Across the river after that, to a house overlooking Battersea Park where a bald West German in a velvet smoking-jacket spoke in a knowledgeable manner about the terrorist connections between Europe and Northern Ireland. Perhaps Ruhr’s working for the Irish, Mr Pagan, the German suggested. Why import Ruhr? Pagan wondered. The Irish had their own gangsters.
From Battersea to Wandsworth. In a prim semi-detached house a lovely young Czech woman, who had been arrested once for her membership in a gang of terrorists that had made an elaborate attempt to bomb the Russian Embassy in Bonn, brewed cups of herbal tea and denounced Gunther Ruhr for “excessive violence”. She didn’t know where to find him, nor had she any idea who had rescued him. In pursuit of the quiet life, she’d lost touch with her former associates. Now she grew organic vegetables and consulted the I Ching and breast-fed a baby that had begun to cry in an adjoining room. Like everyone else encountered during this strange tour of Pagan’s London, she knew nothing, heard nothing. All was blind silence and frustration. Houses in Camberwell and White-chapel, inhabited by Lebanese and Palestinians respectively, brought similar results. Absolutely no information about Gunther Ruhr or his employers or his rescuers made the underground circuit. Final.
On the way back to Golden Square Pagan said, “A waste of bloody time.”
“At least you put the word out,” Foxie said.
“A fat lot of good, Foxie. Whoever employs Ruhr works in complete secrecy. And the rescue operation might have been carried out by phantoms. Nobody knows a damn thing.”
Pagan and Foxworth rode in the lift, an ancient iron coffin that clanged and rocked up to the second floor. Inside his office Pagan had another small taste of Auchentoshan and settled down behind his desk. He was out of breath. He’d gone beyond mere fatigue. He was in another world where you couldn’t quite trust the evidence of the senses. It was like jet-lag magnified, almost as if you saw the world reflected in bevelled mirrors. He stared at the darkened window, listening to the faint whirring of the three computers on the floor below. It was just after midnight and the silence of the streets accentuated the noise of the electronics, which were sinister to Pagan because he had no affinity with them.
I got up from my deathbed for you, Ruhr, he thought. I got up and I walked. You could at least provide me with a hint. You could at least tell me how much time I have left before you do something monstrous. The time factor! It was unsettling to be adrift on a planet whose only clock belonged to Gunther Ruhr.
Foxworth came into the office with a computer print-out. “This is what you wanted. Our computers analysed all four hundred and seventeen names on the Home Office list, all people who arrived in the United Kingdom in the last month. Out of that lot, there are twenty-nine on whom we have active files of our own.”
Pagan scanned the sheets with blurred eyes. Twenty-nine match-ups. That was practically a crowd. He had only eight investigators at his disposal. It wasn’t possible to conduct twenty-nine investigations simultaneously. Even if he managed it somehow, by borrowing men from other departments, how could he be sure he wasn’t wasting manpower and time? Since it was almost a certainty that neither Ruhr nor his associates had entered the UK legally, the names on the list would yield nothing. Twenty-nine!
“I think I’ll stretch out on the sofa,” he said. “Get some of the weight off my feet.”
Foxworth frowned. “Wouldn’t you be better off going home, Frank? Happy to drive you.”
Pagan shook his head.
Determined bastard, Foxie thought. Frank had to have the constitution of a Clydesdale.
Pagan walked very slowly to the couch in the corner of the office. It was an old horsehair piece, overstuffed and creaky and cratered. Even though he lay down with great care, a shaft of pain pierced him and he moaned slightly. When you thought you had it silenced for the night, back it came just to remind you you’re no longer master of your own system.
“I’d like a map,” Pagan said. “A decent one that covers the whole Cambridge area.”
“I have one in my own office.”
“Bring it in here and pin it above my desk, will you?”
“Right away.” Briskly, eager to please, even to pamper him, Foxie stepped out.
