Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  So he was a torero as well? the Count wanted to ask because he guessed Maciques might be a hard nut to crack as his obsolete if irrefutable verbiage spewed out. He looked down at his notebook, where he’d written BIG MONEY BUSINESS, and allowed himself a moment for thought: was Rafael Morín everything he was cracked up to be? Although from a considerable distance, he’d seen the social and professional rise of a man now declared missing. He leaped like a clever, well trained acrobat, one who jumps fearlessly into the void because they’ve put in place a safety net that assures them, up you go, just do it and you’ll triumph, I’m here to protect you. Marriage into a wealthy family was half the battle: Tamara, her father, and her father’s friends, must have smoothed the path for him, but for justice’s sake he must accept the rest was down to him, no doubt about that. When Rafael Morín spoke from a microphone at high school twenty years earlier, his mind was already dead set on the idea of making it, of climbing all the way to the top, and was getting in training. At the time people’s ambitions were usually abstract and vague, but Rafael’s were already well formed, and that’s why he got on the fast track and set out to secure every certificate, every recognition, every award and to be a perfect paragon, self-sacrificing and worthy, cultivating en route friendships that would at some stage be useful, yet he was never out of breath or without a smile. And he showed himself to be extremely able, always ready to make the slightest sacrifice to skip over several steps on the ladder to heaven, conveying good vibrations, trust, forging an image of himself as ever prepared and possessed with the necessary flexibility that made him look useful, malleable and reliable: a man who took on and completed every task he was charged with and quickly bounced back for the next. The Count was familiar with these stories of lives that blow with the wind and imagined the infallible cocky smile he’d put on when speaking to deputy minister Fernández-Lorea about how well things would turn out, Comrade Minister, according to the latest estimates received. Rafael Morín would never have argued with a superior, would only have had exchanges of opinion; he’d never have refused to carry out a ridiculous order, would only have offered constructive criticism and always through the right channels; he’d never have taken a jump without testing the safety net that would welcome him lovingly and maternally, if he had an unexpected fall. So where had he gone wrong?

  “So where did he get the money to give the presents he gave?” asked the Count when he finally managed to read the only thing he’d jotted down. And was surprised how quickly René Maciques responded.

  “I imagine he saved it from his daily allowances.”

  “And would that be enough for the hi-fi system he had at home, to buy his mother Chanel N° 5, for the big and small gifts he gave his subordinates and even to say his name was René Maciques and rent a room at the Riviera and take a twenty-three-year-old sparkler to dine at L’Aiglon? Are you sure, Maciques? Did you know he used your name with the women he picked up or did he never tell you, even in confidence as it were?”

  René Maciques got up and walked towards the air conditioning unit built into the wall. Fiddled with the controls, straightened the curtain that had got caught up in one corner of his office. Perhaps he felt cold. That same night, while pondering the latest twist in the fate of Rafael Morín, Lieutenant Mario Conde recalled this scene as if he’d lived it ten or fifteen years earlier, or as if he’d never wanted to experience it, because Maciques returned to his chair, glanced at the policemen and no longer looked like a television presenter but the timid librarian the Count had imagined when he said:

  “I just refuse to believe that, comrades.”

  “That’s your problem, Maciques. I’ve no reason to lie to you. Now tell us about those presents.”

  “I told you: they must have come from what he saved out of his daily expense allowance.”

  “And could that run to so much?”

  “I’ve no idea, comrades, you’d have to ask Rafael Morín.”

  “Hey, Maciques,” said the Count as he stood up, “would we also have to ask Rafael Morín why you came here at lunchtime on the thirty-first?”

  But René Maciques smiled. He was back on camera, stroking his eyebrows, when he said:

  “What a coincidence! I came to do just that,” and pointed at the air conditioning unit. “I remembered I’d left it switched on and came to turn it off.”

  Now the Count smiled and put his notebook back in his pocket. He was praying Patricia would find something that would allow him to pulverize René Maciques.

  The only time Mario Conde shot at a man, he’d learned how easy it was to kill: you aim at the chest and stop thinking as you pull the trigger; the act of firing almost spares you the moment the bullet hits the man and knocks him to the ground like a hail of stones where writhing, wracked in pain, he does or doesn’t die.

  The Count was on leave that day, and for months he’d tried, as with everything else in his life, to find the thread to the tangled events that had put him, pistol in hand, in front of a man and forced him to shoot. It was two years after they moved him from the General Information Department to Investigations, and he’d met Haydée while investigating a violent robbery that had taken place in the office where she worked. He chatted to her a couple of times and realized the future of his marriage with Martiza was a thing of the past. Haydeé became the obsession of his life, and the Count thought he’d go mad. The passionate onslaught of their love, expressed daily in rooming houses, borrowed flats and other happy hunting grounds, was violently animal and offered him innumerable unexplored pleasures. The Count fell outrageously in love and performed the most extravagantly satisfying sexual deviations he’d ever experienced. They made love time and again, never endingly. When the Count was exhausted and blissful, Haydée knew how to extract that little bit more: he only had to hear her releasing a powerful yellow jet of pee or feel the magnetic tip of her tongue licking its way up his thighs and curling round his member to want to start all over again. Like no other woman, Haydée made him feel a male object of desire, and in each encounter they played love-games like inventive explorers or pent-up celibates.

