Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

The thought that it was best not to lock the car made him turn back. He unlocked it and breathed several times to relax. He confirmed once more that he had the black cap in his pocket and that he could easily lift the handkerchief tied around his neck and cover his face. Finally, he walked down the sidewalk, quickly, and when he turned the corner to go to Román Mejías’s house, the reflection of some red and blue lights coming from Séptima Avenida made him freeze. Those round flashes couldn’t be coming from anything but a patrol car. Daniel Kaminsky then felt the deepest and most painful fear that would ever seize him in his life: a paralyzing fear, mean, full-bodied. He couldn’t and didn’t know what to do but return to the Chevy and, after hiding the gun under the seat, he managed to put it in motion and make it go in fits and starts, until he stabilized the gears and went along Calle Quinta D to reach Avenida 70 and distance himself from the place.

  The mixture of fear and frustration clouded his vision. Daniel Kaminsky had not cried since the afternoon of May 31, 1939, on which, aboard a launch, he saw his parents and sister Judith for the last time, leaning over the deck of the Saint Louis. That terrible day he was still a boy and tears prevented him from saying anything to his parents, to his little sister, but since then he carried that verbal incapacity with guilt. Now he cried because his fear was in reality stronger than all of his desires for justice and because he felt relieved, since on that day some event had occurred that prevented him from killing the one man he knew had contributed to the deaths of his loved ones. Crying and fleeing danger were the only things Daniel Kaminsky could do at that moment.

  10

  Havana, 2007

  Elias Kaminsky also cried. A pair of unstoppable tears ran down his cheeks before the behemoth with the ponytail had time to cut them off and prevent others from following. To help him in that goal, he took in a deep breath of nicotine-heavy smoke.

  Mario Conde was able to contain his anxiety and kept a polite silence. That Santos Suárez park, halfway between Tamara’s house and the one that Marta Arnáez and Daniel Kaminsky occupied for a few years, was miraculously well lit for this city of shady parks and shadowy streets. Conde had chosen that park as the ideal place for the conversation, since at one corner was the building of the school where Marta Arnáez had done her student teaching while working to get her education degree, but also because he liked the place and it evoked for him many pleasant stories from the past, a remote time in which, sometimes sitting on this same bench in this same park, he journeyed through years marked by loves and breakups, parties and baseball games, dreams of writing and traumatic disappointments, always in the company of his former companions, including the absent Andrés, who from the geographic great beyond had sent him this man who was trying not to cry while he evoked the roughest moments of his father’s Cuban life—the former Jewish Pole Daniel Kaminsky, who felt driven to kill a man.

  When Elias seemed to regain his composure, Conde didn’t wait any longer and launched his attack.

  “As you can imagine, I don’t understand a damned thing … In the end, did he kill him or not?”

  Now Elias even tried to smile.

  “I’m sorry, I’m a real crybaby … And this shitty story … Well, that’s why I’m here.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  The painter tried to catch his breath. When he thought it possible, he spoke.

  “He told me that, no, he hadn’t killed him. When he escaped from there, without knowing yet what had happened, he was so afraid that he threw Pepe Manuel’s gun in a river … Of course, the Almendares River, just like the name of the baseball team. He already knew he could never kill that guy, he told me. He hated himself for feeling like a coward…”

  “But what happened to Mejías?”

  Elias looked straight at Conde but kept silent for a few prolonged seconds.

  “He was killed that morning…” he said at last. “The lights my father saw really were from a patrol car, because an hour before, the maid had discovered Román Mejías’s corpse in the living room…”

  Conde shook his head, denying something hidden but obvious that he had to put into words.

