Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  When Conde finally reopened his eyes, he saw the beam again, but from a different perspective. He didn’t know where he was or what exactly had happened, but his first reaction was a typical policeman’s: he slipped his hand under his body and gave a sigh of relief to find his pistol was still there between his belt and his skin. The boom from a clap of thunder confirmed that the buzz in his ears was due to the downpour that had just been unleashed. Then he plucked up his courage and dared touch his head a few inches above the back of his neck, and found the sore spot caused by the blow, though he was reassured to note that his fingers were still dry. He hated the feel of his own blood. Then he remembered the cure Grandfather Conde had always applied when he was left with a big bump after receiving a blow to the head: he would wrap a peso coin in cartridge paper soaked in salt and vinegar and rub the bump, which would slowly disappear. The best part of his grandfather’s remedy came when the cure was complete and he could lick the paper, which had that peculiar taste of salt and pure alcohol. He reflected that perhaps that habit was the beginning of his later fondness for the bottle.

  He made a fresh mental effort and realized he was lying on Pedro Cuang’s bed, with his head resting on the wooden pillow. Whoever had struck him had bothered to put him on the bed and hadn’t thought to steal his pistol, which would certainly have fetched a good price on the black market. Conde concluded they hadn’t wanted to kill or rob him … He looked around and spotted the bottle of rum next to the bed, the contents of which had almost all spilled on the ground except for a small drop left in its belly. Without sitting up, he stretched out a hand, recovered the bottle, raised his head and emptied the dregs of the rum into his mouth. Though the stench from the bed was all over him, Conde decided to stay there a few more minutes, staring at the ceiling beams and waiting for his head, which had taken such a battering (both inside and out) over the last twenty-four hours, to regain a degree of stability. He wanted to think about what had happened, but felt unable to do so while he enjoyed the peace that unexpectedly suffused his spirit, cradling and rocking him as his tsin floated at will, clean and scented, rising like an ethereal vapour towards the ceiling until, overcome by sleep, his eyelids drooped and closed. Before he fell asleep, he remembered that he was there because he needed to solve the murder of a man for whom nobody in the whole civilized West or Far East had shed a single tear. And what if they had killed him as well? How lonely are the dead, was his final thought before dozing off.

  When Mario Conde returned to the land of the living barely twenty minutes later, his headache had gone and he was unable to recall whether what was floating in his mind was the memory of something he’d once read or something he had just dreamed: he had seen a man in a bloodstained Chinese tunic pursuing a naked girl who wore long jade earrings. For his part, he was running after them and trying to take a photograph with an empty camera, just as another man, also in Chinese dress, hit him on the back of the neck. His hazy mind decided it wasn’t a dream: that story of Chinese garb was from something he had read – Chandler, perhaps? He didn’t have the answer. However, he was certain he’d been woken up by a hunch that was about to become a certainty, one that made him leap off the bed: a piece of paper was poking its yellow nose from beneath one of the ceiling beams.

  “You back?” asked an astonished Juan Chion, who forgot to bow or even to smile. “What’s up, are you ill? You b’light yellow …”

  “Well, I like changing colour several times a day …”

  Conde walked into the house, grabbed the old man’s hand and almost dragged him into the dining room.

  “Sit down there, Corporal Chion,” he ordered, and sat down in the adjacent chair. “Read this.”

  The old man took the piece of paper Conde was offering him. The yellow surface of the paper was covered by two lines of pale, imprecise Chinese characters. The old man looked at it, then held it away from himself, trying to find the right position so he could read them better. Conde devoured a cigarette while he waited.

  “It st’lange.”

  “You said that at least ten times yesterday. What the hell does it say?”

  “Li Mei Tang. That someone’s name.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Conde, Conde. Li Mei Tang, third left, sixth ’light, t’lee.”

  “Really?”

  “’Leally.”

  “So what does all that mean, my friend?”

