Mambo

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Do it! Goddamit, do it now!” Rosabal snapped.

  Gunther Ruhr smiled; it was perhaps the singular most blissful expression that had ever appeared on his face. His hands dropped toward the console.

  In a fraction of time too small for even the finest chronometers to measure, too short for the senses to organise detail from chaos, Magdalena saw Rafael Rosabal in the open door of the module. His face was turned slightly away from her, but his profile was visible, unmistakable. She felt her chilled blood rush to her head and through the window of her small failing plane could smell wet grass and black mud – and then everything came together in that one chaotic reduction of time, module and aeroplane, sky and mud, Magdalena and the man she loved, the man with whom she might now spend eternity if there happened to be one, it all fused, melded, and even as it came together it also exploded and blew apart, white flame conjoining the aircraft and the missile-truck, searing the fuselage, disintegrating the module and the men inside it, setting aflame the cables that married the missile to its control centre, then finally toppling in fire the missile itself, which rolled from the truck and slithered from its erector and slumped, fuses melted and shot, navigational system destroyed, its function rendered harmless, into the soft mud.

  Frank Pagan saw Magdalena for only a second as the plane savagely struck the module, and then he closed his eyes against the intense heat he could feel roll across the meadow toward the trees where he stood. When he opened his eyes he looked at how tall flames rose in a great white dance from the truck, a noisy dance set to the strange crackling music of fire. There was a quality of illusion to his perceptions: had he really seen her in the tiny cockpit of that doomed plane? Had he imagined it?

  He stepped back under the cover of the trees. The soldiers who had been shooting at him only minutes before were running from the fiery ruin of the truck as fast and as far as they could, some with their uniforms on fire. He saw one wing of the plane collapse like burning paper, but after that there was very little distinction between objects trapped in the furnace. They all glowed with the same hallucinatory intensity.

  He turned and ran as quickly as he could to the place where Bengochea and the child waited in the helicopter.

  Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras

  The storm uprooted the tent of Tomas Fuentes and blew it across the airstrip toward the ocean, where anchored boats precariously rode the swell. A freighter that had set sail some thirty minutes before had already turned back, and another small ship was reported capsized. On the airstrip, fighter-planes were chained to stone chocks lest they drift and roll in the wind. Tomas watched his tent go flying off like a great bird with drab olive plumage and the grace of an ostrich, and then it was lost from sight. Bosanquet’s tent went the same way, flapping like loose laundry, dragging its guy ropes behind it.

  Fuentes studied the roiling sea just as the wind ripped the panama hat from his head and launched it up into the tall branches of trees where it was blown from left to right, up and down, then out of sight, a symbol – if Fuentes wanted to see it this way – of a lost cause.

  He preferred to think of it as a cause postponed. There would be other days, and they would be stormless, and the sea clear all the way to Cuba and that hijo de puta, Fidel Castro.

  21

  London

  Frank Pagan looked from the window of the Boeing 727 as the electric coastline of Florida faded and the darkness of the ocean replaced land. Then there were clouds, becalmed in the storm’s aftermath. He pretended to read the in-flight magazine but his attention was drawn time and again to Steffie Brough in the seat beside him.

  She was lost in a glossy magazine of her own, a world of models, a synthetic reality, clearly preferable to the one she’d just experienced. She was oddly quiet most of the trip, unwilling to answer even the most innocuous of Pagan’s questions. He realised that sooner or later this little girl was going to need expert help, a counsellor, a therapist. Ruhr had left his mark on her – the question was how much damage had been done?

  Pagan, who had no great mastery of small talk, made idle comments, and Steffie Brough responded, if at all, in a dull way. Strangers with nothing to share, Pagan thought, which in one sense was true – he a London cop, she a horse-breeder’s daughter from farmlands, what could they have in common? The girl, though, had a certain dead look in her eyes, as if curiosity were a capacity she didn’t have; no questions about Pagan’s investigation, no gratitude. Although Pagan sought none, he nevertheless would have thought it natural in the circumstances. She flipped magazine pages, picked at her airline food – chicken pellets with almonds, a glutinous matter masquerading as rice. She was quite lost to Pagan’s efforts to reach her, beyond any kindness he showed, any concern he demonstrated. And he tried; despite what he considered a lack of any natural affinity for kids – here he underestimated himself – he made a good effort. Her retreat defeated him.

