Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios was collecting up the last grains of rice from his tray when Mario Conde entered the canteen at Headquarters. As ever, the lieutenant was astonished by his subordinate’s appetite and skill at salvaging scattered morsels of food: he squashed them with the back of his fork and lifted them to his mouth, and chewed them conscientiously.

  “I told them to keep food for you,” Manolo announced when he saw him walking in.

  “What’s on the menu?”

  “Rice, peas and sweet potato.”

  “How low we’ve sunk, comrade! You eat that sort of thing, so eat mine if you want . . .”

  “Really, Conde?”

  “Really, I make a present to you of today’s grub. And how come you got here so quickly?”

  Manolo smiled, pleased by the fruits of his labour and by the thought of another trayful. “Because I found what I was looking for.”

  “You’re kidding!” exclaimed the Count, even more astonished than by the four rums he’d got for the price of three.”

  “No, siree. I found the deeds for the García Abreu household on Twenty-Second Street, number fifty-eight, between Fifth and Seventh.”

  “And everything else?”

  “That was much easier once I’d got the address in my mitt. The García Abreus left Cuba in March 1961 and the inventory of Expropriated Property is signed by Miguel Forcade in May of the same year, but there was something that surprised me: they didn’t list any paintings. So I spoke to a girl who works in the Archive, a skinny mulatta, with pert little breasts, and asked her if the document was legal and she said it was. So I explained how important paintings weren’t listed and she told me that came in an appendix, because important paintings were a Patrimony issue. So she helped me look for the appendix and we couldn’t find it anywhere . . . What do you make of the story so far?”

  “That I’ll kill you, if you don’t get to the end quickly . . . And no more ‘sos’, if you don’t mind.”

  “OK, so, with the inventory number she called Patrimony, to see if they had the copy of the other appendix in the archives . . . You know what they told her?”

  “That they didn’t have it either, that it never existed, that they never saw one, that there was no appendix.”

  “Elementary, my dear Conde.”

  “And if there is no appendix it’s because they never filled one in and just as they sold the Matisse painting to Gómez de la Peña, they sold the rest to other people . . . It’s called a straight favour on the side.”

  “You really think so, Conde?”

  “I think that and something else, Manolo: that Miguel Forcade knew more about painting than Gómez de la Peña imagined and if that’s true, the dead man screwed the one living twenty-eight years ago.”

  “But how, if he sold him a painting worth almost four million for five hundred pesos?”

  “Because he sold him a painting not worth ten for well over five hundred . . . I bet you anything that no appendix ever existed because all the paintings found in that house were fakes and that’s why Patrimony didn’t want them. Somehow or other the García Abreus got their paintings out of Cuba and left only copies in the house that could deceive any impromptu inspector. But Miguel didn’t swallow that pill; he took advantage of the situation and sold those copies as originals. The most likely scenario is that he quoted a price to the State for a painting he registered as fake, sold like any other object, and pocketed the difference for a painting that was handed over as very valuable, which even came with the certificate of authenticity the García Abreus certainly left behind, but with the proviso it wasn’t shown for some time. Miguel Forcade wasn’t crazy about selling that Matisse on the free market, let alone the Goya and Murillo that everybody knew were in the house. Unless he had a good reason . . . Do you remember how the young García Abreu was an imitator of famous painters? Well if things are as I think they are, what Gómez de la Peña has in his house is by García Abreu junior and if Gómez de la Peña found out, I don’t doubt he’d cut off all Miguel Forcade had dangling. Go on, eat the other trayful, we’re leaving in half an hour . . .”

  Manolo’s eyes, momentarily squinting with admiration, followed his boss as he left.

  “Hey, Conde, how did you figure out all that?”

  “Helped by Bacchus, a Padre and the ration book. All for three pesos,” he responded, not mentioning how the cleansing of his rage at the memory of ex-lieutenant Fabricio had also played its part.

