Caporelli felt the warm gun against the roof of his mouth. He was aware of the smell of booze on the man’s breath. Alcohol and revolutionary fervour. The Major was capable of anything. On the landing, the girl was holding the corner of her silk robe to her mouth. She’d believed Caporelli was protected by the powers in Cuba, that he had the kind of clout which made him impregnable. Last night he’d been tireless, a demon lover, coming at her time and again with a remorseless quality that was extraordinary even in her wide experience. Now he was reduced. He looked tiny to her down there in the entrance hall, and sad.
“Take the paper,” Estrada said, and released the safety catch. It was the most lethal sound Caporelli had ever heard. Nevertheless, he defied the Cuban again. He said Piss off, his tongue dry upon the steel barrel.
“Payaso,” Estrada said, and shoved the gun hard. Caporelli made pitiful retching noises. Later, he thought how little dignity there was in the situation. Stark fear diminished you, reduced you to nothing. Everything you imagined yourself to be was peeled away from you, and nothing else mattered but the proximity of the weapon and the fact that your heart was still beating and you were prepared to strike any kind of deal to keep it pumping. The presence of the girl was already forgotten. The idea that she witnessed this shameful incident meant nothing to him just then.
Estrada took a rosary from his tunic and ran the beads through the fingers of one hand. “God have mercy on you,” he whispered. “Adios.”
And then the little scene, poised so bleakly on the edge of death, dissolved in laughter as Estrada wrenched the gun out of Caporelli’s mouth. The two soldiers, who had reappeared, were also laughing; it was the raucous laughter of drunks enjoying a great joke. Caporelli shut his eyes. His stomach had dropped. His mouth flooded with viscous saliva. He thought he felt a warm trickle of urine against his inner thigh, and he prayed it wouldn’t show.
Estrada said, “Now, Enrico. Take the paper.”
Caporelli reached out without opening his eyes but Estrada, teasing, held the document away from the outstretched hand. The girl was immobile on the landing.
“Let me hear you beg a little, Enrico, or I stick the gun back in your mouth. Only this time no joke.”
“I beg,” Caporelli said. Although he couldn’t see her, he was conscious of the girl moving now, the hem of her robe brushing the marble staircase.
“For what?”
There was dryness in Caporelli’s mouth. “I beg you. Give me the paper.”
Caporelli’s hand closed around the document. Estrada reached down, patted him on the head. Like a dog, a pet that had misbehaved and was now to be banished.
“Big shot, eh? Friend of Batista, eh? You think you own Havana! The Revolution is stronger than you and all your friends, compañero. The Revolution will bring you and your friends to their fucking knees! Now you’ve got ten minutes to get the hell out of here. Pack what you can carry in a small suitcase and go. Cuba doesn’t need you. Cuba doesn’t need your women.”
Caporelli listened to the sound of the three men strut across the courtyard. He remained on his knees for a long time afterwards, humiliated, ashamed by his failure of nerve. Why hadn’t he gone on defying Estrada? Why had he caved in and begged? The answer was devastatingly simple: he’d been to a place he’d never visited before in his young life, the borderline between living and dying. It was a place without sunshine and women, a terrifying place where all your money and power didn’t amount to shit. Life was better than death, even if humiliation was the price you paid.
When he stood up he saw the embarrassing trickle of urine on the marble, and he cleaned it with a white linen handkerchief monogrammed with the initials EC. The girl was standing over him.
She said, “Oh Enrico,” and then she was silent and he couldn’t decide what was in her tone, whether disappointment or horror, embarrassment or sympathy.
Thirty years later, he could still hear the mocking laughter of the men. He could see Estrada’s scarred face and the expensive handkerchief stained with piss. He could still feel the pistol against the roof of his mouth and smell the girl’s perfume. He trembled with rage when he remembered Estrada’s control of the situation, and his own disgrace in the presence of the girl.
He sat up, took his wallet from his jacket. He flipped it open, removed a crumpled sheet of paper. He smoothed it on the bed, his hand trembling the way it always did when he remembered Major Estrada. It was the document of transfer, the traspaso de propiedad. He had made up his mind a long time ago that he wasn’t going to destroy this forlorn keepsake until he was back in Havana.
