Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “That’s the problem … How much is a lot? More than I have, that’s for sure … Say something to your friends, see if they can find out,” Conde said, satisfied at having added more fuel to the fire that was already heating up under Alcides Torres. “So what comes now?”

  “Well, nothing else. Now there really is no more news.”

  “What about the investigation into Judy’s death?”

  Manolo shrugged his shoulders, as if he wanted to reach his major’s bars and wasn’t finding them.

  “It’s going to remain open, but…”

  “There are no more leads?”

  “No. The DNA says that the blood on Judy’s clothing belongs to a man, under the age of fifty, white … With that, we can’t get very far.”

  “Unless you know where to go.”

  Manolo stopped the motion of tossing a croquette in his mouth in midair and looked at Conde. Again his eyes looked for the best way to anchor themselves on either side of his nose.

  “What are you talking about, Conde?”

  “Nothing. About searching…”

  Manolo swallowed the croquette almost without chewing it.

  “Look, what I told you the other day still stands. You cannot get involved in this. If I decided to tell you about Bocelli and the drug and the other things and even about Alcides Torres, it’s because I think I owed it to you, do you know why?”

  Conde looked at him.

  “Because you’re my friend? Because years ago I was your boss? Because I’m more intelligent than you?”

  “No … Because you’ve behaved. It’s like a reward for good behavior.”

  Conde shook his head.

  “Manolo, Judy’s case is more dead than she is. What in the hell could it matter to you if I investigate a little bit on my own?”

  Now it was Manolo who shook his head no.

  “With Alcides Torres under investigation by a special team, things change. A lot. These stories are being looked at by the very top.” And he pointed to the top floor of the building, although both knew that Manolo meant a much more elevated point. “So it would be best for you to stay quiet. What if there’s some kind of relation between what the father’s doing and the girl’s death?”

  This time, Conde nodded. After a pause, he dove in.

  “A few days ago, I was remembering Major Rangel,” he started, as if distracted. “I think I withstood working as a policeman for ten years because we had a boss like him. With old Rangel, with Captain Jorrín, even with that corrupt son of a bitch Contreras, I learned some things … One is that being a policeman is a shitty job. And although you are still a policeman, I imagine that you agree with that, right? Another, that that shit is sadly necessary. Especially when things like the death of Judy Torres happen … Because if I’m sure of anything, it’s that in the story about that girl, there’s something fishy. And surely you also agree, right?” Manolo didn’t confirm or deny, and Conde continued. “A policeman like Major Rangel or like Jorrín, or like Fat Contreras would never have underestimated his sense of smell. What did you learn from those people, Manolo?”

  * * *

  When he said goodbye to Manolo, instead of heading toward any of his usual spots, Mario Conde felt pushed to wander aimlessly, which, he was well aware, had a set destination. He started walking along el Malecón, in the direction of El Vedado, as he allowed his brain to get wrapped up in the digressions that he had avoided before. Now, knowing that Bocelli, his most tenacious suspect with any murky connection to Judy, did not seem to have any link to the girl’s final fate, he was insistent on reorganizing the few surviving pieces on his mental chessboard as he aimed again and, despite Manolo’s repeated warnings, to delineate a possible path toward the knowledge of what happened on the farm on the outskirts of the city where they found Judy’s sexed, drugged, mutilated, and dead body.

  The now-proven fact that the young girl had lost her virginity, apparently just a few hours before dying, the certainty that on her clothing was the blood of a young white man, the evidence that she had taken drugs that were not usually available on the island, the macabre evidence that she had languished at the bottom of the well, in addition to the impossibility of determining if the contusion discovered on her head had occurred with the fall or before it, gave shape to a premonition that was pounding all the more forcefully in the former policeman’s chest: somebody had helped Judy die. He was sure. But, and there was the question: Who? Why?

