Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  “You had a bite to eat?” Manolo nodded, gently rubbing his stomach, and the Count thought it wasn’t a good idea to carry on without eating. “Look, I need you to go on the computer and get a list of all the investigations started in Havana over the last five days and which . . .”

  “Every single one?” asked Manolo, sitting opposite the Count ready to challenge his orders. He stared at his face, and the pupil in his left eye began to shift till it almost disappeared behind the bridge of his nose.

  “Hey, don’t look at me like that . . . Can I finish what I was saying?” asked the lieutenant, who rested his chin on his hands, contemplating his subordinate with resignation and wondering yet again whether Manolo was squint-eyed.

  “Go on, then,” the other demurred, sharing in his boss’s resignation. He turned to look out the window, and his left eye slowly returned to its normal position.

  “Look, you see, to get a grip on this we need to know if it’s related to anything, to whatever. That’s why I want you to get to the computer data and your brilliant brain to select whatever might be connected to Rafael Morín’s disappearance. Something might turn up, you know?”

  “I get it, blind man’s bluff.”

  “Manolo, stop being so fucking awkward. It needs doing. Off you go. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  “You’ll see me in an hour. In an hour? Hey, you’re sending me packing on my hoss and you’ve not even told me what the sheriff said . . .”

  “Not much at all. I spoke to the head of security at Foreign Trade, and it seems the Spaniard is purer than the holy mother virgin. Fond of whores and mean with them, but he sang the usual refrain: he’s a friend of Cuba, has done good business with us, nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “And are you going to talk to him?”

  “You know I’d like to, don’t you? But I don’t think the Boss will give us a plane to go as far as Key Largo. The guy went there on the morning of the first. Apparently everyone left on the morning of the first.”

  “I think we should see him, after what Maciques said . . .”

  “He won’t be back till Monday, so we’ll have to wait. OK, I’ll be back within the hour, my friend.”

  Manolo stood up and yawned, opening his mouth as wide as he could, moaning plaintively.

  “I get so sleepy after lunch.”

  “Hey, you realize what I’ve got to do now?” the Count pursued his interrogation, only pausing to walk over to the sergeant. “I’ve got to see the Boss and tell him we’re clueless . . . You want to change places?”

  Manolo smiled and beat a quick retreat.

  “No, that’s down to you, it’s why you earn fifty pesos more than me. You said in an hour’s time, didn’t you?” He accepted his lot and left the cubicle without waiting for the uh-huh of the lieutenant’s farewell.

  The Count watched him shut the door, then yawned. He thought how at that time of day he should be sleeping a long siesta, curled up under his sheets, after stuffing Jose’s meal or going to the cinema; he loved to relax in matinee shadows and watch very squalid moving films, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, People Like Us or Scola’s We Loved So Much. There’s no justice, he muttered, and picked up the folder and his battered notebook. If he’d believed in God, he would have commended his soul to God before going to the Boss empty-handed.

  He left his cubicle and walked along the corridor to the staircase. A light was on in the last office on the passage, the coolest and biggest on the whole floor, and he decided to make a necessary stop. He tapped on the glass, opened the door and saw the hunched shoulders of Captain Jorrín, who was also looking through his window at the street, resting his forearm on the window frame. Headquarters’ old bloodhound barely turned round to say, Come in, Conde, come in; he stayed still.

  “Hey, Count! Do you really think I should take early retirement?” the man asked, and the lieutenant realized he’d picked a bad moment. I’m a good one to be offering advice, he thought.

  Jorrín was the most veteran detective at headquarters, a kind of institution or oracle to which the Count and many of his colleagues had recourse hoping for advice, predictions and omens of a tried and tested usefulness. Talking to Jorrín was a kind of necessary rite in every tricky investigation, but Jorrín was ageing and his question was painfully symptomatic.

  “What’s the matter, Maestro?”

  “I’m gradually coming to the conclusion I should retire, but I’d like to know what someone like you thinks.”

  Captain Jorrín swung round but stayed by the window. He seemed tired, sad or even exhausted by something that was torturing him.

  “No, I’ve no problems with Rangel, nothing of that sort. We’ve even been friends of late. I’m the problem, Lieutenant. The fact is this work will be the death of me. I’ve been struggling on for almost thirty years and don’t think I can stand any more, any more at all,” he repeated and looked at the floor. “You know what I’m investigating right now? The murder of a thirteen-year-old boy, Lieutenant. A brilliant kid, you know? He was training to compete in the Latin American Mathematics Olympiad. Can you imagine? He was killed yesterday morning on the corner of his street, and his bike was stolen. Beaten to death by more than one person. He was dead before reaching the hospital; they’d fractured his skull, arms, several ribs and lots more besides. As if he’d been run over by a train, but it wasn’t a train, it was people after a bicycle. What’s gone wrong, Conde? How is so much violence possible? I should have got used to such things, shouldn’t I? But I never have, you know? And every time it hurts more, upsets me more. Ours is a fucking awful job, you know?”

  “You’re right,” the Count replied, getting to his feet. He walked over and stood by his friend. “But what the hell can we do, Captain? These things happen . . .”

