Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  “And what were you thinking, Maciques?”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything. About what I did that night. About going to see him and telling him that everything was ready. It was then I had the idea about taking the briefcase with all the papers and telling him to find his own launch. And do you know what the first thing was he said to me when I arrived? That he’d write to me from Miami and tell me where he’d hidden the photocopies; they were in a safe place and nobody would ever find them. Then I was the one who went crazy. I told him what I’d been thinking about him for quite some time, and he threw a punch at me, really a big slap, his hand open, like that, and hit me here just above my ear and that was when I pushed him and he fell against the side of the bath . . . And that was all,” said Maciques as his head sunk between his shoulders.

  “And it was you who put his Panama allowances and the other things in with the papers at the enterprise?”

  “I had to protect myself, didn’t I? Because I suspected he was going to do the dirty on me, and I had to protect myself. The fucking bastard,” he concluded, expending his last drop of vital energy.

  “And did you really think you were going to wriggle out of this one, Maciques?” asked the Count as he stood up. For a moment he’d thought that aged defeated man was worthy of pity but only for a very fleeting moment. The spectacle of defeat couldn’t erase the feeling of repulsion the whole affair had prompted. “Well, you got it wrong, and you got it wrong because you are just like your defunct boss. The same shit from the same latrine. And don’t lose the fear you had, Maciques, hold on in there, for this story is only just beginning,” he said as he looked at Sergeant Manuel Palacios and walked out of the office. The headache had started behind the eyes, and evil intent was spreading across his forehead.

  Where’s that sparrow? he thought. The previous day he’d seen it in its nest, and all that was left were feathers and dry plaited straw in the fork of the laurel tree. It can’t still be flying, if it fell it would have had no hope of escape, no escape from the kitchen cats, and he hoped the sparrow could fly.

  “How many days does it take a baby sparrow to fly, Manolo?”

  The sergeant put down the folder where he was filing the latest reports and the statements signed by Maciques and looked at the lieutenant.

  “What’s got into you today, Conde? How the hell should I know? It’s not as if I were a sparrow.”

  “Hey, kid.” He pointed his index finger at him. “Go easy. You also come up with some darned silly questions. Go on, get this ready for the Boss.”

  “And speaking of Roman Emperors, do you reckon he’ll give us the leave he owes us?”

  The Count sat down in the chair behind his desk and rubbed his eyes. The headache was now a distant memory, but he was sleepy and beginning to feel hungry. He wanted to get this Rafael Morín affair over and done with. He was annoyed he hadn’t laid bare the real depths of a character who went breathlessly from being a leader to a private entrepreneur, from saint to sinner, and died from a single blow, leaving unanswered so many questions he’d loved to have asked.

  “We have to wait for Chinese Patricia to finish at the enterprise. She told me she’d have everything else ready tomorrow morning, and then we can both give the Boss the complete report, and I think he’ll give us a couple of days. I need them. And I think you do too. How’s it going with Vilma?”

  “OK, she’s got over her tantrum.”

  “Just as well, because putting up with you when a woman’s on your back isn’t easy. But in any case, this business is almost over and I probably won’t see your face for the next month . . . Hey, in the end, who told Rafael’s mother and Tamara?”

  “The major called the industry minister.”

  “I’m sorry for his mother.”

  “But not for his wife? Won’t you try to console her?”

  “Go to hell, Manolo,” he replied, smiling.

  “Hey, Conde, what does it feel like when you close a case like this?”

  The lieutenant placed his hands on his desk. They were open, palms upwards.

  “Like this, Manolo, empty-handed. The evil had already been done.”

  The Count and Manolo looked at each other, and then the lieutenant offered his colleague a cigarette, as the cubicle door opened and in walked a cigar followed by a man.

  “Very good work with Maciques, Sergeant,” said Major Rangel, leaning his back against the door. “You excelled yourself as you always do, Mario . . . What manner of man was Rafael Morín?”

  The Count looked back at Manolo. He didn’t know if Major Rangel wanted a reply or was just musing aloud. It was very unusual to see the Boss outside his office and speaking so disconcertingly, and they preferred to stay silent.

  “When will I have the full dossier?”

  “At ten o’clock?”

  “At nine. Patricia’s finishing this afternoon and will leave the enterprise to the Fraud Squad. They might dig up something likely. So nine am. Then you two can disappear and not show your faces till Friday, if I don’t call you before. And tomorrow I’m going to stir things up around this Rafael Morín affair. You just watch me. It’s all very well this ‘take it easy that’s enough on corruption’ and then we’re the ones who have to pull the chestnuts out of the fire.” And his voice sounded like a much bigger, younger man’s, a voice accustomed to demanding and protesting. He looked at the unbroken ash of his cigar and then at his two subordinates. “And they rattle on about delinquents. They’re babes on the tit compared to fellows like him or Maciques, and who knows what goes on up and down the greasy pole, but I’ll be calling for blood . . . A respectable director of enterprise handling thousands and thousands of dollars. I really don’t understand a thing, damned if I do,” and he opened the door and started to follow his cigar out the room. “But tomorrow at nine am I’ll leave here with the report under my arm . . .”

