Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  “But the Count’s gone off on another tack,” concluded the captain.

  “And I’m more certain than ever that something out of the ordinary happened forty-three years ago,” the Count announced.

  “Forty-three years ago?” Rangel enthused in policeman style, and puffed on his cheroot.

  “Do remember you once talked to me about a lieutenant called Aragón?”

  “Of course I do, he was my first boss. He was something special.”

  “Well Lieutenant Aragón left a case open forty-three years ago . . .”

  “The case of the woman who used cyanide to kill herself?” asked Rangel, taken aback.

  “How did you guess?” the Count was even more taken aback than his ex-boss.

  “Because Aragón said it was the only one he never solved. After several months of investigations, his boss ordered him to call it a day. There was a lot of evidence pointing to suicide, but Aragón insisted something strange had happened and wanted to keep on the case . . .”

  “Something really strange did happen,” the Count agreed with Aragón.

  “Go on then, tell me what happened, and see if I get it.”

  “Aragón followed orders and shelved the investigation, but had the forethought not to close the case,” the Count went on. “That’s why it took us so long to find the dossier, because we thought it must have been closed. They’re looking out the rest of the paperwork, and the autopsy report, but in the précis we’ve got it says the woman died from a lethal intake of cyanide, although there were remains of antibiotics in her stomach . . . Aragón reckoned someone who’s about to commit suicide doesn’t bother taking antibiotics to cure a throat infection. He was sure it was murder, but had no way of proving it, and needed time to investigate . . . From what I’ve found out, I agree the woman was murdered, perhaps because she was privy to some serious inside information. Just imagine, her lover and Meyer Lansky were as thick as thieves . . . So we came to see you. I wanted to set you thinking, you must remember something Aragón told you about that case . . .”

  The ex-major put his cigar on the ashtray and looked into the garden. The Count knew Rangel’s memory stored a huge amount of information, and his neurones must now be digging deep into memories of years of conversations with a prehistoric policeman whose infallibility was legendary.

  “The woman was young and very beautiful. She was a singer . . .” said Rangel, returning the Count’s glance. “And Aragón couldn’t find any motives for suicide or murder for that matter. Those most under suspicion had no incriminating motives and there were fingerprints belonging to several people in the house, but all had watertight alibis . . . The deceased had everything ready to leave the country, even a visa in her passport, and was leaving with a man who’d been her lover for several years. Lansky’s partner?”

  “Uh-huh, that’s him. You’re on the right track,” the Count encouraged him.

  “Aragón told me a couple of things had surprised him: that the girl didn’t seem to have any friends and that her lover left Cuba three weeks after her suicide. It also struck him as odd she put her own record on the turntable before committing suicide . . . Wait a minute, I remember what was most suspicious of all was that she diluted the cyanide in cough syrup . . . He reckoned if you’re set on killing yourself, you swallow the poison, and don’t bother diluting it in medicine.”

  “She was murdered. I’ve been sure of that for some time,” declared the Count triumphantly.

  “Aragón was sure, if he’d had more time, he’d have found more leads, but we’re talking 1959, no, it was 1960 by then, when the acts of sabotage started and there weren’t enough detectives to go round. That’s why he was told to forget the singer and get on with other cases. Apart from that, there were no relatives or anyone demanding to know what really happened, and he had no suspects . . . But I don’t understand why you’re so keen connect that death with the murder of the man who was into books.”

  Conde smiled and took a drag on his cigar.

  “Now I know they murdered her. First it was just a hunch . . .”

  “I don’t believe it, Conde, are you still banging on about your hunches?”

  “Well what do you expect, Boss: when I really have a hunch . . . That woman’s lover owned the library the Ferreros inherited.”

  “And he?—”

  “He died in 1961,” interjected Manolo, to show how crazy the Count was. “A car accident, in the United States.”

  “So?” rasped Rangel.