Flat on his back, Pagan raised the computer print-out above his eyes and squinted at the list of names. Beneath each name was nationality, followed by the reasons why the person had been entered in SATO’s computers in the first place. There was a Dutchman called Vanderberg known for his skill in building custom rifles, an American who had some questionable connections in the Lebanon, an Italian journalist notorious for his radical left-wing sympathies and his “exclusive” interviews – florid and sycophantic – with fugitive terrorists. If Pagan couldn’t find the time and manpower to run a check on the people who had access to the allegedly secret route used on the night of the Shepherd’s Bush disaster, how could he justify the investigation of these twenty-nine, not one of whom suggested a plausible bridge to Gunther Ruhr?
And yet how could he know for sure? Thoroughness was a bloody dictator. If you were Frank Pagan, you were imprisoned by your own exactitude. Everyone on the list would have to be contacted, interviewed, even if only briefly, or watched. The likely outcome was that all twenty-nine would be eliminated from having any association with Gunther Ruhr. End of the matter. Heigh-ho. The joys of police work. The enviable glamour.
He was about to set the print-out aside, and ponder the matter of delegating the inquiries to cops purloined from some other department, when he noticed a name at the foot of the second page.
It blinded him at first. He thought he’d hallucinated it, a set of letters created by the morphine-like effect of Pethidine. He shut his eyes, hearing Foxie come inside the room, hearing Foxie say something about a map, noises off-stage, off-centre, as if Foxworth had stepped toward the outer limits of the world and could barely be heard. Pagan opened his eyes. It was still there. Unchanged.
Dear Christ, how many years had passed?
Pagan turned his face toward Foxworth, who was standing on a chair and tacking the map to the wall.
“Foxie,” Pagan said.
Foxworth stepped down from the chair and moved across the room to the sofa. He thought Frank looked very odd all at once, as if more than pain troubled him.
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong?” he asked.
Pagan pointed to the name on the sheet. Foxie looked closely. It meant nothing to him.
“I’d like to know where this person can be found, Foxie.”
“It may take a little time.”
“Do it.”
There was an uncharacteristic note in Pagan’s voice, the grumpy irritability of somebody confronted by a puzzle he couldn’t understand, one he thought he’d solved a long time ago.
Foxie wrote the name down.
From the window of her hotel room, Magdalena Torrente saw the expanse of darkness that was Hyde Park. Black and whispering, it created a shadow at the heart of London. It was a long time since Magdalena had been in England. It would be pleasant to come one day as a tourist, spend some time, see sights. This trip, like the last one, was going to be brief.
The last time here: she didn’t want to think about that.
She shut the window, looked at her watch. It was two a.m. She moved across the room, pushed the bathroom door open, saw her own reflection in the fluorescent glare of the tiled room, dark circles under her eyes and colourless lips. She considered make-up, but he didn’t like her in cosmetics. A real woman, he sometimes said, doesn’t need to paint herself into falsehood.
She lay on the bed. The lift rumbled in the shaft along the corridor. It stopped; the doors slid open. Magdalena closed her eyes and listened carefully. The thick carpet in the hallway muffled the movement of anyone passing. Do you trust him? She wondered why Garrido’s objectionable question came back to her now. Old men knew how to ask tiresome questions. Old men with ambitions, like Garrido, could be especially taxing. Running out of time, th
ey needed answers in a hurry. All their questions were blunt ones. Do you trust him?
She heard the key turn in the lock. She pretended to sleep. It was part of a lover’s game. He would kiss her awake from a sleep he knew wasn’t genuine. He came inside the room very quietly and crossed the floor and she felt the mattress yield as he sat down beside her. He raised her hands to his lips. She felt her pulses jump and her heartbeat rage. He did this to her without fail. The touch of his flesh made her fall apart, a sweet disintegration that was like nothing else she’d ever felt. She lost herself along the way, imploded, turned to fragments. Sometimes she couldn’t remember her own name. Love’s amnesia. She had no patience when it came to him. She took his hand and guided it between her legs. Her short skirt – he liked them short – slipped up her thighs. She wore nothing under the skirt. His hand went directly to the core of her and she gasped because she felt as if he’d penetrated some secret she’d been keeping from the rest of the world. He knew her in the most intimate ways, the deepest ways. She spread her legs, astounded by her own wetness. His finger went inside her and she moaned, biting on her lip because she knew she’d scream if she didn’t keep her mouth closed. She turned slightly, reaching out for him. He was hard and ready and beautiful. Her lover. Her love. She said his name once, twice, lingering over syllables until they became meaninglessly joyful, less like sounds than delicate tastes in her mouth.
