Mambo

by Campbell Armstrong

  Caporelli had crossed the floor while Pagan was speaking. Now he was pressing a wall-button mounted close to the fireplace. Bringing in reinforcements, muscle to kick Pagan out of here.

  “Was it you, Enrico? Was Rafael working for you? Did he hire Ruhr on your behalf? Was that what the meeting in Glasgow was about?” Pagan strode across the room, closer to the little man. All this was wild, like shooting from a dislocated hip. But he had a scent in his nostrils still, and it grew more and more exciting. There was joy in mad surmise, in the crazed inspiration that forced you down unusual pathways. Allegations, red herrings, hares, accusations – sometimes, Pagan thought, work could be fun.

  Clearly irritated, Caporelli once again pressed the bell on the wall. Pagan reached out, removed the man’s hand from the button, gave the bundle of small bones a swift squeeze. “Let me finish, Enrico.”

  “You have finished,” Caporelli said and pulled away his pained hand.

  “Not yet. Here’s a fresh tack. I asked myself who else could possibly make use of a missile. Could it be Fidel himself? After all, he had a taste of missiles a few years ago, maybe he liked having them. But let’s say nobody in the world wants to sell him one. Then let’s imagine he decides to steal one and assigns this chore to Rosabal. Rosabal comes to you for help – old pal, old family friend you say you are – and you put him in touch with Ruhr.”

  Caporelli’s face was expressionless. Aside from the open eyes, hooded under the white eyebrows, it might have been the face of a sleeper.

  Pagan went on, “But we both know why that script’s wrong, don’t we, Enrico? You wouldn’t lift your little finger to give Castro water on his deathbed, would you? You loathe him because he ripped you off for everything you owned in Cuba. The only interest you could possibly have in Castro is to see him either dead or tossed out of office. Therefore, if you’re involved, the missile wasn’t stolen for Fidel’s sake. There’s some other reason.”

  “You amuse me, but my patience isn’t unlimited. I must ask you to leave. Now, please.”

  Caporelli walked towards the door. Pagan followed, thinking how pointless it was to hope Caporelli would break down and tell all. The Italian was hard as flint. And crafty. He had trained his face to reveal very little. So far the only real surprise that had registered was when Pagan had mentioned Rafael’s use of the name Chapotin. Why had that startled Caporelli? Why had that so clearly bothered him? Because something was going on he didn’t know about, Pagan thought. Something that really worried him.

  “I honestly don’t give a damn what you’re up to, Enrico. I don’t care about Cuba, and I don’t care about Fidel Castro. Politics leave me cold. I’m interested in them only in as much as they involve an escaped prisoner who happens to have both a stolen missile and a hostage with him. I want the people and the missile back where they belong. And I think you can help me. I think you know where they might be found.”

  Caporelli acted as if he were no longer listening. He opened the door, looked into the hallway, called out, “André. Max. Come here, please. Escort Mr Pagan out.”

  There was no reply from André and Max. Caporelli made a small hissing sound of irritation, tssss, and moved down the hall. Pagan followed. They passed the open doorway of a bedroom, furnished in black lacquer pieces, like something from the pages of a chic design magazine. Next was the kitchen, the largest Pagan had ever seen, vast and tiled, crowded with appliances, slatted red blinds at the long windows, copper-bottomed pans and skillets suspended from the high ceiling, strings of garlic bulbs, a hanging congregation of red peppers.

  “André! Max!” Caporelli, as if he were calling to two miscreant dogs, clapped his hands briskly. Still no response.

  Pagan tried to get the little man’s attention, but Caporelli shrugged him off as he stalked the kitchen on his quest for the bodyguards.

  “If you’ll listen to me, Caporelli –”

  “I have listened too long already, Pagan.”

  “Tell me what you know about Ruhr, that’s all I ask.”

  Caporelli smacked the palm of his hand against the centre of his forehead. “How many times do you need to hear it? I know nothing. Absolutely nothing! Prego. Do me a favour. Go away.”

  Pagan stopped moving after the Italian. He leaned against the tiled wall and considered the pointlessness of further pursuit. Enrico was too good, an old fox, cunning. He was giving nothing away. Pagan stepped back into a space that was probably called the breakfast nook, a cranny containing a table strewn with rose petals, and four chairs. He needed to sit down, think over his options.

