Mambo (45 page)

It started with that simple notion: the replacement of Castro with a non-Communist, democratic regime in which bankers and investors might have faith. If the proposition were simple, the execution was not. It required all of Falk's cunning and patience to hammer together the strategy that would bring down Castro and elevate Rosabal. It required financial partners, men like Harry Hurt and Sheridan Perry and their Society, money men whose greed could always be counted upon to overwhelm their misgivings. Hurt and the others had to be brought into the scheme in such a way that they might eventually credit
themselves
with the glorious idea of bringing down Castro in the first place. But the plan required more than Hurt's merry gang – there had to be co-operation in certain Government and intelligence agencies, there had to be a force in Cuba itself that Rosabal could galvanise when the time came. So many elements, so many different instruments; but Falk, concert-master, conductor, knew how to syncopate the music and make it coherently sweet.

Falk stared back in the direction of Cuba. He was under no illusion that Rosabal's regime would exist three or four years from now. All Cuban administrations, no matter how sound in the beginning, sooner or later deteriorated into ill-tempered factions and violence and corruption of a kind the United States could not officially tolerate. But, in the meantime, President Rosabal would be tolerable, and friendly, and the honeymoon between the US and Cuba would vibrate with fresh enthusiasms and some satisfying intercourse. A pro-American government, corrupt or otherwise, was forever preferable to Communism in any form.

Rosabal looked at his watch. “It's time for me to leave. When we meet again, Allen, it will be in Havana.”

“I look forward to that,” Falk said.

“A new Havana,” Rosabal added, smiling his best and brightest smile, which flashed in the dark.

Miami

Magdalena Torrente parked her car behind the Casa de la Media Noche in Little Havana. The restaurant was closed for the night, although lights were still lit in the dining-room and the jukebox was playing a mambo and a fat man was dancing with a hesitant skinny woman between the tables. Magdalena stepped into the alley behind the building. Garrido, who had been expecting her, opened the door before she knocked. In his white suit he seemed to shimmer. An hallucination, she thought. Like everything else that had happened.

He held the door open for her, then closed it. They went inside the windowless box-room stacked with cans of tomatoes and sacks of rice. She suddenly longed for a view of something, anything at all. A vista. She clenched her hands and said, “I love him. I've worried it every way I can and I come to the same conclusion every goddam time. I love him.”

Garrido nodded his head. “I know,” he said quietly. He thought:
It is your love that makes you the only choice, Magdalena. It is your love and pain
. He was filled with melancholy suddenly, as if he were remembering the lost love of his own life, Magdalena Torrente's mother Oliva; it was all so long ago, ancient history. Just the same, he was glad there was so little resemblance between the dead woman and her daughter.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I'm fine, really I'm fine.”

Garrido caressed her hair with his hand. A small electric shock flashed across his palm. “Are you sure? Absolutely sure? Do you have the energy,
querida
?”

For a second she gazed up into the bare lightbulb that illuminated the room. She remembered the lights of the Buick on the causeway, the way they burned in her rear-view mirror; she heard again the noise of the big car going through the barrier and over the side.

She blinked, then looked at Garrido. She said, “I'm sure.”

He went to his secret compartment in the wall behind the shelves. He removed a green pouch, which he handed to her. “Some things you may need.”

She took the pouch but didn't open it.

Garrido kissed her on the forehead; the touch of his lips was dry and avuncular, his cigar breath and the scent of brilliantine on his hair not exactly pleasant. But she had the thought that at least there was no betrayal in the old man's gesture.

17

Miami

Lieutenant Philip Navarro of the Dade County Police was an uncommon kind of cop, articulate, smart, inquisitive, loaded down with none of the weariness and cynicism, the suggestion of emotional numbness you sometimes find in forty-year-old policemen. He had enthusiasm still, a vitality Pagan liked. He was short and slim, his face boyish; to offset this impression of youth he'd grown a thick moustache and wore a sombre three-piece suit of the kind you might encounter in the lobby of a Hilton during a bankers' convention. He listened to Pagan's convoluted story with the look of an impartial, but kindly, branch manager about to make a loan to somebody with no collateral.

