Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  The Boss smiled as broadly as he knew how. “I don’t know if I can let you in the house. If Ana Luisa hears you, she’ll stop me seeing you.”

  “Women don’t understand these niceties.”

  “But there are others they do . . . Now she’s cottoned on to the fact I’m off work and she’s taking the opportunity to order me around all day.”

  “It’s a bugger,” agreed the lieutenant. “You spent your life giving other people orders and now . . . Don’t you miss that power, Boss?”

  Rangel looked at his clean desktop and coughed before answering.

  “That ordering thing is like an illness. After you get used to it you almost prefer life with it, though you know it will take you to the grave. I think it’s a terrible vice, and one that isn’t so easy to give up.”

  ‘But you liked it?’

  “In a way yes, I used to enjoy it, though you know I was never unfair towards others. I demanded of them what I demanded of myself. Do you want to know something else, now I’m confessing all this? I haven’t been to bed with a woman who wasn’t Ana Luisa for twenty-eight years. And not because I was never propositioned, believe me. It was because I didn’t have the time, because I didn’t want to complicate my life, to be at risk, I wanted to carry on as chief . . . It was as if I’d picked up all the other things life has and put them in a bag and thrown it into the back of a cupboard; and only kept what I needed in order to be a good boss . . . And look where it’s got me. They’re kicking me out because I wasn’t a good boss and now I’m like a snuffed-out cigar nobody wants to smoke.”

  “You feel empty inside?”

  The Boss tried to smile, but laughter must have been one of the things consigned to the bag he’d hidden: the good intentions aborted on his lips and his last routine as a boss came to his rescue.

  “Hey, that’s enough tomfoolery. How’s the case going?”

  The Count looked at the garden opposite and saw it needed a good clean-out, just as the walls of the house needed a good lick of paint and his sense of smell indicated that the Major’s psychotic dog, a long-legged poodle that ran at the sight of a stranger, could do with a good deep bath: and he felt mildly sorry for the Boss and his empty life. Not even Candito’s Jehovah had the power to revamp those historical sources of satisfaction truncated by other concrete historical necessities: a sorry final destiny for a monogamist like Antonio Rangel, now condemned to live among yuccas shelved for want of cooking oil.

  “Yesterday I spoke to the dead man’s family, in particular his wife, and she told me some pretty interesting things. The strangest was that she almost told me to investigate her brother, one Fermín Bodes. And I also interviewed his former boss in Cuba, Gerardo Gómez de la Peña, you remember him?”

  The Boss nodded and the Count related details of his meetings with those characters and the story of the escape planned by Fermín Bodes and Miguel Forcade, twelve years back.

  “I reckon I should forget the possibility of revenge prompted by jealousy.”

  “Forget it right away,” bellowed the major, as if back at the helm of the Headquarters for Criminal Investigations. “Concentrate on Fermín Bodes: he could be the thread to unravel the skein.”

  “And the owner of the Matisse?”

  “You’d like to nail him, wouldn’t you?”

  “You know I’d be delighted to.”

  “But don’t get carried away. Don’t take your eye off him, because he knows something too, but he’s a hard nut to crack. Damn me, a picture worth three million. Well, get one thing straight, Mario Conde: you’ve got two days to solve this one and you’ll solve it in two days: show the spies’ colonel I wasn’t wrong when I said you were the worst disaster in my working life but the best policeman I’d ever worked with. Do it for my sake, right?”

  “What if I fail this time?”

  “Forget it. You can’t fail.”

  “What if I do, Boss?”

  Major Antonio Rangel looked the Count in the eye.

  “You’ll have disappointed me . . .”

  “Hey, it’s not that bad.”

  “It is as far as I’m concerned. Get on with it, Manolo’s just arrived: and ring me if need be.”

  The Count stood up and the pistol in his belt clattered to the floor. He picked it up, blew the dust off and returned it to its place.

  “If I get any skinnier I’ll have to tie it to me like a dog. OK, let’s see if I sort it between today and tomorrow.”