  It was after five a.m. when the flight reached London, a grey English dawn with a spiteful, jaundiced sun. Heathrow was out of the question – too many journalists and photographers waiting for snapshots of that most beloved of human occurrences, the tearful reunion. Consequently, the plane was diverted to Gatwick, and Stephanie Brough’s parents were taken there in an unmarked car.

  Pagan disembarked with the girl. Outside, in a lounge set aside for the child’s return, a small crowd had come to meet her – her parents, a grandmother, a brother (a gangling youth of unsurpassed awkwardness who had somehow contrived to break the stems of roses he brought to his sister), a dozen or so uniformed policemen, half of them women, detectives in plain clothes, Billy Ewing from Golden Square, and Martin Burr, who clapped Pagan’s shoulder as if to say it was a job well done. And so it was, but Burr was never expansive in his appreciations. A professional did what was expected of him, a professional needed no special thanks. Later, there would be reports and interviews, but not for the moment.

  Pagan, tired, trying not to yawn, was thanked by the gushing parents and the grandmother who planted a perfumed kiss on his lips. All he wanted was to drift away, go back to his flat, sleep for days. It was a lonely prospect and he was apprehensive about the possibility of bad dreams, a missile rising into the launch position, the sight of a small aeroplane burning in a Cuban field – but it was time to slow down his private clock.

  He watched the happy crowd inside the lounge, the smilingly tearful family, Steffie’s mother with her white insomniac face lit like a bright lightbulb, Mr Brough in a check suit with a camel hair waistcoat, Steffie herself clinging quietly to her mother.

  And yet Pagan felt weird. Displaced. Out of sorts. A feeling that had nothing to do with his fatigue. There was something not quite right about this whole gathering.

  He walked to a drinks machine, pressed in a coin, heard a can of Coca-Cola come hurtling down the chute. He popped it, sipped the stuff, longed for a dram of the Auchentoshan to spike it up, and wondered what it was that left him so chilled, that sense of missing something. And then he knew what it was even before Billy Ewing – hushed, confidential, looking like a bookie’s clerk – grabbed him by the elbow and took him aside. They stepped out of the lounge and into the grubby dawn, where Billy blew his nose with distinctive flair, a trombonist of the sinuses.

  “It’s Foxie,” Billy Ewing said.

  Of course, Pagan thought. That was it. Foxie wasn’t here. Good old Foxie hadn’t shown up. He gazed at Billy Ewing and waited for more, but the Scotsman hadn’t much to add.

  “He hasn’t come back yet, Frank. Off he went to Glasgow, called in with one message, and that was the last we heard from him.”

  “You’ve tried to contact him?”

  “Oh, aye, last night I talked with Glasgow Central myself.”

  “And?”

  Billy Ewing shrugged. “And nothing. No trace. He borrowed a car belonging to Glasgow CID – and it hasn’t been returned.”

  “Do you have a copy of his last message?” Pagan asked.

  “Back a
t the office.”

  “We’ll go in your car, Billy,” Pagan said.

  “Whatever you say.”

  They went in Ewing’s Ford through Central London, through streets springing to daily, prosaic life, and by the time they reached Golden Square, Frank Pagan’s sleepiness had evaporated, replaced by a general sense of uneasiness.

  The message was already two days old and as Pagan fingered the flimsy piece of paper he had the unsettling feeling, given perhaps only to mediums and soothsayers, that Foxie’s silence indicated a serious condition.

  “Mibbe he’s following up on something,” Ewing suggested. “Mibbe he’s on to something hot.”

  “And he couldn’t find change for a telephone call, Billy?”

  Ewing, baffled, shrugged. He knew as well as Pagan that Foxworth was a diligent man who paid conscientious attention to detail. Pagan went inside his office and sat for a time on the sofa. He shut his eyes, rubbed them, worried about Foxie.

  He looked up at Billy Ewing. “Get me on the next available flight to Glasgow, Billy. And get me a gun.”

  “Do you want some company, Frank? I know the territory, after all.”