  The distance between where Prado and Malecón crossed and the beginning of Avenida de los Presidentes had disappeared beneath his feet thanks to Conde’s pondering of those realities and possibilities. Something seemed to be increasingly incontrovertible: Judy had gone of her own will to that remote place where she was found. Unless the drugs she took had left her defenseless. This last possibility would imply the existence of a car and, perhaps, of two people to carry her from the road up to the well. But that premeditation did not square away with the criminal idiocy of leaving the bloody clothing there—as it was almost logical to conclude—by the person or the people who had led her to that resting spot. Or was he forcing, out of pure stubbornness, information that only pointed toward the act of suicide? Hadn’t he been convinced that Judy had all of the mental attributes capable of feeding that possibility? Drugged to her eyeballs, couldn’t she have undressed herself, allowed the penetration of her vagina, and then cut her arms and jumped into the well? Had the loss of her virginity acted as a catalyst for her attitude? Couldn’t the note found in her clothing be read as a statement of principle, or rather, of the end?

  When he left the Malecón and turned down Calle G, Conde started to run into the nightlife of young, withdrawn explorers toward those dark corners, more fitting for the sexual games they handed themselves over to with Pantagruel-like appetites. When he crossed Línea and entered the sites of greater tribal concentration, he asked himself what it was that he was really looking for there. Or what he aimed to find. And he couldn’t answer himself, because another cunning question surprised him: Why had Manolo, after having forbidden him before and now again forbidding any intervention, thrown those bits of information to him? There was something suspicious in that change of policy that was never announced as such.

  The heat and the darkness seemed to have come together that night to bring to the surface and make visible hundreds of those young people who displayed themselves like catalog models. Conde felt compelled to remember the carnivals of his childhood, still authentic, for which people voluntarily and joyously selected ridiculous costumes, bought grotesque masks, and made up their faces exaggeratedly. But while the consumption ended along with the party in the case of the carnivals, this juvenile street masquerade party of the new era implied a deeper transfiguration that went from the surface down to the mental depths of those young people determined in their singular pursuit. That spectacle was reality. The attitudes of those young people represented the present, further still, the glorious oft-promised future, which had ended up turning into a carnival with too many masks and no party. A sad future, like an emo convinced of his militancy.

  With his doubts and conclusions on his back, he continued along the climb up one of the avenue’s side streets and, from the corner of Calle 17, where Emolandia tended to take residence, he tried to find some recognizable face below the capillary curtains, under the black outfits, hidden by dark lipstick and makeup. He didn’t make out Yadine, who was surely mourning the death of the woman who made her craaazy; Frederic couldn’t be seen around, either, perhaps because he was giving in to his sexual urges somewhere less visible; he didn’t even find Yovany, the super-white emo, perhaps because he was wandering those indigenous lands in search of lost brothers. But, there were still two, three dozen adolescents there, emo-outfitted to the nines, enjoying their pretend depression, dreaming about musical Nirvanas and religious Nirvanas, displaying their mercilessly but enthusiastically hole-ridden bodies, feeling part of something in which they believed and that made them
feel free … And he didn’t understand how it was possible that Judy had considered leaving the group and, less still, did he understand how he, Mario Conde, had accepted the demand to keep himself at the margins. Judy was a loud scream clamoring for him from the bottom of a dry well.

  11

  They had had breakfast sitting across the table from each other. For Tamara, it was a café con leche in which she was dipping some crackers smeared with butter; Conde, a piece of toast baptized with olive oil over which he had sprinkled salt and crushed a garlic clove. (The milk was a luxury that Tamara could permit herself thanks to the euros that her son sent her; the olive oil, an unthinkable eccentricity on the island, a privilege that Conde had access to by means of his near sister-in-law Aymara, who resided in Italy.) Then, to round out the feeling of a comfortable routine, they both drank another coffee, recently brewed (uncut coffee—or with less additives—than other ignoble grounds, purchased thanks to the dealer in valuable books’ most recent commercial transactions). But both knew that routines like that were unattainable for so many, too many, of the island’s inhabitants.

