Mambo (19 page)

“You are so afraid,” he said. “There is really no need, Stephanie. Sometimes when you are afraid it becomes contagious, and the people around you begin to be afraid also, and then they do irrational things out of fear. Be calm, little girl.”

Steffie licked her dry lips. What bloody good was silence anyway? It was too meek, too feeble. If she was going to get anywhere, she'd have to speak. Her voice was hoarse when she whispered, “If you let me leave, I swear I'll never say a thing to anybody. I'll make a solemn vow.”

Ruhr said, “In my experience, people who make solemn vows are usually the first to make betrayals also.”

“I wouldn't do that. I promise.”

Ruhr looked at her for a while. He slowly transferred the small brassière from his good hand to the bad one. “I am sure you believe what you say right at this moment. But my answer is the same. You see,” – and he patted her knuckles; his skin was like damp slate – “I have business to conduct and I can't afford to let you go home to your parents. Do you understand that? It would be imprudent of me to release you.”

“When will you let me go? When your business is finished?”

Ruhr stood up. He looked down at her. “In about twenty minutes from now, we are going to take a short trip.”

“Where?”

Ruhr placed a fingertip to his mouth, a gesture of secrecy.

“But,” was all she managed to say before Ruhr replaced the gag.

Outside the house, Trevaskis and Rick loaded the Range Rover with M-16s, tear gas canisters, rocket launchers, grenades, gas masks. The guns, which had been cleaned yet again last night by the Argentinians, were all in excellent condition. Ruhr's inspection of the weapons had been thorough.

Trevaskis, half-listening to the car radio, said, “You ask me, it's fucked, the whole situation.”

Rick, as taciturn as he was massive, grunted as he loaded a box of ammunition.

“Some things you don't mess with,” Trevaskis said. “This kid, now. What's the point? I wouldn't have brought her inside the house in the first goddam place. No way. A quick bullet in the skull, kid's dead, you got no extra baggage.”

“Right,” Rick agreed.

“And if you don't want her blood on your hands, then all you gotta do is tie her up real tight and leave her in the house. Sooner or later somebody's gonna find her.” Trevaskis, who didn't much like the idea of violence being done to a child, was quiet for a moment. “He's one sick sonofabitch, lemme tell you. Look into his eyes, man. I seen saner guys in county asylums.”

Slicks of rain ran down Trevaskis' face to his neck and slithered over his St Christopher. “So long as he don't screw up the whole deal, I don't care. I'll tell you one thing for free: I can't stand that bastard. If he crosses me …” Trevaskis let his sentence hang unfinished. Then he added, “There's only one goddam reason to bring the chick along.”

“What's that?”

“Think about it, Rick.”

Ruhr came out of the house just then. The Americans fell silent at once. Ruhr walked round the Range Rover and stood with his arms folded. He stared up at the dawn sky. The clouds and the rainy haze weren't going to be unfavourable factors. He looked at his wristwatch: six fifty-eight.

“I still say we don't take her with us.” Trevaskis stared at Ruhr, a hard look that didn't impress the German, who simply made an impatient gesture. “Either we shoot her, or we leave her behind and secure.”

“She goes in the back of the vehicle. We've discussed all this. The matter is closed, Trevaskis.”

“And then what? What happens to her afterwards?”

Ruhr said nothing. Trevaskis wearied him. The American stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, “I just heard on the car radio your man Pagan's back on the job, Ruhr. He's outta the hospital and coming after you. How's that grab you, Mr Claw?”

Ruhr walked some yards from the vehicle. He wasn't even going to dignify Trevaskis' information, thrown at him like some feeble gauntlet, with any kind of comment. Pagan was a policeman and one cop was much like another: they all had dead imaginations. The best one could hope for from a man such as Pagan was that his injury might have made him a more dangerous adversary, that he was looking less to recapture Ruhr than he was to avenge the death of his comrades. A cop on a personal mission was always more interesting than one plodding through dull routine.

But he'd deal with the question of Pagan later, because something else had begun to bother him slightly.