  “No, don’t start fantasizing. And look, it’s not cold now, and we’ve got to be here early in the morning to write the report, so the case isn’t closed,” Manolo begged as he switched on the car engine, and the Count whispered: “Consort with kids and . . .”

  “What’s this woman done to you, Manolo? You know, you’re shit-scared of her.”

  The car left the headquarters parking lot, and Manolo was still shaking his head.

  “Forget it, you won’t screw me up. It’s not worth two shots. I’m off to Vilma’s, and you can do whatever the hell you want. I’ll pick you up at six. Where should I drop you off? Besides, if I have a couple, I can’t get it up, and we start squabbling . . .”

  The Count smiled and thought “he’s beyond redemption” and lowered his car window. It was undoubtedly getting less cold and the night was off to a peaceful start, ripe for whatever. He wanted a couple of shots, and Manolo wanted Vilma. Two reasonable options. After all, the Rafael Morín case was over, at least as far as the police was concerned, and the Count was beginning to feel empty inside. He’d got two days off which he never knew how best to spend. It had been some time since he’d dared sit opposite a typewriter, perhaps he never would again, to begin one of those novels he’d been promising himself for so long, and the solitude in his house was a hostile calm that made him felt desperate. He anticipated his fling with Tamara would probably be short-lived and would soon conflict with the everyday detail in two lives that were miles apart, two worlds that might coexist but could merge only with difficulty. Should I write my novel about old Valdemira’s library?

  “We’ll pass by the undertakers in Santa Catalina. Rafael Morín’s corpse must have arrived there by now.”

  “What’s the point, Conde?” rasped Manolo who’d always hated wakes and could see no reason to attend another.

  “I don’t know what the point is. Everything doesn’t always have to have a point, right? I just want to poke my head into the wake for a moment.”

  “That’s fine,” the sergeant accepted. “But it’s not work, right? I’ll leave you there and go on. See you at six
in the morning.”

  The car drove along Santa Catalina, and the Count saw people queuing to buy cold drinks; the love motel had recently been reinstated, and a neon sign erected of two red hearts transfixed by a green arrow of hope, and a couple of youngsters were going inside and looking for reception; he saw the stop with a bus packed with stressed people in a hurry, film posters and the driver shouting bastard at him as he passed him on the right, and he thought how nobody had death on their mind, and that was why they could still live, love, run, work, insult, eat, and even kill and think, and then he saw the twin’s house, shadowy between its hedges and sculptures, its big gleaming windows and a fate that had changed for the moment. Rafael Morín had departed that place to play for all or nothing, and had lost his confident dazzling smile once and for all.

  “See you at six,” he said when he saw the undertakers. The lobby was empty, and he thought perhaps the morgue hadn’t yet released the corpse of his fellow school student. “And take care you don’t get her pregnant.”

  “Don’t play that tune. I don’t want any such complications in my life.” Manolo smiled, shaking his boss’s hand.

  “Come on, don’t play hard to get, Vilma’s got you well taped.”

  “OK, my friend, so what?” Sergeant Manuel Palacios laughed again and accelerated away, and the Count thought “He’ll kill himself one of these days.”

  He went up the few steps to the undertakers and read just one name on the board: Rafael Morín Rodríguez, Room D. It wasn’t a good day to be dying, and undertakers weren’t in great demand. He headed to Room D but didn’t dare go in. The sweetish scent of flowers for the dead that impregnated the walls of the building hit him in the pit of his stomach, and he decided to sit on one of the big chairs in the corridor, next to the ashtray on a stand and the public telephone. He lit a cigarette that tasted of wet grass. Inside lay Rafael Morín, dead and ready for oblivion, and it would be a very sad funeral: none of his New Year’s Eve, management-board and trips-abroad friends would come. The man was plagued in more than one sense, and perhaps not even his wife would want to be there. His old friends from high school had fallen by the wayside long ago, would only find out months later, perhaps have their doubts, and wouldn’t believe it was true. He imagined what the wake could have been like in other circumstances, the wreaths of flowers piled up all over the floor in that room, the laments at the loss of such an outstanding cadre, at such an early young age, the funeral oration, so moving and so packed with generous heartfelt adjectives. He dropped his cigarette in the ashtray and walked over to the door to Room D. Like an intruder he gingerly put his face to the glass door and observed the almost empty room just as he’d imagined: Rafael’s mother, holding a handkerchief to her nose, sobbing amid a group of neighbours: the two women who had been doing their washing on Sunday morning; one held the old lady’s hand between hers and was speaking into her ear: for all of them Rafael’s failure was in some way their own failure and the finale to a tragic destiny the man had tried to elude. Tamara was in front of her mother-in-law, and the Count could just make out her shoulders and artificial indomitable curls. She was still; perhaps she’d cried a couple of silent tears. Two chairs from her, also with her back to the door, was another woman the Count tried to identify. She seemed young, her hair style showing off the nape of her neck and straight shoulders, the taut skin on the arm that was visible, and then the woman looked at Tamara and revealed her profile: he recognized Zaida and acknowledged she was being loyal to the end. Seven women; a single female colleague from work. And, at the back, the sealed coffin, wrapped in grey cloth, shockingly bare as it awaited the flowers that always arrived late for a common wake. It would be a sad funeral, he thought yet again and went into the street.

