Читать книгу MAMista - Len Deighton - Страница 8

TEPILO, SPANISH GUIANA.

‘It’s the greenhouse effect.’

The smell of the rain forest came on the offshore breeze, long before they were in sight of land. It was a sour smell of putrefaction. Next morning they awoke to see the coast, and the rusty old Pelicano followed it for two more days. The brooding presence of the vast jungle had had a profound effect upon everyone aboard. South America. Even the crew seemed to move more quietly and passengers spent hours on the confined space they called the ‘promenade deck’. They stared for hours at the mysterious dark green snake of land, and the distant mountains, that all regularly disappeared behind grey mist. For the most part it was flat coastal land: swamps where the mangrove flourished. At twilight flocks of birds – favouring the brackish water – came flying so low that their beaks were scooping up some sort of tiny fish.

The Atlantic water grew ever more ochre-coloured as they went east. It was silt from the Amazon. The prevailing currents make the water brown all the way to the Caribbean. The steward, obsequious now that the passengers were nearing their destination, passed his battered old binoculars around. He pointed out the sheer-sided stone fortress which now housed political prisoners. It was built on a rocky promontory. He said the guards put meat in the sea to be sure the water was never free of sharks.

On that last day of the voyage, the Pelicano drew closer to the land and they saw men, isolated huts and a fishing village or two. Then the sweep of Tepilo Bay came into view and then the incongruous collection of buildings that makes the Tepilo waterfront. Dominating it was the wonderful old customs house with its gold dome. Alongside ornate Victorian blocks, and stone warehouses, stood clapboard buildings, their peeling white paint gone as grey as the stonework. They’d no doubt be snatched away by the next flood or hurricane and then be rebuilt as they had been so many times before.

Here and there window shutters were being opened, as office workers resumed work after siesta. Four rusty dock cranes hung over the jetty where two ancient freighters were tied up. From a castellate tower children were jumping into the water for tourists’ pennies. Beyond that flowed the appropriately named ‘stinking creek’, which vomited hardwood trees when the up-country logging camps were working.

There were two wooden huts used by the soldiers and next to them a customs shed. Painted red it had been bleached pale pink by the scorching sun. Tall white letters – ADUANA – on the wall which faced out to sea were almost indiscernible. Scruffy, grey-uniformed soldiers, with old Lee Enfield rifles slung over their shoulders, stood along the waterfront watching the Pelicano approaching. An officer with a sabre at his belt and shiny top-boots strode up and down importantly. Not so long ago there had been passengers arriving by sea every day. Now only freighters came, and few of them carried visitors. A radio message that the Pelicano had ten passengers aboard had caused great excitement. It set a record for the month. The chief customs officer got a ride on a truck from the airport in order to be present.

The national flag – a green, yellow and red tricolour – fluttered from several buildings, and from a flag-pole near the customs hut. It was a pretty flag. Perhaps that was why no one had wanted to remove the royal coat of arms from it when, almost eighty years before, Spanish Guiana became a republic. Also such a change would have meant spending money. By government decree the royal arms were embodied into the national colours.

Angel Paz watched from the ship’s rail, where the passengers had been told to line up with their baggage. Paz was Hispanic in appearance, Panamanian by birth, American by passport and rootless by nature. He was twenty years old. He’d grown up in California and no matter what he did to hide it he looked like a rich man’s son. He was slim and wiry with patrician features and intelligent quick brown eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He felt in his pocket to be sure his passport was there. His fluent Spanish should have put him at ease but he couldn’t entirely dismiss a feeling of foreboding. He told himself it was due to the weather.

The rain had stopped – it had been no more than a shower – and the siesta had ended. Indian dockworkers were lined up on the steamy wet cobblestones waiting to unload the Pelicano. They were small impassive men with heavy eyelids and shiny brown skin. Their T-shirts – dirty and torn – were emblazoned with incongruous advertising messages.

During the sea voyage, passengers had been expected to keep out of the way of the crew, and not keep asking for the steward. But today they would disembark. Today was the day of the ‘servicio’. The baggage had been brought up to the deck. The cunning little steward – his Galician accent sounding almost like Portuguese – was actually singing, while the bent old man who swabbed the passenger deck, cleaned the cabins and made the beds, was smiling and nodding in a contrived manner. Paz waited patiently behind a couple of passengers with whom he’d played bridge several times. They were from Falkenberg, East Germany – or eastern Germany now that it was reunited – and they were hoping to start a new life in Spanish Guiana. The man – a skilled engineer – had been offered a job in a factory where trucks and buses were assembled and repaired. His pretty wife was wearing her best clothes. They were an affectionate couple, the man attentive and adoring, so that Paz had decided they were runaway lovers. Now they both stared at their new home town, faces tense and hands linked.