  He didn’t even look at the lifts but climbed the stairs after a telephone in the hope of finding his old friend Juan Emilio Friguens at the radio station: they’d go together and check out the sick joke about the yellow dog García Abreu junior stole from Henri Matisse.

  Clad in the pyjamas of his relaxed life-sentence, Gerardo Gómez de la Peña smiled at his new crop of visitors. His hairstyle that afternoon appeared a little less than perfect – short on Vaseline, thought the Count – but his self-confidence remained intact, even riding high, when the lieutenant explained the reason for his visit: “It’s just that we would like our friend Friguens, who is an art critic, to take a look at your Matisse.”

  The former potentate’s smile broadened.

  “That painting set you thinking, didn’t it, Lieutenant?”

  “A Matisse is a Matisse . . .”

  “And even more so in Havana,” Gómez de la Peña added suggestively, as he invited them into his living room, where he spoke to Friguens. “It’s right there.”

  The Count saw Juan Emilio’s meagre body shake all over: three yards from Matisse’s final offering to impressionism and Cézanne’s mastery, the old journalist kept a respectful silence, tongue-tied perhaps by the wonder of seeing before him, after several decades, the masterpiece he had thought lost for ever. When he’d asked him to accompany him to see Gómez de la Peña’s picture, the Count hadn’t mentioned his suspicions and anxiously awaited the specialist’s final verdict: let it be fake, he prayed mentally, so he would have a motive to find Gómez de la Peña guilty or, at least, to see his cockiness diminished by a twenty-eight year-old fraud . . .

  “Please be seated,” said their host, and the policemen obeyed.

  Meanwhile, old Friguens took two steps towards the canvas, like a prowling tiger closing in on its prey. He didn’t speak, almost didn’t breathe, when he took a third step, and reduced to inches the distance between him and the Matisse.

  “Have you got anywhere with Miguel’s death?” asked Gómez, unimpressed by Friguens’s wonderment, as if he were used to that kind of spectacle.

  “Maybe,” replied the Count, keeping his eyes on Friguens.

  “It’s hot, isn’t it?” interjected the former minister, refusing to accept the silence.

  “It’s the calm before the hurricane,” nodded the Count.

  “Yes, that must be it.”

  “That’s it,” he said, when Friguens took another step nearer, as if he wanted to walk down the street on the canvas and enjoy the breeze rustling the trees in that French village.

  The Count’s interest forced Gómez de la Peña to look at the painting, into which that emaciated old man was now sinking his face, as if about to swallow it whole.

  “What do you think, maestro?” came the sarcastic question from the Matisse’s accidental owner, and Friguens turned round.

  “And have you got the certificates of authenticity?” asked the critic, coughing a couple of times, hiding his mouth behind the hand that formed a closed umbrella.

  “And endorsements from Paris and New York.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “Naturally,” agreed Gómez de la Peña, standing up, after putting his misshapen toes in his slippers.

  When the men left the room, the Count lit a cigarette, wishing to defer the moment before he put his question.

  “Well, what do you reckon, Juan Emilio?”

  The old critic looked at the Matisse again, as he moved away and settled into one of the willow armchairs.

 
“Let me sit down. It’s incredible . . .”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Precisely that: that it is incredible,” Friguens reaffirmed. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but I think I found out why the García Abreus bought the Matisse secretly. The problem was that in 1952 Fernando García Abreu got into a bank fraud up to his neck, and got out unscathed because of his friendship with President Batista. That’s was why he didn’t want it to be known he’d bought such an expensive picture, you see.” He trailed off as Gómez de la Peña came back, extracting papers from a brown envelope.

  “Here they are,” he said, handing Friguens a few attached sheets of paper.

  Juan Emilio lifted the certificates up to his eyes, and read them a smile briefly hovering on his lips, until he said: “Now this really is incredible,” as if his flowery vocabulary had been dried up by the aesthetic impact of the Matisse.

  “What is incredible?” queried Gómez de la Peña, smiling more confidently.

  “The fact that the certificates are genuine but the painting is more fake than a twenty peso bill bearing the Count’s face. Now what could be more incredible than that?”