  “So?” mimicked the Count. “Well, I’ll continue with investigations, because I agree with Aragón: Violeta del Río didn’t commit suicide and I’m sure that someone connected to that mystery murdered Dionisio Ferrero. What do you reckon? If they hadn’t killed Dionisio, nobody else would have taken a blind bit of interest in Violeta del Río.”

  Rangel and Manolo looked at each other. They’d have liked to crack a joke, but experience urged caution: the Count’s hunches usually had surprising links to reality. Old Rangel contemplated his cigar and smiled.

  “Conde, it’s ten years since I asked you this . . . and I won’t die without getting a proper answer from you. Why the hell did a fellow like you join the police?”

  Conde smoked his cigar, with a slightly sarcastic smile, prompted by cherished memories.

  “Truly, truly, I didn’t know why for a long time,” he said, no longer smiling. “Although I sometimes liked what I was doing, I hardly ever felt happy as a policeman. Then I decided it was the fault of those bastards who do things and usually get away with it . . . But then, when I saw what was happening in the big, wide world, I think I imagined I’d sort it out a bit so it wasn’t so fucked up, and I swallowed the story about police being able to do that. A romantic dream, right? I know I was swimming against the tide, but I don’t regret what I did, although I’d never do it again. I’d not enlist again, even at gunpoint. Not even with a chief like you. I used to be agnostic, but I’m a total disbeliever now . . . Boss, I don’t even believe in the four noble truths a friend of mine talks about . . . At most, in friendship, memories and a few books. It may sound cynical, but it’s the truth. I don’t like what I see every day and couldn’t cope with it if I was in the force. I feel happier selling old books, wielding no power over others and being at ease with myself. At forty-eight I’ve learned that’s important too. When I can, I enjoy the small pleasures in life, as faraway as I can possibly be from any whiff of power and the idea I have a right to think on behalf of other people and having to obey orders I sometimes didn’t want to obey. You see? I’m much clearer about why I don’t want to be a policeman than why I was one for ten years.”

  He abandoned his bed feeling as if he’d had another encounter with his friend J.D., though this time he didn’t remember the essence of their dialogue: meditation and reincarnation. I expect, the bastard’s into all that and doesn’t want to write, he thought, while trying to get up as surreptitiously as his aches and pains would allow so as not to wake up Tamara. Back on his feet, he turned round and fleetingly observed the sleeping woman, her mouth slightly open, her nightdress rucked up, baring thighs as firm as ever as they climbed to the promising mound of her buttocks. Conde bent over, breathed in and filled his lungs with the smell of hot sheets and sweet saliva, ruffled hair and female vapours from that almost inert body and was surprised by the thought that he’d now crossed every frontier of self-preservation because he unreservedly loved a woman he felt to be his own, with whom he’d exchanged the most intimate secrets. He recalled the almost inaudible splash of Tamara’s tongue in the well of her mouth and the seemingly pitiful purr she’d emit seconds before passing from wakefulness to sleep, and, when she lapsed definitively into unconsciousness, the way her body juddered and alarmed the Count. For her part, she was familiar with and suffered from the night-time snoring of a smoker with one nostril blocked from when a baseball hit him long ago, from the anxiety pursuing him in his deepest dreams, which, so she said, made him assume strange pos
tures like sleeping face down, leaning on his elbows his forehead against the pillow, as if enduring a Muslim form of penitence. The quota of secrets they shared from years of passionate encounters encompassed knowledge of phobias and fears, of things admired and held in contempt, and the vital possession of the most subtle, efficient keys to release the springs of sexual pleasure. The Count recalled how she liked his tongue to lick her clitoris in quick violent movements, letting his saliva run down to her vaginal and anal orifices, as the palms of his hands rubbed her erect nipples and he finally felt the tension in her belly, the changes in her breathing, the build up to the silent eruption of her orgasm. Then he felt his scrotum recede and a lascivious tingle run down his urethra, and pleasurably recalled the arts applied by Tamara to give him maximum enjoyment, licking his nipples, caressing his anal sphincter, revisiting his penis and testicles with her tongue and, opening her legs so that, when he knelt and penetrated her, he could eye her pink fleshy parts wet with saliva and tasty secretions, and watch his honourable member drill the hot insides of a body surrendering wholeheartedly to love and pleasure.

