Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  And with a strength he’d forgotten he possessed, he lifted her up, took her over to the table, sat her down and felt her as he’d never felt another woman. They made love again on the living-room sofa. And a third time in her bedroom before finally calling it a day.

  He lifted the lid of the coffee pot and saw the dark black coffee bubbling up from its red-hot entrails. The light was beginning to break over the trees and filter through to the kitchen windows, and he added four spoonfuls of sugar to his jug of breakfast beverage. It looked as if it would be a sunny morning, and he anticipated it wouldn’t be so cold. He stirred the first coffee in the jug till the sugar melted, then returned it to the coffee pot, where a thick yellow foam formed. Then he poured himself his half-cup so he could start to think. She was asleep upstairs, ten minutes to seven o’clock and to when she gets up, he calculated as he lit his first cigarette. It was a necessary ritual without which he couldn’t start life each day, and he thought about Rufino and about what would happen if he fell in love with Tamara. He couldn’t imagine it happening, he told himself, and even shook his head to confirm that this was so, I still don’t believe it, he muttered and he saw his and Tamara’s clothes on the chair where he’d placed them before making coffee. His vanity as a man satisfied by a memorable sexual performance hardly left room for thought. He knew he had defeated Rafael Morín and regretted he’d not yet shared the second part to the story with Skinny, the successful feats of conquest and colonization. He knew he shouldn’t, but, as soon as possible, I’ve got to tell him.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said, and he almost jumped out of his chair as he realized at that precise moment that if he didn’t flee, he would fall in love.

  He liked to hear a woman’s voice at the start of the day and found Tamara was more beautiful then, with her dressing gown mostly unbuttoned, her lips unadorned and one side of her face marked by the fold in the pillow, her hair relentlessly impertinent, irrepressibly covering her forehead, and her eyes reddened by lack of sleep. He could see she was very happy with her state as a woman who’s well-served and better serviced, so well that she would sing while cleaning a grimy pan, and she came over, kissed him on the mouth and then, only then, asked for her coffee: it was all quite conclusive: he fled or was lost.

  “It’s a pity one has to work in this world, isn’t it?” she said, hiding her smile behind her cup.

  “What would happen if your husband came in through that door?” asked the Count, expecting to hear another confession.

  “I’d offer him a cup of the coffee, and he’d have no choice but to say it’s really good, you know?”

  He travelled in a crowded bus and never stopped smiling; he walked six blocks and kept smiling; he walked into headquarters, and everyone saw him smiling and still laughing when he climbed the stairs and went into his office, where Sergeant Manuel Palacios was waiting for him, feet on his desk and face stuck behind a newspaper.

  “What’s got into you?” Manolo asked, also laughing, reckoning good news was on its way.

  “Nothing really, today’s the sixth of January, and I’m waiting for my present . . . What’s new, then?”

  “Oh, I thought you’d something to tell me. Nothing you could call new . . . What are we going to do with Maciques?”

  “Start all over again. Till he’s exhausted. He’s the only one who’s allowed to get exhausted. Did you see Patricia?”

  “No, but she left a message with the duty officer saying she was going straight to the enterprise. She left at eight last night, and I think she was back welcoming the dawn there.”

  “Have you seen the reports?”

  “No, not yet. I just got here and started to read all the stuff about AIDS in the newspaper. Fucking hell, comrade, soon you won’t even be able to get laid in this world.”

  The Count smiled, was still smiling as he said:

  “Uh-huh, take good note, then. I’m going to have a look at the reports so we can start on Maciques.”

  “Thanks, Boss. May you always wake up smiling,” retorted the sergeant, weaving his way back to the desk.

  He preferred to go down the stairs and, while he did so, he thought how he was in a mood to write. He’d write a very squalid tale about an amorous triangle, in which the characters would live, in different roles, situations they’d lived previously. It would be a nostalgic love story, with no violence or hatred, about ordinary people and ordinary experiences, as in the lives of the people he knew, because you must write about what you know, he told himself, remembering how Hemingway wrote about things he knew and Miki wrote about things he knew he ought to write about.

