Mambo (59 page)

“Nonsense. There was never any question of firing it.”

“That's not the way I saw it.”

“Then your observations are very wrong,” Kinnaird said impatiently. “Rafael wouldn't have fired the bloody thing. It was a prop, a piece of scenery. What the devil does it matter now anyhow? Castro is still in charge of Cuba – did you see that as part of your job, Pagan? To help keep him in power?”

“I didn't help keep anybody in power. I don't give a shit who runs Cuba, Freddie. Castro or some other old geezer – it doesn't make any bloody difference to me in the long run. They're all the same when you get right down to it.”

“What a dreadfully narrow view of the world stage,” Kinnaird said. His expression was that of a man who finds some foul morsel of very old food between his teeth.

Pagan shrugged. Of course it was a narrow view; he'd never found a broad perspective conducive to his sense of right and wrong. If your view was too wide you encountered too many ambiguities. If you sat around pondering all the issues, and trying to understand all the sides, you froze eventually into inactivity. So he always tried to keep it simple, tightly focused. He didn't know how to do his job any other way.

Kinnaird looked down into the hole in the ground, nudged a pebble with his foot, watched it drop inside the trench.

A grave
, Pagan thought. Of course. Foxie's grave. Make it a double. A chill went through him.

He said, “Here's what I wonder, Fred. How is it that your friends and associates keep getting themselves killed off? How does that come about? If I was a cynical kind of fellow – and I'm not, as anybody will tell you – I'd say you developed some pretty bloody selfish ideas. I'd say you did a hatchet job on your chums. What was it? Afraid there wasn't going to be enough Cuban pie to go around? Needed more than your share, Fred?”

“We all need a little more than our share at times,” Kinnaird said. He folded his arms across his chest. He reminded Pagan of a squire in a magazine ad, a handsome tweedy figure advocating the merits of a certain Scotch, something expensive.

“But now there's no pie, Fred,” Pagan said. “The cupboard is bare and there's no damned pie at all! Pardon this malicious smirk you see on my features, but I find that hilarious.”

Foxie laughed at Pagan's remark. It was a nervous little sound, but Pagan welcomed it; it established an audience, it gave him a sense of support. He stared at Kinnaird – Sir Freddie, darling of his party, beloved by the electorate, man with a Great Future, tomorrow's England, tomorrow's Europe, Freddie, slavishly devoted to wealth and position and seemingly equipped with a vampire's appetite for blood. Dear Freddie. Dear, crazy Freddie.

Pagan went on, “I'm not saying you did the hatchet job on your own, Fred. I'm not saying you personally pulled any triggers. You don't have the guts for that. You had some help along the way. Maybe you had other associates, maybe you saw a way of slicing the pie up in thicker pieces. I don't suppose I'll ever get an answer to how it was all supposed to work.”

“Certainly not from me, Pagan. I owe you absolutely nothing. No explanations. No details. Nothing.”

Pagan looked down at the hole in the ground. “You think you can fit us both in there, Fred?”

“I don't see why not.”

“Bit tight,” Foxie remarked. A brave little comment, a flippancy that almost worked, but Foxie's anxious eyes revealed his fear.

“I really don't think it's going to cause either of you any discomfort,” Kinnaird said. “Actually, it's all rather convenient for me. Two for the price of one.”

Pagan sniffed the air deeply, like a man doing something he enjoys for the very last time. The smell of earth in his nostrils was the stench of death; simple, unaffected, plain old death. He glanced at the man who held the shotgun at Foxie's back. He was a bulky character with thin white hair flattened across his large skull. The other gunman, the one with the moustache that covered the scar, stood about three feet behind Pagan. It was one of those situations in which there could only be one outcome. You could try to stammer and stall, you could put up this objection and that, and play for time, but finally the result would be the same – a double-decker grave.

Pagan moved his feet very slightly; he was practically standing on the lip of the trench. Less distance to fall when the time came, he thought. He looked down inside the grave, saw a black stag beetle pick its way laboriously through its ruined territory, then he raised his face back to Kinnaird.

Stall. Kill time
.