  When the Count saw the hard on his imaginings had prompted, he wondered if the years hadn’t transformed them into something more than two lovers: theirs was a well-established blend of knowledge and tolerance that, at some moment, they would have to accept was a definitive bond, but both liked to procrastinate, selfishly defending the last remains of a freedom reduced to the enjoyment of periods of solitude, a solitude that was too pleasurable because it was quickly ended by a short ride from one district of Havana to another, where they always found the life-saving sense of security, solidarity and belonging they gave each other.

  When he entered her bathroom, after discarding the idea of masturbation which had been his goal, Conde stood in front of the mirror and told himself he was fed up of looking like a badly packaged mummy; he ripped the bandages from his eyebrow and the back of his ear. The sight of the three stitches on his bruised skin produced a slight queasiness and he looked away, horrified by his own scars.

  After a coffee and his first cigarette of the day, he ran over a possible agenda: he decided he’d try to talk to Amalia Ferrero, now that Dionisio’s funeral rites had been performed, and concluded he should go back to Elsa Contreras, the once famous Lotus Flower, now sheltering behind the name and terrifyingly real skin of the ravaged Carmen Argüelles.

  Tamara took him by surprise as he was lighting his second cigarette, after a second cup of coffee.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, lifting his chin to get a better view of the state of his injuries.

  “Like shit, but ready for battle,” he said. “The coffee’s still hot.”

  She went to get the coffeepot and Conde, still with the morning hunger provoked by his musings, watched her well-endowed buttocks move under the flimsiest of nightdresses. Unable to hold back, he jettisoned his cigarette, went in hot pursuit, kissed her neck, and put his hands on her buttocks that he opened like the pages of a beautiful book.

  “So you woke up with love on your mind?” she smiled.

  “Seeing you makes me feel like love,” he replied, rocking her gently against the small table.

  “Can I drink my coffee?” she asked.

  “Only if I can do other things afterwards . . .”

  “You’re ill.”

  “It’s not catching. And we’ve been sleeping together for three days like brother and sister. I can’t stand it any more. It’s your fault I was about to jerk off and break my fast . . .”

  “Mario, I’ve got to go to work.”

  “I’ll give you a day’s pay.”

  “Like a whore!”

  Conde’s memory flashed back. He glimpsed the mercenary mulatta’s lascivious tongue, her pert nipples, and even heard her would-be temptress’s voice. He felt his parts rapidly recede, like a timorous animal running into a cave.

  “All right, off you go to work,” he replied, picking up his cigarette that was still smoking and almost smoked out.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, alarmed by his reaction.

  “Nothing much really, I’m worried,” he whispered and went off to get the telephone. He came back to the kitchen and, as if making his first ever confession, asked: “Haven’t you ever seriously thought we should tie the knot?” and, seeing the startled look on Tamara’s face, added: “Only joking, don’t worry . . .” and left.

  Still surprised by his question, Tamara looked ecstatic, almost not crediting what she’d heard and, telephone in hand, the Count smiled as he heard her say: “Is that what a knock on the head does for you?”

  Yoyi Pigeon honked his Chevrolet’s horn insistently and a pensive Count bid farewell to the concrete shapes by Tamara’s house.

  “What do you hope to get from the dead man’s sister?” Yoyi asked, after shaking the Count’s hand and shifting the gear lever.

  “I’d like the truth, but I’ll settle for any lead . . .”

  “And the old dear in Atarés?”

  “I want her to fill in the gaps. She didn’t tell me a number of things. And I don’t think it was out of fear. Too many years have gone by . . .”

  “Are we going by ourselves? I’ve not come prepared. I’ve only got the chain and handcuffs . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll dare do it again. That’s something I’d like to get to the bottom of . . . Anyway we’ll take steel bars . . .”