  When he was in the hallway he walked round the corner towards the Information Department, which Captain Jorrín was just leaving, and he seemed tired and groggy, as if getting over an illness.

  “Hello, Maestro. What’s the matter?” He shook his hand.

  “We’ve caught one of the culprits, Conde.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Not so good. We questioned him last night, and he says he did it by himself. I wish you could see him, a stubborn hulking bastard who reacts as if he couldn’t care less about anything. And you know how old he is? Sixteen, Conde, sixteen. I’ve been a policeman for thirty, and I’m still surprised by such things. The fact is I’m past caring . . . You know, he admits he did it, that he pulverized the kid to steal his bike, and tells it as if he were talking about a baseball game and just as nonchalantly when he says it was all his own work.”

  “But he’s no kid, Captain. How did you catch him?”

  Jorrín smiled, shook his head and wiped a hand over his face, as if trying to iron out the wrinkles lining his face.

  “From a statement given by a witness and because he was riding the bike belonging to the kid they killed, without a care in the world. Did you know people exist who do this kind of thing just to assert their egos?”

  “So I’ve read.”

  “But forget your books. If you want to check it out come and take a look at this boy. He’s a case . . . I don’t know, Conde, but I really think I’ve got to say goodbye to all this. It gets more and more painful . . .”

  Jorrín barely managed a farewell and walked towards the lifts. The Count watched him leave and thought the old sea-wolf might be right. Thirty years are a lot of years in this profession, he muttered, and pushed open the door to the Information Department. He smiled, greeted all the young women and sat down in front of Sergeant Dalia Acosta’s desk: she was the departmental duty officer, and he always wondered how one woman’s head could gather so much hair.

  “Anything from the coastguards?”

  “Not much. Not many people try it when this north wind is blowing, but, look, this has just come in from East Havana. Take a look . . .”

  The Count took the computer printout the sergeant was flourishing in his direction and read the first remarks after the heading:

  Unidentified corpse. Evidence of murder. Signs of struggle. Case opened. Forensics’ preliminary report: 72 to 96 hours since death. Found in an empty residential house, Brisas del Mar. January 5/89, 11.00pm.

  And he turned the sheet over on her desk.

  “When did this come in, Dalita?”

  “Ten minutes ago, Lieutenant.”

  “And why didn’t you call me?”

  “I called you as soon as it arrived and Manolo told me you were on your way.”

  “Any more information?”

  “This other sheet from Forensics.”

  “Let me have it. I’ll return it later. Thanks.”

  I was still in uniform, always carried a briefcase and spent hours in the archives with Felicia, that old computer that seemed a mysterious, over-efficient window on the world. My pistol was in my belt, but my cap had no such luck; I tried never to wear it after reading in a magazine that caps are the number one cause of baldness; it was almost nine pm and all I wanted to do was collapse on my bed, and I was thinking about bed as I walked to the bus-stop when I heard a k
laxon hooting, I cursed as I always curse people who blow their klaxons like that, and looked up to see what kind of guy it was, he’d have two horns and perhaps a trident in his hand, and I saw an arm waving at me from above the car roof. At me? Yes, at you. I couldn’t see clearly because the windscreen was glinting and it was dark, and I went over hoping to hitch a lift. I hadn’t seen him for almost five years, but I’d have recognized him even if it hadn’t been for a hundred.

  “Hell, buddy, my hand almost dropped off hooting at you,” he said, smiling his usual smile, and heaven knows why I was smiling as well.

  “How’re things, Rafael?” I asked, putting my hand through the window. “It’s been ages. How’s Tamara?”

  “You going home?”

  “Yes, I just finished and was . . .”

  “In you get, I’ll drive you to Víbora.” And I got into his Lada, that smelled brand new, of leather and liniment, and Rafael drove off, the last time we spoke.

  “What you up to now?” I asked, as I always ask anyone I know.

  “The same as usual, in the Ministry for Industry, waiting to see what turns up,” he informed me casually, talking in that affable persuasive tone he adopted with friends, very different to the hard, even more persuasive tone he’d employ from a platform.