Behind them were four priests, pale youngsters with cropped heads. They had spent much of the voyage looking at maps and reading their Bibles and passing between them a dog-eared paperback called South America on Ten Dollars a Day. Now everyone was watching the delicate process of docking.

The Pelicano had turned laboriously until she faced upriver. There was a rattle of chain and a splash as the offshore anchor was dropped. The engines roared and whined, churning the muddy water white. All the while the fast current pressed the tired old ship towards the jetty, like a dog on its lead, as the anchor line was paid out. Gently the ship slid sideways until only a thin river of water separated hull from dockside. Ashore, Indian labourers came running forward to retrieve the heaving lines as they came snaking down through the air. The sisal mooring ropes came next, their eyes slipped over the bollards in that experienced way that looks so effortless. As she settled snug against the jetty, with three ropes secured and the backspring in place, the accommodation ladder went sliding down into place with a loud crash.

‘Home again,’ said the steward to no one in particular. A steam crane trundled along the narrow-gauge dockside rail to where it could reach the cargo hold. It made a lot of smoke, and a clatter of sound.

Paz sniffed the air as he picked up his cheap canvas bag to move along the deck. He could smell rotting fruit and the discharged fuel oil that lapped against the hull. He did not like his first taste of Tepilo, but it was better than living on the charity of his stepmother. He hadn’t come here for a vacation. He’d come here to fight in the revolution: the Marxist revolution.

As he waited his turn on the narrow accommodation ladder, he looked again at the town. Against the skyline stood a monument surmounted by a gigantic crucifix. He was reminded of the tortured Christ who, with gaping wounds and varnished blood, had haunted his dimly lit nursery. This humid town suggested the same stillness, mystery and pain.

There was nothing to be done about it now. Angel Paz had burned his boats. He’d deliberately ignored the travel arrangements that his uncle Arturo had made for him. He’d cashed in the airline ticket and routed himself so that the last leg could be done by ship. He’d never work for Don Arturo in any capacity. No doubt Arturo would be furious, but to hell with him. Paz had found people in Los Angeles who could put him in contact with the MAMista army in the south. Not even one of Don Arturo’s thugs would be able to find him there.

The steward approached him, picked up his bag and accompanied him down the gangway. Paz was the only passenger with whom he could talk real Spanish: ‘Put fifty pesetas into your passport and give it to the little guy in the dirty white suit. He’ll keep ten and give forty to the customs and immigration. That’s the way it’s done here. Don’t offer the money direct to anyone in uniform or they are likely to give you a bad time.’

‘So I heard,’ said Paz.

The steward smiled. The kid wanted to be a toughguy; then so be it. He still wasn’t sure whether the big tip he had given him was an error. But that was last night and he’d not asked for any of it to be returned. ‘Plenty of cabs at the dock gates. Ten pesetas is the regular fare to anywhere in town. Call a cop if they start arguing. There are plenty of cops everywhere.’

‘I’m being met,’ Paz said and then regretted such indiscretion. It was by such careless disclosures that whole networks had been lost in the past.

‘They don’t let visitors inside the customs area unless they have a lot of pull.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s these guerrilleros,’ said the steward. ‘They are blowing up the whole town piece by piece. Stupid bastards! Here you are; give fifty to this sweaty little guy.’

The man thus introduced wore a white Panama hat with a floral band and a white tropical-weight suit that was patched with the damp of nervous sweat. With quick jerky movements he took the US passport and snapped his fingers to tell an Indian porter to carry Paz’s bag. The man dashed away. Paz and the Indian followed him. The huge galvanized-iron customs shed was deserted except for four sleeping blacks. The white-suited man danced along, sometimes twisting round and walking backwards to hurry him along. ‘Hurry Hurry!’ His voice and his footsteps echoed inside the shed. The man kept looking back towards the ship. The four priests had lost a piece of baggage and he was anxious that they should not find it, and get through the formalities without his aid and intervention. Some of the officials were inclined to let priests through without the customary payment. This was not a practice the white-suited man wished to encourage, even by default.

With only a nod to two uniformed officials, the man went to the wrought-iron gates of the yard. He waited to be sure that the policeman let Paz out and followed him to the street. ‘Another twenty pesetas,’ said the man at the last minute. ‘For the porter.’ The Indian looked at Paz mournfully.

‘Scram!’ Paz said. The Indian withdrew silently.

The white-suited man returned his passport with a big smile. It was a try-on. If it didn’t work no hard feelings. He tried again: ‘You’ll want a cab. Girls? A show? Something very special?’