  In the sparse space of that tiny office on the third floor of Police Headquarters, far from the futurist flourishes of the house he’d assigned himself, Gerardo Gómez de la Peña, in ordinary shoes, incapable of inspiring envy in anyone, seemed a man who had aged instantaneously. In fact, the process began the moment Juan Emilio Friguens made the credible incredible, declaring with a triumphant smile that it was a fake Matisse painted in Havana, many years after the French original had been created. The absence of the yellow dog was the most obvious hint from the forger, who’d left other mischievous traces of his labours as a copier, so many crumbs thrown to whoever wanted to travel the road of truth. After shouting that none of it was true, Gómez de la Peña had begun to crumble before the Count’s evidence: “If it’s genuine, perhaps there’ll be no problem. But we must be sure, so we’ll take the picture to the National Museum, where two specialists are expecting us. But if they say it’s a fake, I think you did have a good motive for killing Miguel Forcade, don’t you?”

  Gómez de la Peña looked at his toes and didn’t reply. The Count was delighted by the vacillations of the petulant ex-minister and gave him an option: “Will you accompany me now to Headquarters or wait for me to come back with an arrest warrant when they submit that the Matisse is a fake?”

  Gerardo Gómez de la Peña preferred to accompany the lieutenant, who led him to his third-floor office, where all the heat of that pre-hurricane evening seemed to have gathered. They could now see a grey, grey sky through the window, palpably threatening rain, although the tops of the trees kept perfectly still, as if warning of the evil latent in that excessive calm, before a most destructive storm.

  “Hurricane, hurricane, I feel you coming/and on your hot breath/I await gleefully/the lord of the winds,” the Count recited to himself, thinking of the physical and spiritual cyclone that filled the island’s first great poet with despair, almost one hundred and sixty years earlier, when nothing was known of hectopascals or predictable paths, though they knew everything about the harsh lessons of the vertiginous horrors that lay behind the word hurricane. And Heredia, in his poet’s voice, called on the cyclone to come, his cyclone, the one he wanted and awaited with baited breath. Why do we need the same things, poet? wondered the Count as he grew more on edge because Manolo was taking too long to appear with the definitive response on the other whirlwind, imagined in oils on canvas. So he turned round, sat down in the chair behind his desk and looked Gerardo Gómez de la Peña in the eye.

  “And did you really believe all that time that the painting was genuine?”

  The man breathed sonorously, expelling all the hot air accumulated in his lungs.

  “What do you think? That I was going to say I had a real Matisse when I knew it was fake?”

  “The will of men, like the hurricane’s, is unfathomable . . . Who can say . . .? Because one would like to know whether you have a Swiss bank account, engorged by a real Matisse . . .”

  “But don’t you understand that son of a bitch deceived me like an idiot? I can’t believe it even now . . .”

  “Nor can I. Because even now I still believe the real Matisse existed or exists, and the painting was the reason why Miguel Forcade dared to return to Cuba. And I also think they could have killed and castrated him for that real Matisse, which is worth five million and not the three and a half you estimated, or am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know what you are getting at.”

  “That perhaps you both hid the real work twenty-eight years ago . . .”

  “Don’t be naïve . . .”

  The Count smiled but pointed an index finger at his man: “If there’s anyone naïve here, it’s you. And that may be your sole salvation: that you could have been such a fucking fool you thought you’d bought a Matisse worth a million for little more than five hundred pesos and the assignment of a house in Vedado, though at the end of day, the house wasn’t yours either, was it, and could be given to Miguel or to Jacinto, if Jacinto could repay in kind . . . But if you’re not naïve and an idiot whom Miguel Forcade fooled over all these years, you may be a criminal on various charges, including perhaps homicide. Which label do you prefer, naïve or idiot . . .? I highly recommend one or the other, because all other paths now point to prison.”

