“Frankie?”
They were kneeling in the lee of a low brambly hedge where the long lines of raspberry canes petered out. The sky was paper white and the air was heavy and thick.
A vortex of midges coned above their heads.
She opened his shirt and put her arms inside it, holding him, her palms against his shoulder blades. She rested her head on his shoulder. After a moment or two, he put his arms around her, his fingers meeting on the hard nubble where her bra fastened.
“Frankie?”
Still she wouldn’t speak. He lifted his right hand and buried it in her hair. Cautiously, he caressed the place where her neck met the base of her skull, marveling at how fragile it felt. He was certain that this silent embrace was her way of telling him it was over. That she was finishing with him. It made him gasp, as if he had been slapped by a gust of sleet out of the hot summer sky. He pulled her head away. She lifted her face. He was baffled to see that her eyes were wet, yet she was smiling.
“What?” He failed to keep the anger, the vast disappointment, from his voice.
“You smell nice,” she said. “For a boy.”
Then at last she kissed him, more urgently than ever before. She lifted herself up on her knees, and her hands rose up to the nape of his neck. Her nails pressed into his skin, hurting.
He was convinced that this was their good-bye kiss, the parting embrace.
So when they broke apart, he blurted, “I love you, Frankie.”
It was a shameful and desperate declaration. They were like foreign words. He had never heard real people use them. He’d shocked himself. He needed her to say that she loved him, too. To cancel out, to pardon, what he’d said.
She didn’t.
Instead, she said, “We can’t go on like this.”
It was like something you heard on the telly. He lowered his head like King Charles I inviting the executioner’s ax.
Frankie leaned away from him, pushing stray hairs from her face.
She said, “D’you know the little lane between Borstead and Bratton Morley?”
He looked up at her gormlessly. “What?”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a place where it goes through some woods. Skeyton Woods, they’re called. There’s a bridleway that goes off the lane. It’s got an old gate across it. Know where I mean?”
“Yeah. Frankie —”
A man’s voice called from dangerously close by, startling them. Frankie got to her feet, stooping to stay below the level of the raspberry canes.
“Meet me there tonight. Seven thirty. Okay?”
He nodded. Then she was gone.
Clem shoved his bike through the gateway and concealed it in a shallow ditch screened by bracken. He knew the place well, had known it all his life. He had a faint memory trace of walking in these woods with his mother when he was little. Before they’d moved to Borstead. For some reason the memory had a sad coloring to it.
A quarter of a mile or so from where he now stood, waiting, was the Dip, an old gravel pit overhung with trees. In the days before he’d become an outcast Grammargog, he’d been one of the Millfields Gang, who’d bike to the woods to play hectic daylong games of stalking and warfare there. Beyond the Dip, the bridleway forked. The left branch emerged, eventually, onto a farm track behind Bratton Manor. He assumed that Frankie would come from that direction. After an eternity of ten minutes, he could hardly resist the urge to set off to meet her, to get to her sooner. But she’d said the gateway. It seemed to him that his insides were actually vibrating with indecision. And the swelling fear that she would not come.
She wouldn’t, he realized; she’d never intended to. She’d planned this cruelty as a way of ending things between them, knowing that he’d be too hurt, too humiliated, ever to go near her again. This sudden, terrible certainty untethered his heart. He groaned aloud, and although he was alone, he felt shamed by the hot tears that blurred his vision. He took refuge in anger. At himself, for spoiling everything by saying he loved her. By getting serious. How could it get serious, seeing who he was and who she was? He’d scared her off. He cursed himself: You effing idiot, Ackroyd. He made himself curse her: Stuck-up bitch.
He’d go home. Sod it. In a minute. Definitely.
After a while, he heard a soft thudding and looked down the track. Christ, someone on a horse. He was about to duck back out of sight when he realized it was her. Bucking up and down in the saddle to the easy rhythm of the horse’s trot. A brown horse dappling bright then dark in the light slanting through the trees. Seeing Clem, it slowed, hesitated. He saw her urge it forward by tightening her knees and heels against its body. It came on cautiously, tossing its head a little, whiffling. She was wearing clean jeans and a beige tweed jacket over a white T-shirt. Her hair was partly tied back, leaving long tresses hanging on either side of her face. Clem stuck his hands into his pockets, trying not to look like someone about to faint from relief. Or joy. Or fear of horses.
