Mambo

by Campbell Armstrong

  Crack.

  She’d come back tomorrow. She couldn’t leave the mystery alone.

  3

  London

  When his wife Roxanne had been killed seven years ago by an IRA bomb detonated in a London street, Frank Pagan had lived for some time in a world of incomprehensible pain, a bleak place where his will to live was smothered. It was the sort of pain that lingered in bewildering ways long after the event. A resemblance on a street, a phrase from a certain song, the creak of a floor in his flat – these things stirred the ghost, and the pain returned, always swift, never less than savage. He’d come to accept that this emptiness was a lifelong thing. He’d combated it to some extent, but there was always the residue. Sometimes he’d caught himself waiting for the approach of Roxanne Pagan’s memory. The anticipation of pain, a gentle masochism.

  That was one kind of hurt.

  In this white hospital room, whose translucence suggested an hallucination, he was beginning to understand another form of pain altogether. When he raised his face, hot threads tightened malignantly in his chest. When he had to get out of bed and go to the toilet – he defiantly refused to take the wheelchair, which was transportation for the damned only – he walked like a man negotiating a field of broken glass. Any sudden motion sent a violent response up through his bandaged chest. At times his heart seemed charged with electricity, as if copper wires were conducting a brisk current through it.

  He really hadn’t needed to be reminded so forcibly of his own mortality. What also shook him was the sense of violation, his body breached by a force that might have destroyed him. This notion was shocking: he’d been shot at before, but never hit, and perhaps he’d come to think it was one of those things that happened to other people, never to oneself.

  It didn’t matter that his Pakistani doctor, Ghose, a sweet chain-smoking man with fidgety hands, kept telling him he was wery wery lucky. After all, six policemen had died during the carnage four days ago in Shepherd’s Bush. Another inch to the left, Ghose had reminded him, another short inch, and the total would have been seven. Imagine it, Mister Pagan – the tiny distance of infinity. The idea of six dead policemen, four inside the leading van, one in the third car, and poor Ron Hardcastle from a devastating head wound, took something away from any contemplation of his own luck. Even the knowledge that two of the assailants had also been killed didn’t quite cut the gloom.

  On the morning after Pagan’s admission to the hospital, Ghose had held up X-rays in his smoky-orange fingers, pointing enthusiastically to the pathway of the bullet, which had gone straight through the right lung. Absolutely no functional disturbance, Ghose had said. No fractured ribs. No debris. Very little crushed tissue. A wonderfully clean exit. I’m utterly delighted. I rarely see such symmetry. You must thank God for the insignificant yaw of the bullet.

  Yaw: now there was a nice little word. Pagan had wondered why, if it was such a terrific wound, aesthetically so pleasing to Ghose and with a low yaw factor into the bargain, he was in such terrible pain those first three days.

  Initially he’d been injected with morphine. A thoracostomy tube had been inserted in his chest to reinflate the lung, and then attached to a chest-draining unit. The wound had been closed on the third day. He’d been given anti-tetanus therapy and antibiotics and Ghose prescribed Pethidine, so that this fourth day was the most comfortable Pagan had spent. But comfort in the circumstances was merely relative: he was more glazed by drugs than truly soothed. Just when he thought the pain had subsided it would come back and lance him, causing him to gasp and his eyes to water.

  And then, Christ, there were the dreams. In most of them he was back on that terrible street again, surrounded by searing flames, hearing the same explosions. Sometimes he rushed toward the burning van and tried to get the door open to release the trapped men, but he never quite made it. Infuriating dreams, frustrating and tragic. He always scorched his hands in these nightmares. At other times he dreamed of Gunther Ruhr, hearing over and over the drily uttered German phrase Ruhr had used in the car. Die Reise ist nicht am Ende bis zur Ankunft – endlessly repeated, echoing. He reached out in anger to silence Ruhr, but invariably the German had vaporised, courtesy of that special chemistry of dreams and Pagan would wake sweating, filled with a sense of desperation.

  What he really needed was to be discharged from this place. He couldn’t do anything from a hospital bed. He couldn’t bring the outside world into this boring room of tubes and charts and starched bedsheets. He couldn’t begin to get at Ruhr, who had disappeared without the courtesy of a clue. He’d asked Ghose only that morning to release him. With that inscrutable look all doctors must learn in medical school, the doctor said he’d consider it.