  Pagan shook his head, stood up, felt an immense pressure in his chest. He didn’t want company, talkative or otherwise. He would follow Foxworth’s trail alone. He borrowed Ewing’s pistol, a Smith and Wesson, and Billy drove him from Golden Square out along the motorway to Heathrow.

  On the way Billy Ewing mentioned the result of his inquiries into Harry Hurt and Sheridan Perry. Pagan could barely recall having made the request; it seemed such a long time ago. Rich pair of buggers, Frank, was how Billy Ewing phrased it. “But wealth, as my old Grannie used to phrase it, is no guarantee of immortality.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Harry Hurt was assassinated in Washington, and Sheridan Perry has disappeared.”

  “Somehow I’m not surprised,” Pagan said.

  Billy Ewing sighed. “There’s a lot of dying going on, Frank.”

  Scotland

  The flight to Glasgow was uneventful. It was just after eight a.m. when Pagan arrived and took a taxi to the city centre. Morning sunlight in the city, an unexpected state of affairs, and lovely, the breeze off the River Clyde bracing, the clouds rushing across a clear blue sky. In the heart of Glasgow Pagan went at once to the offices of the Executive Motor Car Company in West Nile Street. This was the new Glasgow – gone was a certain tired, washed-out drabness, a weariness of the soul that had given the city the appearance of some Baltic capital. Uplifted, scrubbed, renewed, it was as if the city had overcome an inferiority complex after many years of arduous, expensive therapy.

  Pagan found the Executive Motor Car Company located over a philately shop. He climbed the stairs. Halfway up, winded, he paused. A telephone rang somewhere above him, a kettle whistled. This was the way Foxworth had come, these were the stairs he must have climbed. Pagan reached the landing where a lovely young woman stood in a doorway, holding in one hand a mug of hot tea.

  “You don’t look terrific,” she said. “Are you feeling sick? Can I get you anything?”

  Pagan smiled, shook his head, showed his ID, asked about Foxie. The woman said her name was Miss Wilkie and, yes, she remembered Foxworth, he had been very charming, very much a gentleman of the kind one rarely saw these days – and she blushed, Pagan noticed.

  Miss Wilkie frowned, as if she had become suddenly concerned about Foxworth’s fate. “Has something happened to him?”

  “I’m not sure,” Pagan replied. “Where was he going when he left here?”

  “I gave him very specific directions, Mr Pagan, to a house in Ayrshire. In fact, I kept a copy of the map our driver made for him. It’s a bit rough, but easy to follow.” She paused. She had small, trim hands that gleamed because they had recently been rubbed with skin lotion. “He hasn’t come back yet, is that it?”

  Pagan nodded. “That’s it exactly.”

  “He asked about some men – let me think a minute. They had names that began with the letter C. One was called Chap, Chap something or other.”

  “Chapotin?”

  “I believe you’re right,” said Miss Wilkie. “The other man was named Caporelli. Both these men used our limousines to visit the country house in which Mr Foxworth showed such interest.”

  Pagan felt a very small pulse in his dry throat. He tried to imagine Foxie’s excitement when he uncovered the information that both Chapotin and Enrico Caporelli had visited the same house. That link, that complex knot tying together Caporelli and Chapotin, the same knot that brought both Rosabal and Gunther Ruhr into its ornate folds and twists.

  “He might have been in an accident,” Miss Wilkie said in a kindly, hesitant way. “Some of the roads are bad. Then there are cliffs …” She left this line of thought alone, and smiled, and there was bravery in the expression. “You’ll find him, you’ll see. People always turn up.”

  But in what condition? Pagan wondered. He took the copy of the map, studied it, felt dizzy. He asked about renting a car and Miss Wilkie said she could oblige very easily. A few forms to complete, that was all. Pagan filled in the requisite paperwork, thanked Miss Wilkie, shook her hand, went down into West Nile Street. The city seemed unduly loud to him suddenly, the clatter of buses, clogged streets. He found a small coffee shop near Royal Exchange Square and went inside, drank two cups of strong Kenyan quickly, then returned to Executive Motor Cars Limited to pick up his hired car, a Fiat Uno.

  Out of the city and on his way south; easy enough on paper, but his sense of direction was skewed and he went in circles for an hour before finding the route that would take him into Ayrshire, presumably the same route Foxworth had taken before. Pagan drove carefully; sleep kept coming in now, dark wave after dark wave. He studied Miss Wilkie’s map now and then, and, noticing the sparkling greenery of the countryside through which he drove, wished he were a tourist and this some casual jaunt directly into the heart of beauty.