  “Me chino, not o’lacle.”

  Conde squeezed out the last drops of his intellect.

  “They’re directions, right?”

  “Conde, you police, not me.”

  “It sounds like directions … but directions to fucking where?”

  Juan shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s written in Chinese because it was written by a chino …” Conde continued.

  “T’lue.”

  “… so another chino could read it.”

  Juan Chion smiled and pointed a finger at Conde.

  “See, chino ain’t ants. Chino cunning bastards and myste’lious too.”

  “Too mysterious … And look what they just did to me so I wouldn’t get to the bottom of any of their mysteries.”

  Conde turned his head and showed him the marks from the blow to the back of his neck.

  “What that all about, Conde?”

  “I think they whacked me so I wouldn’t find this scrap of paper. The guy who hit me also went to Pedro’s house looking for it. He wasn’t interested in anything else … But he really hit me hard, it hurts like hell. Do you have a cure?”

  “Chino pomade good for eve’lything.”

  “Well, smear some on, because I need to go and find whoever did this to me. It has to be the same person who killed Pedro Cuang … and I’m sure he killed him because he wanted to extract from him what was written on this scrap of paper. Pedro’s severed finger was collateral damage …”

  “Colla what?”

  7

  Major Rangel scrutinized Mario Conde, while puffing on the longest of Havana cigars as he sat behind his desk, enveloped in a cloud of bluish smoke. The lieutenant felt like his boss had inserted him between two glass slides and was studying him through a microscope lens as if he were a mutating virus.

  “You look as if you’ve come straight from a dumpster,” was the first, would-be scientific conclusion reached by the chief of Criminal Investigations Headquarters. “At least you smell as if you’ve been inside one.”

  “That’s a chino smell, boss.”

  “A chino smell?” Rangel removed the cigar from his mouth and delicately tapped the ash into a Murano crystal ashtray, a recent gift from his elder daughter, who was married to an Austrian ecologist who roamed the world saving whales and Bengal tigers – though on a budget that enabled them to stop off in Venice and buy expensive glassware. As one does.

  “I slept in a chino’s bed … But I’d better not tell you about that, man.”

  “I should think not. But do tell me how it’s going, because I’ve got things I need to pass on to you. I didn’t call you here because I couldn’t live without seeing you … What the hell were you doing in bed with a chino?”

  “Halt right there, boss … Clarification needed.”

  Conde acted extremely respectfully towards his superior. Nonetheless, he felt at ease working with him and liked to tease him with his ironic repartee. Conversely, Major Rangel, who was so cutting with the rest of his subordinates, admitted – only to himself – that he had a weak spot for that irreverent detective who could be overfamiliar and even dared call him “man” and drop by his house so the major’s wife would invite him in for a cup of coffee. At the end of the day, Rangel thought, someone has to put up with him; despite his obsessions and wayward thinking, that lieutenant was his trouble-shooter. And every now and then he had to get his own back.

  While he was explaining to Rangel that sleeping in a chino’s bed wasn’t the same as sleeping with a chino, and telling him everything that had happened since Patricia
had turned up on his doorstep, Conde sensed his ideas were finally coming together and moving him towards a discovery that would help him solve his Chinese case. At the same time, he was also a hundred per cent sure there were other invisible but even thornier issues around the murder. Sure, a dark shadow from the past hung over the chino’s death, and the removal of that darkness, whatever its nature, might have painful consequences. But he didn’t tell Rangel about these worries that were still too vague, or that he still harboured a suspicion, however flimsy, that pointed to Francisco Chiú.

  “So you’re not sure that the dead chino is at all connected to the cocaine being shifted in the Barrio?” asked Rangel, dropping his cigar on the ashtray.

  “Not at this point. Why do you ask me, man? Everybody keeps bringing up the business of the cocaine in the Barrio …”

  Rangel leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a second.

  “What I’m about to tell you is confidential. If anyone finds out I told you, they’ll slice me down the middle. Get that?”

