Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “I want to talk to you, Detective” were the first words the young girl said, when he had barely opened the door.

  Even a former cop could be surprised by that sort of Chandlerian speak and Conde didn’t dare wonder what Ricardo Kaminsky’s granddaughter was looking for, although he had a bad feeling. His immediate concern was over where to hold that conversation. Inside the house, alone with that girl in the prime of her youth, no way; on the porch … what would the neighbors say if they saw him with a goth girl? To hell with what they think, he told himself, and after asking Yadine to hold on a moment, he fetched the keys to the lock that held together his uncomfortable iron chairs.

  “If I’m not mistaken, I never said at your house that I was a detective…” Conde began to speak while he set up the chairs for their conversation, as he had done months before for the painter Elias Kaminsky, who was the girl’s cousin, more or less.

  “But you look for people, yes or no?”

  “That depends on who, why, and for what,” the man said as he settled in, his curiosity piqued already. “What’s going on with you? Is there some problem at home?”

  “No, not at home … What I want is for you to look for someone,” the girl exclaimed, and Conde smiled. Between her belief that he was a private detective who dedicated himself to finding lost people, and the relaxed innocence (dressed up as seriousness or concern) on the face of the goth girl, whose beauty could be sensed beneath her exultant grooming, the situation was starting to seem halfway between hilarious and novel-like. But he chose to maintain distance, hoping for a quick end to the dialogue, although his curiosity had not completely diminished.

  “If someone has really been lost, it’s the police who should be doing the search.”

  “But the police don’t want to keep searching and she has been missing for ten days,” she said with fury and anguish.

  Conde took a deep breath. That was the moment at which a drink of rum would do him good, but he pushed the idea aside immediately. He chose to light a cigarette.

  “Let’s see, who is this she who is lost?”

  At that moment, Yadine took a cell phone out of the pocket of her studded black shirt, touched some buttons, and looked at the screen for a few seconds. Then she held out the device to Conde, who could see Yadine on the screen, alongside another young girl, dressed and made up in a very similar way. Only then, with her only visible eye fixed on Conde, did the girl reply with the greatest conviction, “This is the she. My friend Judy.”

  Conde returned the phone to her and Yadine put it back in the pocket of her shirt.

  “So what happened to her, your friend Judy?” Conde avoided interjecting a “dammit” in his question and decided to do whatever he could to move forward a little more. “Because what I see is a freak goth like you…”

  Then the clarification arose that would serve definitively to bait Conde’s curiosity.

  “No, you’re wrong. I’m not a goth or a freak. I’m emo.”

  “Emo?”

  “Yes, emo.”

  “And what’s being emo, if I may ask? Excuse my ignorance…”

  “You’re excused … Or not. I forgive you if you help me look for her. She is my best friend,” she clarified, always emphasizing the pronoun.

  “I don’t know if you’ll be able to forgive me, because I can’t promise you anything … But now tell me what being emo is…”

  Yadine arranged her hair again and Conde discovered in that sole eye something that seemed like frustration or sadness.

  “You see, now we could use Judy … She explains it better than anyone.”

  “About being emo?”

  “Yes, and other things. Judy is off the charts…” she stated, and touched her temple to indicate that she was referring to her friend’s intelligence.

  “Well, tell me something about emos…”

  “We’re emos and those others aren’t. Look, there are freaks, Rastas, rockers, Mikis, reparteros, gamers, punks, skaters, metalheads … and us, we’re emos.”

  “Uh-huh,” Conde said, as if he understood something. “And?”

  “We, the emos, don’t believe in anything. Or in almost nothing,” she corrected herself. “We dress like this, in black or in pink, and we think the world is fucked.”

  “And you’re emos because you like it?”

  “You’re emo because you’re emo. Because it hurts us to live in a rotten world and we don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  “Well, on this last point, you all are not too original, shall we say,” Conde had to tell her. He felt like he was treading water and tried to lead the conversation to an end. “So what happened to her, your friend Judy?”

  “She got lost about ten days ago.” Yadine seemed more at ease although sadder at that point in the conversation. “She disappeared like that, suddenly, without telling anyone, not me, or the other emos, or even her grandmother … And that’s very strange,” she emphasized again. “The police say that she hasn’t shown up because she must have tried to leave on a balsa raft and drowned in the sea. But I know that she didn’t go anywhere. First of all, because she didn’t want to leave; second, because if she’d wanted to leave, I would have known, and her grandmother, too … or her sister who lives in Miami and who didn’t know anything, either…”

  Conde couldn’t help his former profession taking over his mind.

  “Doesn’t Judy have parents?”

  “Yes, of course she does…”

  “But you only mentioned her grandmother. And now the sister…”

  “Because she doesn’t get along with her parents. Especially with her father, who was—no, not was, who is—a disgusting pig and didn’t want her to be emo…”

  Conde thought about her possible father. Although he still wasn’t quite sure what an emo was, and despite not sharing the traumatic experience of having a child, he felt a slight solidarity with this parent and thus decided not to delve any deeper into the subject.

