“Grandpa, I’m going to Parque de Reyes for a while.”
And she headed toward the place where she had last met up with the would-be detective. Conde reconfirmed for himself the difficulty of that conversation when he saw the young girl walk away, now without her emo clothes and with her hair in a ponytail that fell over the back of her neck.
“We’re really worried about that girl,” Ricardo Kaminsky said when she couldn’t hear him anymore.
“Kids these days…” Conde commented noncommittally.
“For days, she has barely eaten anything and hasn’t dressed up as emo … I think she is depressed for real.”
“What a shame…”
When he arrived at the park, Conde found her sitting on the same dilapidated bench where they had spoken a few days prior. Au naturel, Yadine was a girl of real beauty, in whom the contributions of the mixed heritage running through her veins had obtained the best balance. But her overflowing sadness ruined that intense beauty.
“Aren’t you emo anymore?” was Conde’s greeting as he waited to see the best path to take.
“If Judy wanted to stop being emo, why should I be?”
“Are you sure she was going to get out?”
“Yes, she told everyone…”
“So then, what was she going to be?”
“That, she didn’t tell anyone. Judy could be tremendously mysterious … When she wanted to.”
Then, Yadine fell apart. She started to cry with some deep, choking sobs as her tears made two mighty streams.
“I can believe that. More mysterious than usual,” the former policeman, who was capable of coming out with any nonsense when he felt disarmed, dared to say. Did Judy know anything about the source from which her father expected a lot of dollars to come? He asked himself again, motivated by his intention to ask Yadine, but decided not to do so: in any event, what Judy knew didn’t decide anything, and he wasn’t going to mention the details of that other sordid story to Yadine. Besides, the girl’s weeping was affecting him so much that he felt the possibility that he himself would join her to make up a strange chorus of the plaintive.
Conde lit a cigarette to calm himself and to give the young girl time to recover herself.
“You didn’t look for her enough…” she accused him, still between sobs, as she wiped her face with her hands.
“I did what I could,” he defended himself, although without presenting his best reason: Judy was already dead when he started asking about her.
“But they killed her, man, they killed her…”
And she began to sob again.
“The police don’t know…”
“The police don’t know anything … She did not commit suicide, I’m sure she didn’t.”
Conde hesitated between trying to console the girl and explaining to her what he himself thought, telling her what he knew and believed about her friend’s death, because if there is anything he was convinced of, it was that Yadine must be the person who most felt affected by Judy’s death. Because not only did she love her and have the occasion to physically express that love: Yadine idolized Judy. And in that weeping, Conde knew well, there was not a single trace of guilt. It was just pain, pure and raw.
“Are you going to school?” He found himself a chink through which to escape.
The girl was putting herself back together and nodded.
“Yes, next week, exams start…”
“Your grandfather says you’re barely eating.”
She raised her shoulders and sobbed mutely. The man felt the girl transferring her sadness to him.
“I’m sorry, Yadine,” he said, after throwing the end of his cigarette far away. “I have to leave, because…”
Yadine looked at him with her reddened and sadder-still eyes.
“Everyone leaves … It doesn’t matter to anyone … They killed her and it doesn’t matter to anyone,” she said, and started to sob again, to make more tears, as she stood up and looked at Conde with clearly accusatory intent. “It doesn’t matter to anyone,” she said again, and started running to her house, on Calle Zapotes, the same house where, fifty years prior, her great-grandparents Caridad Sotolongo and Joseph Kaminsky arrived in the company of teenage Ricardito, who was already the owner of a Jewish Polish last name.
As he watched her get farther away, Conde felt himself gasping for air, a knot rising in his throat and tears blurring his vision. Although it was not his fault, he felt the weight of fault, his share of what was in the air surrounding him. Just what I needed, he thought as he started to feel his ass cramping due to the lack of support caused by the broken plank of the only surviving bench in Parque de Reyes. Then he thought that Yadine and Judy’s love had been born marked by the most classic and tangible tragedy: that of being the descendants of Montagues and Capulets.
* * *
Conde definitely knew a better method than reflection when he needed to clear his thinking and free himself of heavy spiritual burdens. The formula was simple and had demonstrated its efficiency many times: two bottles of rum, the right mouths and ears, and an abundance of conversation. A few years before dying, his old friend, el chino Juan Chión, had taught him that, in the sensible Tao philosophy, those spiritual jolts were usually called cleaning the tsin.
Before handing himself over to the necessary Asian ablution, Conde decided to fulfill one last obligation: he called Major Manuel Palacios and told him what he knew of the possible exit route of a Rembrandt painting from Cuba, perhaps exported by Alcides Torres. If the super policeman in charge of the former leader’s case managed to get anything out of Alcides, all the better. And if they didn’t, fuck them. And he went out to the street.