‘Get lost,’ Paz said.

‘Cocaine: really top quality. Wonderful. A voyage to heaven.’ Seeing that he was totally ignored, the man spilled abuse in the soft litany of a prayer. He didn’t mind really. It was better that he got back to the ship, and retrieved that suitcase he’d hidden, before the priests found it.

Once through the gate, Paz put his bag down in the shade. A cab rolled forward to where he was standing. It was, like all the rest of the line, a battered American model at least fifteen years old. Once they’d been painted bright yellow but the hot sun and heavy rains had bleached them all to pale shades – some almost white – except in those places where the bodywork had been crudely repaired. The cab stopped and the driver – a bare-headed man in patched khakis – got out, grabbed his bag and opened the door for him. In the back seat Paz saw a passenger: a woman. ‘No … I’m waiting,’ said Paz, trying to get his bag back from the driver. He didn’t want to ride with someone else.

The woman leaned forward and said, ‘Get in. Get in! What are you making such a fuss about?’

He saw a middle-aged woman with her face clenched in anger. He got in. For ever after, Paz remembered her contempt and was humiliated by the memory.

In fact Inez Cassidy was only thirty – ten years older than Paz – and considered very pretty, if not to say beautiful, by most of those who met her. But first encounters create lasting attitudes, and this one marred their relationship.

‘Your name is Paz?’ she said. He nodded. The cab pulled away. She gave him a moment to settle back in his seat. Paz took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. It was a nervous mannerism and she recognized it as such. So this was the ‘explosives expert’ so warmly recommended by the front organization in Los Angeles. ‘You are not carrying a gun?’ she asked.

‘There was a man in a white suit. He took me straight through. I wasn’t stopped.’

It annoyed her that he had not answered her question. She said, ‘There is a metal detector built into the door of the shed. It’s for gold but if sometimes …’ Her voice trailed off as if the complexities of the situation were too much to explain. ‘If they suspect, they follow … for days sometimes.’ She gave him a tired smile.

Paz turned to look out of the car’s rear window. They were not following the signs for ‘Centro’; the driver had turned on to the coastal road. ‘There is no car following us,’ said Paz.

She looked at him and nodded. So this was the crusader who wanted to devote his life to the revolution.

Paz looked at her with the same withering contempt. He’d expected a communist: a dockworker, a veteran of the workers’ armed struggle. Instead they’d sent a woman to meet him; a bourgeois woman! She was a perfect example of what the revolution must eliminate. He looked at her expensive clothes, her carefully done hair and manicured hands. This was Latin America: a society ruled by men. Was such a reception a calculated insult?

He looked out of the car at the sea and at the countryside. The road surface was comparatively good but the thatched tin huts set back in the trees were ramshackle. Filthy children were lost amongst herds of goats, some pigs and the occasional donkey. It was not always easy to tell which were children and which were animals. Sometimes they wandered into the road and the driver sounded the horn to clear the way. Hand-painted signs advertised fruit for sale, astrology, dress-making and dentista. Sometimes men or women stepped out into the road and offered edibles for sale: a fly-covered piece of goat meat, a hand of bananas or a dead lizard. Always it was held as high in the air as possible, the vendor on tiptoe sometimes. They shouted loudly in a sibilant dialect that he found difficult to comprehend.

‘Checkpoint,’ said the driver calmly.

‘Don’t speak unless they ask you something,’ Inez ordered Paz. The taxi stopped at the place where the entire width of the road was barred by pointed steel stakes driven deep into it. The driver got out with the car papers in his hand. A blockhouse made from tree trunks had become overgrown with greenery so that it was difficult to distinguish from its surrounding bush and trees. Grey-uniformed Federalistas, their old American helmets painted white, manned the obstacle. One of them went to the rear of the car and watched while the driver opened the trunk. The other held a Rexim machine gun across his body as if ready to fire it. Paz looked at it with interest. He had seen them before in Spain. In the Fifties a Spanish manufacturer sold the gun as ‘La Coruña’, but it was too heavy, too cumbersome and the price was wrong. They went out of business.

Two more soldiers were sitting on a log, smoking and steadying ancient Lee Enfield rifles in their outstretched hands. Standing back in the shade was another man. Dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, he wore fancy Polaroid sun-glasses. On his belt he had an equally fancy automatic pistol with imitation pearl grips. He did nothing but watch the man and woman in the car. Paz had seen such men at the docks. They were the PSS, the political police.

The taxi’s boot slammed closed with enough force to rock the car on its springs. Then the driver and the soldier collected the identity papers which Inez offered through the lowered window. The papers were taken to the man in the white shirt but he didn’t deign to look at them. He waved them away. The papers were returned to Inez and the driver started the car.