  “No, it can’t be…”

  “I’m thinking the same thing … or I thought it,” Elias corrected himself. “Roberto Fariñas thought the same thing. And my mother … Who would believe that the same day he decided to kill that son of a bitch, someone else would come, beating him by an hour, to kill Mejías and steal the Rembrandt. It’s tough to swallow, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s hard…”

  “There’s something that doesn’t fit and that has always made me doubtful…” Elias began. “The thing about Pepe Manuel’s gun is true. My mother saw it. He had it … If you have a gun or a revolver, isn’t it easier to kill a guy with a couple of shots instead of wrestling with him, immobilizing him, and then slitting his throat with a knife? A guy who, besides, could already be armed?”

  The questions hit Conde like blows just as he was settling into the story’s logic, after having seen the movie that Daniel Kaminsky’s mind was projecting through the words of his son.

  “They slit his throat?”

  “That’s how they killed him. They slit his throat in such a way that they ripped his head off … There was blood everywhere…”

  “Like Judith and Holofernes?”

  Elias looked around before answering.

  “Yes, the way my father imagined Judith’s Hebrew revolt, just like in his imagination he saw himself saving his sister, also Judith…”

  Conde shook his head vehemently.

  “Now I really don’t understand a fucking thing, or many fucking things.” Conde added the plural to convey how incapable he was of following any of it. He understood, of course, that a son would put up the most illogical defenses so as not to believe that his father had killed a man, even for the most justifiable reasons. What didn’t make sense at all was that that same son would come to the ends of the earth, of his own free will, to roll around in shit before the eyes of a stranger, merely in search of some support that, by all accounts, he didn’t need, since he believed or wanted to believe his father. And he was even paying for that unnecessary support. No, the list and the money weren’t players in that game that, however ardently, was placing biblical myths and baroque painting on the stage of reality, in addition to the supposed lack of interest in the two million dollars that the recovery of the painting of discord was worth.

  “Hmmm, explain to me what happened … My brain must be freezing.”

  “They tied Mejías’s hands behind his back, put a handkerchief in his mouth, and stripped him of his clothes. Then they killed him with an enormous slit of the throat. But before that, they had cut him in several places, his arms, his stomach, lower down … It seems it was something terrible, very bloody … At the beginning, they said it was some revolutionaries, because Mejías was a government official. But that way of killing him … it looked more like a burglar who was caught by surprise and tied him up first, tortured him to find out something, like where he kept his money, and killed him in the end to escape or out of fear that Mejías would recognize him. Many burglars have no intention of killing anyone and only do so when they have no choice. But what happened to Mejías was too much … even his penis … Of course, for the government and the police, it was more convenient for it to look like political vengeance. That showed what those revolutionaries were capable of in their desperation and that they lacked scruples. And since, for some reason, the stolen painting was barely mentioned, this was the theory that had the most currency.”

  “I have to ask Rabbit if he knew that story. I had never heard it…”

  “If my father is the one who killed Mejías,” Elias continued, “at least he knew that it didn’t have anything to do with the clandestine fighters who were in the city. If they were going to kill people, there were many others to kill before Mejías, who had even helped them in matters like Pepe Manuel’s. Unless he tricked someone, right? The fa
ct is that they didn’t find any prints or other clues and they never found out who killed Mejías. My father told me that, in his opinion, the killer had been a burglar caught by surprise by Mejías…”

  “Yes, that’s all very well and good. But, for now, I don’t believe it, to be honest.”

  “It seems that Roberto Fariñas never believed it, either. I already told you, he also knew it hadn’t been the revolutionaries. Because he was one of them, right? Two months later, he would join a cell of clandestine fighters, the kinds who did ‘action and sabotage,’ as they said.”

  “Yes, I know … What about your mother?”

  “What was she going to say? She said she was convinced it had been some burglars. She had to act convinced, even if she really wasn’t deep down.”

  “And what do you think? Please, tell me the truth.” Conde needed to get to the bottom of this, to find a point to latch onto so he could keep going.