Of course, the porch of Skinny Carlos’s house, like nearly always, ended up being the best place for the foreseen cleaning of the tsin. Although Conde arrived with a bit of a delay, since, unexpectedly, the Bar of the Hopeless had closed that afternoon FOR EXTERMINATION!, according to the markered sign in Gandinga’s hand, always a fan of love letters. Conde imagined that if the chemical product sprayed on the place turned out to be truly efficient, the following morning it would be possible to find the bodies even of species considered long ago extinct. Megatherium, for example! Tyrannosaurus, for sure! And in the surrounding areas, as collateral damage, several of the neighborhood drunks on the verge of dying of dehydration.
That night, Carlos and Rabbit appeared thirsty, since they asked Conde to quickly serve them the first liter of the top-shelf white rum acquired in convertible pesos. Candito accepted the can of TropiCola that his friend had brought him by virtue of his ethylic retirement.
As they warmed up their engines with the right fuel, they talked about Elias Kaminsky’s phone call, although Conde preferred to not yet reveal the extraordinary connection he had discovered. After the first drinks, Conde at last focused on his true purpose and narrated, with interruptions caused by Carlos’s questions, the last known details about the disappearance and fatal reappearance of Judy Torres, which was the matter most poking at his conscience.
As expected, the news that the girl’s father was under police investigation garnered most of the interest of those present, who passionately hated that type of shadowy character, representative of a resistant and endemic national plague. And that was without knowing the best part of the story!
Candito the Red, more grounded than the rest of them, still thought that the girl had committed suicide: he had thought so ever since he learned of the mental confusions that she possessed so forcefully, and the entire ritual preceding her death confirmed it for him. Carlos, meanwhile, went back and forth between the death being a suicide and it being a crime, and he supposed that Judy’s loss of virginity had a lot to do with either of these two options. Rabbit, on the contrary, was more supportive of Conde and Yadine’s suspicions of murder, although he also thought that Judy had gone of her own will to that remote place where they had found her: there, she had drugged herself with her companion and, voluntarily or in
voluntarily (voluntarily, Conde reminded him), had had sexual relations with him, and then … Had she cut her arms or were they cut? And why was there other blood on her clothing? And where had those strange drugs come from? And what about the damned missing money?
Close to midnight, Conde got on his way toward Tamara’s house. Despite the fact that he had barely had anything to drink, he felt drunk and frustrated, since instead of certainties capable of generating solutions, he had become weighed down with new doubts. The conversation with Manolo and the ones held that day with Elias and Yadine had made the confusing story of Judy’s death come back with overwhelming pressure, definitely unbearable, and Conde had the conviction that that obsessive insistence would only be relieved with a categorical response. But where in the hell and how in the hell will I find it, he said to himself and, thanks to the fact that his judgment was impaired by the alcohol, the kick he aimed at the granite block serving as a street sign failed and he fell on his ass on the sidewalk, from where he discovered, joyous, the moon’s enormity.
Like a thief entering the house of the woman whom he aimed to marry someday, and, to not disrupt her sleep, he decided to lie down on the sofa in the living room. He undressed and, as soon as he laid his body down horizontally, a sudden and surprising dizziness forced him to stand up. Alarmed by that reaction, he tried to think: How is it possible that I am so drunk with so little rum? Am I getting that old? Might it be true that I’m an alcoholic? No, no … When his brain stopped going around in circles, he went to the bathroom and put his head under the spray of the shower and, having turned a towel into the turban of an Indian aspiring to blessed Nirvana, he walked to the kitchen, where he placed the coffeepot on the burner.
With a half cup of coffee, he returned to the living room. As he drank the beverage, he felt sleepiness leaving him and the fog in his mind was starting to lift, like the sky after the rain. Was I drunk and now I’m not? He lit a cigarette and, when he was looking for an ashtray, he saw it. There, amid other discs, was the DVD copy of Blade Runner that had belonged to Judy. Since he had nothing better to do, he turned on the player and inserted the disc, and then turned on the television.
Sitting in his favorite armchair, he started to watch the movie without watching. As the plot unfolded and his brain settled down, he focused on the story again. That futuristic fable was communicating something remote, further still, something intimate. His sympathy for the replicants and for their desperate demand to have the right to live turned out to be more dramatic and visceral this time, perhaps due to the remaining effects of the alcohol, or perhaps merely because that drama was preparing him to communicate something that could still not be pinpointed. Toward the end of the film, when the replicant hunter and the last model of those condemned creatures have their agonizing and bloodied duel, Conde felt himself on the verge of tears. Did everything make him want to cry now? That epic figure with the very white skin of the humanoid mutant, so perfect and powerful, became for him a familiar image, almost known, while the replicant ran out of the final seconds of its vital mechanisms, maliciously programmed by its creator.
Five hours later, just as it was starting to get light out, Conde opened his eyes and, from the sofa where he had fallen deeply asleep, fixed them on the living room ceiling. The explosive force of a conviction, born in some wakeful corner of his brain, had taken him out of sleep with a large push and even a few kicks. Now Mario Conde knew where to look for the mystery of Judith Torres’s death. And he knew, besides, that his premonitions had inopportunely changed their way of manifesting themselves: instead of a pain in his chest, just below his left nipple, now they showed up like a dizziness similar to one that could be caused by common drunkenness. Nothing changes for the better, he thought.