“Easy, boy,” Frankie said, bringing the uneasy horse to a halt. She swung herself out of the saddle.
She said, “Hello,” as if to someone she’d met by chance, and walked to the horse’s head. She put her hands on its hard flat cheeks.
“This is Clem. Clem, this is Marron. Isn’t he gorgeous? This is one of our favorite rides.”
She looked at Clem at last. “Say hello. Wait, give him these.”
She took three sugar cubes from her jacket pocket.
“Sit them on your hand, like this.”
He let the horse slobber them up, then wiped his hand on his jeans.
“Have you been waiting ages? I’m sorry. But listen, I had this terrific idea. I told Mummy that I was feeling guilty for neglecting Marron while I was working in the fields. I said that I’d try to find the time to take him out once or twice a week when I got home. And she bought it! She said that it was a très bonne idée. It means we can meet in the evenings! Don’t you think that was clever of me?”
He did, yes, and was dizzied by these new possibilities. But her brittle-sounding chatter was like a barrier between them. He was keenly aware of Marron’s rolling eye. And, yet again, of how achingly beautiful this girl was, how impossible all this was.
“Clem? Don’t you?”
“Yeah. Brilliant.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I . . .”
He moved toward her. She turned her head to glance back down the track, and he understood.
“This way,” he said, and walked to where a narrower path led away into the bracken. The horse was reluctant to turn and was nervy on the path. Frankie led him by the bridle, making encouraging chut-chut-chut noises. After five minutes, they came to a little dell inside a group of ancient beech trees, their trunks like huge clenchings of gray-green muscle. Light came in shifting dazzles through fans of leaves that descended almost to the ground.
“Will this do?”
Frankie surveyed the scene. “Hmm. Is this where you bring all your girls, Master Ackroyd?”
“Only the special ones.”
She looped and knotted Marron’s reins onto a low branch, then regarded Clem mock seriously.
“How many special ones have there been?”
But he was too impatient for games. “None. You’re the first, Frankie. Honest.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Come here, then.”
They stooped under the fringe of the leaf mantle. Their feet rustled the rust-colored leaf litter. Frankie took her jacket off, spread it on the ground, and sat on it. He knelt in front of her and slid his hand into her hair, finding that delicate place at the top of her neck. He leaned toward her.
“No,” she said, “like this,” and lay on her side, resting her head on her hand.
They had never lain down together, and Clem hesitated, fearing he would not be able to hide his uncontrollable stiffening from her.
“Come on,” she said. “We haven’t got al
l night, you know.”
“You mustn’t go too fast,” Maddie Travish had told her. “Because if you do, the boy will think you’re a tart. So no touching anywhere on the first three dates, okay? After that, a hand on the bum is perfectly acceptable. If you like him, if his breath doesn’t stink or anything like that, you can let him touch you up here. But only outside the bra. Definitely not inside the bra until at least the fifth date.”
“Why, Maddie?”
“Because boys like to think they’re making progress. They’d absolutely loathe to think that you are in control of things. They want to believe that you’re absolutely dying for it, but terribly afraid of giving in. So when you do give in, they think it’s because they’re irresistible. Besides, it’s the most wonderful fun, making them wait. They get into the most extraordinary states. You can do almost anything with them, darling.”
Frankie wasn’t sure if countless stolen snogs in the hedges of fruit fields counted as dates. Perhaps parts, or fractions, of dates.If they did, the arithmetic was complicated. But the answer probably came to five, at least. So she shifted onto her back and took Clem’s right hand and guided it up inside her T-shirt and pressed it onto the slithery nylon that cupped her left breast. This had a startling effect: Clem sucked all the breath out of her mouth and moaned at the same time. She opened her eyes and found herself looking into his. They were sort of glazed.