He closed his eyes. How could you count what Cuba had cost him? In monetary terms he’d been robbed of three million dollars in 1959, worth about seventy million thirty years later. But he had a melancholy sense of having lost something other than money: Estrada had stripped him of honour. But Estrada wasn’t the real culprit. It was Castro, whose shadow fell like that of a great dark vulture across Cuba. It was Castro who had robbed him and it was Castro against whom he would have his revenge.
5
London
Frank Pagan’s unit, officially known as SATO, the Special Anti-Terrorist Operation, occupied two floors of an anonymous building in Golden Square in Soho. The unit had come into existence in 1979 as a specific response to Irish terrorism. In the middle of the 1980s it had been disbanded and integrated into the structure of other Scotland Yard departments. Last year, however, at the direction of Martin Burr, the unit was revived and its charter expanded beyond Irish matters. Pagan, despite internal opposition at Scotland Yard from men who resented the publicity he’d generated in his career, had been named officer in charge. Small minds, Burr had said. Small people. Pagan had a screw you attitude to these gnomes who criticised his personal style, his fashionable suits and coloured shirts, the American Camaro he drove, the rock and roll he favoured. He did not fit comfortably into the Yard hierarchy, which was not known for its flexibility in any case. He possessed a streak of energetic individuality, considered very close to anarchy by those who disapproved of him.
On this cold evening in October, Pagan sat at the window of his office and looked down into the darkness of Golden Square. He had secured his release from hospital that same afternoon by the simple if painful expedient of rising from the bed, dressing in the clothes brought to him by his assistant Foxworth, and strolling past the nurses’ station. He’d been assailed at once by the matron, a bollard of a woman who ruled the wards with a tyrant’s flair. She’d prevented Pagan’s exit until Dr Ghose could be summoned. When the physician arrived, he’d berated Pagan for taking things into his own hands, but he’d seen a strong resolve in the Englishman that was outside his experience. What else could he do but permit Pagan freedom on condition that he change his bandage once every day, take his painkillers and antibiotics, refrain from any energetic activity, and return within three days for a check-up?
Loaded with gauze and bandages, armed with prescriptions, uttering lavish promises, Pagan stepped out into the late afternoon a free man. The adrenalin rush of liberty hadn’t lasted long before he discovered that his freedom wasn’t from pain. Inside the taxi on the way to Golden Square he doubled over, clutching his chest and alarming Foxie, who didn’t know what to do. Pagan swallowed a painkiller and the fit passed shortly thereafter, but it drained him, leaving him paler than before.
Now, sitting at the window of his office, he poured himself a small shot of Auchentoshan, a Lowland malt whisky of unsurpassed smoothness he’d begun to drink lately. Combined with Pethidine, it banished all misery. It encased the brain in a velvet envelope.
“How do you feel?” Foxworth asked. He sat on the opposite side of Pagan’s desk. He was a tall man, the same height as Frank Pagan. His bright red hair was cut short, but it still resembled an unmanageable bush.
“I feel like something a dog might throw up. But I thank my lucky yaw I’m still alive,” Pagan replied.
“A good yaw’s priceless,” Foxie rema
rked. He’d been Pagan’s assistant during SATO’s first incarnation. Pagan had recently rescued him from the Forgery squad to bring him back into the fold. Foxie had been horrified by the shooting in Shepherd’s Bush. Pagan’s wounding in particular was too close to home, too unnerving. A darkness had coursed through the whole unit at the news. Detectives, even those who disliked Pagan, moped in their partitioned offices, awaiting hospital bulletins.
Now that Pagan had come back work was in progress again, but Foxie thought his return premature. Frank was pallid, and the diet of malt whisky and drugs wasn’t likely to be beneficial, no matter how strong his constitution might be. It was vintage Pagan. He couldn’t keep away. Gunther Ruhr was preying on him, burning a hole in his brain.