  “Look, Yadine.” He began to prepare his withdrawal by trying to be nice to the young girl, who seemed really affected by her best friend’s disappearance. “I don’t have any way to investigate a disappeared person, that’s the police…”

  “But they’re not looking for her, dammit!” The girl’s reaction was visceral. “And maybe she has been kidnapped…”

  At that moment, Conde felt sorry for Yadine. Did the unbelieving emos watch soap operas? Episodes of Without a Trace? This kidnapping thing sounded like Criminal Minds. Who in the hell was going to want to kidnap an emo? Dracula? Batman? Harry Potter?

  “Let’s see, let’s see, tell me a couple of things … Besides being emo, what did your friend do?”

  “She’s in high school, the same one as me. She’s a genius,” she said, and touched the same temple as before. “And tests start next week, and if she doesn’t show up…”

  “So she’s your fellow student. Was Judy doing anything dangerous?” Conde tried to find the best way to put it, but there was just one option: to call a spade a spade. “Was Judy taking drugs?”

  For the third time, Yadine moved her hair over her face. Conde wished at that moment to be able to see her full expression.

  “Some pills … but nothing beyond that. I’m sure of it.”

  “And did she hang out with strange people?”

  “We emos are not strange. We love getting depressed, some like to hurt themselves, but we’re not strange,” she concluded, emphatic once again.

  Conde noticed that he was on delicate ground. They “loved” getting depressed? His curiosity took flight again. And to top it all off, they weren’t strange?

  “What’s this about hurting themselves?”

  “Cutting ourselves a little bit, feeling pain … to free us,” Yadine said after a moment, and ran her fingers over her forearms covered with two tubes of striped fabric and her thighs ensconced in a dark pair of pants.

  Conde thought that he didn’t understand a damned thing. He could allow for
those young people not believing in anything, even allow that they fill themselves with holes from which to hang hoops, but slashing themselves? Getting depressed for the pleasure of getting depressed to thus free themselves? From what? No, he didn’t understand it. And since he knew that he would perhaps never understand it, he decided not to ask any more questions and to put an end right there to that absurd story of an emo who was lost and maybe even kidnapped.

  “Well, well … as a favor to you, I’m going to see what I can do … Look.” He carefully weighed his options and picked with utmost care the most noncommittal proposal that would allow for a quick escape. “I’m going to talk to a friend of mine who is a police chief and see what he says … And then I’m going to talk to Judy’s parents, to see what they think of—”

  “No, not to her parents. To Alma, the grandmother.”

  “Okay, to the grandmother,” he agreed without arguing, and took out a piece of paper he had in his pants pocket and the pen hanging from his shirt. “Give me Judy’s grandmother’s address and telephone number … But bear in mind that I’m not committing myself to anything. If I learn something, I’ll call you in a couple of days, okay?”

  The girl took the piece of paper and wrote. But when she returned it to Conde, she let out her last request, while simultaneously lifting the hair that fell over half of her face, allowing him to see the true beauty and tangible agony that defined her seventeen-year-old face.

  “Find her. Come on … Listen, this whole Judy thing has me depressed for real.”

  * * *

  Skinny and Rabbit, like two of Columbus’s lookouts, were watching over the horizon from the porch of Carlos’s house. As soon as they saw him come around the corner, carrying a bag whose contents weren’t at all difficult to imagine, Carlos put his automatic wheelchair in motion and yelled, “Damn! You’re really full of yourself!”

  “Who’s thirsty around here?”

  “Have you seen what time it is, beast?” Skinny admonished him as he snatched the bag away from him and rummaged inside it, making clear that there was enough thirst there to go around.

  Conde patted Carlos’s head and gave Rabbit a high-five.

  “You’re fucking kidding me, beast, it’s not even nine o’clock. Wassup, Rabbit?”

  “Skinny told me you were coming early, that you had money and had bought rum and … I’m … I’m fine, but could be better,” his friend said, and accepted the bag Carlos was holding out to him before going inside.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She’s making something.”

  The mere knowledge of that promising information made Conde’s insides rebel against the solitude to which they’d been subjected.

  “Give me the lowdown,” he demanded of his disabled friend.

  “My old lady says she wasn’t up for making more work for herself … Runny corn tamal en cazuela … with lots of bits of pork inside … And Rabbit brought some beer to wash everything down. With this heat…”

  “The night’s coming together,” Conde admitted as Rabbit returned with glasses full of rum and ice. Once distributed, they drank the first drink and felt their worries losing traction.

  “Really, Conde, why were you so late? Didn’t you finish up early with Yoyi?”

  Conde smiled and took another swig before responding.

  “The craziest thing in the world … Let’s see, who of the two of you knows what emos are?”

  Carlos didn’t even have the chance to raise his shoulders in confirmation of his ignorance.

  “They’re one of the urban tribes that has shown up in recent times. They wear black or pink, they comb their hair over their faces, and they like to walk around depressed.”

  Conde and Carlos looked at Rabbit, dumbstruck, as he displayed his knowledge. They were used to hearing him talk about the use of metals in Babylon, about Sumerian cooking or Sioux funeral rites, but his erudite lecture on emos surprised them.