He said, “God, Frankie. God.”
She could feel his hard thingy against her leg. Little electrical currents ran through her.
“Do you really love me?”
“Yeah. Christ, Frankie.”
She pressed her fingers on his and showed them what to do.
“I love you, too.”
She was both relieved and surprised that she meant it.
AT THIS POINT I need to take you on a short detour. I’m very much a cause-and-effect sort of a fellow. I’m fascinated by the way things fit together (and come to pieces). And if we were to take what eventually happened to Frankie and me and drew something like a flowchart of how it came about, one of its arrows would lead us into the darkness of a Caribbean night: the night of February 15, 1898, in fact. Just off the north coast of Cuba, in Havana Bay.
The half-moon appears only fitfully among slow-moving clouds, and stars are few and far between. It is very quiet. The only scraps of sound are the clop and trundle of the horse-drawn carriages along the Malecón, Havana’s seafront boulevard, and snatches of brassy music. Apart from where the city’s lights spill into the harbor, the sea is black. In its vastness, tiny spangles bob, the lamps of fishing boats. But there is one larger concentration of lights, those of an American warship, the USS Maine.
It is nine forty p.m. There are few strollers or lingerers along Havana’s shoreline; the authorities, having recently crushed another revolution, do not encourage the populace to gather after dark. But for those who witness it, who stagger and scream or are momentarily paralyzed by it, who are physically rocked by it, the explosion will be unforgettable. A vast plume of fire erupts from the sea, then forms itself into a boiling globe of red and orange that recolors the city. The sound comes an instant later, a lumbering thunderclap that seems to last an impossibly long time, echoing, even though there is nothing for it to echo from. The Maine has blown up. The front third of the ship, where most of its crew were sleeping or playing cards or writing letters, has been transformed into fiery vapor. The sleepers, the gamblers, the writers, have disintegrated. Their bits, their atoms, are hurled into the sky, then rain down onto the surface of the sea, like the grains of an exhausted firework. Within minutes the remaining hulk of the ship has gone, gulped onto the floor of the bay. Two hundred and sixty-six men are dead.
(By one of those coincidences that make you wonder if there is in fact a Scriptwriter Beyond the Stars, my grandmother Winifred entered the world, red, slippery, and resentful, just a few minutes later. Perhaps even before the waters had regathered themselves above the wreck of the Maine.)
Pretty much as soon as they were united, the United States of America started hankering after Cuba. (And still do.) How could they not? It was the biggest island in the Caribbean. Tropical and lush, blessed with lovely beaches, it was so temptingly close: only ninety miles from the southern tip of Florida. Its capital, Havana, is the same distance from Miami as Washington, D.C., is from New York City. The island grew lots of sugarcane, and America had a very sweet tooth. Unfortunately, Cuba was part of the Spanish Empire. (Spain’s hired Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, had discovered it, much to the surprise of the people who already lived there.) In 1848 President James Polk offered to buy it. The Spanish declined, in no uncertain terms, and continued to treat the Cubans very harshly, which greatly distressed the freedom-loving and slave-owning Americans.
In 1895, after another failed uprising, the Spanish sent a general (fondly nicknamed El Carnicero, the Butcher) to get Cuba more firmly under control. One of his tactics was to herd huge numbers of people into concentration camps, where the military could more conveniently keep an eye on them. And while the military watched, the internees died, hundreds of thousands of them, from disease and starvation.
There was widespread outrage in the United States, and the newspapers clamored for President McKinley to do something: ideally, turf the goddamn Spaniards out of Cuba and take over the place. McKinley didn’t do that. He issued dire warnings to the Spanish, who ignored them and continued on their brutally merry way. Then, toward the end of January 1898, the president sent the USS Maine to Havana, thinking, I suppose, that the sight of American sea power might persuade them that he was serious. The Cuban authorities treated the crew — the officers, at least — with careful courtesy. (The ordinary sailors were not allowed ashore, in case trouble broke out. Which must have been deeply frustrating, so close to a tropical island reputedly full of beautiful dusky women and awash with rum.)