* * *
He pressed the intercom button and turned to look at the expression on his former colleague Manuel Palacios’s face. The policeman was looking, enthralled, at the mansion, to which a few thousand well-placed dollars had returned it to what must have been its original splendor. Through every one of the agent’s pores, instead of sweat extracted by the July heat, rose liquid envy before the magnificence and the sensation of peace and well-being the dwelling exuded, in the middle of a city that was dirtier and noisier every day.
For Conde, it had been difficult to make Manolo listen to him but, later, very easy to get him to go over there with him. First thing in the morning, when he showed up at investigations headquarters and asked for Major Palacios, Manolo told him over the internal telephone that he was in a meeting and couldn’t see him. Conde lowered his voice and, to avoid revealing too much to the sergeant who sometimes worked as receptionist on the line, told him to stop fucking around and come down for a couple of minutes: if he wasn’t interested in what he was going to tell him, then he, Mario Conde, would forget about it all and would get the hell out of there forever. Manolo, after a pause, asked him to wait below the bay leaf tree on the street. He would be down in ten minutes.
The policeman was wearing his uniform with bars and displaying the stressed face that went nearly everywhere with him in recent years.
“What?” Conde attacked him. “You don’t want them inside to see you talking to me?”
“Go to hell, Conde. I don’t have time to be—”
“Then find time,” Conde interrupted him. “Because I am more than sure that I know who was with Judy on the day she died … Or was killed.”
Manolo was looking at his former colleague with his usual intensity and cross-eyed-ness. He knew Conde too well to know that he didn’t play with things that really mattered to him.
“What are you talking about?” Manolo started to get soft. “Does it have something to do with the Rembrandt painting that you told me about yesterday?”
“No, I don’t think that one thing has anything to do with the other … But before going on, I want to tell you something … Manolo, you are a cross-eyed son of a bitch. You called me two days ago and told me what was and wasn’t happening in Judy’s case to—”
“So you would get involved in it without my telling you to get involved. And you got involved … Well, yes, I’m a little bit of a son of a bitch. And since you asked me the other day, I want to tell you that that was one of the things I learned to do with you … Was it worth something?”
“I believe so,” Conde admitted, and told him about his premonition.
After that moment, the easy part began. And because of that, an hour later, a sweaty Manuel Palacios was alongside Conde when the intercom’s metallic voice asked for the visitor to identify himself. It was Manolo who responded.
“It’s the police. Open up…”
The words worked like a magic spell, and the electric sound of the lock opened by remote control almost overlapped with Manolo’s final demand. Meanwhile, on the porch, the figure of Frau Bertha was visible next to the solid wood door of the dazzling mansion.
Manolo, determined to take control, approached the woman and showed her his badge.
“Hello. We came to speak with Yovany González.”
The woman’s Germanic face turned almost red.
“What did he do now?”
“We’re looking into that,” Manolo limited himself to saying.
“And is this gentleman a policeman or is he not a policeman?” the luxury maid asked, referring to Conde.
“No, Frau Bertha … I was, I already told you,” Conde reminded her.
“Frau Bertha?” The woman didn’t understand anything, but she preferred not to attempt comprehension. “That kid is always getting into trouble … I’ll go find him. Sit down.”
If the outside of the dwelling had made Major Palacios sweat, the interior, despite the cyclonic insistence of the ceiling fans, had him on the verge of melting.
“How much money is there on these walls, Conde?” he asked, looking at the works of art surrounding him.
“Hundreds of thousands, I’d say … Less than a lot…” he added.
“And you really
think that this kid…? Living in this house? What could he need…?”
“The mysteries of the human soul, Manolo. Incidentally, let me be the one to try to reveal them…”
Manolo, who loved interrogating suspects, reluctantly agreed, perhaps convinced that he didn’t have enough of a grasp of the territory in which that conversation would move.
Yovany, with his light-haired curtain falling over his right eye, looked at them from the entrance to the dining room. He was barefoot and wearing flowered shorts and a mauve-colored T-shirt. Around his neck, like some kind of postmodern torture gadget, he had some headphones with padded earflaps. The presence of a uniformed police officer with bars contributed to accentuating his paleness, if that chromatic degradation was possible. He looks like a damned replicant, Conde thought, and waited for him to get closer.
“We have to speak with you, Yovany … And if your mother isn’t here, we prefer that this woman be present,” he said, and pointed to a seat for Frau Bertha, who was looking at them from a respectful but interested distance.
“What happened now?” the boy asked.
Conde waited for the maid, without a doubt violating orders by the owners, to take a seat in the living room.
“Let’s make it clear that this is just a conversation, eh…? Well, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for days,” Conde began. “Is your father’s name Abilio González?”
When they heard the question, the faces and colors of Yovany and the presumed German governess recovered their altered balance.
“Is that why you came to see me? What happened to the dude?” Yovany asked with a small smile already on his lips.
“You didn’t answer me … Is his name Abilio González Mastreta?”
“Yes … That’s his name. Did he die?”
Heretics Page 60