It was not easy to get the wide Pontiac around the metal stakes. It meant going up on to the muddy shoulder. The soldiers watched but did not help. Paz offered to get out and direct the driver but the woman told him to sit still. ‘It is all part of the game,’ she said.

When the driver had negotiated the obstacle the blank-faced man in the white shirt gave them a mocking salute as they pulled away. ‘It is all part of their stupid game,’ she repeated bitterly. She felt shamed in a way that only Latins understand. She gave him his passport and put her own papers back into a smart tote bag. ‘Most of them can’t read,’ she said. ‘But you can’t depend on that.’ She clipped the bag shut and said, ‘A friend of mine – a nurse – broke curfew almost every night using a liquor permit to get through the patrols.’

‘And got away with it?’

‘Until last month. Then she ran into one of the courtesy squads that patrol the tourist section where the hotels are. The lieutenant was at school with her.’

‘She was lucky.’

‘They took her to the police station and raped her.’

Paz said nothing. Her quiet answer had been spoken with a feminist fervour; she wanted to make him feel guilty for being a man. He looked out of the window. They were passing through a shanty-town. It was unreal, like sitting at home watching a video. Children, naked and rickety, played among wrecked cars and open sewage. A big crucifix guarded the entrance to the camp. At its base stood an array of tin cans holding flowers and little plants. One of them was a cactus. The sun beat down upon the rain-soaked sheets of corrugated metal and the draped plastic that made the walls and roofs. It produced a steamy haze. Through it Paz saw the distant buildings of downtown Tepilo. They shivered in the rising air like a miraged oasis.

After another mile of jungle they came to an elaborate stone wall. They followed it until there was a gateway. There they turned off, to find a comfortable house set in five acres of garden. ‘Is this a hotel?’ Paz asked.

Once it had been a magnificent mansion but now the grandiose stone steps, and the balcony to which they led, were crumbling and overgrown with weeds.

‘Sometimes,’ said Inez. She got out. He picked up his bag and followed her up the steps and into the house. A grand carved staircase led to the upper floor. She showed him to his room. Everything was grandiose, old and slightly broken like the servant who followed them into it. He opened the shutters and pulled the curtains aside. ‘You offered your services to the movement,’ she said after the servant had left.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know anything about explosives?’

‘I am an expert.’

She smiled. ‘Well, Mr Expert, I need you. Come with me.’ She took him to an attic room where a kitchen table was littered with bomb-making equipment. ‘Teach me to make a bomb.’

He looked at the way the things were laid out on the scrubbed table: scissors, insulation tape and string. There were some steel ball-bearings in a tray that might have been made as a crude triggering device, also a sharpened pencil and a notebook. Only a woman would have arranged it all so neatly. ‘You are mad,’ he said.

‘Teach me!’

‘With this junk?’ He extended a hand but did not touch anything.

‘I’ll get anything else you need,’ she said.

‘What are you trying to blow up?’ he asked. She hesitated. He turned to look at her. ‘You’ll have to tell me.’

‘A safe. A steel safe in the Ministry of Pensions.’ He studied her to see if she was serious. ‘Three times we have tried. None of the bombs exploded. This is our last chance while we still have a way of getting into the building.’

He looked at the equipment but did not touch it. He said, ‘We must wear coveralls and gloves. Just handling this stuff will leave enough smell on you to alert a sniffer dog. They use sniffer dogs in Tepilo, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’ She went to a huge closet in the corridor. From one of the shelves she took freshly laundered coveralls and cotton gloves. ‘We are not complete amateurs,’ she said, and held the coveralls up to see that they would fit him.

When he was dressed, with his hair tucked into a pirate-style scarf, he picked up the wrapped sticks of explosive and looked at them closely. ‘Oshokuyaku, probably picric acid.’ He sniffed at it cautiously as if the smell alone was lethal.

‘It cost a lot of money,’ she said. She had expected an explosives expert to be bolder with the tools of his trade. Was he afraid, she wondered.

‘Then you were taken, honey! That stuff was obsolete twenty years ago. The only good news is that it looks like it’s been stored properly.’ He put the explosive down gently and sorted through a cardboard box that contained a jumble of odds and ends: rusty screws, wires, detonators, a tube of glue and more sticky tape. ‘You’ve got the rough idea,’ he said grudgingly.

She opened a drawer and produced some brand-new batteries. ‘They are fresh and tested,’ she said.

‘How are you going to set it off?’

From the closet she fetched a wind-up alarm clock, still in a cardboard box. She put it on the table in front of him. ‘I need two clocks,’ he said. ‘Give me another.’

She got a second one. ‘Why two?’

