Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  He was fainting, he was fainting, he thought when he felt the warmth of Patricia’s lips, her tongue and mouth wrap round his weepy but erect creature. No, he wasn’t fainting, he was dying … Conde felt he was ascending to heaven, even hearing St Peter’s keys jangle, or was it the ironware of Congolese Zarabanda or Lucumi Oggún? So what if it was? That was heaven, for fuck’s sake, pure heaven.

  An hour later, after fulfilling so soundly at such a random moment one of his life’s most persistent desires, Conde boiled up more coffee and poured a cup for Patricia, who’d slipped her officer’s uniform back on: the kind that imprisons and interrogates. Mario Conde was convinced that erotic act would lead nowhere and that he should simply accept it as the magical consequence of the fortuitous descent of his towel and human frailty, though he also knew he would never again look at Patricia with the same eyes: he now knew at first hand, had seen, tasted, even penetrated what her clothes concealed. He had tangible visual material to embellish his dreams and masturbatory sessions.

  Conde sat down on the other dining-room chair with a fresh cup of coffee and lit a cigarette.

  “So, Patricia,” he said, clearing his throat. “What must I do to get old Juan to tell me what he doesn’t want to tell …?”

  Patricia tidied her braided curls and drank her coffee.

  “Mayo, I don’t know what my father knows, although you are right: he does know something. They always know something, but they never let on …”

  Conde snuffed out the cigarette he’d been smoking.

  “Please, Patricia, don’t you start being all mysterious too.”

  “No, Mayo, I’m not being mysterious … Let me finish, for heaven’s sake. Look, first, I want to remind you of something you know only too well: my father, Francisco, Pedro and all these chinos are men who have paid the highest price for existing in this world. They have experienced the worst: they have starved, been insulted, discriminated against, uprooted and everything else you want to put on a list of lousy experiences and humiliations. You ought not to be surprised if they’re suspicious and don’t open up just like that.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Conde allowed. “And that’s precisely why I’ve been trying to track you down and talk to you for the last two days. I’m afraid that by attempting to find out the truth, I might hurt more people who don’t deserve to be. Your father, for example. I’ve a nasty feeling … Or Francisco Chiú, your godfather, who has a role in all this too, though I don’t fucking know what.”

  “Francisco is dying,” she responded. “Liver cancer.”

  “Your father told me he was in a bad way, but not …”

  Patricia looked him in the eyes. And Conde got the message at once: the lieutenant knew something very big she didn’t want to let on. Something that Conde needed to know in order to have some idea of what he was into and how much shit he might uncover.

  “Tell me, Patricia,” he ordered.

  Patricia didn’t stop looking into Conde’s eyes until she started to talk: “My father told you the story of his cousin Sebastián, the one who wanted to go to California …”

  “Yes, the one they froze and chucked into the sea.”

  “Sebastián and thirty-one other chinos. It was a massacre.”

  “Hell … And if he’d had the money, your father would have been in that boat,” said Conde, while he prepared himself for her revelation.

  Patricia took a last sip of coffee; it was cold by now.

  “Yes, he and Francisco. Because one of my godfather’s brothers was also sailing in that boat. That’s why Francisco saw the Greek captain the day his brother signed the deal with that bastard … Like he saw the captain again here in Havana, drinking a beer in a bar as if nothing had happened, twelve years later. By that time everyone knew what they’d done to those thirty-two chinos in the Gulf of Honduras. I suppose that a drunk sailor must have bleated what happened and that’s how the news spread and reached the Barrio … When Francisco saw the man who’d killed his brother, he didn’t think twice: he decided to take his revenge. My godfather, a greengrocer at the time, always carried a knife on him, but misfortune is writ in the most ridiculous ways: on that day he didn’t have a knife because he was going to the Jewish tailor’s on Calle Muralla to buy a suit for my parents’ wedding. So when he saw the Greek, he rushed back to the Barrio to look for his knife … and bumped into my father. Francisco was furious, he was acting like a lunatic, but he didn’t tell my father what was wrong or what he was intending to do … That day my father should have been working at the grocer’s, but by chance the delivery boy was ill and he had to do the errands around the Barrio. That’s why Francisco and my father met. The moment my father saw his friend, he realized something serious was up, and almost forced him to tell him what had happened. And finally Francisco did tell him … and my father left what he was doing. They both went to look for a knife and then went to look for the Greek bastard who should never have come back to Cuba … And they found him.”

