Read Online Mambo by Campbell Armstrong - Free Book Online Page A

longer existed in Castro’s shabby socialist paradise. He’d heard that his beautiful house, confiscated in 1959 on behalf of the bullshit Revolution, was now occupied by a department of MINAZ, the Ministry of the Sugar Industry, or one of those other godawful bureaucracies the fidelistas were so fond of creating.
    He wanted that house again. He wanted it back so badly he ached. He lusted after it with an intensity that was beyond simple greed. It was his house; he had always imagined dying in it one day. He could hear the sound of his heels echo in the tiled entrance hall and the laughter of girls in the upstairs room. Tall women, huge breasts, invariably blonde, that was how he’d always liked them. Back then, he’d been blessed with amazing stamina and a lot of lead in his pencil.
    But it was more than just the house .
    â€œThe Vedado could use a coat of paint,” Rosabal said. “Like everything else in Cuba.”
    Enrico Caporelli rose from his chair and took a pair of leather gloves out of the pocket of his black overcoat.
    â€œThen we must see if we can give it one, Rafael,” he said. “Fresh paint is one of my favourite smells.”
    The rainclouds over Glasgow grew darker and heavier as the limousine left the city and approached the coastal road to Ardrossan and then south to Ayr. On the Firth of Clyde, the stretch of water that eventually became the Irish Sea, the rain turned to mist, drawing a lacy invisibility over the Island of Arran and the imposing mountain called Goat Fell. Once, in a dramatic way, the peak pierced the mist like a fabulous horned creature, but was gone again before Caporelli was sure he’d seen it.
    He dozed in the back of the big car, waking every so often to look out at the rainy green countryside or some small town floating past. At Ballantrae, fifty miles from Glasgow, the car turned away from the coast and headed inland on a forlorn road that was rutted and pocked. This narrow strip passed between tall hedgerows. Here and there, where the hedges parted, overgrown meadows sloped toward a distant stand of thick, misty trees. How could any place be this green? The darker the green, the more secretive the landscape. Caporelli had the sensation he was travelling into a kingdom of rainy silences. A secure kingdom, certainly; he saw at least two men with shotguns stalking the spaces between trees.
    The house came finally in view, a large sandstone edifice built in the early part of the twentieth century, although its style echoed much earlier times. Circular towers suggested fortresses of the late sixteenth century. Darkened by rain, the house had shed some of its red stone warmth, and looked uninviting. The limousine entered the driveway and came to a stop at the ornate front door, which was immediately opened by Freddie Kinnaird, whose florid face appeared to float through the rain like a balloon escaped from a child’s hand.
    Caporelli waited until the chauffeur, a taciturn man called Rod, had opened the door for him before he got out. Then, ducking under an umbrella Rod held, he stepped toward the house where Freddie Kinnaird shook his hand vigorously. “Welcome to Kinnaird’s folly.”
    They were improbable associates, the beefy red-faced Englishman with hair the colour of sand and the tiny white Italian. Kinnaird placed a hand on Caporelli’s elbow and steered him inside the enormous flagstoned hall of the house where a fire burned in the baronial fireplace. Caporelli spread his palms before the flames, thinking he didn’t much care for the size of this room or the stuffed animal heads that hung high on the walls – elks, boars, deer. They had the glassy, haunted look of all animals slain before their time.
    â€œWhy did you buy this place, Freddie? Did you need something small and intimate?”
    Freddie Kinnaird poured two small sherries from a decanter and smiled a generous white-toothed smile. “It has some obvious