hadn’t been its principal purpose.
Ruhr, scrupulous and smart, had kept his records diligently. It soon became clear to his readers, his team of auditors, that the late terrorist often knew more about his employers than they could ever have supposed. He investigated the men who hired him. He made careful inquiries. He was no casual extremist. He took extraordinary care. Sometimes he succeeded in penetrating the secrecy surrounding those who bought his services: sometimes he managed to go beyond the names of the lesser figures to the larger ones. Intermediaries gave way to principals, minor players to major ones. Men of high positions in government and financial circles who thought they had hired Gunther Ruhr from a safe distance, who believed themselves anonymous, had their names inscribed in his records.
There were photostats of bank drafts, copies of money orders, numbers of bank accounts on small Caribbean islands; Ruhr’s manic eye for detail was evident at every turn. Nothing much had escaped him.
It was an enormously damaging set of documents, in some instances shocking in its revelations. In what became known unofficially as the St Helier Accord, it was decided, within a matter of hours and hardly any debate, that the documents, to be kept from the press at all costs, would be divided among the parties with direct interests – the record of Ruhr’s involvement with Basque separatists, for example, would go directly to the Spanish government to deal with as it saw fit; the names of his employers in Japan who had him destroy a resort hotel would be handed immediately to Japanese officials. And so on.
Six hours after it assembled, the conference ended.
Two days later, Martin Burr travelled down to Brighton and walked with Frank Pagan along the promenade on a rainy night. They passed the disheartening ruin of the West Pier, which, in the English Channel mist, had the appearance of a ghost ship. In another age it had been graceful, an elegant edifice that had stubbornly withstood the demands of the sea. Neglected now, it was nothing more than a reminder to Martin Burr of a world that had become bored by the graceful – one that responded only to the quick and the crass. It was a world in which you could find crumpets inside frozen-food compartments and exquisite teas in mass-produced tea-bags.
“You’re looking more like your usual self,” Burr said. “I’m glad to see that.”
Frank Pagan didn’t mention the new course of antibiotics he’d just begun, or the ugly infection Ghose had discovered in the chest wound. These things were tedious inconveniences; they could be kept to oneself. He looked out at the Channel. The mist was magnificently damp and mysterious, crawling up over the pebbled beach. He put a hand in the pocket of his overcoat and fingered the bottle of painkillers there; the wound in his chest, agitated by infection, pierced him sharply. He tried to ignore it.
Burr tapped the promenade rail with his cane and listened a moment to the quiet drumming sound he’d set up. “I have teams of people going through Kinnaird’s records – which are copious and complicated as befitted a man with a great deal to conceal.”
“I imagine,” Pagan said. He was genuinely interested on one level, that of policeman; but the recuperating tourist in him felt removed from Burr’s world. He’d go back into that world eventually, and he’d become immersed in it as he always did, but for the present he wanted to be nothing more than a man casually watching the secretive mist on a moist night in Brighton.
Burr said, “Kinnaird’s phone calls are rather intriguing. Several were placed to an apartment in Acapulco, which turns out to have been the property of Rafael Rosabal. Kinnaird and Rosabal. Fine bedfellows.”
Pagan saw a light out there in the folds of the Channel, a small passing ship perhaps. Then it was gone. He turned to look at Martin Burr. Dampness adhered to the Commissioner’s eyepatch, reflecting the lamps along the promenade.
Burr stopped tapping his cane. “Freddie made phone calls to all the members of his little group. Caporelli, the others. Cocky sod, though. Didn’t even bother to take the trouble to make these calls from some public phone. He made them either from his house in Scotland or his apartment in The Albany. I daresay he thought he was above the law. Can’t get over the gall of the fellow.” Burr shook his head for a while; from his point of view the nefarious activities of Kinnaird and his associates were beyond any reasonable man’s comprehension, as was Kinnaird’s sense of impunity.
Pagan turned away from the misty sea. He thought how Freddie and Rosabal must have decided to eliminate the others. Then Rosabal, who elevated avarice to chilly new heights, had taken it one step further and ordered the elimination of Freddie. They were charmers. Real princes.
