Len Deighton - MAMista

‘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.