‘In case one doesn’t work properly,’ he said. He tore the boxes open. They were an old-fashioned style: circular with a bell on top and Mickey Mouse on the face.

He placed the clocks side by side on the table and looked at it all. ‘Have you got any other explosive?’

She shook her head.

‘No American stuff? No Semtex? Russian Hexogen?’

‘This is all we have, until the next consignment comes. We had gelignite but it was oozing some sort of chemical.’

‘It’s not still around here is it? That was nitro running out of it.’

‘They buried it.’

‘You people are loco,’ he said again. ‘You need proper explosive.’

‘What’s wrong with that explosive?’

‘You’ll never make a bomb with that Japanese shit.’

‘They said it was fresh from the factory. It came in last month.’ She sounded desperate. Her face was white and drawn. He thought she was going to burst into tears. ‘This task is important.’

Paz looked at her thoughtfully, and then back to the bomb. ‘It just won’t explode,’ he said. ‘These American detonators won’t fire Jap explosive. You might as well connect it to a bundle of tortillas.’ He expected her to try to laugh, or at least to speak, but she was devastated by the disappointment. He said, ‘American explosive is high-quality and very sensitive. American caps will blow American explosive but they won’t make this stuff move.’

‘You must fix it,’ she insisted. ‘You are Mr Expert.’ She said it bitterly and he resented that. Why should this spoiled bitch hold him responsible for not performing miracles with her collection of rubbish?

‘We’d need a booster to put between the caps and the charge,’ he explained patiently. ‘Then we might make it explode.’

‘You could do it?’

‘Could you get sugar?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Sodium chlorate?’

‘Do they use it to make matches?’

‘Yes.’

‘We raided a match factory to get some once. Someone said it was for bombs. I could get some.’

‘How long would it take?’

‘I’ll speak on the phone right away.’

‘Careful what you say. A whole lot of people know what sodium chlorate can do.’

‘Go downstairs and tell one of the servants to cook a steak for you. There is plenty of food here. Suppose everything you need is brought to the Ministry of Pensions? Could you do it on the spot?’

‘Who said I was going to plant the bomb?’

She looked at him with unconcealed derision. This was the showdown; the time when he was forced to come to terms with the true situation. He had placed himself under the orders of the MAMista. That meant under the orders of this woman, and of anyone else to whom the Movimiento de Acción Marxista gave authority.

He spoke slowly. ‘We must have coveralls and gloves and kerosene to wash with. And good soap to get rid of the smell of the kerosene.’

‘I will arrange all that.’ She showed no sign of triumph but they both knew that their relationship had been established. It was not a relationship that Paz was going to enjoy.

He picked through the box to select some pieces of wire and a screwdriver and pliers and so on. He put these things alongside the explosive and the clocks. ‘I will need all those things. And a tape measure at least a metre in length.’

‘Estupendo!’ she said, but her tone revealed relief rather than joy.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t like her. She looked too much like his stepmother and he hated his stepmother. She’d sent him away to school and stolen his father from him. Nothing had gone right after that.

The Spanish day takes place so late. Tarde means both ‘afternoon’ and ‘evening’. The word for ‘morning’ means ‘tomorrow’. Seated outside a café in Tepilo’s Plaza de Armas, the young man was reminded of the Spanish life-style. The Plaza was crowded: mulattos and mestizos, aristocrats and beggars, priests, nuns, blacks and Indians. Here and there even a tourist or two could be spotted. There were sweating soldiers in ill-fitting coarse grey serge and officers in nipped-waist tunics with high collars, polished boots, sabres and spurs. Paz watched a group of officers talking together: the subalterns stood at attention with white-gloved hands suspended at the permanent salute. Their seniors did not spare them a glance.

Behind the officers, a stone Francisco Pizarro, on a galloping stone steed, assailed the night with uplifted sword. On the far side of the Plaza rose the dark shape of the Archbishop’s Palace. It was an amazing confusion of scrolls, angels, demons, flowers and gargoyles: the collected excesses of the baroque. On this side of the square the paseo had begun. Past the flower-beds and the ornamental fountains, young men of the town marched and counter-marched. Girls – chaperoned by hawk-eyed old crones – girls, smiling and whispering together, paraded past them in their newest clothes.

From inside the café there drifted the music of a string trio playing ‘Moonlight and Roses’. Across the table was the woman – Inez Cassidy – wearing a mousy wig and fashionably large tinted glasses. She was watching Paz with unconcealed interest and amusement.

‘They are not bad, those nylon wigs,’ he said in an attempt to ruffle her. He had not drunk his chocolate. It was too thick and cloying for him. He was nervous enough for his stomach to rebel at just the smell of it.