  “So they’ve given you your own car?”

  “No, not yet, this one’s assigned to me and, you know, it’s as good as mine, because I’ve just come from a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce, and that’s how I spend my life. I work hard . . .”

  “How’s Tamara?” I repeated, and he barely managed to say she was all right, that she’d done her social service here in Bejucal, and was now at a new clinic they’d opened in Lawton. No, we still don’t have children, but we’ll order one any day now,” he added.

  “And how are you getting on?”

  I tried to see what film they were showing at the Florida when we drove through Agua Dulce and I thought I’d tell him not so good, that I was just a bureaucrat processing information, that last month Skinny had been operated on again, that I didn’t know why I’d married Martiza, but I didn’t feel like it.

  “Good, pal, good.”

  “Hey, drop by one day and let’s have a drink,” he suggested as we reached October Tenth and Dolores, and I thought how it was the first time Rafael had ever said anything like that to me, or to Skinny or Rabbit or Andrés or any of us, and when he pulled in at the traffic lights in Santa Catalina so I could get out, I responded in kind: “Yes, be seeing you. Give my regards to Tamara.”

  And we shook hands again, and I watched him turn into Santa Catalina, his red indicator blinking; he gave two farewell toots and drove off in the car that smelled brand new. Then I thought: you bastard, you’re only interested in being my friend because I’m in the police. And I had to laugh, that last time I saw Rafael Morín.

  His eyes no longer shone; his voice no longer boomed at the masses. His freshly-shaven, washed and wideawake face no longer bore that squeaky clean sheen. He no longer smiled automatically and confidently spread light and good vibrations. It seemed he’d put on weight, a sickly purplish fat, and his brown hair urgently required a comb.

  “Look who it is,” said the Count, and the forensic doctor pulled the sheet back over him again, like a curtain falling on the last act of a play that lacked emotion or charm.

  “Well, if it isn’t my friend the Count,” he said, and the Count thought: He’s blacker than the tar the roads could do with.

  Lieutenant Raúl Booz smiled, and his white young colt’s teeth brought a shaft of light to the jet-black expanse of his face. Nobody would guarantee he was more than seven feet tall or weighed in at three hundred pounds, but the Count turned into a bag of nerves just looking at him. “How can he be that big and black?” he asked himself as he got up and shook Detective Lieutenant Raúl Booz’s hand.

  “You already know Sergeant Manuel Palacios, I believe?”

  “Yes, of course,” replied Booz, who also smiled at Manolo and settled down on the sofa that filled the space next to a wall in his office. “So you were the one looking for this guy?”

  The Count nodded and explained the story behind the disappearance of Rafael Morín Rodríguez.

  “Well, I’m going to hand him over to you all sewn up, my friend. It will be the easiest case you’ve ever had. Take a look at this.” And he handed the Count a file that was on the sofa. “There was a hair with capillary tissue under one fingernail. Naturally, it must belong to his killer.”

  “And what are the results of the autopsy, Lieutenant?”

  “As clear as daylight. He died on the night of the first or early in the morning of the second. Forensics can’t be sure because the cold helped preserve the body, and that’s why nobody knew a corpse was there. He had a fractured second and third cervical vertebra, which pressed down on his spinal cord, and that was what killed him, and his brain was severely banged about, but that wasn’t lethal.”

  “But what happened, Lieutenant, what do you reckon?” Manolo interjected, ignoring the file the Count was handing him.

  Lieutenant Raúl Booz, head of the criminal investigation squad in East Havana, looked at his own fingernails before answering.

  “The station in Guanabo got a call last night at about ten saying a strange smell was coming from an empty house in Brisas del Mar and that the back-door lock had been forced. It’s a block of only two houses, one that’s empty in winter, and the one belonging to the woman who called that’s about twenty yards away. The people in Guanabo went to look and found a dead body in the bathroom. All the signs pointed to the man dying when he fell against the bath, but the blow was so hard he can’t just have slipped, Palacios. He was pushed and before that there was a skirmish during which the dead man scratched his murderer and took out the hair we analysed. He’s a white man, in his forties, between five foot four and five foot eight tall and, naturally, black haired . . . That’s just for starters.”