  Restless, Pagan turned his face to the window, where a rare October sun shone on the dusty glass. A tree, gloriously lit by autumn, pressed against the windowpane and tantalised him. There was a high breeze outside, the kind of spirited wind that dries laundry. All this contributed to his impatience. All this made him doubly determined to find a way out of here before it was night again and nurses came to dispense sleeping-pills with the persistence of drug-dealers. Now, Frank, you really must swallow this, do you the world of good. Or, Come on, Frank, be a good boy. He didn’t want to be a good anything. He wanted to be a cantankerous pain in the arse to doctors and nurses alike. He wanted out: he wanted Gunther Ruhr.

  When the door of his private room opened he saw Martin Burr step inside. Burr, the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, carried a bottle of that British panacea called Lucozade and a small bag of fruit, both of which he set down on the bedside table. Haggard from insomnia, he’d been coming twice a day ever since Pagan had been rushed here by ambulance. The Commissioner propped his walnut cane against the bed and sat down, smiling at Pagan, who noticed how a streak of sunlight struck the dark-green plastic patch over Burr’s blinded right eye.

  “How are we today, Frank?”

  “We’re a long way from wonderful,” Pagan replied. “We would like to get the hell out of here.”

  Burr reached for his cane and tapped it on the floor, sighing as he did so. “You’re always in such a damned hurry, Frank. Accept the fact you’ve been wounded, and even if you’re released from this place you need time to convalesce. You still look awful.” Burr looked round. “Rather nice place. Room to yourself. TV. Magazines to read. Enjoy the privacy, Frank. Think of it as an enforced holiday.”

  “With respect, what I need is to get back on the job.”

  Burr’s smile was small and strained, barely concealing the stress of a man who had just spent the worst four days of his life. There had been endless news conferences, and questions raised in the House of Commons about events in Shepherd’s Bush. A commission of inquiry was being set up, which meant that a bunch of professors and civil servants would be asking all kinds of bloody questions. And the press, good God, the press had squeezed the tragedy for everything it was worth and more. The breakdown of law and order. The incompetence of British security forces. The supremacy of the “super-terrorist”. On and on without end. A mob was howling for blood, preferably Martin Burr’s. And the Home Secretary had commanded Burr to attend a private interview, which could only mean that the Commissioner’s job security was somewhat in doubt. These were not good times. The temper of the country was bad; the citizens were horrified when policemen were killed.

  Burr said, “What would it accomplish if you returned to work? You’d wear yourself out within a day, Frank. You’d be back in this bed in no time flat.”

  “I don’t think so. Basically I think I’m in good shape.”

  “Notwithstanding a hole clean through your chest. Think of the shock to your system.”

  “I can’t just lie here.”

  “Afraid you have to,” Burr said. “Anyway, everything that can be done is being done.”

  “And Ruhr’s back in custody?”

  “Below the belt, Frank.”

  Burr leaned towards the bed. He laid both hands ove
r his face and massaged his flesh in a tired way. When he spoke there were hollows of fatigue in his voice. “Let me bring you up to date. Our explosions people say the parked cars that exploded along Acacia Avenue were detonated by a timing-device and the explosives used were of Czech origin.”

  “Brilliant work,” Pagan remarked drily.

  Martin Burr gave Pagan a dark look. “I realise you have very little patience for the kind of systematic work technicians have to do, Frank. Nevertheless, it has to be done.”

  Pagan shut his eyes. There was a tickle in his nostrils. A sneeze was building up. If it succeeded, it would send uncontrollable bolts of pain through his chest. He struggled to overcome it, reaching for a tissue just in case.

  Burr continued. “Twenty-six cars were detonated simultaneously. Nobody we interviewed in the vicinity saw anybody plant the explosives in the first place. The whole thing was done with an extraordinary degree of stealth.”

  Pagan opened his eyes. The sneeze had faded. He lowered the tissue and looked at Martin Burr. “I think we can take stealth for granted,” he said. That tone – it was close to petulant sarcasm. He’d have to be careful not to push it. Alienation of Martin Burr wasn’t a good thing.