  He stopped in Ayr, stretched his legs near the harbour, breathed the sea air into his lungs, watched gulls squabble like spectators in search of a sport. Perhaps Foxie had come this way too; pursuing a ghost, Pagan thought. He half-expected to see Foxie by the side of the road, his automobile broken down and young Foxie resting indolently upon a grassy bank while awaiting the arrival of a mechanic. But Pagan saw no Foxworths and no broken-down cars. He drove south out of Ayr and almost at once the countryside became forlorn – lovely, yes, but in a different way, more starkly melancholic, with ancient, whitewashed stone cottages and old farmhouses erected in quiet isolation, and here and there a TV antenna to bring another world, an incongruous one, into old parlours. Pagan continued to drive south.

  He parked in a place overlooking the sea, examined the map again. He saw Ballantrae on his rough map, and out of that village led a narrow track, and there – an inked rectangle, underlined – was presumably the house. It was unnamed, a simple inky square on copy paper. Had Foxworth gone there? Had he found it? If so, why hadn’t he called Golden Square to say so?

  Pagan’s head throbbed as much from anxiety as pain; dread created a stress all its own. He drove again, thinking that Foxie could take care of himself, he was a grown man, a good cop, he knew how to handle situations: so why all this damned worry?

  The town of Girvan, sunlight on deep grey water, seabirds, a miniature fairground, tarpaulined for the dead season, near the sea. Pagan was blinded by bright sun rippling on the tide. And then Girvan was behind him and he was headed for the village of Ballantrae, remembering that Robert Louis Stevenson had once written a novel entitled The Master of Ballantrae, but Pagan had never read it, never read a word of Stevenson; how remiss of him, he thought now. Foxie, who had gone to an expensive school, had probably read the lot.

  The track outside Ballantrae was narrow. Birds flew from hedgerows – bright starlings, thrushes, plain little sparrows, and once a plump plover that flew toward Pagan’s windshield as if intent on bringing to a swift conclusion some avian
depression. The hedges that rose on either side prevented any kind of view of what lay beyond, and Pagan wondered if Foxie had come this way and felt the same sensation of isolation, almost an eeriness that the forceful sun could not dispel.

  Foxie: where the hell are you?

  What did you find in this place?

  The track grew worse; the hedgerows eclipsed the low morning sun. Pagan felt the Fiat bump and shudder, but it was nothing compared to the ride in Bengochea’s chopper. He slowed where the hedges thinned, seeing flat meadowlands vanish toward stands of trees, an empty landscape with neither animals nor people. Only a solitary hawk, casting a squat shadow, suggested motion. He ought to have reached the house some time ago, but then he understood that this roughly drawn map bore no resemblance to actual scale.

  When he finally saw the house it surprised him. It rose in sunlight and shadow as though it were a deformed sandstone dream, grand circular towers and narrow windows, a pretension here in a landscape without airs of grandeur. He stopped the Fiat, got out, peered through the hedgerow at the edifice, then pushed his way through – branches springing at him with unexpected harshness – and stepped into a swampy meadow littered with yellow wild flowers.

  The house glowed red in morning sunlight. In crannies, in abysses of brickwork, between turrets, shadows were wine-coloured and warm. Pagan walked across the sponge-like grass toward the mansion, then paused when he reached a copse of trees. Somebody had been working there – a wheelbarrow was propped alongside a tree, a spade stuck in the soil, there was the soft scent of good earth newly turned over. A sizeable trench had been dug in the ground. Pagan stepped between the trees, paused, looked off in the direction of the house, which was a half mile away.

  A car was parked in the drive, a Jaguar, he thought, but sunlight obscured the lines of the vehicle; there was also a jeep just behind it. Nobody moved, though; the house showed no sign of life. Had it not been for the presence of spade and wheelbarrow and the clammy black perfume of newly shovelled earth, he might have thought the estate abandoned. He took a few steps forward between the overhanging branches of the trees, and loose leaves, disturbed by his passage, drifted to the ground around him. Earth made soft by recent rains sucked at his shoes.