  “Well, yes,” Conde affirmed. “Those are the emos … And I was late coming here because, until just a while ago, I was talking to one.”

  “An ‘emette’?” Carlos played with words.

  “The granddaughter of the Cuban Kaminsky, the doctor.”

  “So what did you talk about? Depression?”

  “Just about…” Conde said, and he relayed the girl’s unexpected request based on her mistakenly considering him some kind of tropical private detective.

  “So what the hell are you going to do?” Carlos wanted to know.

  “Nothing … I’m going to call Manolo to see what he knows and, if I have time, maybe I’ll talk to the grandmother, to calm down Yadine, because I feel sorry for her. But where am I going to find that girl, who must be doing God knows what out there?”

  “So what if she was really kidnapped?” asked Rabbit, who watched the most soap operas of their group.

  “Well, then we wait for them to ask for a ransom … ‘Give me a freak or I eat the emo!’ As far as I’m concerned, right now, I’ll take the tamal en cazuela, because I’m starving to death, dammit,” Conde proclaimed, determined to free himself of that story, which sounded more and more outrageous to him.

  They ate like Bedouins who had just emerged from a long time in the desert: two bowls of ground grains that Josefina had deftly turned into delicate ambrosia. On the side, they had a tomato and pepper salad and a large plate of fried sweet plantains. They doused it all in beer and stamped out any remaining hunger with a bowl of sweet coconut and cream cheese.

  Around midnight, while heading to Tamara’s house, Conde was certain that he was forgetting something important. He didn’t know what. Or where. Just that it was important …

  He entered the house and, after undressing and brushing his teeth, he tiptoed toward the bedroom, like the classic husband who has come home too late. In the darkness, he heard Tamara’s light snoring, always wet and high-pitched. With extreme care, he settled into his side of the bed, fully conscious that he preferred the other side. But from the beginning, Tamara had been inflexible on what belonged to her: if you want to sleep with me, this is my side, always, here and wherever, she warned just once, patting the left side of the mattress. With everything Conde received from that woman, it wasn’t worth fighting over spatial trifles. Although he preferred the other side.

  The man placed his head on the pillow and felt his exhaustion—accumulated during a tense and hectic day—relax his muscles. The pleasure of the meal and the effects of the beer and rum propelled his relaxation toward sleep. In that journey, without him willing it, arose the image of Yadine, the Kaminsky emo. The girl, with her piercings and her sad gaze, managed to place herself above any known and even sensed worries, to accompany him as he glided toward unconsciousness.

  2

  As soon as he set foot in the entrance of the criminal investigations headquarters, Conde felt the desire to turn around and run away. Although it had been twenty years since he had run from (or even visited) that site, the memory of his tormented, decade-long stay in the police world always churned his insides with reliable pain. As he looked at the new furniture, the heavy curtains caressed by air-conditioning, the freshly painted walls, he asked himself if that sterile-looking place was the same one where he had worked as a policeman and if that experience had occurred in the same life he was living now and not in a parallel life or one that had ended long before. How in the hell did you stand being a policeman for ten years, Mario Conde?

  He didn’t recognize any of the uniformed people he passed and none of them recognized him—or at least, so it seemed, to his relief. Of the investigators of his time, only the youngest ones must have survived, like then sergeant Manuel Palacios, his trusty assistant investigator, who, after making him wait twenty minutes, at last came out of the elevator and approached him. Manolo was uniformed, the way he liked to be, and had major’s bars on his shoulders.

  “Let’s go talk outside,” he told him as he shook his hand and almost pulled on Conde to bring him o
ut of the refrigerated atmosphere toward the indecent steam of the June morning.

  “Why in the hell can’t we talk in there, man?”

  Manolo donned some mysterious glasses behind which he sought to hide, at minimum, the wrinkles and dark circles around his eyes. Manolo was no longer the thin man he had once been, either, although you couldn’t exactly say he was fat, even if he seemed so. Conde studied him carefully: the body of his former colleague looked like that of a poorly inflated doll. The years of poisonous air had collected in his now-sagging abdomen and face, but his arms, chest, and legs remained dry and lifeless. Holy shit, this bastard is doing worse than I am, he thought.

  Below the same Mexican bay leaf tree that twenty-some years prior Conde used to see from the window of his cubicle, the men sat themselves down on a wall, each with a cigarette in hand.

  “What’s going on now, brother? Let’s see if the sparrows shit all over us here.” Major Manuel Palacios was smoking, looking left and right, as if he were being followed. “On top of everything else, now you can’t smoke in there … I’m telling you, Conde, things are at the point that no one can stand it…”

  “When haven’t they been?”

  Manolo tried to smile.

  “You don’t know the half of it! The smoking thing is the least of my worries … Go figure that, now, all of a sudden, they noticed that if the ones lower down the totem pole were stealing, it’s because the ones above them were giving them the keys and even opening the doors for them … There are a ton of higher-ups in prison or on their way … Really big fish … Ministers, deputy ministers, business leaders…”

  “They finally shook the tree. But it took a lot of work…”