  “Off you go, Mario, before I boot you out. Hey, and listen to this: watch it with Miriam. Don’t complicate life, right?”

  “Whatever you say, Chief,” and he saluted him in an almost perfect military style that would have delighted the sweet-scented Colonel Molina.

  In 1979 Rolando Fermín Bodes Alvarez was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for prolonged embezzlement, trafficking in perks from his position in an important state body and for forging documents. The one crime the Count liked best was embezzling: he remembered the joke told by Baby-Face Miki, his old friend and bad writer, about a once well-known Cuban scribbler who’d even been given prizes for his occasional verse, a homage, salutes, celebrations and favourable opportunities, who’d been sentenced to have his hands chopped off for cooking the books and, when accused of being a poet, had been let him off because of lack of proof . . . Fermín had spent ten years inside – two thirds of his sentence, for good behaviour – and was barely three months out of prison. Only three months? thought the Count and it seemed too much of a coincidence: one left prison and the other came to Cuba. At the time of his arrest, Fermín Bodes had defrauded his company to the tune of one hundred and fifty thousand pesos, of which eighty thousand were confiscated from him, and he’d spent the rest, among other luxuries, on building his house (also confiscated), in distributing favours and buying an out-board motor (confiscated as well), which had never been linked to a clandestine departure from the country. Why would he want to? The trading in favours wasn’t investigated in any depth either, or at least wasn’t written up in the file Sergeant Manuel Palacios had got hold of that morning. The most extraordinary aspect of the whole case was that Fermín had quietly stashed away one hundred and fifty thousand pesos without anyone noticing. Just fucking incredible, thought the policeman as he closed the folder.

  From his small office at Headquarters, the Count observed yet again the almost becalmed landscape he could see through the window. That sea of treetops, punctured by the domes of the nearby church, had always helped him think and he now needed to think as on few occasions in his career: his next step would be to question Fermín, but he foresaw how that conversation might just confirm him in the knowledge and prejudices he already possessed. Miriam’s brother would be wily enough not to disclose facts that could lead to his being implicated if it were true Miguel had returned to Cuba for something only his brother-in-law could give him or help him achieve. Of course, pondered the Count: perhaps Miguel had preferred to avoid taking any risks at the airport, despite his diplomatic and customs privileges in 1978, because what he wanted to take out of the country was possibly too big, obvious or dangerous. But what could it be? A man whose hands had touched a Matisse worth three million, exchanged for a house in Vedado, must have encountered in serial expropriations things able to change the lives of one person, if not several. The frantic flight of the Cuban bourgeoisie, forced to fulfil its wish or need to depart with just a few personal belongings, had led to the abandoning of real treasures, often hidden inside false-bottomed wardrobes or mattresses, with the hope they’d be recovered in the course of a speedy return to their lost privileges. Diamonds? Pearls? Gold and jewels? No, Miguel could have taken all that if he’d been sure he could go through a diplomat’s bureaucratically privileged channels. Something more voluminous? He couldn’t get the strange Matisse on Gerardo Gómez de la Peña’s wall out of his mind as he sought out a possible object. Yes, it could be a particularly valuable, large canvas. But where the fuck was it? The ones the Count had s
een in his house didn’t rate that highly, but how could he know for sure? What if it wasn’t a canvas? Or if it were, in fact, the Matisse belonging to Gerardo Gómez de la Peña? Yes, of course it might be, thought the Count, and he thanked Candito for his new mystic fervour, which even stopped him from drinking alcohol: if they had done the usual the previous night (drink at least two pints each) his head would have exploded by now, with that plethora of possibilities lurking behind a castrated man cast out to sea – a sea he feared so much – after his head had been smashed in a drunken rage . . . Yes, the sea was part of the story: the sea across which Miguel could have fled with his probable booty almost safe, if he hadn’t had an irrational fear of that same ocean where he’d been flung, like a posthumous metaphor for a phobia that almost ruined him and placed him at the mercy of charitable nuns in the cold Madrid winter of 1978. The ocean that also opened its abyss between Miriam and Fermín, on the island, and Miguel, on the Florida peninsula: a sea that had claimed so many lives over thirty years and that had sicked up, perhaps in revulsion, the corpse of Miguel Forcade, the brother-in-law of ex-jailbird and former leader Rolando Fermín Bodes Alvarez, who just then stepped into his cubicle, through a door kindly opened by Sergeant Manuel Palacios, who said: “Do go in.”