  “You taste like a vampire,” Tamara said to him as she tasted the hint of garlic when she kissed him goodbye.

  “And you smell like freshly cut grass…”

  “Yves Saint Laurent … A gift from a patient. Are you jealous? I’ve got to run…”

  Conde watched her leave and felt the weight of Tamara’s absence in an unearthly way. Something had to be going very poorly within him for as confirmed a hermit as he was to suffer the wing beat of solitude for such a mundane reason and, at the same time, to not feel any distress from the act of starting a new ritual, a pleasant one, but a ritual nonetheless, embellished with talk of jealousy, to boot. The former policeman didn’t have to think too long to understand the reason for his numbness: the mystery of life, but, above all, the mystery of the death of Judy Torres.

  A half an hour later, when he was getting ready to go out, the sound of the telephone ringing pulled him out of his thoughts.

  “Conde, it’s me, Elias Kaminsky…”

  Conde greeted him with the warmth he felt for the behemoth.

  “I called your house but…” the painter continued. “Are you living at Tamara’s house already?”

  “No, I’m still there, here, I don’t even know, my friend … Well, what’s new?”

  “Something interesting. Or at least, that seems interesting to me … The lawyers discovered that the painting hadn’t come from Los Angeles but rather Miami.”

  “That makes more sense.”

  “But why make that move and hide the origins?” Elias Kaminsky asked, and Conde agreed with him. Why the concealment?

  “And were they able to find out who had it? Was it a relative of Román Mejías’s?”

  “Well, we don’t know if it was anyone from that man’s family,” Elias continued, informing him, “but it’s a young woman, Cuban, and the weird thing is that she arrived in the United States about four years ago on a balsa raft. Perhaps she brought it with her, or rather, that it was always in Cuba until—”

  An electric charge ran through Conde’s brain when he heard the words “balsa raft.” Two wires were activated that had been far apart until that moment, now brushed against each other, allowing the charge stirring around them to go on. But he thought, no, what his mind was formulating wasn’t possible.

  “Shit, Elias! Shit, shit…” Conde interrupted Elias’s reflections, but got stuck, because his thoughts were moving over a surface that couldn’t find a focal point.

  “Hey, what’s going on with you?” Elias seemed alarmed.

  Conde hit his forehead three, four times, and took a few seconds to gather his ideas and find the ability to speak.

  “Do you know the name of that Cuban woman?” And then he closed his eyes, as if he did not want to see the avalanche headed toward him, ready to crush him.

  “The last name is Rodríguez,” Elias said. “Her married name…”

  Without lifting his eyelids, Conde took in all the air around him and asked, “And is her name María José?”

  The silence on the other end of the line, 1,800 miles away, announced to Conde that his declaration had hit the painter Elias Kaminsky in the face. He himself, with the receiver stuck to his ear, could feel at that moment how his hands were sweating and his heart was beating.

  “How do you know that name?” Elias’s words came at last, weighed down with the incapacity to understand what was happening.

  “I know because…” he began, then stopped. “First, tell me something. You told me that your father told you that, besides the Rembrandt, Mejías had other reproductions by Dutch painters, right?”

  “Yes, others…” Elias must have been searching his memory to be able to respond to a question without knowing where it was going. “A church by De Witte—”

  “A landscape by Ruysdael and Vermeer’s View of Delft,” Conde interrupted him, and continued. “And he had a sister who had become wheelchair-bound after an accident?”

  “But what in the hell…?”

  “The thing is, I know the man who kept the painting, Elias … He’s the father of a girl who … Well, he’s the father of María José and I’m sure that he’s the nephew of Román Mejías. I was at his house. I am now nearly convinced that the authentic Rembrandt never left Cuba until he could get it out, I think by way of Venezuela, and from there he was able to send it to his daughter who was in Miami so she could sell it … And that man was hoping to earn a lot of dollars, truly a lot. Shit, now I know how much a lot of dollars are: more than a million…”

  On both sides of the line, there was a silence for a while that seemed infinite, until Elias reacted.