She was not put out. ‘They are good enough for a job like this. You’ll wear your dark glasses too, if you take my advice. The new law requires only one eye-witness to ensure conviction for acts of terrorism.’ She did not use the word ‘terrorism’ sardonically. She had no quarrel with it as a description of what they were about to do.

She looked at Paz. His skin was light but he was heavily pigmented. She could see he was of Hispanic origin. His hair was dark and coarse. Parted in the middle, it often fell across his eyes, causing him to shake his head like some young flirtatious girl. He had that nervous confidence that comes to rich college boys who feel they still have to prove themselves. Such boys were not unknown here in Tepilo. They flaunted their cars, and sometimes their yachts and planes. One heard their perfect Spanish, full of fashionable slang from Madrid, at some of the clubs and waterfront restaurants beyond the town. Neither was it unknown for one of them to join the MAMista. At the beginning of the violencia such men had enjoyed the thrills of the bank hold-ups and pay-roll robberies that brought money the movement needed so desperately. But such men did not have the stamina, nor the political will, that long-term political activity demanded. This fellow Paz had arrived with all sorts of recommendations from the movement’s supporters in Los Angeles, but Inez had already decided that he was not going to be an exception to that rule.

In the local style, Angel Paz struck his cup with the spoon to produce a sound that summoned a waiter. She watched him as he counted out the notes. Rich young men handle money with contempt; it betrays them. The waiter eyed him coldly and took the tip without a thank you.

They got up from the table and moved off into the crowd. Their target – the Ministry of Pensions – was a massive stone building of that classical style that governments everywhere choose as a symbol of state power. Inez went up the steps and tapped at the intimidating wooden doors. Nothing happened. Some people strolled past but, seeing a man and a girl in the shadows of the doorway, spared them no more than a glance. ‘The janitor is one of us,’ she explained to Paz. Then, like a sinner at the screen of a confessional, she pressed her face close to the door, and called softly, ‘Chori! Chori!’

In response came the sound of bolts being shifted and the lock being turned. One of the doors opened just far enough to allow them inside.

Paz looked back. Along the street, through a gap between the buildings he could see the lights of the cafés in the Plaza. He could even hear the trio playing ‘Thanks for the Memory’.

‘You said it would be open, Chori,’ Inez said disapprovingly.

‘The lock sticks,’ said the man who had let them in, but Paz suspected that he had waited until hearing the woman’s voice. In his hand Chori held a plastic shopping bag.

‘Is there anyone else here?’ Inez asked. They were in a grand hall with a marble floor. A little of the mauvish evening light filtered through an ornate glass dome four storeys above. It was enough to reveal an imposing staircase which led to a first-floor balcony that surrounded them on all sides.

‘There is no need to worry,’ said the man without answering her question. He led them up the stairs.

‘Did you get the sodium chlorate?’ Paz asked.

‘The booster is all ready,’ Chori said. He was a big man, a kindly gorilla, thought Paz, but he’d be a dangerous one to quarrel with. ‘And here are the coveralls.’ He held up the bulging plastic shopping bag. ‘First we must put them on.’ He said it in the manner of a child repeating the lessons it had been taught.

He took them to a small office. Chori made sure the wooden shutters were closed tightly, then switched on the light. The fluorescent tube went ping as it ignited and then the room was illuminated with intense pink light. Two venerable typewriters had been put on the floor in a corner. A china washbowl and jug had been set out on an office desk, together with bars of soap and a pile of clean towels. On the next desk sat an enamel jug of hot water, and alongside it a can of kerosene. ‘Is it as you wanted?’ Chori asked Inez. She looked at Paz: he nodded.

Paz was able to see Chori in more detail. He had a wrestler’s build, a tough specimen with dark skin, a scarred face, and clumsy hands the fingers of which had all been broken and badly reset. He was wearing a blue blazer, striped shirt and white trousers: the sort of outfit suited to a fancy yacht. He saw Paz looking at him and, interpreting his thoughts, said, ‘You don’t think I’m staying on, after this thing explodes, do you?’

‘I could tie you up and gag you,’ said Paz.

Chori laughed grimly and held up his fingers. ‘With this badge of articulate dissent, the cops won’t come in here and sit me down with a questionnaire,’ he said. ‘And anyway they know the MAMista don’t go to such trouble to spare the life of a security guard. No, I’ll run when you run and I won’t be back.’ His stylish clothes were well suited to the Plaza at this time of evening.

Paz was already getting into his coveralls and gloves. Chori did the same. Inez put on a black long-sleeved cotton garment that was the normal attire of government workers who handled dusty old documents. She would be the one to go to the door if some emergency arose.