Pagan put one hand to his chest, which had begun during the last few minutes to ache. Ghose's stitches were perhaps coming undone again. What did that matter? He was about to be administered the ultimate painkiller anyway. He stared across the grave at Foxie, whose expression was one of discouragement, as if he'd just frantically searched through his own box of tricks and found no way of pulling a rabbit, at the last possible moment, out of a hat.

Stall
.

“As a matter of curiosity, Fred, how do you propose to get away with our murders?” Pagan asked. A desperate question, a last bleat.

Kinnaird clasped his hands behind his back in a pontifical manner that Pagan despised because it suggested superiority and power; Freddie Kinnaird must have thought he was invincible. “You forget I'm the Home Secretary, old chap. I'll take an active interest in your disappearance. I'll stage-manage the investigation, if I need to.”

“Martin Burr's going to go after this one very hard. He's a tenacious bastard. He'll find his way here. After all, Foxie did. And so did I. It's not exactly a cold trail,
old chap.
”

“But you never came here, Pagan. Nor did your young friend. Nobody saw you. Your car will be found on some side street in Glasgow. You and your associate will simply become mysteries that start on page one and then find their way to page five, and after that oblivion and amnesia and God rest your souls, etcetera.”

“Burr can be persistent,” Pagan said.

“Then I'll fire him,” Kinnaird remarked.

“You've really got it covered, Freddie.” There was that anger inside him again, rising in his throat with the persistence of a gas. What wouldn't he have given to have Kinnaird alone in a locked room for sixty seconds? It was useless to feel such a sense of violence when there was nothing you could do to vent it. But it wouldn't leave him.

“Farewell.” Kinnaird turned away, then stopped, looked round again. “I'd stay for the finale, but some things simply do not attract me on an aesthetic level.”

“One last question, Freddie. How do you sleep? How the hell do you manage to sleep?”

Kinnaird said nothing. He moved between the trees.

Pagan called out, “You ever have bad dreams, Kinnaird? Do you have bad dreams about Shepherd's Bush? Does that ever cross your bloody mind?”

Kinnaird stopped, looked round. “I never dream.”

Then Kinnaird kept going. Pagan, who heard the faraway song of the lark again, felt the shotgun against his spine. He clenched his hands at his side in useless anger. The sun, unseasonably hot, beat at his face; he raised a hand, wiped sweat from his eyelids, blinked across the trench at Foxworth, who looked haggard and resigned.

“This isn't how I imagined an ending,” Pagan said. He felt the pressure of the shotgun and heard the gunman say
Move your arse, Jack
, in his harsh nasal way. He was being forced back to the edge of the grave.

“Nor me,” Foxworth said. “In my pyjamas. Middle of the night. Heart attack in the arms of some gorgeous thing. I always thought that was the way to go. Bit of bliss for the big ending.”

“I don't think I expected to die in Scotland either,” Pagan said.

“Do you think it's unhallowed ground, Frank?”

Banter on the steps of the guillotine. A quip or two for the executioners. Gallows humour.

The man with the white hair pushed Foxie toward the trench too. Pagan and Foxie faced one another across the hole. There was a moment of intense silence suddenly, as if nothing flapped or flew, sung or buzzed. Pagan saw Freddie Kinnaird still walking between the trees, perhaps now three or four hundred feet from the killing place and stepping briskly, hurrying away from the distasteful scene he had himself arranged. Strangely Kinnaird made no sound either, no crackle of leaves underfoot, no whisper of clothing against tree trunks or low branches. The whole world had become mute.

Pagan stood at the very edge of the trench. He held his breath, thought about the gun in his coat pocket, imagined trying to turn, trying to wrestle the shotgun from the man who held it, but he had nothing going for him, no advantage, no chance to surprise, because the shotgun was pressed to his spine and if he made even one aggressive gesture it would go off immediately.

Out of time, Frank.

He looked down into the bleak cavity, then raised his face in the direction of Freddie Kinnaird.

The man in the black raincoat who stepped unexpectedly from the trees shot Freddie Kinnaird through the skull with a pistol.

It was done swiftly, with professional economy, one bullet that shattered Kinnaird's head and demolished half of his face. Freddie Kinnaird went down on his knees, then pitched forward, and the gunman – the same killer Frank Pagan had last seen shooting Caporelli in his Paris apartment, and who clearly had no interest in anything other than the task he'd just accomplished with such ease – disappeared through the trees like a man accustomed to sudden vanishing acts.