  Fermín was forty and showed no visible trace of having spent a quarter of his life in the prison he’d left only a few months before. His skin was still smooth, tinged with pink that reddened towards the neck, and his body was finely toned, his broad chest and muscular arms revealing an evident fondness for physical training. To the Count’s mind, his hands and manicured fingers were too exquisite, and his eyes were like his sister’s: a vague grey veering to green or blue, the same thick, curly eyelashes. He had surely been a very successful womanizer in his heyday as a wealthy man of influence, and the policeman felt his rancour and frustration rise at the sight of a man who could have done whatever he most desired in the world: go wherever, choose a really pretty, sexy woman, and say: ‘jump on board’ . . . hoisting her on his shoulder without further ado. Besides, that pair of arms was certainly able to thwack a ball right out of the ground . . .

  “You like playing baseball?” the Count began, staring at Fermín’s arms.

  “When I was a kid, I used to play like anybody else, why?”

  “Nothing in particular,” retorted the policeman, sighing wearily. “I saw on your file that you got out of jail three months ago. What were you doing in prison?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean did you work at all.”

  “I’m an architect and I worked at that almost all the time.”

  “I see,” said the Count, and though he tried hard he couldn’t restrain himself. “And did you do weights in prison?”

  “No, I’ve never done weights. I do circuits . . . You brought me in to ask that kind of question?”

  The Count ignored him, as if he wasn’t concerned by Fermín’s question that was almost a carbon copy of his sister’s. He looked back out of the window and spoke from there to the gymnast architect who played baseball as a kid: he was undoubtedly a man apprenticed by the hard knocks of life now displaying the acquired skills of a porcupine: the smell of danger made him turn in upon himself, and show only his aggressive spikes.

  “You know why I called you in and I hope you can help me . . . Your brother-in-law’s death remains a mystery to us, particularly because of one thing we can’t fathom. What did Miguel come to Cuba for? Did he come to see someone, or to reclaim something he left when he stayed over in Madrid?”

  “I still don’t get you,” said Fermín, after staring at the Count for a few moments.

  “I never imagined you’d find it so difficult, Fermín. I’ve no choice but to spell it out . . . I mean, don’t you think this murder seems quite random, far too random, if there weren’t some powerful motive from Miguel Forcade’s past. Don’t you think Miguel came looking to reclaim something, something of great value that fell into his hands when he worked as an expropriator and which he couldn’t take out when he left Cuba in ’78?”

  “To be frank, I hadn’t really given it a moment’s thought,” Fermín replied, after a longer pause.

  The Count felt his nerves tensing. That bastard was trying to wriggle out of it, but he wouldn’t let him. Miriam and Fermín were still his only visible paths to the truth, and truth, not that criminal’s arrogance, should be his only concern.

  “When was the last time you saw Miguel?”

  “The day before he was killed. I went to his place and left him my car in case he needed it.”

  “And you didn’t arrange to see each other the following night?”

  “No.”

  “He was going to see a relative of his that night?”

  “I don’t know who it might have been.”

  “So I should conclude you don’t have the slightest idea why Forcade was murdered?”

  The architect smiled. A smile that assumed he was probably holding all the trump cards.

  “I’d say it was a case of assault and robbery, wouldn’t you?”

  “And then they cut his balls off? And left his car intact without taking even a tyre? Nobody’s going to believe that, Fermín . . . And of course you didn’t bring up your clandestine departure again, the one you were planning when he defected to Spain?”