  “Get it like the coffee you didn’t offer me today …”

  “Get that?” The major’s tone of voice changed as he repeated the same question, and Conde perfectly understood the meaning of his fresh tone.

  “Yes, I get it.”

  The cigar had gone out, but Rangel picked it up and held it between his fingers.

  “There’s a big investigation in progress into the cocaine circulating in Cuba. It’s massive. There are loads of people working on it. If the drugs being trafficked in the Barrio aren’t related to your murder, then forget it.”

  “But Major —”

  “No buts, Conde. You just do what I say, for once in your damned life! Find out who killed the dead chino and go back on leave. And forget all about this conversation.”

  Although he didn’t understand, Conde assumed Major Rangel’s instruction must be driven by very concrete motives, and he had no choice but to respect his order.

  “And what if the murder and the drugs are connected?”

  “Well, you just stop what you’re doing and come to see me as quick as you can before doing anything else. Get it?”

  “Yes, I get it, I told you, like the coffee I never got.”

  “Right, so clear off,” Rangel blasted, using his cigar as a cue to point Conde to the exit. “But you’ve been warned. Get up and go.”

  Conde stood up, straightened his shirt and began his retreat. But by the door he risked one last salvo: “Hey, man, you’re stressed out … You should give your tsin a clean …”

  “Get out, for fuck’s sake! And go and take a bath!”

  Conde crossed the office’s reception area and headed out into the corridor. He took the lift and went to his tiny office, where Manolo was waiting.

  “What did the major want?” enquired the sergeant.

  “Nothing really: to offer me a coffee and talk about Confucius a while … You know how sociable he is.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Manolo, totally sincerely.

  “So, what have you got for me?”

  “Look,” said Manolo, opening the folder that was lying on the desk. “March last year a policeman routinely asked a suspicious guy on Zanja and Lealtad to identify himself. The fellow got all agitated and, after seeing his ID card, the policeman asked him what was in the pouch he was carrying, and he ran off. They soon caught him: he was carrying several lists of bets for a bank that gambled on the Venezuelan lottery that you can pick up on shortwave radio. There was a round-up and three bankers were caught, but they only found the money for that day … Then things went awry: the boss of the business, one Amancio Valdés, had a heart attack and died three days after being imprisoned. That’s when the other two bankers reckoned heaven was on their side: they said Amancio was the boss and looked after the money. In the end, they held the trial and the bankers got two years for illicit gambling and the bet collector got fourteen months, but not a cent more was ever discovered. Once those bankers were out of circulation, others took their place, and the lottery is still going big time in the Barrio. That’s what I’ve got on the case, apart from the things you might be imagining by now: Pedro Cuang went to China when all the trouble started and returned when Amancio Valdés died. Too much of a coincidence, don’t you reckon?”

  “And those in prison are still in prison?”

  “Positive.”

  “And did any of their families go on a shopping spree?”

  “Negative.”

  “And was there anything drug-related in those shenanigans?”

  “Two joints of marijuana that —”

  “Just as well …” Conde sighed. “And what else did you find on Amancio Valdés?”

  “More positive stuff: until 1959 he ran a gambling den in the Barrio and his cover was a laundry. And wouldn’t it be a big coincidence if Pedro Cuang had worked there?”

  “And was that the case?” Conde asked, quickly warning him, “If you say ‘positive’, I’ll chuck you out of that window.”

  Manolo smiled and closed the folder.

  “You’re getting overexcited … Well, naturally, he worked there thirty years, until he retired in 1968. But the best is still to come,” he announced, and began a pause he prolonged as he felt his boss’s tension rising. “The forensic says Pedro Cuang had a stroke before they strung him up. Apparently they hadn’t planned to kill him, but when he went all paralytic they must have taken fright and thought it was best to shut him up for good.”