  If the Count hadn’t fallen for that frivolous innocent abroad who was transformed whenever sex was nigh, he’d never have been standing, fretful yet happy, on the corner of calle Infanta, half a block away from the office where Haydée worked until five thirty pm. If that afternoon Haydée, in her rush to their next dose of delirium, hadn’t made a mistake adding six and eight and getting twenty-four, as she noted in an impossible tally, she would have left at five thirty-one, and not five forty-two, when the din in the street and blast from the gun got her up from her desk all worried and anxious.

  The Count lit his third despairing cigarette and didn’t hear the cries. He was thinking about what would happen that afternoon in the flat of a friend of a friend who was on a two-month course in Moscow, which had become the momentary shelter for their still clandestine passion. He imagined a naked sweating Haydée working on the most sacred places of his trembling anatomy and only then saw a man streaming blood and running towards him, his green shirt darkening over his belly, apparently about to fall to the ground and beg forgiveness for all his sins, but he knew forgiveness wasn’t in the mind of the other man who, with a limp in his left leg and a shattered mouth, was clutching a knife and running at him. For a long time the Count had thought that if he’d been in uniform, it might have stopped the man in a hurry who nobody else had challenged, but when he dropped his cigarette and shouted “Stop right there, you bastard, stop. I’m a policeman” the man straightened up, lifted his knife above his head and directed his hatred at the intruder in his path who was shouting at him. The strangest thing was that the Count always reran the scene in the third person, as if it were outside the perspective of his own eyes, and he saw the guy who was shouting take two steps backwards, put his hand to his waist and strike silently, and shot the man who was still wielding a knife over his head less than a yard away. He saw him fall backwards, twist round in
a way that seemed rehearsed, drop the knife from his grasp and start writhing in pain.

  The bullet entered at shoulder level, barely splintering his collarbone. The only time Mario Conde shot someone, it all ended with a minor operation and a court case where he testified against his aggressor, who’d long since been cured and repented his alcohol-induced violence. But the Count endured several months of doubt as to whether he’d aimed at his attacker’s shoulder or chest, and swore he’d never again resort to his pistol outside the shooting range, even if it meant engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a man with a knife. Nonetheless, he’d have reneged on that most solemn pledge if it ever came to René Maciques. I swear by my mother he would.

  “Don Alfonso, let’s be going to headquarters,” he said and wound up the car window. The driver looked at him and knew he shouldn’t ask any questions.

  China Patricia and her team were sailing on a sea of salaries, contracts, service orders, purchases, travel, sales, memoranda, pledges, countersigned cheques and reports of agreements and disagreements all affirming that everything is fine and dandy, astonishingly correct; Zaida was on a different sea, of tears; it was true: the relationship between her and Rafael was really more than that of a boss and his secretary, went beyond the walls of the enterprise, but it was no crime, surely, because Rafael never suggested anything of the sort, never said anything along those lines, never ever, and she swore Rafael drove her home on the thirtieth and she’d not heard from him since. Manolo applied pressure and she cried, my son little Alfredo loved him so much and he got out of his car and went to wish him a Happy New Year; Maciques, of course, there were things he didn’t know, he was only in charge of the office, they should question the deputy financial director, he’d be back from Canada on the tenth, and again he didn’t think so; and the Boss, looking at the ash on his Davidoff, because he’d have to speak to his son-in-law because he couldn’t stand any more from him, he took the boy off and turned up pasted at eleven thirty pm, his blood pressure had shot up with all this bother, but he wanted the case solved now, today, Mario, in three days Japanese buyers are coming who’d begun to negotiate a big deal with Rafael Morín for the purchase of sugar derivatives, a deal worth millions of dollars, Morín had worked several times with them and the minister wanted a reply, and he asked, Mario, do you need help?, two days had gone by and he still hadn’t come up with anything.

  The Count looked up and saw the cold glare of Monday 5 January and thought how tonight the temperature would be ideal for waiting till midnight to put out three bunches of grass and three bowls of honeyed water, in a corner of his house, for the camels, and a letter addressed to Melchior, Gaspar and Balthazar, but the telephone rang and he reluctantly jettisoned the idea of a letter to the Three Kings.

  “Hello?” he said as he half sat down on his desk and stared at the tops of the laurel trees.

  “Mario? It’s me, Tamara.”

  “Oh, it’s you, and how are you?”

  “Last night I stayed up waiting for you to call.”

  “I know, but things got very difficult and I didn’t leave here till late.”

  “And I called you this morning at around nine thirty.”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “I didn’t leave a message. Why did they call you yesterday?”

  “Just routine. Zoila is a friend of René Maciques and doesn’t even know Rafael personally. We’re making progress.”

  “And still no news of Rafael?” And all he really wanted to know was the intention behind that question. He almost preferred to believe Tamara was desperate for news of her husband and also thought how technically she was still suspect number one, as she added: “Uncertainty will be the death of me.”

  “Mine as well. I’m tired of all this.”