Burr drew his cashmere scarf up around his neck and shivered slightly. “What a bloody mosaic,” he said. “And it doesn’t end with Freddie’s unprincipled dealings either. I’ve just seen some of Gunther Ruhr’s papers.”
Pagan, intrigued now, had heard about these notorious papers and the waves of utter terror they had set in motion through government circles in various countries.
Burr said, “In his documents, Ruhr claims he was first approached by Rosabal more than three years ago. Then about twelve months ago in Mexico City he was given the green light. Steal the missile, he was told. Deliver it to Honduras, where an invasion force was waiting with tanks and fighter-planes. Amazing assortment of equipment from all over the place.”
Steal the missile, Pagan thought. Just like that. He looked back out into the Channel, which smelled of winter, dead things. The night was as melancholic as his mood, which he hadn’t been able to shake for days. He reflected on the coup Magdalena had talked about, the democratic underground in which she’d had such faith, the uprising, but she’d never mentioned an invasion force. Maybe that was something else Rosabal had concealed from her. There were so many unanswerable questions. What had Burr called it? A bloody mosaic. Ambitions, lies, rapacity, warped patriotism, all the grubby little ingredients of the big picture, which was elusive still, and would perhaps remain so for a long time.
Burr lowered his voice, as if the dark might be filled with eavesdroppers. “One hears the most appalling rumours of mass arrests, tortures, executions all over Cuba.”
Pagan shivered. Cold air rose up from the Channel. He wondered about Estela Rosabal and what had become of her as a consequence of her husband’s ambitions. Executions, Burr had said. Was that her fate? Had she been propped before a firing-squad and gunned down? He recalled, with a clarity that saddened him, the way she’d looked when he’d seen her in Havana; the ruined innocence of beauty. Had Rosabal in all his life ever touched anything without destroying it?
Pagan was quiet for a moment. He heard the tide whisper coldly over stones. Then, as if to himself, he said, “I keep seeing that bloody missile. And I keep wondering if Rosabal intended to fire it. I can’t get the damned thing out of my mind.”
Martin Burr shrugged. “If he did, what was his target?”
Pagan had no answer. He looked back into the mist, which seemed to him just then as inscrutable as Rosabal’s intention. He imagined the missile on the truck, the way it changed angle, the eerie sense of disaster he’d experienced. And then he remembered Magdalena’s doomed little plane and he wasn’t sure if the missile had ever moved at all, or if it was something he’d created out of his own awful tiredness, an hallucination, a fanciful perception.
Burr said, “I rather thought Castro’s speech might have shed some light on that question.”
“People like Castro aren’t in the business of shedding light. They prefer darkness.”
“Perhaps,” said Burr.
Frank Pagan heard the mournful sound of a ship’s fog horn, like the cry of something lost in the night. He turned from the Channel, glanced at the forlorn relic of the West Pier. Magdalena’s doomed little plane, he thought. Lately he’d had the most unbearable dreams of her. There was always the small plane burning – not quickly, as it had happened in reality, but in a very slow way. Then the dream made that awful upward shift into nightmare when her face appeared in the yellow-red pyre of the cockpit and turned very slightly, sightlessly, mouth twisted open and lifeless, toward the trees under which he stood, and he saw an agonising look in her dark eyes before she was consumed. A horror, repeating itself three or four times during the last ten days.
He always woke with a sense of deep sorrow and depressing loss, as if there were an important word he couldn’t quite remember, or a disturbed sensation he couldn’t name. Whatever it was, it felt like something burrowing far inside him, something it would take time to destroy.
The fire that coursed suddenly through his chest made him double over against the promenade rail.
“Are you all right, Frank?” Burr asked.
Pagan took out the bottle of painkillers, uncapped it. He tipped one into the palm of his shaking hand. He stared at the pill. Did he need this? Would it really reach the place where the pain hurt most and kill it? He let the pill slip from his hand, then tossed the bottle through the air and watched the capsules vanish in the direction of the darkened beach below. They would fall among the pebbles where they’d lie concealed until the tide drew them back into the Channel and they disintegrated in brine.
“I’m fine, Commissioner,” was all he said.