  “Obviously they weren’t planning to kill him or cut off his finger … The old fellow was the key to finding Amancio’s money … So what else do we know about Pedro Cuang?”

  “Next to nothing. As far as we know, he didn’t have children, wasn’t married and had no relatives in Cuba.”

  “But there was someone he could leave a message for.”

  “What message might that be, Conde?”

  Mario Conde looked at the street out of the only window in his cubbyhole and saw the transparent spectre of heat rising and spreading after the rain. He regretted the dreadful state his mind was in, subdued by alcohol, knocks, Rangel’s orders, ngangas and contradictory input: he couldn’t think fast enough. But the fact that he could remove Francisco Chiú from place of honour on his list of suspects came as a relief to his lethargic brain. Then he decided to throw himself into the only promising opening he had. He took the paper with the Chinese characters out of his pocket and handed it to his colleague.

  “This message … The path to Pedro’s – or Amancio’s – money is inscribed on this scrap of paper … Manolo, I’ll buy you a meal if you can tell me the meaning of Li Mei Tang-third-left-sixth-right-tree.”

  The sergeant looked up from the paper and its Chinese ideograms and stared at his boss. When his eyes settled on a distant spot, his left eye seemed to become detached and try to hide behind his nostril.

  “Don’t go all one-eyed and tell me, come on!”

  “They’re directions, right? To a place where there’s a tree, where there’s a path that goes left and then another that goes right and something connected to somebody by the name of Li Mei Tang.”

  While he listened to him, Conde felt a light beginning to illuminate his mind and started to smile.

  “Fuck, kid, now ain’t you a genius?”

  Manolo also smiled as he waited to see where the lieutenant’s joke was heading.

  “Don’t piss around, Conde.”

  “Sure, I’ll piss around, compadre. Come on, let’s get the car and pick up Juan. The infamous Li Mei Tang must be buried in the Chinese cemetery. I bet you anything that’s what it is.”

  “Now, now, right now? … Hey, what about my pigs, my friend, hey, what about my pigs, my pigs.”

  Manolo tried to reason with the repetitious, loudmouthed guard but he insisted: no, no, no, it was cemetery closing time and nobody could come in to do anything, unless he had orders from the administrator. Besides, he had to go and collect the slops from a dining hall where th
ey kept them back for him so he could feed his pigs (I’ve got five, five, he repeated) and he wasn’t going to stymie that for the police, a dead chino or anyone. His pigs came first … second and third …

  Making the most of the gravedigger’s strident rant, Lieutenant Mario Conde and old Juan Chion acted as if they’d not heard and carried on down the central alley through the cemetery and counted three paths, turned left and walked between the graves, dodging the puddles left by the downpour. And on the sixth path, when they turned right, they found their reward under an ancient weeping willow: LI MEI TANG (1892–1956), engraved in gold letters on a red granite plaque. Li Mei Tang’s tomb showed he’d been a powerful man in his lifetime, but the deceased didn’t seem to have been left a flower for many years. The lid of the sepulchre had been stained by soil and resin from the trees, and the bronze rings for handling the slab had inscribed it with their green spirit.

  “It’s the stark truth, isn’t it, Juan? We are so alone when we’re dead.”

  The old man looked at him.

  “Not all dead, Conde. You bet Li Mei Tang had company, ’light?”

  “Did you know that the grave of a chino is a bad place to keep something? People believe you bury your dead with jewels and money, but, worst of all, the babalaos say that Chinese bones are the best for making ‘Jewish’ cauldrons.”

  “What me always say, chinos useful for eve’lything. Even Cuban witchc’laft.”

  Conde looked back to where Manolo was arguing with the guard and then felt the cemetery’s unappealing silence. He sensed, as he often did, that his death might be something near and tangible, and he wanted to be far from there. The hypochondriac within started to lash out, and he knew that when that character was aroused, he always ended up depressed or gloomy. They are really all alone, he told himself as he lit up a cigarette.