Navarro was a big fan of Martin Burr, who had apparently deported a notorious Colombian drug lord from the United Kingdom some years ago, a man Navarro wanted for a variety of crimes in Florida. Burr had smoothed the extradition process, overriding paperwork and red tape, and Navarro had always been grateful. It was this gratitude that Frank Pagan hoped to tap now as he sat in the Lieutenant's cramped office, whose window looked over a lamplit yard containing impounded cars. On the wall behind Navarro's desk hung framed awards commending him for his civic work and his marksmanship.

Navarro said, “With your British passport you can enter Cuba legally. Fly out of Miami to Jamaica or Mexico City, get a visa, fly to Havana. I don't see any problem there.”

“That takes too much time,” Pagan said. “I'm looking for a fast alternative.”

“The age of immediacy,” Navarro said, and sighed, as if he longed for slower eras. He rose from his chair and walked to the window where he leaned his forehead against the pane a moment. “When I got your call, first thing I did was check you out with Martin Burr.”

“And?”

“He asked me to extend the hand of co-operation. Said you were sometimes on the headstrong side but otherwise okay.”

“Good of him.”

“Also you were less than objective at times.”

“Character analysis isn't Martin's strong point,” Pagan remarked. “Besides, objectivity's overrated. I get involved.”

“At the gut level,” Navarro said.

“Usually.”

Navarro, who had no great regard for professional detachment himself, liked Frank Pagan. He turned from the window. “I'm happy to extend the hand of co-operation. I'm just not sure how far it should go. If I understand you, what you're asking me to do is break the law.”

“Purely in a technical sense,” Pagan said.

“Easy for you to say, Frank. I live here. You don't.”

“I don't have your connections in this town, Phil. I don't know where to go, whom to ask. If I did, I wouldn't have come here and bothered you.”

Navarro remembered now that Martin Burr had mentioned something about how persistent Pagan could be. Worse than a bloody door-to-door salesman, Burr had said. “What makes you sure Rosabal can help you?”

“I never said I was sure. Put it another way. I'm running very low on options, Phil. I have to talk to Rosabal. It might be a dead end, but right now I don't have anywhere else to go.”

Navarro sat up on the edge of his desk, swung one leg back and forth, looked sympathetic. He had been in predicaments similar to Pagan's, when you had nothing more than some bare hunch to base your actions on and your superiors quibbled about the adequacy of your instincts.
You can't make a case on your intuitions, Phil
– he'd heard it all before.

Another reason he was sympathetic to Pagan was because the man had been at the very centre of the Shepherd's Bush Massacre, which – according to Martin Burr – had made Pagan understandably anxious, some might even say overly so. A smidgen of kindness would not go amiss, Burr had added. Phil Navarro, surrounded every day of his life with news of murdered colleagues in the continuing drug wars of Dade County, hadn't grown immune to the shock of loss he felt when he heard of policemen slain on duty.

“What you want is tricky,” he said. “Also risky.”

“I expected that,” Pagan remarked.

Navarro, who had recently quit smoking, took a wooden toothpick from a container on his desk and poked his lower teeth with it. “Costly too, Frank.”

“That might be a problem,” Pagan said. He had about four hundred dollars in traveller's cheques and a Visa card whose limit was dangerously close. “I assume that nobody in this clandestine line of business takes plastic?”

Navarro smiled and said. “The only plastic they understand is the kind that explodes. But my credit's always good in certain circles. There's always somebody happy to please Lieutenant Navarro. You know how it is.”

“I know exactly how it is,” Pagan said. In London he had his own pool of shady characters who were always delighted to score points with him. They reasoned, quite rightly, that it was better to have Pagan on your side than against you.

“Okay.” Navarro snapped his toothpick, discarded it. “I'll make a phone call. I'm going to have to ask you to wait outside, Frank.”

Pagan understood. He found a chair in the lobby and slumped into it. He shut his eyes. Through the thin wall he could hear the low mumble of Navarro's voice, but the words were indistinct. Two uniformed cops went past, glancing at him with looks of surly curiosity; he felt like a suspected criminal. He sat for ten minutes, then Navarro called him back into the office.