  “Of all what?”

  And he hesitated for a moment, because he didn’t want to get it wrong.

  “Of being Rafael’s private policeman.”

  “Have you been to the enterprise?”

  “I was there just a minute ago. I left the Fraud Squad experts there.”

  “Fraud Squad? Mario, do you really think Rafael’s involved in something like that?”

  “What do you think, Tamara? Do you really believe he could buy everything he bought you with what he saved from his daily allowances?”

  A protracted pregnant silence followed at the end of the line and finally she said:

  “I don’t know, Mario, I really don’t. But I can’t see Rafael mixed up in anything of that sort. He,” she hesitated, “isn’t a bad person.”

  “So they keep telling me,” he muttered and wiped unexpected sweat from his forehead.

  “What did you say?”

  “That that’s what I think as well.”

  And silence descended again.

  “Mario,” she said, “I’m not worried by what happened yesterday, that . . .”

  “But I am, Tamara . . .”

  “Oh, you just don’t understand,” she protested, feeling she needed to confess and he was making it more difficult for her. “Why do you think I’m calling you? Mario, I want to see you again, really.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, Tamara. We’ll see each other, and then what will happen?”

  “I don’t know. Must you think everything through a thousand times?”

  “Yes, I must,” he admitted, feeling his headache was on the way back.

  “Won’t you come?”

  Mario Conde shut his eyes and saw her in bed, naked and nervous, open and expectant.

  “I think I will. When I’ve found out what’s happened to Rafael,” he said as he hung up and felt the pain gather behind his eyes. It was like an oil slick spreading over his forehead and expanding, but the pain brought an idea, when I find out what’s happened to Rafael, and Lieutenant Mario Conde reproached himself, you idiot, why didn’t you start there?

  “You come to die in my arms?” quipped Captain Contreras, and his contented, no-regrets fatso smile reverberated off the walls. He left his chair that gave a sigh of relief at an unlikely rate of knots for such an elephantine mass of humanity and walked over to shake the lieutenant’s hand. “My friend the Count. Life’s like that, my boy, brickbats today and thanks tomorrow, though some people are disgusted by what we do, you know? Naturally, nobody likes playing with shit, but someone has to and in the end they come knocking on my door, you didn’t, because you’re a friend, although you’ve never wanted to work with me, but life is full of surprises.” And he started laughing again. His paunch, tits, triple chin and cheeks danced for joy. He laughed so easily, so very easily, that the Count always thought Fatman Contreras laughed too easily. “Let me have a look, then.”

  The lieutenant handed him the photo. Captain Jesús Contreras scrutinized it for a few minutes, and the Count tried to imagine the constipated archive of his brain at work. What passed once through Fatman Contreras’s eyes was forever engraved on his memory together with the most recondite distinguishing features. It was the pride of his life, and he knew he was always useful, if not indispensable, because Fatman was directly responsible for investigating foreign currency fraud and nobody could ever say he was short of work. The aim of his team – the Contreras Tubbies, as they were known – was to be the daily thorn in the side of Havana’s speculators and dollar-sellers, and over recent months it had chalked up an enviable record for nailing speculators.

  “He’s not in the trade,” he concluded, still looking at the photo. “What does your computer say on the matter?”

  “That he’s as clean as a baby’s bottom straight out of the bath.”

  “I knew it. So what do you want from me?

  “That you should get your informers and undercover agents to check him out in case he ever sold dollars. He handled a lot of Cuban money, and I think that’s how he got it. I also want you to investigate another guy whose photo I’ll send you shortly.”

  “What are their handles?”

  “This guy’s Rafael Morín, and the other
’s René Maciques, but don’t worry about names, work on their faces.”

  “Hey now, Count, isn’t this the fellow who disappeared?”

  “Welcome to the party, Fatman.”

  “You gone mad? Don’t go getting me into deep water. The man is a big deal . . . A minister keeps calling the Boss and stuff like that. You dead sure he’s been messing with greenbacks?” asked Contreras, dropping the photo on the desk as if it were suddenly a red-hot potato.

  “I’m sure of fuck all, Fatman. It’s a hunch from the heart or rather from a headache. Fatman, he was getting lots of money from somewhere, and it wasn’t on the black market.”

  “Yes, it was, for all you know. But you’re stirring shit, Conde and when the shit hits the fan . . .” replied Fatman, returning to his bruised chair. “OK, when do you need to know by?”

  “As of yesterday. The Boss is in a foul temper because I’ve been three days on the case. He’ll soon want blood, and I suspect it will be mine he’ll be after. So give me a helping hand, Fatman.”

  Then Captain Contreras laughed again. The Count was astonished he should find everything so amusing, because Fatman was in fact the hardest policeman he’d known, no doubt the best in his line of business, although his cheery obese face hid almost three hundred pounds of complexes. The ever-present smell of burnt grease he gave off and the hurried ends to both of his attempts at marriage were too much of a burden for him. But he fought back with laughter, convinced he’d been born to be a policeman and that he was a good one.

  “All right, all right, as it’s you . . . Send me the other photo and tell me where I can contact you if something turns up.”