  He looked for a cigarette in his jacket pocket. He was really dry, and noticed Baby-Face Miki on the pavement opposite, as he waited for a gap in the traffic and wondered why he was coming to the wake. But he felt he could take no more, quickened his step and walked up the street that ran parallel, spontaneously bursting into song: “Strawberry Fields forever, tum, tum, tum . . .”

  Skinny Carlos looked at his glass as if he couldn’t understand why it was empty. He felt like that after the fourth or fifth shot, and the Count smiled. They’d already seen off half a bottle of rum and hadn’t seen off their sadness. Skinny had wanted to go to the wake, and the Count refused to take him, why do you want to go, don’t be morbid, he said accusingly, and his friend ordered him not put any music on. Skinny felt the respect for death of those who know they will soon die and have decided to drown their bad memories, fatal thoughts and gloomy ideas in rum. But those fucking bastards always come up for air, thought the Count.

  “So what do you intend to do with Tamara?” asked Skinny when his glass regained its rightful weight.

  “I don’t know, you beast, I don’t know. It won’t work, and I’m afraid of falling in love.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Because of what might come later. I don’t like suffering for the sake of it and so prefer to suffer in advance, right?”

  “I always said you liked punishing yourself.”

  “It’s not easy. You know, it really isn’t,” he said, gulping his rum down. He put his glass on the small table in the centre of the room. “I must go. I’ve got to write a report in the morning.”

  “You going to leave me almost a pint? You’re not eating? Do you want old Josefina flying into a tantrum? No, wild animal, no, for I’m the one who will have to listen to her saying you don’t eat properly, that you’re really skinny and that I’m the bad boy for starting you on the rum, that you’ve got to look after yourself more and asking when are you going to marry the nice girl, get this, and have a kid. And I’m not up for it today, you know. It’s been fucking awful enough as it is.”

  The Count smiled but wanted to cry. He looked over his friend’s head and saw on the wall the faded Rolling Stones poster and Mick Jagger’s buckteeth; the photo taken at the coming of age party for Rabbit’s sister, Pancho smiling, Rabbit trying not to laugh and Skinny in his special party hairdo, the fringe he hid at school over his eyebrows and almost closed eyes, putting an arm round Mario Conde’s shoulders, looking as if he’d had a fright, soul brothers from time immemorial; the tatty medals under false colours Skinny had won when he was a very skinny baseball player; the now almost invisible Havana Club label that someone had stuck to the mirror years ago during one hell of a drinking binge and that Skinny had decided to preserve for eternity in that same spot. It was a sad wall.

  “Skinny, have you ever thought why you and I are mates . . .?”

  “Because one day I lent you a knife at high school. Come on, don’t harp on about life. It just comes as it comes, fucking hell.”

  “But it could be different.”

  “Lies, you brute, lies. That’s just one tall, tall story. Hell, don’t get me on that tack, but I will tell you one thing for nothing: the guy who’s born to get honey from heaven, gets it in jarfuls and if that bullet’s meant for you, it does your life in. Don’t try to change what can’t be changed. Don’t whinge. That’s right, pour me another.”

  “One day I’ll write about this, I swear I will,” said the Count, pouring two generous shots into his friend’s glass.

  “Right, just do that, get writing and don’t just keep thinking about doing it. The next time you want to bring the subject up, please put it in writing, OK?”

  “One of these days I’ll tell you where to get off, Skinny.”

  “Hey, what’s the point of all this chitchat?”

  Mario Conde looked at his glass and looked like Skinny looked when it was empty but didn’t dare say a word.

  “Nothing, just forget it,” he replied because he thought one day he wouldn’t be able to converse with Skinny or call him my brother, wild animal, pal or tell him life was the most difficult profession going.

  “Hey, and in the end where did he put the suitcase full of money?”

  “
He copped out and threw it into the sea.”

  “With all those notes?”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “What a fucking shit.”

  “Right, a fucking shit. I feel very odd. I wanted to find Rafael and really didn’t mind whether he was dead or alive, and now he’s appeared it’s as if I’d like to disappear him again. I’d rather not think about him but can’t get him out of my head, and I’m afraid this might last a long time. Whatever can Tamara be feeling, do you reckon?”

  “Hey, put some music on if you want,” Skinny suggested, “Whatever.”

  “What do you fancy?”

  “The Beatles?”

  “Chicago?”

  “Formula V?”

  “Los Pasos?”

  “Credence?”

  “Uh-huh, Credence,” they concurred, and listened to Tom Foggerty’s rich voice and the guitars of Credence Clearwater Revival.

  “It’s still the best version of ‘Proud Mary’.”

  “By a long chalk.”