  He moved towards a chair. Then stopped. The cranny contained more than flowers and furniture.

  André and Max had been shot at very close range and propped against the wall in the shadowy cavity. One of the men had his big blank face turned toward Pagan, dead blue eyes open, cheek blown away, the abstract expression of sudden death. Pagan, who could still be shocked by murder, looked across the room at Caporelli and was about to tell him that his bodyguards were no longer guarding bodies – but before he had the chance to speak the kitchen door was opened.

  “Ah,” Caporelli said. He was waiting for his soldiers. He thought they were coming through the door, belatedly answering his call. He thought they would have the Englishman ejected in a matter of seconds. Pagan shouted at the little man, something like Get down! although he couldn’t remember later exactly what he’d said. In the doorway stood a man with a silenced pistol; having disposed of André and Max, he’d presumably been roaming this enormous apartment in search of Caporelli.

  And now he’d found his quarry.

  Pagan had barely time to record a swift impression, and it was neither interesting nor useful – medium height, medium weight, medium everything, dark hair, dark overcoat, dear Christ description failed him in the intensity of the moment, language melted away. He was, after all, cornered in a breakfast nook, and it seemed completely absurd to be shot to death there: a nook had no inherent dignity. Objective observation of the gunman was the last thing on his mind.

  “In the name of God,” Caporelli said.

  The gunman fired once. The sound was reminiscent of pressurised air fleeing a punctured pipe. The gunman was clearly an expert shot. Caporelli was spun round by the impact of the bullet, which had struck him directly in the heart. He clattered to the tiled floor, an unsmoked cigar in its cellophane wrapper rolling out of the pocket of his robe.

  Pagan had time to see the gunman turn his face towards the breakfast area; the pistol came up once again in the man’s hand. Aware of the glass door behind him, conscious too of how he was almost trapped, Pagan turned so quickly that he felt the stitches in his chest stretch. Glass would yield if he forced it, if he threw himself at it: one small corner of his panicked brain still recognised this fact. He launched himself hurriedly and without undue fear of falling from a high place because he’d seen, through the slats of the blind, a balcony, a handrail, flower pots, even an empty bird-cage.

  The blind buckled and fell to pieces when he charged it, slats bending under his weight, small plastic screws popping. The door itself shattered easily, scattering angular fragments of glass across the balcony. Pagan landed on hands and knees, but he hadn’t been caught by glass and he wasn’t bleeding. He rose to an ungainly crouching position and surveyed the balcony quickly. Six feet by twelve, it adjoined the balcony of the neighbouring apartment, separated only by an ornate wrought-iron rail, about seven feet high. Pagan rushed toward it and clambered up. Halfway, he realised he had a terrific view of the Bois de Boulogne. With this appreciation came a certain dizziness. He swayed, moaned, heard air buzzing in his ears, kept climbing. There was neither elegance nor equilibrium in the way he ascended.

  He clutched the top of the rail, hauled himself up through strata of pain that were numbed for the moment by the adrenalin of fear. He glanced back once across Caporelli’s balcony, seeing how the fractured blind – slats bent at all kinds of angles – hung out through the broken glass l
ike some spindly creature that has been crushed. There was no sign of the killer; but that meant nothing. He could be striding toward the glass door even now. He could appear on the balcony at any second. He could still shoot Pagan.

  Pagan made one final strenuous effort, and pulled himself over the rail. He dropped without subtlety into the adjoining balcony and stumbled just as a door opened and a man appeared. Not the gunman. He was presumably Caporelli’s neighbour, this meek-looking, homely man in the tweed jacket.

  “Qu’est ce qui se passe?” he asked, alarmed. “Que voulez-vous?”

  Pagan took out his wallet and showed his ID to the man, who peered at it in the bewildered way of somebody whose life, for so long a placid, plodding business, has just taken a very odd detour.

  “Ah, Scotland Yard,” the man said as if these two words explained all. “Oui, oui. Entrez, entrez,” and he held the glass door open for Pagan, who turned one last time and looked through the metal rail at Caporelli’s balcony – empty and bleak, under the flat noon sky.

