MAMista

‘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.

‘They are not bad, those nylon wigs,’ he said in an attempt to ruffle her. He had not drunk his chocolate. It was too thick and cloying for him. He was nervous enough for his stomach to rebel at just the smell of it.

She was not put out. ‘They are good enough for a job like this. You’ll wear your dark glasses too, if you take my advice. The new law requires only one eye-witness to ensure conviction for acts of terrorism.’ She did not use the word ‘terrorism’ sardonically. She had no quarrel with it as a description of what they were about to do.

She looked at Paz. His skin was light but he was heavily pigmented. She could see he was of Hispanic origin. His hair was dark and coarse. Parted in the middle, it often fell across his eyes, causing him to shake his head like some young flirtatious girl. He had that nervous confidence that comes to rich college boys who feel they still have to prove themselves. Such boys were not unknown here in Tepilo. They flaunted their cars, and sometimes their yachts and planes. One heard their perfect Spanish, full of fashionable slang from Madrid, at some of the clubs and waterfront restaurants beyond the town. Neither was it unknown for one of them to join the MAMista. At the beginning of the violencia such men had enjoyed the thrills of the bank hold-ups and pay-roll robberies that brought money the movement needed so desperately. But such men did not have the stamina, nor the political will, that long-term political activity demanded. This fellow Paz had arrived with all sorts of recommendations from the movement’s supporters in Los Angeles, but Inez had already decided that he was not going to be an exception to that rule.

In the local style, Angel Paz struck his cup with the spoon to produce a sound that summoned a waiter. She watched him as he counted out the notes. Rich young men handle money with contempt; it betrays them. The waiter eyed him coldly and took the tip without a thank you.

They got up from the table and moved off into the crowd. Their target – the Ministry of Pensions – was a massive stone building of that classical style that governments everywhere choose as a symbol of state power. Inez went up the steps and tapped at the intimidating wooden doors. Nothing happened. Some people strolled past but, seeing a man and a girl in the shadows of the doorway, spared them no more than a glance. ‘The janitor is one of us,’ she explained to Paz. Then, like a sinner at the screen of a confessional, she pressed her face close to the door, and called softly, ‘Chori! Chori!’

In response came the sound of bolts being shifted and the lock being turned. One of the doors opened just far enough to allow them inside.

Paz looked back. Along the street, through a gap between the buildings he could see the lights of the cafés in the Plaza. He could even hear the trio playing ‘Thanks for the Memory’.

‘You said it would be open, Chori,’ Inez said disapprovingly.

‘The lock sticks,’ said the man who had let them in, but Paz suspected that he had waited until hearing the woman’s voice. In his hand Chori held a plastic shopping bag.

‘Is there anyone else here?’ Inez asked. They were in a grand hall with a marble floor. A little of the mauvish evening light filtered through an ornate glass dome four storeys above. It was enough to reveal an imposing staircase which led to a first-floor balcony that surrounded them on all sides.

‘There is no need to worry,’ said the man without answering her question. He led them up the stairs.

‘Did you get the sodium chlorate?’ Paz asked.

‘The booster is all ready,’ Chori said. He was a big man, a kindly gorilla, thought Paz, but he’d be a dangerous one to quarrel with. ‘And here are the coveralls.’ He held up the bulging plastic shopping bag. ‘First we must put them on.’ He said it in the manner of a child repeating the lessons it had been taught.

He took them to a small office. Chori made sure the wooden shutters were closed tightly, then switched on the light. The fluorescent tube went ping as it ignited and then the room was illuminated with intense pink light. Two venerable typewriters had been put on the floor in a corner. A china washbowl and jug had been set out on an office desk, together with bars of soap and a pile of clean towels. On the next desk sat an enamel jug of hot water, and alongside it a can of kerosene. ‘Is it as you wanted?’ Chori asked Inez. She looked at Paz: he nodded.

Paz was able to see Chori in more detail. He had a wrestler’s build, a tough specimen with dark skin, a scarred face, and clumsy hands the fingers of which had all been broken and badly reset. He was wearing a blue blazer, striped shirt and white trousers: the sort of outfit suited to a fancy yacht. He saw Paz looking at him and, interpreting his thoughts, said, ‘You don’t think I’m staying on, after this thing explodes, do you?’