  Burr fingered his plastic eye-patch, which he did when he was annoyed. “I understand your impatience, Frank. I also understand that a gunshot wound affects a man’s perceptions. However, I didn’t come here to listen to your cutting little asides. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.”

  Whenever he was irritated, Burr resorted to a patronising tone that Pagan disliked. Chided, Pagan stared at the window, the gorgeous sunlight, and resolved he’d leave this place today no matter how the considerations of Doctor Ghose turned out. He’d swallow some Pethidine and walk out of this bloody hospital under his own steam. By mid-afternoon he’d be back in his office overlooking Golden Square in Soho, where his anti-terrorist section was located. Lord of his own domain again.

  “Now where was I?” Martin Burr said. “Ah, yes. I was coming to the two terrorists killed in the assault.”

  Pagan felt his interest quicken. “Is there anything new?”

  “We haven’t been able to identify one of the men. The other, however, was an Australian citizen by the name of Ralph Masters.”

  “It doesn’t ring any bells,” Pagan said.

  Burr sat back in his chair. “Born Adelaide 1940. Served in the Australian Army in 1960. Nothing for a long time. Then he turns up again in Biafra, nowadays Nigeria, in 1967. He was in the Congo in 1968. After that, he makes an appearance in Nicaragua in the mid-1970s.”

  “The mercenary circuit.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Is there anything more recent on him?”

  Burr shook his head. “So far as we know, he’d been sitting quietly in Sydney. He installed telephones for a living.”

  “That must have bored him senseless. Some people can’t settle after they’ve tasted war. Is there a record of him entering this country?”

  Burr shook his head. “We don’t know when he came in, nor how he got here. We don’t know who employed him.”

  “The same people who employed Gunther Ruhr. Who else?” Pagan plucked a purple grape from the bunch Burr had brought. He popped it in his mouth and bit into the soft skin.

  “Whoever they are.” The Commissioner was morosely silent. Pagan had never seen him quite so dejected. He felt an enormous sympathy for Burr, who took the death of the policemen hard. Recent events had obviously been a heartbreak for him, visiting the widows, the fatherless kids, mouthing platitudes that amounted to nothing in the end. The Commissioner, a candid man who had no glib political skills, was not above genuine tears.

  “I keep thinking about how our security was breached, Frank. I come back time and again to that. That aspect of the whole thing depresses me. It’s not only the dead officers, although God knows that would be monstrous enough in itself.”

  “Too many people knew the route,” Pagan said. “And somebody blabbered.”

  “The itinerary was decided at the highest level. The Home Office was involved. It was decided by all parties that instead of an ostentatious escort we would transport Ruhr quietly by a highly secret route. An awful mistake, as it turned out.”

  A secret was hard to keep in a world of committees, Pagan thought.

  Burr made circles on the tiled floor with the tip of his cane. “I seem to remember you were the only one who raised the subject of air cover, Frank. I wish the rest of us had paid more attention.”

  Pagan shrugged. None of the Commissioner’s wishes could alter the past. Both men were quiet for a long time before Burr went on, “I’d like to think that if somebody gabbed out of turn then it was from sheer carelessness rather than outright treachery. I don’t like the idea of a mole.”

  “But it’s a distinct possibility,” Pagan said.

  Burr got up from the chair and walked to the window. He was a big man, wide-shouldered and heavy around the centre. He looked out into the sunlight and blinked. “Ten people knew the route, including ourselves.”

  “I don’t think you can stop at ten, Commissioner. If you include secretaries and assistants, who have an odd knack of getting wind of everything, the number’s probably closer to thirty, thirty-five. And out of that lot somebody – by accident or design – had a connection with Ruhr’s friends.”

  Pagan paused. His mouth was very dry. He sipped some water before going on. “The trouble is, it’s difficult to run a really thorough investigation of some thirty individuals, especially if it has to be done quickly. And since Ruhr’s obviously up to something in this country – otherwise the big rescue makes no sense – time’s a factor. He’s not over here to sit around twiddling his thumbs for weeks, is he? He’s an expensive commodity. Somebody paid for him to be here. That same somebody spent a lot of money on the rescue. I suspect we’re looking at a matter of days before Ruhr does whatever he’s here to do. Perhaps less.” Pagan hadn’t spoken more than a couple of short sentences since his wound and now he was hoarse. There was an ache in his chest, a brass screw turning.

