Mambo (11 page)

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.

But the Society of Friends was different. It had no secret handshakes, no secret languages, no rituals of indoctrination, no masonic trappings. The Society, although profoundly secretive and jealous of its own anonymity, had gone beyond those forms of playacting. It promised more than fabulous wealth, it pledged a share in power, in shaping the destinies of countries like Cuba, sinking under the miserable weight of Communist mismanagement. The Society assured personal contact with history. It rendered senseless the notion that men were powerless before destiny. Some men, such as the members of the Society, could make an amazing difference. That they could make incalculable fortunes at the same time was not unattractive.

Magiwara gazed through his glasses into the drizzly streets. He believed he had a great deal to contribute to the Society, some of whose members bore him a residual resentment for his race. Caporelli, for example, had always seemed vaguely indifferent to him, and the two Americans, whom he didn't trust, treated him with the condescension of men who have eaten sushi once and, finding it deplorable, have condemned all of Japanese culture as being crude.

Magiwara knew he'd overcome these obstacles in time. He'd never yet been defeated by a hurdle placed in his way. At the age of fifty-eight he had amassed a personal fortune of seventy-three million dollars. Membership in the Society of Friends would increase that sum a hundredfold. The legality of the Society's business didn't perplex him. He knew there were grey areas, under-explored by routine capitalists, in which creative men might construct profitable enterprises. Such as Cuba, he thought.

He had studied the Society's history, at least the little that had been made available to him in the archives, stored in a bank-vault in the Italian town of Bari. These documents provided a broad outline of the Society's development, from the late nineteenth century when it had come into existence as a banking adjunct to the Mafia, laundering Sicilian money, investing it discreetly and legally, managing it as it grew. Through the 1920s and 30s, the Society, reorganising and naming itself for the first time The Society of Friends, a title whose ironic religious resonance escaped Magiwara, had seen the urgent need to move away from the violent excesses and the adverse publicity generated by men like Capone. The Society, far more secretive than the Mafia – which had become a public corporation, a soap opera, its innermost workings exposed for all and sundry to relish – now existed quite apart from the organisation that had spawned it. Few contemporary Mafiosi even knew of the Society's existence. If they'd heard of it at all it was only as ancient history, an obscure group that had gone out of existence before the Second World War, having “lost” considerable sums of the Mafia's money in “regrettable market trading”. In fact, the missing money had been embezzled cleanly by officers of the Society and now the Society owned banks and investment houses that had once belonged to the great financial barons of the West, managed funds, manipulated massive amounts of the currencies that flowed between the stock exchanges of different countries. It influenced prices on the world's markets, funded anti-Communist movements in Central America, Asia, and Africa. It never avoided its fiscal responsibilities. Its various fronts – banks, financial houses, shipping companies – all paid taxes in the countries where they were located. Whenever difficulties arose, whenever there was a tax dispute, these disagreements were always somehow settled very quietly, man to man, banker to revenue officer, and the Society of Friends was never mentioned. It moved unobtrusively and swiftly like a great shark seeking the shadowy places where it might be glimpsed but never identified. Sinewy, elegant, contemptuous of weakness, indifferent to ethics, it was firmly entrenched in the structure of world capitalism. And Kenzaburo Magiwara was a part of this great organisation.