He tugged the skirt from her hips, slid the blouse from her shoulders. He kissed her breasts, her throat, her mouth, and each time his lips touched her skin she felt a delightful giddiness. She was in flight and soaring. She closed the palm of her hand around his cock and stroked it softly, drawing it closer to her own body as she did so. Sheer impatience made her bold and aggressive. She spread her legs as widely as she could and led him inside her, then she locked her heels on his spine, rocking him, hard, then harder, as if she were trying to trap something that couldn’t quite be caught: an essence, an elusive moment.
Hard, harder still, she held on to him, and the dance grew quicker and simpler and more forcefully intimate until nothing separated her from him. There was only love and this insane freefalling bliss. She bit his shoulder and clawed his back, arching her hips, lifting herself up to intensify the connection, and then she came and kept coming until she was quite drained and he’d gone limp inside her. They collapsed together in silence, both breathless, both very still, paralysed.
When finally she got up from the bed, her thighs felt weak, her legs distant. She walked to the window and gazed out over the park. A match was struck, a cigarette lit. The room filled with the acrid smell of tobacco. She turned, seeing his face in the pale red glow of his cigarette. She moved back towards the bed. It was always this way; she immediately wanted him again, as if the first encounter had been nothing more than preamble, a surface scratched. There were other levels to reach, other satisfactions to be had. He drew on his cigarette and the reddish glow illuminated his bare chest.
“Your goodies are on the bedside table,” she said.
She saw him smile. It was a good smile, lively and attractive, open and genuine. She loved his face. If she were blinded she would have known the face by touch alone, its familiar topography. She shivered because the intimacy of all this overwhelmed her. At times, her careless sense of love frightened her. Only if you consider futures, she thought. The trick is to live in the moment. That way you can’t think of fate. Fate is what happens tomorrow.
“You’re too thoughtful,” he said.
“How can anybody be too thoughtful? I like doing things for you. I think about you all the time. I can’t get you out of my head. I try, you know. I wake up and I tell myself – I must have a day, one lousy day, when I don’t think about him. And it never happens.”
He was quiet for a long time. He stubbed out his cigarette. Then he said, “Do you think it’s any different for me?”
“I hope you suffer the way I do.” She tried to make this sound light-hearted but it came out with more gravity than she’d intended. She sat on the bed and took his hand, pressing the palm over a breast. “I want us to be together. Always together. I hate the way we’re kept apart.”
“It’s a matter of time.”
“Patience isn’t one of my virtues. I have to practise it. Every time we meet I panic when I think of how little time we have together. I want it to be different.”
“Soon. Everything will be fine soon.” The welcome certitude in his voice filled her with hope. Things would work out in the end because they had to. She had the same uncomplicated belief in the triumph of love some people have in the prophetic qualities of the stars. Other men paled by comparison now. She thought of how he dominated her imagination. In the few times when she considered this love clearly, she saw it as some form of addiction, as demanding as any narcotic.
“Did you have any problems?” he asked.
“With the money?” She shook her head. “I sailed straight through. I knew I would. I have this look I sometimes do – haughty and regal. Nobody meddles with it. Especially customs officials.” She gestured toward the closet. “It’s all there. I put it in a briefcase. Exactly the way you like it.”
“You do everything the way I like,” he said.
She laughed. She had a laugh that was a little too deep to be ladylike. “I want to please you,” she said.