There were times when he stood in a landscape or stepped inside a room and he had an instinct, almost a certainty, an animal sense, that something adverse was about to happen. Often this premonitory ability gave him time to take evasive action. But right now whatever troubled him was so vague it was like a faint scent blown on a haphazard breeze.

He looked up the slope of land that rose from the farmhouse, up through mud and wet trees and clumps of nettles. Whatever made him uneasy lay on the rise, he was sure of that much. He covered the butt of his pistol with the palm of his hand and studied the landscape. The trees dripped, the foliage stirred, the mud was covered with puddles that reflected the sky like so many tiny cracked mirrors.

Ruhr thought about the girl. Her parents would have begun last night by calling their daughter's friends. There would have been no panic at first, a mere uneasiness, perhaps a certain irritation after a time. Then they might have gone out on foot to search for her. Rain and mud and the absence of light would halt them, at least until dawn. They would also have called the local police.

But how many men were available in a country constabulary? And the terrain, covered with muddy fields and ditches and a tortuous network of lanes, could not be combed quickly. Even though it was mainly a flat landscape, it was a secretive one, with hollows, and tall grasses, and dense stands of trees. There were hundreds of isolated farmhouses, weekend cottages for Londoners, windmills, abandoned ruins.

Ruhr took a couple of steps toward the slope. He might have done what Trevaskis had recommended. He might have shot the child. He'd already considered the idea. In time, no doubt, he would jettison her. But he remembered the feel of her skin, and the small white brassière flecked with mud, and he thought about the high cheekbones and the thin oval face and the way her short skirt hardly covered her thighs. He was flooded with a longing both familiar and dangerous. The youthfulness of the child, her silken vulnerability: these were the two elements of an equation whose sum was terror. And what was terror but a means of total control? Besides, when he thought of the girl in Cambridge he had a sense of unfinished business, which he didn't like.

There was another factor in the girl's favour. He imagined a situation in which he might need a hostage, a human shield, a bargaining chip. In his past experience he'd found hostages useful tools. It was astonishing how the forces of law and order would silence their guns when they knew innocent lives might be jeopardised. The terrified face of a hostage was a mirror that reflected the image of an orderly society threatened. Let the hostage be killed and what did you have – the failure of the state to protect its innocents, the dreaded anarchy the forces of law existed to prevent.

Trevaskis might have shot the girl, but therein lay the difference between the American and Ruhr. The former never considered the possibility of finding gold in dross; Ruhr, on the other hand, had a genius for turning the unexpected to his advantage. How else had he survived this long?

Now the wind blew, running through the trees as if a congregation of squirrels had set the branches dancing. Under that rattle there was something else. Not the wind.

Then Ruhr saw.

There, at the crest of the slope, a man pushing a bicycle appeared. He was coming down toward the house; Ruhr at once recognised the man's uniform as that of a police constable. Here, in this rustic corner of England, country policemen still cycled their beat. Ruhr watched the man come down the incline, then he turned slightly, conscious of how Trevaskis and Rick were motionless now, and how the two South Americans stood very still in the open doorway of the house.

The policeman reached the foot of the slope. He was middle-aged and slightly overweight and he wheezed a little.

“Morning,” he said.

Ruhr kept his pistol covered.

“Bloody awful day,” the policeman added. He made sure his bike was well balanced against the trunk of a tree, then he strolled toward Ruhr. Mud squelched beneath his heavy boots as he moved. About six feet from Gunther Ruhr he stopped.

“I'm looking for a girl that's gone missing,” the constable said. “Seems she was out riding and her horse came home without her last night. I was wondering if you'd seen any sign of the child.”

A horse; the girl hadn't mentioned an animal. “I'm sorry,” Ruhr said.

“Well then,” the constable said. “Keep your eyes open, sir, if you don't mind. Always appreciate any information. You new around here?”

Ruhr nodded. He saw it suddenly in the man's face: recognition, disguised behind a large uneasy smile, but recognition just the same. It was unmistakable.

The policeman scratched the side of his face and said, “We all know how young girls are nowadays. Spend nights with their boyfriends. Parents are the last to know, of course.” The constable had himself in check now. He had control. He could go through the motions without showing the excitement of discovery. This was the terrorist being hunted all across England – and here he was, right in your own back yard!