  The Count expected a visible reaction to this awkward question, but Fermín didn’t flinch. Ten years in prison must have taught him something about life.

  “I don’t know what departure you can be referring to.”

  “Yours and your sister’s. Miriam told me the whole story.”

  “I don’t know why she told you about something that never happened.”

  “And why would you want the out-board motor they found in your house when you were arrested in ’79?”

  “To install on my boat, of course. I like fishing, like lots of people in this country who have boats and lots of other things and do legal and sometimes even untoward things with them . . . The newspaper is still talking about that and they were all leaders or military; some were even policemen, like yourself . . . Or even more police than you,” he sounded off, as he put two fingers up to one of his shoulders.

  “Yes, you’re right,” allowed the Count, his muscles stiff with mounting anger. That fellow had just uttered the only verifiable truth in the whole conversation and had touched a very raw nerve: he saw his friend the Major again, forlorn and forgotten, and felt the dam break, so his anger could flood out: fuck the lot of them, he thought, though he spoke in more measured tones: “Well, now we’ve reached this juncture, you give me no choice but to tell you: make sure you aren’t mixed up in Miguel Forcade’s death, because if you are I’ll do everything in my power to ensure you spend the rest of your life doing press-ups in prison. I’m not a policeman for nothing, as you reminded me. You may go.”

  Fermín Bodes stood up and looked at Sergeant Manuel Palacios, who had stayed obediently silent, and then at Lieutenant Mario Conde.

  “Thanks for your advice,” he said, and left, gently closing the door behind him.

  The Count listened to Fermín’s footsteps move towards the lifts, and snorted, as he pressed the tips of his thumbs against his temples.

  “What do you make of the fellow, Manolo?”

  “That guy knows more than a roach and is in shit up to his elbows, Conde. But he got your goat. I’ve never heard you say anything like that to anyone . . .”

  “Bah, Manolo, I just wanted to see if he got jittery . . .”

  “Well, what should we do, put a tail on him?”

  The Count paused a moment.

  “No, it doesn’t make sense . . . You know, nothing makes sense in this business.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “To find out what Miguel Forcade was after . . . Just phone this person,” and he jotted a name and a number on a piece of paper. “Ask if we can see him in an hour’s time. I’ll go and see if Colonel Molina has finally m
ade it to his office and tell him to sit tight until the case is solved . . .”

  “No, stop, my boy, don’t tell me more. Let’s see if I know which one it is: a fairly impressionist Matisse, where you can see trees swayed by the wind in a deserted street, and in the background there’s a small yellow patch that could be a dog?”

  “I didn’t see any dog, but I think that’s the picture.”

  “It’s Autumn Landscape. Fancy finding it there! And how come I never found out that fellow had it? What do you say his name is?”

  “Gerardo Gómez de la Peña, ex-head of Planning and the Economy. Do you remember him now?”

  “Vaguely,” replied the old man, Juan Emilio Friguens, who smiled, with that characteristic gesture of his, hiding his mouth and irony behind a hand, cupped like a closed umbrella: his fingers were so long they must have had more bones than were necessary, and they moved as if belonging to an animal skeleton powered by St Vitus. Despite their length, the digits barely hid the wolfish teeth of an old man ever ready to laugh at his own jokes. “The fact is I have to conserve my memory for more important things, you know? Every day my brain cells are less active . . .” and he covered his laughing mouth again.

  The Count smiled as well: he felt nothing but admiration for that quiet, sarcastic man. He’d got to know him on an investigation of a theft of various paintings from the National Museum, when the deputy director of Fine Arts recommended he consult him: Friguens was the best informed person in Cuba in the matter of works of art and possible markets for them and his mind held the most reliable catalogue of all the important items that had at some time crossed the island’s coasts, in one direction or the other.

  “Rumour has it that the Matisse in question is worth a toast. I’ve got white or vintage rum, which is best on the road to perdition?”

  “White and no ice,” the Count replied.