‘You made the booster?’ Paz asked.

‘Yes,’ said Chori.

‘Did you …’

‘I was making bombs before you were born.’

Paz looked at him. The big fellow was no fool and there was an edge to his voice. ‘Show me the target,’ said Paz.

Chori took him along the corridor to the Minister’s personal office. It was a large room with a cut-glass chandelier, antique furniture and a good carpet. On the wall hung a coloured lithograph of President Benz, serene and benevolent, wearing an admiral’s uniform complete with medals and yellow sash. The window shutters were closed but Chori went and checked them carefully. Then he switched on the desk light. It was an ancient brass contraption. Its glass shade made a pool of yellow light on the table while colouring their faces green. Chori returned to the steel safe and tapped on it with his battered fingers. Now it could be seen that three of his fingernails had been roughly torn out. ‘You understand,’ he said, ‘this baby must go. There must be enough explosive to destroy the papers inside. If we just loosen the door it will all be a waste of time.’ Chori was bringing from a cardboard box all the things that Paz wanted: the explosive and the wires and the clocks. ‘We found a little plastic,’ said Chori proudly.

‘What’s inside the safe?’

‘They don’t tell me things like that, señor.’ He looked up to be quite certain that the woman was not in the room. ‘Now, your comrade Inez Cassidy, she is told things like that. But I am just a comrade, comrade.’

Paz watched him arranging the slab of explosive, and the Mickey Mouse clocks, on the Minister’s polished mahogany desk.

Emboldened by Paz’s silence, Chori said, ‘Inez Cassidy is a big shot. Her father was an official in the Indian Service: big house, big garden, lots of servants – vacations in Spain.’ There was no need for further description. Trips to Spain put her into a social milieu remote from security guards and night-watchmen. ‘When the revolution is successful the workers will go on working: the labourers will still be digging the fields. My brother who is a bus driver will continue to get up at four in the morning to drive his bus. But your friend Inez Cassidy will be Minister of State Security.’ He smiled. ‘Or maybe Minister of Pensions. Sitting right here, working out ways to prevent people like me from blowing her safe to pieces.’

Paz used the tape measure and wrote the dimensions of the safe on a piece of paper. Chori looked over his shoulder and read aloud what was written. ‘Sixteen R three, KC. What does it mean?’ Chori asked.

‘R equals the breaching radius in metres, K is the strength of the material and C is the tamping factor.’

‘Holy Jesus!’

‘It’s a simple way of designing the explosion we need.’

‘Designer explosions! And all this time I’ve just been making bangs,’ said Chori.

Paz slapped the safe. ‘Make a big bang under this fat old bastard and all we will do is shift him into the next room with a headache.’ He took the polish tins and arranged the explosive in them: first the Japanese TNP, then the orange-coloured plastic and finally the grey home-made booster. Then he took a knife and started to carve the plastic, cutting a deep cone from it and arranging the charge so that none was wasted.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Relax, Daddy.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m going to focus the rays of the explosion. About forty-five degrees is best. I want it real narrow: like a spotlight. Here, hold this.’ To demonstrate he held the tins to the sides of the safe. He moved them until the tins were exactly opposite each other. ‘The explosions will meet in the middle of the safe, like two express trains in a head-on collision. That will devastate anything inside the safe without wasting energy on the steel safe itself.’

‘Will it make a hole?’

‘Two tiny holes; and the frame will be hardly bent.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’

Paz looked at him. ‘The man who showed me how, would have put tiny charges in a line all round, focusing them at the centre. But he was an artist. We’d be up all night trying to do that.’

‘It’s great.’

‘It’s not done yet,’ said Paz modestly, but he glowed with pleasure. This man was a real comrade. From the desk Paz got a handful of wooden pencils and fixed them round a tin, holding them with a strong rubber band. ‘The charge has to stand-off at least the distance of the cone diameter. That gives the charge a chance to get going before it hits the metal of the safe.’

‘How would you like to write down everything you know? An instruction manual. Or make a demonstration video? We’d use it to instruct our men.’

Paz looked at him and, seeing he was serious, said, ‘How would you like one hundred grams of Semtex up your ass?’

Chori laughed grimly. ‘I’ll do this one,’ he said.

‘Okay. I’ll wire the timers.’ Paz took a Mickey Mouse clock and bent the hour-hand backwards and forwards until he tore it off. Then he jammed a brass screw into the soft metal face of the clock. Around the screw he twisted a wire. Then he moved the minute-hand as far counter-clockwise as it would go from the brass screw. He wound up the clock and listened to it ticking.

‘It’s a reliable brand,’ said Chori.