“Thanks for your time, sir.” The policeman glanced at the house, then walked to his bicycle. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

He wheeled the vehicle out from under the tree and when he'd pushed the bike about ten feet, Ruhr called out to him.

“Constable. One moment.”

The policeman turned. Ruhr moved toward him. The wind gathered force and shook every tree on the slope and blew a quick flurry of dead leaves through the air.

“Sir?” the policeman asked. A solitary leaf had settled on his shoulder.

Three feet from the constable, Ruhr stopped. In a swift gesture, which looked superficially innocent – a man bending to adjust a sock, a shoelace – he reached beneath the turn-up of his trousers and into the leather sheath he kept strapped to his shin. The knife was in his hand before the constable could move, and, before the weapon registered, the policeman was all but dead. He couldn't move quickly enough for Ruhr, who came up with the knife at an oblique angle and drove the blade into the throat. The policeman cried out, clutched the slash in his neck, then slid to his knees as if, astonished by imminent death, he needed to pray. Ruhr stabbed the man a second time, twisting the blade deep in the ribs.

The policeman fell back, knocking his bicycle over and causing the front wheel to rise in the air, where it spun idly. Ruhr wiped the blade with some leaves.

“Fucking impressive,” Trevaskis said to Rick.

9

Villa Clara Province, Cuba

The house overlooked the ocean and the group of islands known as the Archipelago de Sabana. It was a large white stucco affair constructed around a central courtyard; moonlit water splashed out of a fountain and cascaded over a statue in the shape of a naked girl. The statue was a fine example of social realism, but the Lider Maximo, who stood on a balcony overlooking the fountain, wasn't exactly famous for his appreciation of anything artistic, though he always talked otherwise, since nobody ever questioned his judgments. He surrounded himself at times with swarms of words – like a beekeeper of language – phrases heaped on phrases, intricate and often colourful, yet frequently convoluted and downright enigmatic.

He fought with the urge to smoke one of the cigars he'd given up a while ago. He looked up at the sky. It was a gorgeous Cuban midnight with thin, high clouds and the sound of the tide, a night of coolness and clarity. But the Lider Maximo wasn't in any mood to appreciate such things.

Noises rose from the party in the room below. A piano played. Somebody told a joke to polite laughter. Across the courtyard, beneath arched doorways, armed guards stood in shadows. There were always guards wherever the Lider Maximo went. He even had people who tasted his food before he consumed it.

He turned away from the sight of the statue and walked inside the house, intolerant of this social gathering tonight; the chit-chat, the men who wanted to shake his hand, the requests whispered in his ear, a favour here, a favour there, everything was a bore. He listened a moment to the piano. He had no ear for music – especially now, when he was this impatient.

Where was the Minister of Finance? What was keeping him
?

The Lider Maximo went down the stairs. The piano was silent. In the large drawing-room all heads turned as he entered. His unsmiling condition had been noticed earlier and the party had adjusted itself. What might have been loud was muted and discreet. Everybody tried to please the Lider Maximo. They stepped around him as if he lived at the centre of a large pampa of unbroken eggs. Everybody breathed softly in his presence and smiled just a little too eagerly. Women, some of whom underwent a suppressed hysteria in the man's company, were shrill in their pleasantries. But he was more than a man; he was as much an icon in Cuba as the old plaster Christs and Madonnas one still found concealed all the way from the Golfo de Guanahacabibes in the west to Punta Caleta in the east.

Communist Party officials and military leaders and attractive women filled the room. Some spilled out on to a patio where the remains of a roast pig turned on a spit and charcoals glowed and wine bottles stood in disarray on small tables. The Lider Maximo, stroking his beard, stared through the open door and across the patio.

The car would come from that direction.

He tried to be charming to a handsome silver-haired woman, a Danish journalist, who wanted to know something about political prisoners – but he was surrounded by his attendants and assistants and the usual Colombian novelist with three names who was something of a house pet. The entourage that swirled about him also included a group of Communist functionaries, some of whom had come from Italy and Spain and India, sightseers of Caribbean Communism:
fidelismo
.