  “I don’t have the clarity I need to judge this matter. All I know is this story, the one he told me … Ever since I was a kid, I started to suspect that there was something dark in my father’s past, here in Cuba, but I had no idea what it could be. Until one day, about twenty years ago, he at last told me this story. And he told me because he wanted to. Or because he was scared due to the prostate cancer … Although there was always something strange about that story regarding my parents leaving Cuba in ’58, the truth is that it wouldn’t have even crossed my mind to come here and ask Roberto Fariñas if he knew something about my father’s past that … For years I thought he had left Cuba because of something to do with Pepe Manuel.”

  “So what happened to Pepe Manuel?”

  The painter looked at Conde as if he wanted to prepare him for the response.

  “The same day they killed Mejías, Pepe Manuel killed himself in Miami.”

  Conde felt his mind going two steps backward to take the blow.

  “He killed himself? A suicide?”

  “No, no, it was an accident while loading a gun. Or that’s what they assume happened. He shot himself in the neck.”

  “The same day?”

  “The same day,” Elias Kaminsky confirmed. “At dawn, nearly at the same hour.”

  Conde, who had forgotten to smoke, lit up one of his cigarettes. The accumulation of coincidences, incongruities, lucky or forced solutions in that story was too much for him. He even nearly felt the juices of his reflections running over the edges of his poor, watery old brain.

  “So what about the damned painting?” Conde asked with his last sparks of lucidity.

  “Well, I don’t know, and that’s the biggest mystery in this whole mess. Let’s see: If my father had killed Mejías and taken the painting … where in the hell was it stuck until now? How is it that other people took it to London to sell it? How did those people have the certificates my grandfather asked for in Berlin in 1928 and that must have come with him on the Saint Louis?”

  “You say that they never mentioned the theft of the painting? So that it would look like political vengeance?”

  “My father told me that they barely mentioned the theft. Perhaps to feed the theory of political vengeance. I looked at the newspapers from 1958 that reported Mejías’s killing, and it’s true: on the first day they mention a stolen painting, but they don’t say it was a Rembrandt. And a stolen Rembrandt has always been a serious thing…”

  “So they don’t know if the one who killed him stole the painting or not?”

  “I’d say no … That he didn’t steal the Rembrandt.”

  Conde smiled, overcome by the mess of contradictions.

  “Elias, this is the moment where we get in your car, you drop me off at home, and you go, so I can think. Do you realize how tangled up this story of your father’s is? How I can’t make heads or tails of anything you tell me?”

  “Remember that, for better or for worse, I’m Jewish. I’m not going to just give you one hundred dollars per day to listen to me speaking nonsense. It’s because it’s so complicated that I need your help.”

  “Of course … But, again, I ask you, what is it exactly that you want to know? And forgive me for insisting on this, is what you want to know going to help you recover the painting that is now worth more than 1.2 million dollars?”

  Elias Kaminsky looked across the park, through the wrinkled trunks of the casuarina trees and the Mexican bay leaves. Even in that place, the September heat felt like a steam bath, and Conde noticed that the painter’s forehead was damp with sweat.

  “I want to know if my father tricked me and told me he didn’t kill that man but really did, something I would understand. I already know that it’s not easy to confess that you killed someone, even if he was a son of a bitch like that Mejías. But I know that my mother died thinking that, yes, he had killed that man. At the end, she herself told me so, at my father’s funeral … And, as far as I know, his friend Roberto Fariñas thought the same thing. But I want to doubt. No, better yet, I want to believe him. Especially since that painting appeared in London. Because if my father killed that man, with all the reasons he had to do so, he had to have taken the painting. He couldn’t have not done so. It was the family’s legacy, wasn’t it? It was justice … But somebody who was not him kept the painting, and right now I don’t think that Mejías’s killer, whoever that was, would have taken the original Rembrandt that day … Although after thinking about it a lot, I’m on the verge of believing that they did take the painting that was in the living room…”

  “Did they take it or did they not take it?” Conde yelled, only to immediately regret the outburst.

