Mambo by Campbell Armstrong Page A

the West End in a bedsheet. The mind is boggled.”
    â€œAll I do is lie here and feel useless. Sometimes Ghose teaches me new words. I just learned ‘haemothorax’, and that’s the highlight of the whole day.” Pagan looked at Martin Burr with disarming intensity. “I need to be in on this one. You know that.”
    Martin Burr ignored Pagan’s plea and took a pocket watch from his waistcoat. He flipped the silver lid open. “I must be running along, Frank. Busy busy. Things to do. I’ll see if I can come back again tonight. Can’t promise.”
    â€œAnd I stay right here?”
    â€œExactly.”
    Pagan watched Martin Burr go toward the door. “Is that an order, Commissioner?”
    Martin Burr sailed out of the room neither answering Pagan’s Mambo question nor acknowledging it, even though he must have heard it. Was it some sly tactic on the Commissioner’s part? Was he telling Pagan to take total responsibility if he discharged himself? Pagan listened to the click of Burr’s cane as it faded down the tiled corridor. Then he lay very still for a time before he smiled and reached for the telephone at the side of the bed.

4
    Glasgow
    Two men sat in the glass-walled conservatory of the Copthorne Hotel overlooking that heart of Victorian Glasgow called George Square, a large open space dominated by statues and the massive edifice of the City Chambers. On this rainy afternoon in October the Chambers, built in the Italian Renaissance style, looked vaguely unreal and uninhabited, as if the local government officers who were its usual occupants had fled in a scandalous hurry. The whole rain-washed square gave the same empty impression despite the occasional pedestrian hurrying under an umbrella.
    The older of the two men, a small white-haired figure called Enrico Caporelli, gazed pensively through the wet glass. Every five minutes or so he could see his black limousine pass in front of the conservatory while the driver killed time circling the area. Caporelli, five feet tall and sixty years of age, swung his dainty little feet in their expensive Milanese shoes a half-inch off the floor.
    Everything about the Italian was tiny, except, it was said, his cunning and his sexual organ. He’d been legendary for his dalliances with showgirls in his old Havana days. Whenever he thought of the floor shows at the Tropicana or the Nacional – before the barbudos had come down from the hills and screwed everything and everybody on Cuba – he remembered them with fondness and loss. He rubbed his hands, which were smooth as vellum, and said, “I’ve always enjoyed the statues here. Things were built to last back then. They were expected to be doorable. ”
    The younger man nodded, although the statues in the square didn’t appeal to him. They lacked flair. Passion, uncommon in damp presbyterian climates, was missing.
    Caporelli gazed at Queen Victoria a moment, then turned his face away from the drenched stone likeness of the monarch. He changed the subject suddenly. “Nobody on God’s earth is worth such a price.”
    â€œNormally I would agree with you. But not in this case. Believe me.” The younger man, Rafael Rosabal, was tall and muscular, handsome in a manner that was particularly Latin. He had the kind of face, symmetrical and perhaps a little too perfect, that at first beguiles most women, then later begins to trouble them in some indefinable way.
    Rosabal was cold in this climate. He’d been cold ever since he’d left Havana ten days ago. Despite the heavy woollen overcoat he’d purchased in Moscow, he was still uncomfortable. He wondered why Caporelli always chose unlikely cities for their meetings. Saint Etienne, Leeds, now Glasgow. Presumably Caporelli had business interests in these places.
    â€œIf he’s as smart as I’m always being told, how come he got himself in this godawful mess in the first