Foxie studied his superior a moment. There was a new gauntness about Frank’s features. He looked like a bleached-out holograph of himself, as if he were on the edge of fading away entirely. There was the usual flinty light of determination in Pagan’s grey eyes but it seemed faintly manic to Foxworth.
Pagan stood up. His shadow fell across the massive pop-art silk-screen of Buddy Holly that dominated the wall behind him, a splash of extraordinary colour in a room that was otherwise white walled and merely functional. “Let’s start with this dead Australian,” he said.
“I’m a little ahead of you, Frank,” Foxworth said. He reached for Pagan’s in-tray and retrieved a telex that had come from Sydney only that morning. “It’s not exciting.”
Pagan stared at the report. It said only that the man killed in Shepherd’s Bush was one Ralph Masters, age fifty, a former sergeant in the Australian Army. There was a brief mention of the man’s mercenary activities, but no criminal record. He lived alone, no known relatives. “A bloody bore,” Pagan remarked. “Is that the best they can send us? Excuse me if I nod off.”
“I’ll follow it up by telephone later,” Foxie said.
Pagan looked across the square. It was eight-thirty and the streets were quiet and a faint mist adhered to the lamps. By altering his angle slightly he could see taxis cruise along Beak Street. In the other direction he could see the glow from the harsh, frosted lights of Piccadilly.
“I’ll need the usual list.”
“It’s already hère,” Foxie said, patting the in-tray. “Updated this very morning.”
“You’re fast, Foxie.”
“Greased lightning. That’s me.”
Pagan stared at the lengthy computer print-out Foxworth passed to him. Prepared by the Home Office and available to a variety of law enforcement agencies, it was a list of people who had entered the United Kingdom recently, and whose names appeared on the Home Office data base under the category “questionable”. This included visitors involved in political activity in their homelands, alleged radicals, Communists, businessmen employed in dubious concerns (for example, suspected of having narcotics connections), anti-monarchists, and assorted others. The list showed a high preponderance of Libyans, Irishmen, Iranians, Palestinians and Colombians. None of those named had been denied entry into the country. They weren’t considered “undesirable” enough for that measure. The “undesirables” belonged on another catalogue altogether and were usually detained, interviewed, then deported before they had more than a couple of lungfuls of British air.
“Have you run these names through our own computers?” Pagan asked. The length of the print-out depressed him. There must have been more than four hundred individuals. Was all the world’s riff-raff cheerfully entering this green land?
“It’s being done even as we speak,” Foxie said.
“You’re really on top of things here, aren’t you? I should have stayed in hospital.”
“Which would have shown remarkable judgment, Frank.”
Pagan squeezed out a small smile and sat down. He went into a slump for a moment. Where the hell did you start? Where did you go to find Ruhr? It struck him as an overwhelming task. Looking for a terrorist in hiding was going to be the kind of thing where luck, that grinning bitch, would play a significant role. Or sheer doggedness. Pagan much preferred flair, the sudden insight, the flash of knowing, to all the humdrum police procedures of knocking on doors and slogging the streets and interviewing people who thought they were about to be arrested for old parking fines.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Foxie asked.
“Do me a favour, Foxie. Stop looking at me as if I’m going to collapse in a coma.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m not about to keel over. Understand?” Pagan rattled the print-out, just a little annoyed by the concerned look on Foxworth’s face. Was he destined to be scrutinised at every turn by his fellow officers looking for signs of infirmity? “Where was I?”
“The list, Frank.”
“Right. The list. The trouble is, the people who rescued Ruhr aren’t likely to show up on any damned list. The Australian didn’t. Why should we expect any of the others to be co-operative enough to make an appearance? It’s just not on. I don’t think we can expect any leads to Gunther from the print-out. Besides, the people who rescued Ruhr might be home-grown talent, Foxie, and they wouldn’t be on this index. The only import might have been the Aussie.”
“Could be.”