  “I mean to say that, yes, they took it, but it wasn’t the original, as Roberto suspected. All of the paintings in Mejías’s living room were very good copies, and whoever took the one of the Jew’s head thought it was an original. But the authentic one must have been left behind at Mejías’s house, hidden. If this is what happened, for Mejías’s family it was best not to even talk about the theft, not to mention the Rembrandt and let the police insist that it was a political murder. Besides, that would explain what may have happened to the authentic Rembrandt: that one of Mejías’s daughters, or who knows what other person close to the family, got it out of Cuba at some point, with my grandfather’s documents of authenticity. Then, the person who got the painting out of Cuba sold it to someone, perhaps the same seller who is now trying to auction it off in London. Is it too much of a coincidence that it’s coming to auction after the death of my parents? Two months ago, when I went to London, I saw the copies of that certificate. There is no doubt that it is the one my grandfather Isaiah obtained in Berlin in 1928, the same paper that Mejías showed to Hajdú the Jew, the guy from Fotografía Rembrandt … In short, Conde, what I want to know is the truth about my father, whatever that truth may be. I want to know who kept the painting that could have saved my family and made money from it, or tried to make money from it. And if it’s possible, I also want to do justice and recover the painting that for three hundred years belonged to the Kaminskys. I have no doubt that it is here in Cuba, where the keys to that story lie. And I have only you to count on to help me get them … As you can see, what I want to know is not going to help me get back the Rembrandt. But it could help me get back my father’s memory, perhaps do justice…”

  Conde crushed his cigarette butt on the cement. He took a deep breath and looked at the edge of the park, where the most impenetrable darkness began. At that moment, he had the feeling that, in reality, he was looking inside his mind and seeing only a chaos of unconnected fragments dancing in the shadows.

  “Why hadn’t you ever come to Cuba before if you’re part Cuban?”

  Elias smiled for the first time in a long time.

  “It’s precisely because of that … I’m made up of too many things to explore them all. Since traveling to Cuba has always been a little complicated, it was the easiest thing to put off,” he said. Without smiling, he added, “And because, until now, I preferred not to poke arou
nd in that story my father told me. But with the auction…”

  “I understand that,” Conde said. “Now help me see if I understand some other things. Let’s say your father didn’t kill Mejías … okay? So, then why did he run away from Cuba a month later?”

  “Out of fear … the same fear that made him throw away the gun. He told me that when he found out about Mejías’s death, he went crazy. From fear. He felt like a coward … Then he started to think about things he hadn’t thought about. For example, that old Hajdú would say something about his questions regarding the painting. Or that his friend Roberto, knowing what he knew, would rat him out … These things were so absurd that my mother came to believe that they fled because he really had killed that man.”

  “I would have thought the same…”

  “Then why didn’t he take the painting?”

  A light went off in Conde’s head and he took off after it.

  “And what if he killed Mejías, took the fake painting and got rid of it when he realized it was a trick?”

  “I’ve also given a lot of thought to that possibility … Then why wouldn’t he use the gun instead of killing him with a knife?”

  “Eye for an eye, right? To make him suffer … To do what Judith did.” Conde threw out possibilities.

  “Then why would he tell me a story he didn’t have to tell me, just to lie to me? No, he had no obligation to tell me anything.”

  Even though he was between a rock and a hard place, Elias Kaminsky wouldn’t give up. Conde chose to get right to it.

  “Elias, do you want someone to dig around a little and tell you, for your peace of spirit, that your father didn’t mutilate and kill a man?”

  The painter shook his head emphatically.

  “No, Conde, you’re wrong. I think—I’m sure—that he didn’t kill Mejías. But I’d like absolute certainty and I’d like to know what happened to the Rembrandt painting. I can’t stand by with my arms crossed while someone becomes a millionaire with what cost three of my family members their lives … And if in search of that truth it comes up that my father committed a crime, then that also helps my peace of spirit, as you say. Because I would understand what he did. And for whatever he could have done, I will always forgive him, as terrible as it was. What I wouldn’t forgive is that he deceived us, my mother and me.”