  Burr stared at him. “If you’re saying that our real priority is to find Ruhr and put the security breach on the back burner, I wholeheartedly agree. Easier said than done, alas. Half the police force of England is looking for him right now, Frank. We’ve had reports of the bugger in Torquay and Wolverhampton and York and all the way up to Scotland. In terms of false sightings, Gunther Ruhr rivals unidentified flying objects.”

  Pagan had a mild Pethidine rush, a weird little sense of distance from himself. At times he floated beyond everything, spaced-out, drifting, a cosmonaut in his own private galaxy. It was a pleasant sort of feeling. It was easy to see how people became addicted to Pethidine. It relegated terrorists and dead policemen and gunshot wounds to another world.

  Pagan shut his eyes and tried very hard to concentrate. “Ruhr specialises in destruction. The question is, what is he here to destroy? And why was he in Cambridge? What’s so interesting about the place?”

  “Not a great deal, Frank.” Martin Burr, an Oxford man with no high regard for the rival university, helped himself to a small glass of Lucozade. He drank, made a face, wondered about the masochism of whole generations of English that had sought good health in the oversweet liquid.

  “What about the countryside around Cambridge? Aren’t there a couple of military bases?” Pagan asked.

  “There’s a NATO installation about forty miles away in Norfolk. Also a number of RAF bases within a forty-mile radius of Cambridge, plus a couple of army camps. We’ve been doing a spot of map-reading.”

  “I thought the NATO base was going out of business.”

  Martin Burr nodded. “To a large extent. The terms of the American-Soviet disarmament treaty call for mid-range ballistic missiles to be removed from bases, shipped back to the United States and then destroyed – with Russian observers on hand to ensure fair play. There’s a laughable contradiction in terms. I’ve yet to hear of a Bolshe
vik who understood fair play.”

  Pagan rarely paid attention to the Commissioner’s bias against Communism. It was a facet of Burr’s personality: a form of phobia, and really quite harmless.

  “Any one of those places is a candidate for Ruhr,” Pagan said.

  “They’ve all beefed up security heavily in the last few days for that very reason. They wouldn’t be easy targets for our German friend.”

  “Is there anything else that might attract him to the area?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too. Ruhr’s target could be a person rather than a place. Or a group of people. In which case, where the devil do we begin? At least three international conferences are coming up in the next week or so in Cambridge. The city’s going to be filled with all kinds of experts. Environmentalists, meteorologists, chemists – and that’s only in Cambridge. What if Ruhr’s target lies in Northampton? Or Bury St Edmunds? What then?”

  Pagan considered the Commissioner’s remarks for a moment. Ruhr had become endowed with almost supernatural powers: he was everywhere, and capable of anything. “Here’s another possibility to make things a little more complicated: Ruhr was just passing through Cambridge on the way to somewhere else – London, Birmingham – and he stopped to have some fun, if you can call it that.”

  Pagan remembered the girl who had been with Ruhr at the time of his capture. A skinny little thing, anaemic, small-breasted. Her name was Penny Ford and she lived in a one-room flat where she’d taken Ruhr after a casual encounter in a pub. When Pagan had interviewed her she’d said that she wasn’t in the habit of inviting strange fellows home, you understand, but Ruhr had been, well, bloody persistent and anyhow he didn’t have a place to stay, and she was only human after all. And her rent was almost due into the bargain and she was a bit short of the readies. She’d imagined a straight screw, Pagan thought. Uncomplicated sex, a quick exchange of money, end of the matter. Ruhr had other notions.

  Penny Ford hadn’t been able to tell Pagan why Ruhr was in Cambridge or how he had travelled there or where he was living. She knew nothing about him. She was informative only when it came to his sexual demands. Pagan remembered the girl’s quiet voice. We had sex, and I thought that was the end of it … I went inside the lavatory and when I came back he was sitting up on the edge of the bed and looking at me … well, in a funny kind of way … And he was making this dry whistling sort of noise, you know, tuneless like, but weird, like he wants to whistle only he doesn’t know how … He asks me to come over. Which I did, because I thought he wanted another go. He asks me to sit on his knee. Which I also did.