“What the hell, it’s procedure, and we’ll follow it, but I’m not getting my hopes up.” Pagan put the print-out aside, sipped his drink. He set the empty glass down. “Another thing, Foxie. I don’t want any information leaving this office unless it’s cleared by me personally. If there’s a leak, I don’t want it being traced back here. I want a scrambler on my line to the Commissioner’s office.”
“Noted,” Foxworth said.
“Do you have reports on the search for Ruhr? Is there any pattern?”
Foxie shook his head. “The usual hysteria, Frank. The good people of the land peer from behind lace curtains and think, Ah-hah, Gunther the Beast is lurking in the shrubbery. The mass imagination. Wonderful thing.”
Pagan sighed. “Where does that leave us, Foxie?”
“There’s the rub. Where indeed?”
Pagan gazed through the window again. He was thinking of the terrorist groups and their supporters in the darkness of this great city, loose clans of rightists, leftists, Leninists, Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, white supremacists, radicals who plotted to overthrow the monarchy (a notion with which Pagan sometimes had a modicum of sympathy), Libyans who sat in Mayfair and paid vast sums of money for explosives and weapons, Palestinians in Earl’s Court scheming to get their homeland back – they were out there in the dark corners, murmuring, planning, talking to themselves, in an atmosphere of paranoia.
Pagan had had encounters with a great variety of them, from the silly groups that consisted of two or three very lonely people putting doomed homemade bombs together in garden sheds to groups like the Libyans, some of whom lived in bullet-proof apartments in the West End and controlled banks and had access to funds beyond reckoning. He knew their worlds. He knew that if there was to be any useful information about Ruhr and his associates it would be out there among the sympathisers and the financiers and fellow-travellers. It could be anything, an item of gossip, a whispered rumour, the kind of information that never percolated up from street level to official channels. And he wasn’t going to get it sitting in Golden Square.
“I think I need a ride in the fresh air, Foxie. Will you get us a car?”
“A car?” Foxie thought that an early night would be the best thing for Pagan, but didn’t say so.
“Car. Four wheels, chassis, internal combustion device – you remember?”
Foxie smiled, picked up the telephone.
The car was a Rover and Foxworth drove, following directions given to him by Pagan, who constantly consulted a small red notebook. This, Foxie realised, was Chairman Frank’s famous Red Book, in which were said to be inscribed the names and addresses of all Pagan’s connections in the terrorist network. It was Foxie’s first sight of the legendary book.
They went first to an apartment be
longing to Syrians in Dover Street, Mayfair, then to a Libyan house in Kensington, disturbing people who watched TV or prepared evening meals. At the Kensington house a black-tie party was going on, ladies in cocktail dresses, delicate little sausages on toothpicks. Pagan didn’t care that his timing was terrible. He was, Foxie noticed, in full flight and for the moment at least like the Pagan of old. No formalities, no niceties of etiquette, were going to get in his way. He helped himself to coffee, swallowed a sausage, and looked around as if the dinner-party wasn’t taking place at all. There was a lot of surly conversation, the kind that originates in suspicion and outright resentment. We don’t know Gunther Ruhr. We don’t know anything about him or his friends. We are innocent of any illegal activities, Mr Pagan – kindly leave us in peace or speak to our lawyers. They all had lawyers nowadays, Pagan thought. They all had smooth-faced men in pricey pinstripes who manipulated legal niceties for hefty fees. Lawyers appalled Pagan. They had the moral awareness of toadstools and the untrammelled greed of very small spoiled children.
Next, a basement flat in Chelsea occupied by a group of very intense men who called themselves The Iranian Revolutionary Front aka TIRF. Acronyms were like test-tubes in which radicals appeared to spawn. If you didn’t have a decent acronym you didn’t have an image, and without an image no new recruits. TIRF opposed both the new Ayatollah and American imperialism. Pagan tried to goad them by asking about the ideological confusion in such a position but they didn’t want to be drawn into a dialogue with a reactionary policeman, the representative of a monarchy. They’d suffered under the Shah and to them the Queen of England might have been Pahlevi’s wicked sister. The Iranians barely raised their faces from their bowls of rice, avoiding eye-contact with both Pagan and Foxworth. A sulky zero there.
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