  The detective who responded to Pagan’s phone call was Claude Quistrebert from the Sûrété. He was a tall elegant man who wore a black and white pinstripe suit and a splendid blue carnation in his lapel. Pagan admired his style, which isolated him from his three colleagues, rather badly dressed men who swarmed all over Caporelli’s apartment with a clumsy enthusiasm that was almost endearing.

  Quistrebert and Pagan talked in Caporelli’s study. The Frenchman’s English, better than the Englishman’s French, relieved Pagan of having to translate.

  “Your description of the gunman leaves something to be desired,” Quistrebert said.

  “There was nothing exceptional about him. I’d recognise him if I saw him again, I’m sure, but as for striking characteristics or features …” and Pagan shrugged dismally; he’d almost been shot at by a total nonentity.

  “Striking?” the Frenchman asked, a little puzzled.

  “Prominent,” Pagan explained.

  “Ah. Of course.”

  There was a crash from the kitchen, the sound of a heavy pot or a tureen clattering to the tiles. Quistrebert seemed not to notice. Perhaps he was accustomed to conducting investigations where his men broke things in their enthusiasm.

  Quistrebert, sharp-faced, equipped with a nose that might have been made for burrowing, was at the window, looking out across the Bois. “In the circumstances, I don’t think we can expect to apprehend the man,” he said, without turning to Pagan. There was a critical little edge to his tone; he wasn’t happy with his British colleague’s powers of observation. He’d read of Pagan in the newspapers and considered him, with perhaps a twinge of envy, just another publicity-chasing cop. “Why was Caporelli killed? Do you have light to throw?”

  “None,” Pagan replied.

  “You had reasons of your own for being here, of course. I will not pry.”

  “Routine questioning.” A blanket phrase, a clear signal that meant “Don’t ask”.

  “Naturally.” Quistrebert strode across the room on long, stalk-like legs. He sat behind Caporelli’s desk and surveyed the papers there absently. “Caporelli had business interests in France. A paper mill. A perfume company in Nantes. Also some banking. This much is a matter of public record. I understand he had many commercial interests in Italy also. On the face of it, a wealthy businessman. Such a man would inspire a number of enemies, no?”

  “More than likely,” Pagan said. Hadn’t Madame Chapotin said that her late husband had a banking concern in Italy? Pagan enjoyed these little correspondences.

  Quistrebert stroked the flower in his lapel. “He interests me, this Caporelli. Only a couple of days ago, he was a witness to a fatal accident here in Paris. I read the report.”

  Pagan felt his interest sharpen. “What happened?”

  “He saw a man run over by a truck and crushed. It was a very bloody affair. Very bad. As an important eyewitness, he was required to give a statement, of course. In any case, he clearly felt a personal involvement. The victim of the accident was an associate of his, a certain Herr Kluger from Hamburg.”

  An associate. Enrico and his associates, Pagan thought, had a knack for unhappy endings. Chapotin, this Kluger, and now Enrico himself. There was a grand design here, murderously neat.

  Quistrebert said, “They were walking after dinner, it seems, when a truck hit the unfortunate Kluger and dragged him under the wheels. A terrible mess.”

  “You’re convinced it was an accident?” Pagan asked.

  The Frenchman looked unblinkingly at Pagan. “What else? Scores of witnesses say they saw the truck being driven in an erratic fashion. The driver, a Spaniard, was drunk. I may add that he died of apparent heart failure some hours later in prison.”

  Quistrebert was silent a moment. “I will share with you a curious feature of the affair, Mr Pagan. The body of the driver was removed by persons claiming to be his relatives.”

  “Claiming to be?”

  “They had identification. They were from Madrid. The body was released to them. Again, nothing so very unusual. People want to bury their dead – a fact of life. But then the discovery was made by a diligent officer that the truck had been stolen four days before in Lyon. The driver had carried a false Spanish licence. No such person ever existed. His fingerprints are not on record. Nor can we locate the so-called relatives who came to claim him. We’ve been investigating the whole affair, but every avenue turns out to be a dead end, provoking what policemen always dread – too many questions. Too many grey areas. No clues.”