It was a diversion, shocking in its abruptness, and Pagan seized the unattended moment with all the passion of a survivor; he brought one clenched hand up and back, swinging the fist in a tight, powerful arc that ended when his knuckles made noisy thudding contact with the forehead of the hare-lipped man, who gasped and moaned and lowered his shotgun involuntarily. Something was broken in the man's face – the upper part of the nose, the ridge of bone above the eyes. Pagan, whose hand felt weirdly numb, wasn't sure what. The man bled profusely through the nostrils and made a choking sound. Pagan raised a foot, kicked at the shotgun, struck the barrel, but didn't force the gun out of the man's hands. The man stepped back, the contours of his face filled with flowing blood, his flop of a moustache turned scarlet. Pagan whipped the Smith and Wesson out of his pocket and fired it directly into the man's chest even as the other gunman, who had been standing behind Foxie, pulled the trigger of his shotgun despite the fact that Foxworth, alert as only a frightened man can be, had brought his shoulder into contact with his guard, knocking him just slightly off-balance.

The sound of the shotgun was so deafeningly loud that it rolled through Pagan's head like a thunderstorm. He fired his gun once at the white-haired man who took the bullet in the eye – but then Pagan was slipping, tumbling, earth crumbling under the soles of his shoes, and he was going down inside the very grave he'd tried to avoid, a weird view of the world, all sky and branch seen through eyes made half-blind by pellets of damp soil. He spat earth from his mouth, wiped it from his eyes, rose, clawed the sides of the trench, hauled himself up to a standing position.

Foxworth was looking down at him. He extended a hand towards Pagan, who grabbed it, and pulled himself out of the hole. Breathing heavily, badly, he shook clinging earth from his overcoat and hair, but it was everywhere – in his ears, his mouth, his shoes, fragments of the grave.

For a time Pagan said nothing. He surveyed the trees, the quiet landscape, the house in the distance. He looked at the two men who, only seconds before, had been potential executioners. The white-haired one was dead and had fallen under a spray of dark green fern so that his face, thankfully, was concealed from view. The other sat slumped against the trunk of a tree, holding both hands over his chest and groaning in pain.

“He'll need an ambulance,” Pagan said. “We can call from the house.”

Pagan, followed by Foxworth, walked to the place where Kinnaird lay. Ants, having scouted an abundant source of unexpected protein, were already filing in an unruly manner over the ruined side of Freddie's face. A fat horsefly crawled across Freddie's hair. Pagan spat a crumb of black earth out from between his teeth.

Foxie said, “I was never more glad to see you, Frank. I'd been stuck in the cellar of that bloody house for God knows how long. Our guards here were waiting for Kinnaird to turn up and make some kind of decision pertaining to my fate. When he finally showed up he didn't waste time deciding what to do with me. I'll say that for Freddie. He wasn't the vacillating sort.”

Pagan smiled by way of acknowledging Foxie's remarks, but it wasn't much of an expression. He had no energy left to him. It seemed to him that he stood outside of himself, that he had left his own body and was floating like some weird wind-lifted speck toward the sun, a strange sensation. But the pain in his chest brought him back to earth.

“New tenants are already moving in, I see.” Foxworth nodded down at the armies of ants. “I only hope they find Freddie edible. Who killed him anyway?”

“It's a long story. We'll talk about it later.” Pagan's voice was dry, cracked, almost gone. He walked away from the corpse of Kinnaird. Followed by Foxie, he went down through the meadow toward the big red house. He paused once, looked up at the sun; in the distance, the smallest flash of silver, was a tiny aircraft that could be heard droning, then it was gone and the sky, too blue for this season and this country, was empty again. Inevitably he thought of Magdalena, but it was one of those thoughts that opened and closed like a certain kind of ghostly flower.

Epilogue

Several days after the death of Frederick Kinnaird, the Lider Maximo spoke in the Plaza de la Revolutión in Havana. His speech started at two in the afternoon. If the past was any guide, he would not finish until six, perhaps six-thirty, and his audience would by then be numbed and hungry. The day was breezy and warm; flags busily flapped around the Plaza.