‘I could tie you up and gag you,’ said Paz.

Chori laughed grimly and held up his fingers. ‘With this badge of articulate dissent, the cops won’t come in here and sit me down with a questionnaire,’ he said. ‘And anyway they know the MAMista don’t go to such trouble to spare the life of a security guard. No, I’ll run when you run and I won’t be back.’ His stylish clothes were well suited to the Plaza at this time of evening.

Paz was already getting into his coveralls and gloves. Chori did the same. Inez put on a black long-sleeved cotton garment that was the normal attire of government workers who handled dusty old documents. She would be the one to go to the door if some emergency arose.

‘You made the booster?’ Paz asked.

‘Yes,’ said Chori.

‘Did you …’

‘I was making bombs before you were born.’

Paz looked at him. The big fellow was no fool and there was an edge to his voice. ‘Show me the target,’ said Paz.

Chori took him along the corridor to the Minister’s personal office. It was a large room with a cut-glass chandelier, antique furniture and a good carpet. On the wall hung a coloured lithograph of President Benz, serene and benevolent, wearing an admiral’s uniform complete with medals and yellow sash. The window shutters were closed but Chori went and checked them carefully. Then he switched on the desk light. It was an ancient brass contraption. Its glass shade made a pool of yellow light on the table while colouring their faces green. Chori returned to the steel safe and tapped on it with his battered fingers. Now it could be seen that three of his fingernails had been roughly torn out. ‘You understand,’ he said, ‘this baby must go. There must be enough explosive to destroy the papers inside. If we just loosen the door it will all be a waste of time.’ Chori was bringing from a cardboard box all the things that Paz wanted: the explosive and the wires and the clocks. ‘We found a little plastic,’ said Chori proudly.

‘What’s inside the safe?’

‘They don’t tell me things like that, señor.’ He looked up to be quite certain that the woman was not in the room. ‘Now, your comrade Inez Cassidy, she is told things like that. But I am just a comrade, comrade.’

Paz watched him arranging the slab of explosive, and the Mickey Mouse clocks, on the Minister’s polished mahogany desk.

Emboldened by Paz’s silence, Chori said, ‘Inez Cassidy is a big shot. Her father was an official in the Indian Service: big house, big garden, lots of servants – vacations in Spain.’ There was no need for further description. Trips to Spain put her into a social milieu remote from security guards and night-watchmen. ‘When the revolution is successful the workers will go on working: the labourers will still be digging the fields. My brother who is a bus driver will continue to get up at four in the morning to drive his bus. But your friend Inez Cassidy will be Minister of State Security.’ He smiled. ‘Or maybe Minister of Pensions. Sitting right here, working out ways to prevent people like me from blowing her safe to pieces.’

Paz used the tape measure and wrote the dimensions of the safe on a piece of paper. Chori looked over his shoulder and read aloud what was written. ‘Sixteen R three, KC. What does it mean?’ Chori asked.

‘R equals the breaching radius in metres, K is the strength of the material and C is the tamping factor.’

‘Holy Jesus!’

‘It’s a simple way of designing the explosion we need.’

‘Designer explosions! And all this time I’ve just been making bangs,’ said Chori.

Paz slapped the safe. ‘Make a big bang under this fat old bastard and all we will do is shift him into the next room with a headache.’ He took the polish tins and arranged the explosive in them: first the Japanese TNP, then the orange-coloured plastic and finally the grey home-made booster. Then he took a knife and started to carve the plastic, cutting a deep cone from it and arranging the charge so that none was wasted.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Relax, Daddy.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m going to focus the rays of the explosion. About forty-five degrees is best. I want it real narrow: like a spotlight. Here, hold this.’ To demonstrate he held the tins to the sides of the safe. He moved them until the tins were exactly opposite each other. ‘The explosions will meet in the middle of the safe, like two express trains in a head-on collision. That will devastate anything inside the safe without wasting energy on the steel safe itself.’

‘Will it make a hole?’

‘Two tiny holes; and the frame will be hardly bent.’