‘It has only to work for forty-five minutes,’ said Paz. He fixed the other clock in the same way and then connected it.

‘Two clocks?’

‘In case one stops.’

‘It’s a waste.’ A soft patter of footsteps sounded in the corridor and Inez put her head round the door. ‘There is a police car stopped outside,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to use a radio?’

‘No,’ said Paz.

‘I’ll go downstairs again. I’ll set off the fire alarm if …’

‘Stay here,’ said Chori. ‘We are nearly finished.’

Paz said nothing. Taking his time he went to look at the way Chori had fixed the stand-off charges to the safe. He prodded them to make sure the sticky tape would hold. Then he connected the caps and twisted the wires around the terminals of the dry batteries. Finally Paz connected the clocks to the charges. He looked up and smiled at Chori. ‘Fingers in the ears, Daddy.’ He looked round. Inez was still in the doorway. He smiled at her; he’d shown her that he was a man who mattered.

Without hurrying the three of them left the minister’s office. Inez returned to the darkened room to resume her watch from the window. The two men started to remove all traces of explosive. They stripped off the coveralls and cotton gloves and stuffed them into the shopping bag. Then they methodically washed their hands and faces: first in kerosene and then in scented soap and water.

Inez returned. She looked at her watch and then at the two men. She could not hide her impatience but was determined not to rush them. When the men were dressed, the three of them went down the main staircase. They walked through the building to the back entrance, to which Chori had a key. Once outside they were in a cobbled yard. There were big bins of rubbish there and Chori took the bag containing the soiled coveralls and stuffed it deep down under some garbage. The police would find it but it would tell them nothing they didn’t already know. It took only five minutes for them to get to the Plaza de Armas and be back at the café again.

‘There is plenty of time,’ said Paz.

Everything looked the same: the strollers and the soldiers and the fashionably dressed people drinking wine and flirting and arguing and whispering of love. The fountains were still sprouting and splashing, to make streams where the mosaics shone underfoot. Only Angel Paz was different: his heart was beating frantically and he could hardly maintain his calm demeanour.

The café music greeted them. The table they’d had was now occupied – all the outdoor tables were crowded – but the trio found a table inside. The less fashionable interior part was more or less empty. The waiter brought them coffee, powerful black portions in tiny cups. Glasses of local brandy came too, accompanied by tiny almond cakes, shaped and coloured to resemble fruit. ‘Twenty-two minutes to go,’ said Chori.

‘This one had better go back with you tonight, Chori,’ said Inez, a movement of her head indicating Paz.

She leaned forward to take one of the little marzipan cakes. Paz could smell her perfume and admired her figure. He could understand that for many men she would be very desirable. She sensed him studying her and looked up as she chewed on the sweet little cake. They all ate them greedily. It was the excitement that made the body crave sugar in that urgent way. ‘The car is late,’ she said to Chori. She stood up in order to see the street. It was crowded now, and even the inside tables were being occupied by flamboyantly dressed revellers.

‘It will be all right,’ he said. ‘He is caught in the traffic.’

They drank brandy and tried to look unconcerned. A group came in and sat at the next table. One of the women waved to Inez, recognizing her despite her wig and dark glasses. The waiter asked if they wanted anything more. ‘No,’ said Chori. The waiter cleared their table and fussed about, to show them that he needed the table.

The curfew had actually increased business in this part of town. Many of the cars parked in the plaza bore special yellow certificates. They were signed by the police authority to give the owners immunity to curfew. Some said the curfew was intended only for Indians, blacks and the poor. Well-dressed people were unlikely to be asked for their papers by the specially chosen army squads that patrolled the town centre.

The car that collected them from the café arrived fifteen minutes late. As they went to the kerb Paz saw the four crop-headed priests who’d been with him on the ship. One of them bowed to him: he nodded.

When the three of them were inside the car they breathed a sigh of relief. The driver was a trusted co-worker. He asked no questions. He drove carefully to attract no attention, and kept to the quiet streets. They encountered no policemen except a single patrolman keeping guard in the quiet side-street where the tourist buses parked for the night.

The traffic lights at the cathedral intersection were red. They stopped. Through the great door Paz could see the chapel and the desiccated remains of the first bishop displayed inside a fly-specked glass case. A thousand candles flickered in the dark nave.

Some worshippers were coming out of the cathedral, passing the old wooden kiosks with their polished brass fittings. From them were sold foreign newspapers and souvenirs and holy relics.

As the traffic lights changed to green Paz heard a muffled thump. It was not loud. He heard it only because he was listening for it. ‘Did you hear that?’ Paz asked proudly.

‘Thunder,’ said Chori. ‘The rains will begin early this year. They say it’s the greenhouse effect.’