“I'll drive you to meet a man called Salgado. He'll take you.”

“I owe you one, Phil.”

Navarro raised a smooth well-manicured hand in the air. “Don't thank me too soon. You ever been in Cuba?”

Pagan shook his head.

“It's not terrific under the best of circumstances, Frank, and the way you're entering the country isn't the best by a long shot. You don't have a visa. Your passport hasn't been stamped at any point of entry. You have no return ticket. No hotel booking. Worst of all, you're carrying a gun. You've got to watch for police. You've got to be very careful you aren't seen behaving suspiciously by those charmers who call themselves the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution – they watch everything that goes on. Some of them are old ladies who sit in their windows all day long to see who's coming and who's going. They report strangers immediately. Be careful. Act normal. Act as if you know where you're going. And for Christ's sake don't get caught.”

Navarro paused and looked at Pagan with concern. “I can get you in, Frank. When it comes to getting you out, I don't know how I can help.”

“I'll take my chances,” Pagan said. What else could he do?

Navarro was quiet for a time. “I was born in Cuba. My parents took me out when I was eight and I haven't been back. I've got family still there. It's an unhealthy place, Frank, like any police state.”

They left the office. When they were out in the lobby Navarro said, “Salgado will deliver you to somebody who can provide you with a car and the address you need in Havana. After that, buddy, you're on your own.”

“I realise that.”

“You get into any trouble, you never saw me, you don't know who I am, you don't know who flew you into Cuba, you know absolutely nothing. You're a clam. Pretend amnesia. Pretend lunacy. But give nothing away.”

“Lunacy should be easy,” Pagan said.

Navarro drove through North Miami and past Florida International University. Pagan was very quiet during the ride. He felt an odd kind of tension, as if Cuba were a haunted house he was about to enter – Navarro spoke now and then about his vague memories of his birthplace – little things, a horse-race he'd seen at Oriental Park in 1958, going with his father to a baseball game played between something called the Hershey Sport Club and the University of Havana in 1957, a brief adventure in shoplifting at a Woolworth store in Havana. Pagan had the feeling that Navarro might have been reminiscing about life in the United States in the 1950s, as though Cuba, in the doomed reign of Fulgencio Batista, had been nothing more than an unofficial American state.

Dark fields loomed up. Navarro became silent as he drove over a rutted track between meadows. He stopped the car, got out. Pagan followed him over the field. Beyond a stand of trees a small plane idled. A dim light glowed in the cockpit.

“This is it, Frank,” Navarro said.

Pagan shook the man's hand, then glanced at the plane. The propellers turned, the craft rolled forward a little way. To Pagan's anxious ear the engine sounded erratic, a heart missing a beat; you're afraid, he thought. Dead scared and hearing things.

“I'm not convinced this is right,” Navarro said.

“Maybe not.”

“What the hell. Sometimes the wrong thing turns out to be right. In your place, I'd do exactly what you're doing. I justify it that way.”

Pagan understood that he was meant to find some comfort in Navarro's approval. What he felt instead was a kind of clammy apprehension and a tightness coiled around his heart.

Honduras

Two hours before dawn the cruise missile and the tarpaulined missile control module were transported to the freighter
Mandadera
. They were raised by shipboard cranes and lowered into the hold of the vessel. Ruhr, demonic by lamplight, supervised every movement, scolding the crew, hovering over the cylinder in a way that reminded Captain Luis Sandoval of a fussing
abuela
, a grandmother. The German, who carried a canvas bag he would not let out of his sight, checked the strength of the crane cables and the integrity of the winch; he was busy here, busy there, vigilant, energetic, fastidious.

Luis Sandoval, anxious to begin the five-hundred-mile voyage to Santiago de Cuba, fretted impatiently, especially over the child in the entourage, a teenage girl whom Sandoval had not expected. He showed her to a small cabin, where she sat on the edge of the bunk with her knees jammed together and her eyes flat and dull. Why was this child aboard, this urchin, this unsmiling
granuja
?