MAMista. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