  When they were opposite Amalia Ferrero, Conde once again saw the exhausted, transparent woman he’d met several days ago. The food cure brought by the books seemed eaten away by grief and her sad eyes were hidden from sight by constant blinking. Her fingers were raw, about to bleed, and had suffered from a bout of frantic chewing.

  “The police have told me to stop selling books until they finish their investigation,” she said, when she saw her visitors, skipping any polite chitchat.

  “We’ve come about something else. Can we talk for a few minutes?”

  Amalia’s lids started blinking again, uncontrollably, as she ushered them into the reception room. Conde inspected the closed mirrored doors of the library, and looked in vain for the glass ashtray. What the fuck had one of those two told him about that library? Which one was it? He tried to poke in his memory: the reply wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Amalia, I’m really sorry to bother you, but we need your help. The man who came to buy books still hasn’t shown up, although we’ve found other things out and perhaps . . .”

  “What other things?” the woman’s eyes sparked.

  “The singer I told you about, Violeta del Río, was really Catalina Basterrechea. She was Alcides Montes de Oca’s lover.”

  “It’s news to me . . . I didn’t know. Didn’t have the slightest . . .” she answered emphatically.

  “It’s strange you didn’t know. She was going to leave Cuba with Alcides. And if you’d made your mind up, you’d have gone together.”

  “But I didn’t know . . . I didn’t want to leave . . .”

  The Count decided it was time to apply a little pressure.

  “Your Mummy knew. She knew everything . . . She sorted out all the red-tape to bury that woman when she committed suicide.”

  “Mummy did whatever Mr Alcides told her to do. I told you: she was his trusted help. But I didn’t know . . .”

  “There was a lot of doubt as to whether Catalina Basterrechea committed suicide or was murdered.”

  When he said that last word Conde knew he’d touched a sensitive spot. An almost imperceptible physical reaction rippled though her. She was on tenterhooks. Conde hesitated, although his instinct told him to stick the scalpel in and gouge out the dead tissue.

  “I still think it odd that you were living in this house, so close to your mother and Alcides, and knew nothing about that tragedy. How old were you in 1960?”

  “I don’t know,” stammered Amalia, who blinked frantically, put a finger to her mouth, and tried to restrain herself. “I was twenty. It was decad
es ago . . . and I was just a young girl.”

  “From what I gathered, you’d started working, joined the union, and accepted a post in a bank, a position in the Federation . . .”

  “That’s true enough, but I knew nothing about any Catalina, or what Mr Alcides did with his life. And what my mother once knew has gone with her madness . . . Satisfied? Why don’t you go and leave me in peace? I feel very upset,” her voice pleaded; she was close to collapse. “Dionisio was my brother, can’t you understand? He was almost all I had left in this world . . . My nieces and nephews went. My mother’s dying. Today or tomorrow . . . And that bloody hole of a library . . .”

  A shaft of light rent the shadows in Conde’s mind and lit up his memory. Amalia had struck a very personal note about the library which might just have opened a way to the truth.

  “What’s your problem with the library, Amalia? A few days ago you said something about the library rejecting you and you rejecting the library. Why did you say that?”

  Amalia looked at the two men and blinked and blinked. Her voice sounded like an exhausted sigh.

  “Will you leave me in peace?”

  Conde nodded and accepted their conversation was at an end, convinced more than ever that that house, and in particular the coveted library of the Montes de Ocas, hid the secrets that couldn’t be revealed, that Amalia perhaps thought had been swallowed by her mother’s dementia and the occasionally merciful passage of time.

  Yoyi insisted on being present at the conversation with Elsa Contreras – or would it be with Carmen Argüelles? – and the Count thought he had the right: after all, the police still reckoned he was a murder suspect in the present mess the ex-detective was intent on using the past to solve.

  “You like the beautiful, expensive things in life, so I can tell you now: you’re not about to see anything pleasant,” said the Count as they drove into the barrio.