And then — WHUMPH! — the Maine was gone.
The U.S. Navy conducted an inquiry and concluded that the ship’s magazine — its ammunition store, containing several tons of explosive charges for its guns — had blown up. That was pretty much a no-brainer, given the violence of the cataclysm. But the navy also decided that the explosion had been triggered by a mine. And, of course, the only people who could have planted the mine were the Spanish. This conclusion was almost certainly wrong, but that didn’t matter. It gave the Americans a reason to go in.
On April 22, 1898, McKinley ordered a sea blockade of Cuba to strangle the trade in and out of the place. Two days later, Spain declared war on America. It was one of the dumbest moves in all history. The U.S. trounced them. The war was over in less than three months, and the Americans took possession of the Spanish Empire, which, in addition to Cuba, included the Philippine Islands on the other side of the world altogether.
Surprisingly, the U.S. did not declare Cuba to be part of its territory; it didn’t make it one of the United States. Officially, it occupied the country for only four years. In fact, it controlled the country for the next sixty, until, in my lifetime, the nightmare figure of Fidel Castro loomed over the horizon.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Cuba became the holiday destination for rich Americans. And where you find rich Americans, you will find the Mafia. The Mob moved in pretty early. Meyer Lansky, probably the cleverest gangster ever, saw the possibilities quicker than most. If Americans with plenty of money were sailing or flying south for a suntan, what else might they want while they were there? Class hotels? Certainly. Casinos, bars, brothels, drugs, racetracks, nightclubs? Definitely. Lansky went to Cuba and got himself appointed “adviser on gambling reform” to the U.S.-sponsored dictator, Fulgencio Batista. You can imagine what kind of gambling reform advice a casino-owning mobster would offer a tyrant: “Like, just keep the cops away, Fulgencio, unless we need a bad loser beaten up, okay? And let’s not talk about taxes. Here, put this fat envelope in your pocket.”
Lansky built himself a twenty-one-story hotel on the Havana seafront. His brother built one just down the way. Cuba became America’s marijuana-smoking, coke-snorting, sex-drenched, rum-addled tropical playground. One of the privileged young Americans who went there, as an official guest, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Years later he would be one of the men who played a game of political poker, with the survival of the world at stake, and hurried me and Frankie toward our fate.
Yet again, I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s not easy, keeping history in line. Herding cats in fog is easy by comparison.
America’s party in paradise came to a sudden and shocking end. Castro’s boatload of revolutionaries landed in Cuba late in 1956. They were betrayed almost immediately and ambushed by government forces. Fidel, his brother Raúl, and Che Guevara survived and hightailed it into the mountains. From there, the Barbudos (Bearded Ones) gathered new recruits and conducted a guerrilla war that lasted two years. Amazingly, the Barbudos won it. In December 1958, Batista fled and Fidel assumed power. He turfed the Yankees out and took their mining companies, sugar plantations, and fruit farms under state control. The music died and the lights went out in the hotels, casinos, and brothels.
For the U.S., it was a humiliating trauma. It was like losing your elegant, beautiful, easygoing mistress to a sweaty, hairy lout. The Americans were very sore about it. When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Castro was high up on his list of Things to Take Care Of. The Central Intelligence Agency created Operation Mongoose, dedicated to getting rid of Fidel. It planned acts of sabotage inside Cuba: propaganda, subversion, assassination attempts. Kennedy’s younger brother Robert was given the task of overseeing the operation. The truth is, though, that Mongoose was a crackpot, cowboy organization. It came up with some highly imaginative plans to unseat Castro. They would put explosives into his cigars. They’d spray LSD into the radio studio from which Fidel broadcast his endless speeches to the nation; the tripped-out leader would start burbling about turning into a flying peacock or some such, and the Cubans would think he’d gone insane. They’d doctor Fidel’s clothes with a chemical that caused total hair loss; without a beard, the leader of the Bearded Ones would also lose his credibility. Maybe those gullible Cubans would see his denuded chin as a sign from God.