  “But there are people walking around who can’t even imagine that they do, Lieutenant,” he interrupted the advice the Count was offering and looked back out of the window. “I went to the boy’s funeral this morning, and I realized I’m too old to be still doing this. Fuck, you know, they’re killing kids to steal their bicycles . . . It’s beyond me.”

  “Can I give you some advice, Maestro?”

  Jorrín acquiesced. The Count knew that the day old Jorrín took his uniform off, he’d embark on an irreversible decline that would end in death, but he also knew he was right and imagined himself, twenty years on, looking for the murderers of a young kid and told himself it was all too much.

  “I can think of only one thing to say, and I think it’s what you’d have said to me if I were in your situation. First find the boy’s killers and then consider whether you want to retire,” he pronounced before he walked towards the door, tugged at the door handle and added, “Whoever forced us to be policemen?” and headed down the corridor to the lift, infected by the maestro’s anguish. He looked at his watch and was alarmed to see it was already two-thirty. He felt he’d journeyed through the longest of mornings when minutes were languid and hours slow and difficult to defeat; his eyes saw a watch by Dalí. He went into the Boss’s office and asked Maruchi if he could see him when the intercom alarm went off. The young woman said: “wait”, waved her hand and pressed the red button. A rusty tin voice, turned into a stutter by the intercom, asked whether Lieutenant Mario the Count was around or where’d he got to as he’d not yet put in an appearance. Maruchi looked at him, changed her tone and said: “I’ve got him right here” and changed key again.

  “Well, tell him he’s got a call, from Tamara Valdemira. Should I transfer it?”

  “Tell her yes, otherwise she’ll bite my head off,” said the Count, walking over to the grey phone.

  “Transfer the call, Anita,” Maruchi requested and cut off, adding, “I think the Count has an interest in the case.”

  The lieutenant put his hand on the receiver, and it rang. He was looking at the Boss’s chief secretary when the telephone rang loudly for a second time, and he didn’t lift up the receiver.

  “I’m a bag of
nerves,” he confessed to the young woman, who shrugged her shoulders, what do you expect me to do? And he waited for the third ring to finish. Then picked it up: “Yes, it’s me,” and Maruchi just stared at him.

  “Mario, that you? It’s Tamara.”

  “Yes, tell me, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m not sure, something silly, but it might be of interest.”

  “I thought Rafael had turned up . . . Go on.”

  “No, I was just looking in the library and saw Rafael’s telephone book, it was there by the extension and, I don’t know, maybe I’m being really silly.”

  “Get to the point, woman,” he begged and looked back at Maruchi: you’re all the same, his sigh suggested.

  “Nothing really, kid, the book was open at the letter Z.”

  “Hey, you’re not going to tell me that Rafael is Zorro and that’s why he’s disappeared?”

  She stayed silent for a moment.

  “You can’t hold back, can you?”

  He smiled and replied: “Sometimes I can . . . Come on then, what’s Z got to offer?”

  “Just that there are two names: Zaida and Zoila, each with a number.”

  “And who might they be?” he asked, clearly interested.

  “Zaida is Rafael’s secretary. I don’t know about the other one.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “What do you think? I reckon I’m a little on the old side for reactions of that kind.”

  “You’re never too old . . . Did he usually leave that book there?”

  “No, that’s why I called. He always had it in his case, and his case is in its usual place, by the bookcase at the back.”

  “Go on, give me the two numbers,” he said, and his eyes requested Maruchi note them down. “Zaida, 327304, that’s El Vedado. And Zoila 223171, that’s Playa. Uh-huh,” he said, reading Maruchi’s jottings. “So you’ve no idea who this Zoila might be?”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “How’s the list going?”

  “Going. That’s why I was in the library . . . You know, Mario, I’m more worried now.”

  “OK, Tamara, let me investigate these numbers, and I’ll call by. All right?”

  “All right, Mario, I’ll be expecting you.”

  “Uh-huh. See you.”

  He took the sheet of paper the secretary pointed his way and studied it for a moment. Zaida and Zoila sounded like a melancholy Mexican duo of ranchera singers. He should have asked Tamara about the relationship between Rafael and Zaida but hadn’t dared. He jotted down the names and numbers on his notepad and smiled and asked Maruchi: “Hey, baby, do me a favour and give the people downstairs a call and tell them to look out the addresses for these numbers.”

  “Anything for you,” replied the young woman, bowing to the inevitable.

  “I so love willing women. When I get paid I’ll buy you . . . And the chief?”

  “Go in, he’s waiting for you, as he usually is . . .” she told him and pressed the black intercom button.

  He tapped the door with his knuckles before going in. Major Antonio Rangel sat behind his desk, officiating at a cigar-lighting ceremony. He was subtly angling the flame from his lighter, turning the cigar, and each movement of his fingers created a tranquil puff of blue smoke that floated before his eyes, embracing him in a compact scented cloud. Smoking was a transcendent part of his life, and people familiar with his fetish for a good Havana never interrupted him in the act of lighting a cigar. Whenever possible, they would give him well known brands as presents on the requisite day: a birthday or wedding anniversary, Father’s Day or New Year’s Day, the birth of a grandson or graduation of a son; and Major Rangel was gathering together a proud collector’s cache from which he could select different brands for particular times of day, buttresses to shore up his state of mind and sizes according to the time at his disposal for a smoke. Only when he’d finished lighting his cigar and contemplated with professional satisfaction the perfect crown glowing at the end of his smoke, would he straighten in his chair and address his latest visitor.

