Mambo (15 page)

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

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

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

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

“I'm disappointed, Frank.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Frank Pagan. I can't believe it.”

“Can I come in?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thirteen years, give or take.”

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

“You were twenty-six.”

“And naïve.”

“We were both naïve.”

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

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

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

“Likewise,” she said.

“You look wonderful.”

“My hair's a mess. No make-up.”

“When did you ever need it?”

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

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

“You look sick,” she said.

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

“How bad is it?”

“It comes and goes. Mostly it comes.”

“Poor Frank,” she said.

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

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

“I don't remember that, Frank.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I leave tomorrow.”

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

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

“How about tomorrow?”

“I can't, Frank. Sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Suspicion?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you think?”

“A coup?”

She didn't answer.

“Bloodless?” Pagan asked.

“I can't see into the future.”

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

Magdalena Torrente said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

“What brings you here this time, Magdalena?”

“I'm a tourist.”

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