  Gómez de la Peña shook his head, still in denial. It was still incredible apparently – Friguens had said so – the disastrous fakery of a painting he used to unfurl as his victory standard over the way he’d been punished for his failed economic management, when the door finally opened and, as the Count had been hoping, Manolo’s fingers signalled a V for victory.

  “Faker than a nurse’s virginity . . .”

  Gerardo Gómez de la Peña heard the sentence and slumped further into his chair, before saying: “I’m glad they killed him. For being such a bastard.”

  “Well, now tell me something new about Miguel Forcade,” requested the Count, eager to digest more novel or revealing information.

  Colonel Alberto Molina remained tight-lipped as he listened to the whole story as recounted by Lieutenant Mario Conde: the long haul after a fake Autumn Landscape that existed because another real one existed whose whereabouts were still unknown, and that might be – one or the other, or perhaps both – the cause of Miguel Forcade’s death. Standing up, smoking his second cigarette since the Count had put in an appearance, the new boss at Headquarters scrutinized the certificates of authenticity and the proof of sale of that Matisse, signed by Miguel Forcade and Gerardo Gómez de la Peña.

  “And I suppose these García Abreus took the picture out of Cuba?”

  “Apparently. But when Forcade found out this one was a fake, he realized he had a good deal on his hands and thought on his feet.”

  “He was a real devil,” he added finally, returning to his seat. “I’m not surprised by the way he was killed.”

  “There are various kinds of demons,” commented the lieutenant and thought of Major Rangel: “The country’s mad,” the Boss would have said as if there were still something that could shock him.

  “And do you think Gómez is the murderer?”

  The Count yet again weighed up the possibilities in the light of his prejudices and decided not to take any risks.

  “We can’t be sure, though I would be delighted if he were, because I don’t like his sort. But he says he never knew it was a fake and he doesn’t seem to be lying. And that leaves him without any apparent motive. At any rate I’ll let him spend another night sleeping inside, in the same cell as the rapists, the black guy and the little white one. That usually helps, I can tell you . . .”

  The Colonel stood up again. He was clearly fazed by the riddles cast in his direction by a story of serial lies and deception, sustained over almost thirty years.

  “I don’t know what to say . . . this is all new to me. What is undeniable is
that you’ve upturned a cartload of shit . . . But if it wasn’t Gómez, who the fuck did it?”

  “You know, I’ve got Fermín Bodes in reserve, Miguel’s brother-in-law. I am convinced he knew why the dead man came to Cuba, and if he knows why he may also know why they killed him. And quite likely may even have killed him himself. But I’ve got no way to bring him in. He’s another livewire and he’s got guts.”

  “And Miguel’s wife?”

  “She’s really tasty . . . And she also knows things she’s not letting on and lets on about things she’s not been asked. She’s the one I really can’t get my head round . . . Besides, I don’t believe she’s a natural blonde . . . But what I’m more and more certain of is that Forcade’s murderer knew what he had come here for, and that was why he killed him. Though the castration business is a spanner in the works. What do you reckon?”

  The Colonel put his cigarette out and looked at his subordinate.

  “I don’t know why I let myself get dragged into this madness, when I was so quiet and peaceful in my office . . .”

  “Now you can see how difficult this is to solve in three days. But I’ll promise you something . . . What’s the time now?”

  “Ten past five, why?”

  “Because tomorrow at this exact same time I will answer your question: I’ll tell you who murdered Miguel Forcade . . . I hope you’ll have my release papers ready by then. All right?”

  “All right . . . to the good health of us both,” and he half turned, not even remembering to give his military salute.

  Mario Conde would only sing boleros in two precise states of mind: when he foresaw he might fall in love or when he was already madly and desperately in love – which was the only way he ever fell in love. Although his fortune in love had not been particularly favourable for nurturing his gift with boleros, several of those lyrics, made from words that could sing equally of love or disappointment, of hatred or the purest of passions, had lodged in his mind during vehement spates of amorous frenzy, during which he’d sung them, even outside the shower. And he preferred one in particular to any other bolero on the face of this earth and on his tongue:More than a thousand years, many more, will pass,