  This sounded to Pagan as less an accident than a deliberate murder that hadn’t worked out as planned. The killer had lost his nerve, as sometimes all men do, and needed the fiercely blind courage of inebriation to go through with the murder of Herr Kluger. The source of the killer’s courage had also been the cause of his downfall. Surely he meant to escape after ploughing the victim down but was too drunk to do so. Pagan wasn’t about to suggest this to Quistrebert, though. The Frenchman wouldn’t take kindly to unsolicited advice; he had a streak of Gallic disdain and stubbornness.

  “What do you know about Kluger?” Pagan asked.

  “Another businessman. He was Caporelli’s partner in the perfume company. But his interests were wide. He was the chief shareholder in a large Pharmaceuticals company in Frankfurt, sole owner of a vineyard in California, the proprietor of magazines in Scandinavia – the list is long. A very rich man. Like Caporelli.”

  “Can I have a report of the accident before I return to London?”

  “Of course.” Quistrebert smiled for the first time since he’d arrived, a fox-like expression. “Perhaps when you have official business in Paris in the future you will call me prior to your arrival, Mr Pagan?”

  “Count on it,” Pagan said.

  Glasgow

  Foxworth, who had arrived at noon in an unseasonably warm and sunny Glasgow, had one of those little breaks that make a policeman’s lot tolerable. It came at about three o’clock in the afternoon after he’d spent several hours with members of the Glasgow Criminal Investigation Division – friendly men, he thought, and level-headed – going over the reconstruction of Jean-Paul Chapotin’s movements in Glasgow. There was the usual dogged routine of checking taxi companies and limousine services and car-hire firms, which involved making many telephone calls and waiting for people to get back to you after they’d checked their records and logs. It was a dismal business, actually, and quite uninspiring; or so Foxie thought. He knew dull routine had its place in his kind of work, but he’d inherited something of Frank Pagan’s dislike of this plodding aspect of their employment. Give me the bright moment, Pagan had once said. Give me the flash, the sudden insight when lo and fucking behold, you know beyond doubt!

  While the investigation of Chapotin’s movements had been taking place, a similar inquiry into Enrico Caporelli’s trip to Glasgow had also been going on. This had been a little simpler than the Chapotin inquiry in the sense that there was a record, kept by the m
en observing Rosabal, of Caporelli meeting the Cuban at a hotel in the centre of the city. Caporelli was merely the peripheral figure in this surveillance, an incidental entry in the Cuban’s life: But the young detective who’d logged the time and place of the encounter had the brains to record the number plate number of the limousine that had picked Enrico up. Foxie liked this young man’s notes, which combined the merit of plain observation with a touch of personal resentment; subject rode off in a fat limousine, number plate G654 WUS; very small man with white hair and an arrogant strut. Fat and arrogant; an enjoyable deviation from the prosaic language of police notes.

  It was a start – a licence-plate number.

  The limousine that had ferried Caporelli away belonged to a company called Executive Motor Cars Ltd, with offices in West Nile Street in the heart of the city. When Foxie called the number, a polite female told him she “needed a wee minute” to check her log – how often had he heard the word “log” since he’d come to Glasgow? – and get back to him. Foxie, during his routine telephoning, had already asked this same woman about Chapotin. My, you’re awfully busy, the woman had said on the second call. She had a lilting, liquid accent.

  The Break itself happened while Foxworth was drinking tea from a thick china mug and waiting for return phone calls. The woman from Executive Motor Cars Ltd called back to say that the driver of G654 WUS had transported Enrico Caporelli to a house “somewhere in Ayrshire”. As for Foxworth’s other inquiry, the one concerning Chapotin, the woman told him that one of the company’s other drivers had picked up a man by that name at Glasgow Airport and had taken him to the same place in Ayrshire.

  Ah-hah! Foxie had one of those rare moments, given only to cops, poets and fishermen, when the object of a search suddenly materialises. Caporelli and Chapotin, transported by the same limousine company, went to the same address in Ayrshire. Since Glasgow wasn’t what you’d call Limousine City, it wasn’t such a coincidence that both men had been serviced by the same car firm.