  Conde felt the huge weight of that story fall on his shoulders – a delayed but justified revenge: an execution. And was speechless.

  “My mother found out straight away,” Patricia continued, “but she also kept the secret. Thirty years later, she told me, just before she died. She decided to tell me because Francisco’s son was in prison and my father had asked me to help him and I had refused, saying that if he’d done something wrong, he should pay for it … My mother didn’t know what had happened after Francisco and my father went to find the Greek captain, although you hardly needed to be an oracle to guess. I even researched it afterwards and found it reported in one of the sensationalist newspapers of the time. People suspected the Greek had been killed in a drunken brawl … But what my father and his friend had done together was so terrible their relationship became much deeper and complex than simply friendship: something that can only exist when you have killed a man, right? … That’s why Francisco Chiú is my godfather and Panchito is my father’s godson …”

  Patricia was silent and looked into the coffee dregs in the bottom of her cup as if she could read there the key to a fate that had put her father in a street in the Barrio Chino when Francisco, on a day when he hadn’t been carrying a knife, had been returning home to find the revenge weapon, a set of coincidences able to lead Juan Chion to the murderer of his cousin Sebastián.

  “The past is the past, and now think of it as never having existed, although you know it existed and what its ingredients were …” Patricia seemed to need a pause to gather her breath, and then she concluded: “The present is what’s important. Solve the case of Pedro Cuang, Conde.”

  “I’m going to do just that, Patricia.”

  “But try to make sure there isn’t much collateral damage, as my father said you told him … The poor man looked the word up in a dictionary … I know what you’re like, and that’s why I asked Major Rangel to give you the case and promised him that my father would help you …”

  The china finally smiled again as she got to her feet and, with a sad smile, gently caressed Mario Conde’s face. She turned round and went into the street, removing from Conde’s reach the vision of that edible woman … that he had now devoured at least once in his life. Down to her last fibre. Like a juicy melon in the month of May.

  9

  Fatty Contreras looked him up and down and smiled. Recently everyone was seeing him in a different light or laughed when he came into sight, Conde reflected, and put out his hand to be tortured: one of the favourite pastimes of Captain Jesús Contreras, head of the Currency Trafficking Section, was to unload the pressure from his two hundred and sixty-five pounds into a handshake.

  “Conde, oh Conde,” he greeted him, as he always did while he crushed the lieutenant’s fingers, and, as he laughed, he pulled on Conde’s hand and led him into his office. “Hey, you feel really soft today … and your face is a bit odd … you’re kind of pink … What did you get up to this morning?”

  Conde smi
led.

  “I can’t say … but it was something fantastic.”

  Contreras gave him a more leisurely inspection.

  “I know what it was, what I don’t know is with whom … Although if I made the effort, I’d find out soon enough.” He smiled again with his whole body, as usual. “Yes, when you have a good one in the morning, it relaxes you for the rest of the day, right? Come on, out with it, what’s on your mind?”

  For years Conde would remember that man’s encyclopaedic insights, and, above all, the way his whole body shook when he laughed, the way the voluminous architecture of that police captain’s flesh shook, a man who months later would be demoted, fired and tried for continuous, hefty major crimes of extortion, brought to light by the still secret investigations in progress that Major Rangel had alluded to without revealing the slightest detail. Who would have thought at that point that Captain Jesús Contreras, the smiley, easy-going fatso, ever efficient and helpful, was a corrupt policeman whose actions even put on the line the head of Major Rangel, the honest officer who unfortunately acted as his boss? Twenty years later, whenever Conde evoked the image of Fatty Contreras, the by then ex-policeman, he felt an uneasy mixture of disgust, gratitude, anger and compassion for the defenestrated fraudster.