  “But how is it possible that you—?”

  “It’s possible because Yadine, Ricardito’s granddaughter, set me on that path, without her imagining where it would go … Not her, not I…”

  As best as he could, Conde relayed the story that Yadine Kaminsky had thrown him into and that, by way of Judy’s disappearance and her death, connected, in the worst way, a remote past and the families of the two young emos through a tragedy that reached into the cabin of a passenger ship anchored in the port of Havana in 1939.

  “Elias, this has to be one of those cosmic circumstances of which your father used to speak…” Conde concluded, and added, “Do you see how it’s easier to believe that God does exist?”

  “Conde,” Elias Kaminsky said at last, obviously moved by the story. “Is there any way to prove that that Alcides took the painting out of Cuba?”

  “I think only if he confesses it … And I don’t think he’ll do it, because there must not be proof that he took it out. There might not even be proof that he ever had it … And because there’s a lot of money at stake. If Alcides waited for your mother to die to take it out and try to sell it … No, without any other proof, I don’t think he’ll confess anything.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elias accepted. “In any event, I’m going to mention it to the lawyers.”

  “Yes.” Conde was still thinking about what could have caused that unexpected revelation. “But I’m not going to tell Ricardito. His granddaughter is involved…”

  “That’s okay. Did you already tell him about the litigation and about the money? And that things are going to take a good long while? You don’t have to tell him anything else.”

  “No, forgive me, I still haven’t said anything to him … But today I’m going to go see him to tell him about the litigation … And, of course, there’s no need…”

  After another long and heavy silence, Elias asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I don’t know … The truth is, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry. Since the painting left Cuba, it doesn’t change things too much … Although knowing for sure could help…”

  “Yes, it’s always better to know…”

  “Yes, to know…”

  The silence returned and Conde fe
lt exhausted. In reality, disappointed. Because even knowing the truth, without being able to prove it, he couldn’t guarantee that justice would be served.

  “Forget it, Elias, call me whenever you want … And say hello to Andrés for me.”

  “Thank you, Conde. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’ve told me…”

  Conde thought for a few moments before saying, “Today, I would’ve preferred that you didn’t have to thank me for anything. That would have meant that perhaps Judy would still be alive…”

  Again, silence took over the conversation. Conde realized that he had spoken of Judy and that perhaps Elias would’ve assumed he meant Judith Kaminsky, the girl who never got to be his aunt, lost in the Holocaust.

  “Goodbye,” Elias said, and Conde hurried to hang up and finish that conversation that fueled his unease with the world and some of its inhabitants. More than was healthy.

  He returned to the kitchen and drank the rest of the cold coffee. He didn’t feel better after discovering the path taken by the Rembrandt painting Joseph Kaminsky had thought he had destroyed and that the heirs of the infamous Román Mejías had kept hidden for almost half a century, perhaps knowing the way in which Mejías had become its owner. Or not knowing. But dreaming of getting a lot of dollars from it.

  As he got farther away from Tamara’s house, feeling the collision of ideas that kept arising inside his poor head, Conde seriously considered whether it would be best to just take that whole story about the Rembrandt painting and some white, black, and mulato Jews, tell it all to go to hell, and drink until he passed out.

  * * *

  It was easier for Mario Conde to omit the recent revelations and explain to Ricardo Kaminsky only what he had to tell him about the possible, although quite drawn-out, recovery of the Rembrandt painting and the future intentions of his cousin Elias than to hold the dialogue he’d put off for days with his granddaughter Yadine.

  Just when her grandfather Ricardo was again telling Conde that he didn’t have any property rights regarding the painting and, as such, he didn’t feel he had the right, either, to accept any money sent by Elias Kaminsky, the girl came out onto the porch and, after coldly greeting him, threw a coded message into the air, in the best Kaminsky style.