He stroked her breast almost absent-mindedly. He had moments like this when an essential part of him disappeared. She was frightened by these times. They undermined her, riddled her already frail sense of security. She went to the bathroom, filled a glass with water, returned to the bed.
“Garrido isn’t sure about you,” she said.
“At times Garrido’s an old woman.”
“He’s still sharp. He’s intuitive. He knows what I feel for you, but I’m not sure he approves.”
“Garrido worries me, Magdalena. His age –”
“You can’t go back on your promise,” she said. “Garrido and everyone else on the Committee expect some kind of positions of authority. They think of themselves as the provisional government in exile. It’s been that way for years. He sees himself as the Minister of the Interior or something just as elevated. It’s the only thing he lives for. He’s a hero in the community. You can’t even think of excluding him.”
He sighed, patted the back of her hand. “It’s going to be all right. I’ll keep my word.”
The atmosphere in the room had changed slightly. There was a vague darkness all at once, almost a gloom. She knew what it was. She’d opened the door and allowed Garrido to come inside, Garrido and all the politics of el exilio. This bedroom was sacrosanct, a place for lovers only, not for politics, and dreams, and plots.
She wanted to dispel the melancholy. Lightness, something trivial. She reached to the bedside table and picked up the small silver bowl containing cubes, each nicely wrapped with the name of the hotel written on them. She undid one, held it out, popped it in the man’s mouth. It was another game they played together, another tiny familiarity.
She laid the tip of her finger between his lips. Then she kissed him. The small crystals of sugar that adhered to his tongue made the kiss wildly sweet.
“I love you,” she said. She whispered his name several times. She’d been taught as a child that when you said a word often enough you understood its true meaning, its innermost reality. So she repeated her lover’s name, searching for an intimacy inside an intimacy, a revelation, the blinding insight that she was loved as much as she loved. She wanted the ultimate security.
He made her sit on the edge of the bed, then he gently parted her legs. She watched him, with anticipation and delight, as he kneeled on the floor, his mouth level with her knees. She continued to observe his face as it disappeared into the shadows between her thighs and then she trembled, throwing back her head and closing her eyes, her hands made into slack fists, her mouth open.
A voice that was not her own said I love you, Rafael. I love you.
New York City
It was ten p.m. local time and drizzling lightly all across the eastern seaboard when Kenzaburo Magiwara arrived at Kennedy Airport. He passed nimbly through customs and immigration where his passport, densely stamped, much-used, caused the immigration officer to make a mild joke about how Mr Magiwara should have a season ticket to America. Magiwara never smiled. It was not just that occidental humour eluded him, which was true, it was more the fact that the mask of his face had not been built for easy merriment. To most Europeans, Magiwara bore a strong resemblance to a younger version of the late Emperor Hirohito. Small saddles of flesh sagged under his eyes and his mouth was arrogant. He emitted a sense of power, although its precise source was hard to locate. Did it come from the sharp little eyes and the impression they’d seen every hand of poker ever played? Was it from the disdainful mouth, about which there was some slight secretive quality? Or was it something more simple – like the assured way the man moved, as if he knew doors were going to be opened for him before he reached them, as if he understood that flunkies were going to attend to his baggage and transport and that all the insignificant details of his life were taken care of by others?
A chauffeured limousine was waiting just outside the Pan Am terminal. It transported Magiwara in the direction of Manhattan. He sat in the back, feeling a little sleepy, looking forward to his arrival at the apartment he owned in Central Park South. It had been a good trip, at least in the sense that the Society of Friends had seen fit to continue on its present course.
Magiwara was the first Japanese ever to have been invited to join the Society, which connected him to a world wherein enormous profits could be made and fortunes increased beyond dreams. It was a form of freemasonry, although he had no prejudices in that direction. Quite the contrary, secret societies had existed in Japan for centuries and Magiwara had been associated with a few of them in his time – business groups, fraternities of a political nature, religious organisations.
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