  “I’ve got a dead chino on my back, Fatty,” he’d said that morning, when Contreras could still be a lifeline.

  “Well, I know a babalao who’s wonderful when it comes to getting rid of the dead and prying spirits. He must be good if he has clients who come from abroad for the ceremony when they’re mounted by a saint and pay him in dollars … He’s a real eccentric, because he’s Ukrainian, of Jewish extraction, and became a babalao here in Cuba. What do you reckon? Obviously, it’s the Government that draws up his contracts with these foreigners and pays the Ukrainian babalao in Cuban pesos … Ho-ho. What do you think? Just tell me and I’ll fix you a time so he can give you a good clean-out?”

  “Don’t piss around, Fatty. I’m in a foul mood and have got a babalao, palero and abakuá who’s streets better than yours …”

  “And does he get paid in dollars? Tell me, because if so, I need to put him inside this very minute for currency trafficking …”

  Conde sat in a chair in front of Captain Contreras’s desk and glanced around his office.

  “So don’t you offer your pals a coffee any more?”

  Contreras laughed, but it was a short-lived eruption.

  “So you’d like a coffee? You don’t know that orders from above reduced rations and I don’t get any any more.” While he spoke he walked round his desk and flopped into his armchair. Conde always wondered the usual – how does that poor chair stand it? – while he watched the show Contreras put on before giving him his coffee. “You tell me how the fuck Walesa and his bloody Poles are connected to the yuccas and sweet potatoes planted in Matanzas? Or Gorbachev and his load of shit to coffee from the slopes of Guantánamo? A shipyard fucks up in Poland or the Soviets start eating shit, and there’s no sugar here or I lose my coffee ration …”

  “Forget the coffee,” suggested Conde, while thinking Contreras was right. But that was hardly the moment to discuss the global socialist economy or the future of communism in Europe. Or in China.

  “Well, just take a look here so you can see I love my pals,” the captain continued, opening a desk drawer and waving his huge paws over its contents like a magician over his hat: he took out a glass of coffee and handed it to Conde.

  “Hell, it’s even hot!” exclaimed Conde, as if shell-shocked.

  “I kicked up such a stink that to shut me up Major Rangel sends me a glass whenever they slip him some coffee, because, of course, they didn’t touch his ration … A matter of hierarchy, right?” And he let loose a laugh. His flab, tits and bottomless barrel of a belly danced to the deafening rhythm of his guffaw.

  “Nobody can touch you, Fatty,” responded Conde, though life would show him to be wrong. Who could claim that Contreras wasn’t a nice guy? Who knew he was more than met the eye?

  “And that’s even though people here are always mouthing shit about me. And you know that’s true, although you don’t, because we’re pals, right?”

  “Well, you know, it’s exactly that: I swear I can’t live without you.”

  “Naturally, that’s why you’re here. Out with it: what’s getting to you? By the way, does the dead chino on your back have anything to do with the live Chinese consul who was in Major Rangel’s office this morning?”

  Conde shut his eyes. That was all he needed.

  “The Chinese consul?”

  “That’s what Rangel’s secretary told me …”

  Conde lit his cigarette; it had never even crossed his mind that the inhabitants of the Barrio Chino were at all connected to the consulate of the country that wasn’t the same country that they had left, even though, luckily or unluckily for them, chinos would always be chinos, even if they had surgery to change their eyes. He realized he had to speed things up and got straight to the point: he was there because he needed Captain Contreras to let him have a snitch.

  “Someone who knows all the goings-on in the Barrio Chino, Fatty: what’s cooking, what’s the gossip. I’m sure you must know such an individual.”

  “Oh, really? Easy as pie, right?”