  “And enough to finish on, Lieutenant,” replied the Count.

  “But there is a complicating factor. Although the murder was probably not premeditated, something very strange happened afterwards. The murderer stripped his victim and took his clothes away, and there’s no sign of the briefcase or leather bag the dead man must have been carrying before the fight, given the traces of leather on his hands, and it must have weighed a fair amount because he kept passing it from one hand to the other.”

  “And any traces of cars or anything like that?”

  “Nothing of the sort. The fresh fingerprints belong to the dead man, and are on the broken door, in the kitchen, on an armchair in the living room and in the bathroom. It looks as if he was waiting for someone, almost definitely the murderer. And we combed the surrounding area round about but no sign of the dead man’s clothes or briefcase. But this case is a doddle, don’t you think?”

  “And, Booz, how about if we ring you in two hours to confirm that the murderer goes by the name of René Maciques?” the Count asked as he stood up and straightened the pistol threatening to leap from his belt.

  The Count thought about lighting a cigarette but stopped himself. He preferred to get out his pen and fiddle with its catch. The monotonous sound echoed aggressively in the silence of the cubicle.

  “Well, then, Maciques?” Manolo finally asked, and Maciques looked up.

  What a chameleon, thought the Count. He was no longer the lively conversationalist of their first encounter or the punctilious librarian they had recorded. A mere day without a shave had been enough to transform the head of office into a potential model tramp, and his shaking hands brought to mind a dire devastating winter.

  “He was to blame,” said Maciques, trying to sit straight in his chair. “He was the one behind all this mess when he realized they were going to finger him. I don’t know how everything else happened.”

  “I think you do, Maciques,” Manolo insisted.

  “It was just a manner of words. I meant I can’t really explain i
t . . . He came to see me on the night of the thirtieth and told me the Mitachi people had brought forward their visit and this was going to put him really in it. I never found out what it was, although I can imagine, it must have been to do with money, and he told me he had to leave the country. I told him that was madness, it wasn’t so easy, and he told me it was really easy, that he had ten thousand Cuban pesos and a pile of dollars to pay for a motor launch and I should find him one. That was when he blackmailed me with the bank account and ownership of the car. I still don’t know how he managed to photocopy those papers, but the fact was he had them. Well, no, he’d already planned the car bit: he got it as a present and gave it to me, and naturally I sold it, it was red-hot and I sold it . . . Then I repeated it was madness and told him he wasn’t playing straight with me, and he replied by telling me to get a launch and forget everything else. And the truth is I didn’t even make a start, for I thought there must be a way to get those papers back.”

  “By killing him, Maciques?”

  The man shook his head. It was a mechanical reaction but as intense as the way his hands were shaking.

  “No, Sergeant, some other way . . . But to gain time I told him I’d contracted a launch for daybreak on the first, after the party on the thirty-first, I told him, it’s the best time to leave, the skipper’s got permission to go fishing, and we should be in Guanabo at four, and I wish you could have seen him at the party. He was already imagining himself out of Cuba and was more petulant and arrogant than ever, the lousy shit, I tell you, be glad you never met him . . . I think I should have stopped it all at the start. But you know what fear is? Fear you might lose everything, probably go to prison, never be anybody again? That’s why I did what I did and picked him up at his place after we left the party and drove to Guanabo. Then I parked somewhere by the Veneciana, next to the river, and told him I was going to see the guy, and what I did was to walk to the beach and stay there a while. When I went back and told him it would have to be that night he went mad. I’d never seen him like it before; he called me an asshole and a number of other things, and said I should be grateful he was going, because if he wasn’t, he would put me in it, and a few more choice expressions. Then I drove him to the house. I knew it was always empty in winter, because a friend of mine rented it from the owners in September, and we went in and I told him to wait there till nightfall, that the skipper had told me they’d leave very early, and then I drove back to Havana.”