  “You wanted to see me. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I didn’t have much choice in the matter, did I? Take a seat.”

  “When you’re as stressed as I am and feel you can’t think straight, the best thing is to light a cigar, not firing it up and wallowing in smoke, but smoking it properly, for each cigar is unique and offers you every ounce of goodness it has. When I’m smoking like this and doing other things, it’s a waste of a six-inch Davidoff 5000 Gran Corona, which deserves to be smoked slowly and thoughtfully or simply when one can sit down to smoke and chat for an hour, which is the ideal lifespan of a cigar. The one I lit this morning was a disaster: first because mornings have never been the best time for a cigar of such quality and second because I didn’t pay it proper attention and mistreated it, and however much I tried later on, I couldn’t make amends, and it was as if I were smoking an amateur roll, it really was. I can’t understand why you prefer to smoke two packets of cigarettes a day rather than one Havana. That transforms you. And I don’t mean it has to be a Davidoff 5000 or another good Corona, a Romeo y Julieta Cedros N° 2, for example, a Montecristo N° 3 or a Rey del Mundo of whatever size but a good dark-skinned cigar that pulls gently and burns evenly: that’s what one calls living, Mario, or the nearest one ever gets. Kipling said a woman is but a woman, but a good puro, as they call them in Europe, is much more. I can tell you the fellow was absolutely right, because I may not know much about women, but I know lots about Havanas. One is a fiesta for the senses, a riot of pleasure, my boy: it revives the sight, awakens taste, rekindles touch and creates the lovely taste that goes so well with an after-dinner cup of coffee. And is even music to the ears. Listen to it moving between my fingers and almost moaning as if prey to desire. Do you hear that? Then come the accompanying pleasures: seeing half an inch of ash mount up or removing the band when you’ve smoked the first third. Isn’t that living? Don’t look at me like that. I’m being perfectly serious, more than you might think. Smoking is a true pleasure, particularly if you know how. What you do is a vice, a cheap experience, and that’s why you get frustrated and despair. Get this straight, Mario: this is a case like any other and you are going to solve it. But don’t let the past prejudice you, right? Look, to help you over the hump, I’m going to make an exception. Well, you know I never give cigars to anyone, but I’m going to give you a Davidoff 5000 as a present. I will now tell Maruchi to bring you a coffee and you’ll light up, the way I told you, and you can tell me what it’s like. You’d have to be a real son of a bitch if this doesn’t bring you back to life. Maruchi.”

  “Saturday 30 – 12 – 88

  “Armed Robbery. Retail company Guanabacoa district. Guard seriously injured. Culprits arrested. Closed.

  “Attempted murder. La Lisa district. Culprit arrested: José Antonio Évora. Victim: culprit’s wife. In a bad state. Statement: admits responsibility. Motive: jealousy. Closed.

  “Armed robbery, Parque de los Chivos, La Víbora, October Tenth District. Victims: José María Fleites and Ohilda Rodríguez. Culprit: Arsenio Cicero Sancristóbal. Arrested 1 – 1 – 89. Closed.

  “Murder. Victim: Aureliana Martínez Martínez. Resident at 21, N°1056, e/A and B, Vedado, Plaza District. Motive: unknown. Open.

  “Disappearance: Disappearance of Wilfredo Cancio Isla. Case open: possibly drug trafficking. Missing man found in a boarded up house. Accused of breaking into the property. Arrested pending investigation possible drug connections.

  “Armed robbery . . .”

  He closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips against his eyelids. The conversation with Jorrín had sharpened the hypersensitivity he’d not lost in all those years on the job and which helped him imagine each case individually. And that list of pointless crimes filled three computer printouts, and he reflected how Havana was turning into a big city. He puffed gently on the cigar the Boss had given him. Recently, he reflected, robbery and assault were on
an upward curve, the siphoning off of state goods seemed irrepressible, and trafficking in dollars and works of art had become much more than a passing fashion. It’s a good cigar, but none of this relates to Rafael. Tens of daily reports, of cases that were open, closed or still under investigation, astonishing connections linking a basic illegal beer-bar with an illegal betting shop, and the betting shop with counterfeit petrol vouchers, and the counterfeiting with a consignment of marijuana, and the drugs with a real store offering a selection of domestic electrical goods to purchase with dollars that couldn’t be traced. If only this cigar helped me think, because he needed to think, after he’d told the Boss about his dealings with Rafael Morín and Tamara Valdemira, I had a doggish infatuation for that woman, Boss. “But that was twenty years ago, wasn’t it?” the major asked, and he said: “Forget any idea I might take you off the case. I need you on it, Mario. I didn’t call you this morning for fun. You know I don’t like disturbing people just for the sake of it, and I’m not so romantic as to invent tragedies when they don’t exist.