  “Help me, Fatty. This is a complicated business, you’ve seen how even the embassy’s got involved … and take a look at what they did to me yesterday.” Conde turned his head to show Contreras the contusion at the base of his skull.

  “That was some whack,” Contreras replied, not laughing now, and added, “No, we can’t allow this … It shows a lack of respect and —”

  “But they didn’t steal my pistol. Does that make any sense? How much is my pistol worth right now?”

  Contreras pondered for a few seconds and declared: “Rented out, with eight bullets, a hundred pesos a day. Sold, like three thousand, because lately there’s been great demand …”

  “So they rent them out now, do they? I didn’t know that. You need to help me, Fatty.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

  “And I’ll say it a third: help me, compadre.”

  “All right, man, I’ll throw you a lifeline … You know, you’re a straight-up guy and there’s not many of those around these days. But let me remind you of something: never start thinking you’re better than everyone else. We’re all wading through shit here and nobody escapes unscathed, nobody … I defended you when you had that fight with Lieutenant Fabricio, because Fabricio is a fuck-wit and it was time someone kicked him up the ass and did him over … But I know you sometimes give yourself airs, you play the intellectual, and that pisses off lots of people. When you’re police, you’ve got to behave like it and not get above yourself, because a policeman who’s disliked by other police is in for a very hard time …”

  Conde let him ramble, as he was interested in Contreras’s view, which he found somewhat surprising.

  “And what’s the point of that spiel right now, Fatty?”

  “The point is that this place right now is a time bomb and it’s best not to decide to start running when it blows up …”

  Conde recalled Major Rangel’s mysterious warnings about drugs, and was sure something serious was cooking beneath the apparent routines of Central Headquarters for Criminal Investigations. And, as on so many occasions, in so many places, he felt an overwhelming desire to clear off to the remotest back of beyond.

  “I’ll give you the best operator I’ve got in the Barrio.”

  He was almost knocked off his chair by Contreras’s voice. The other man’s finger was pointing at his face like a plantain. “But take good care of him. Narra is worth a million pesos. And only use him on the case you’re investigating now, don’t mix him up in anything else. I know you only too well when you get going …”

  Evidently Narra must be part Chinese, which was why he was called Narra, the name given to all Cuban chinos for some damned reason or othe
r. This Narra revealed his origins particularly when he laughed: his eyes became two deep furrows in his face, symmetrical fissures with a sombre, sinister allure. He didn’t look chino in any other way, though: more like your average mulatto, fished out of a trunk of memories. He sported a démodé flat-top with tight curls and no sideburns, the hairstyle that had characterized the smart-asses and wheeler-dealers of the 1970s, and the dark skin of his right arm bore a tattoo that announced, “Eva, I’d die for you”. What could Eva have done for him or given him that he was so ready to die for her? Conde thought he should ask. Narra’s smile revealed two dazzling gold teeth, like yellow reflectors. “Let him laugh as much as he likes,” Contreras had warned him, “but the fact is he shits himself the second he sees a cop.” Narra was thirty and had spent twelve of those years in jail, first for robbery with GBH, then for dealing in illegal currency, and that was how he had fallen into the lap of Fatty Contreras, who had worked hard to break him in and had got his sentence reduced in exchange for certain services. “Treat him well,” the captain had added. “He’ll be expecting you at 1 p.m. in his sister’s house in El Cerro.”

  When Conde flashed his lieutenant’s card, Narra laughed sarcastically, as anticipated.

  “I’m a friend of your friend Contreras,” the lieutenant told him, and Narra let him in. His sister lived in the premises of an old grocery store on Calle Cruz del Padre, whose fate had been changed: first by the government law controlling food supplies, and then, out of necessity, transforming it into a gloomy, soulless abode. Conde noted one room, a kitchen and a bathroom before Narra told the woman who was cooking, “Cacha, I ain’t here” and pointed the policeman to the stairs to the wooden mezzanine floor they’d built thanks to the very high ceiling and where they’d installed the bedroom.