Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  “The Marquess never mentioned it.”

  “Of course he didn’t: Ofelia Belén Pacheco and the Marquess are sworn enemies, ever since Ofelia bedded one of the Marquess’s boyfriends. Although that was in the days when buses were made of wood . . . Well, they have fantastic parties and all the transvestite buddies of Havana go there. Sometimes thirty or more.”

  In the spacious living room, under the influence of music of a seemingly Barbra Streisand flavour, several couples of diverse make-up had started dancing and the Count stared at Estrella, dancing boleros and cutting an incongruous figure with her dance partner, a titchy black barely five feet tall, whom the Count supposed had bigger dimensions that were momentarily hidden. Viki was still standing by the balcony, and the Count was alarmed when he realized that if he hadn’t been warned he’d have thought her a woman who was desirable, if not beautiful.

  The atmosphere exuded a ghetto freedom, limited but capacious, as the dancers’ hands caressed their partners and muffled voices echoed the song. A distasteful chill ran through the policeman when he spotted a couple kissing shamelessly: two men – according to legal, biological codes – some thirty years old, moustachioed with jet black hair, soldering lips to facilitate a flow of tongues and saliva that injected the Count with a squeamish repugnance he tried to quell by gulping down another glass of rum. He knew then that he’d gone too far on that journey to hell and needed different air if he wasn’t going to suffocate or die of shock. A policeman who boasted he’d seen every possible barbarity, he now felt pain-stricken by a vibration born from a tight knot of male hormones, unable to resist that most disturbing negation of nature. He looked at Polly and tried to smile, as he turned his green goblet round, as if to demonstrate that the evaporation was damaging the atmosphere.

  “Should I put you on the alcoholics’ list?”

  “Put me down as an aspiring or discerning drinker . . . Hey, the Marquess says Alexis hadn’t been here for days.”

  “That’s right, I hadn’t seen him for some time.”

  “And when you saw him, did he tell you he was in love with somebody?”

  Polly looked up, as if seeking her reply in the visible part of her lank fringe.

  “I don’t think so. I think he was still with a painter whose name I’ve forgotten, one who did things with collages.”

  “Salvador K.”

  “Hey, you’re really in the know! You sure you’re not police?”

  “Really I’m not, love . . . And what did Alexis tell you?”

  “Nothing much, that he was really fed up and that if he split with the Salvador guy he wasn’t going to hitch up with anyone else. And he went off because he was going to mass at the cathedral.”

  The Count thought how Alexis Arayán must have been carrying his Bible, where perhaps the passage on the Transfiguration was already missing.

  “Why did you suddenly shut up?” enquired Polly, pressing one of his legs. “Do you want another drink?”

  “That’s not a bad idea. I’d like to have a drop with you.”

  And she smiled, as mischievous as ever.

  “Why not have a drink at my place? I live just round the corner.”

  “Are you a transvestite?”

  “Come and find out.”

  “The walk will warm you up,” said the Count, and compared Polly to a St Bernard on a rescue mission in the middle of a snowstorm. Averting his gaze from the kissing moustaches, he looked round for the Marquess. He wasn’t in the room, nor was his amphibian friend. Polly’s roll-call, he thought, as he stood up, still had a way to go.

  The Count let himself be undressed without claiming the promised drink and was pleased to see his best friend on duty, despite the evening’s bustle and the worries about sexual fraudulency still torturing him; a whiff of sparrowish behind had woken him up. He took off Polly’s baby-doll and wasn’t surprised by her small tits, with their ripe nipples, just bursting to be touched and bitten, then he warily checked inside her panties and found no false castrations, but a moist, inverted mine down which half a hand vanished. Awakened abruptly by the discovery of that vein, his travelling companion perked up, stretched, yawned and braced its swollen tissue, before descending, like a bullet winging home, into Polly’s mouth, deep like the other cavities he’d already explored.

  Polly was a sophisticated lady: unhurried and unfussed, she fellatioed delicately, licking his penis’s every cranny, swallowing, then bringing it back into the fresh air only to languish enviously as her sparrow’s teeth tightened round his testicles. It was the Count who had to call for a truce, dismayed by the imminent spurt and desirous to deepen his knowledge of her second jousting cleft, and he pushed Polly on her bed, ready to crucify her, just as the girl’s hand intervened in her fate.

  “Oh, mum, I’ve always wanted to lay a policeman. Go on, there are some condoms under the pillow,” she said, sucking on the Count’s nipples as he hooded his anxious friend, annoyed by the lateness of the party.

  He penetrated her as if it wasn’t a first visit, noticing how much was required to fill a slit worthy of a white whale’s rather than a sparrow’s, a surprise Moby Dick, but he was happy at the manoeuvrability permitted by Polly’s hundred pounds, portable Polly, easily upped and downed the length and breadth of polyethelene which blocked off a good part of that objective, if invisible reality. The Count was surprised by his own energy, which he could only attribute to his systematic lack of such binary practices. He inned and outed like a jack-in-the-box, hooked on a nipple, then offered up an ear for a girlish tongue to explore. Saliva ran like the rivers of life, turned them into slippery, naughty sea snakes. He went back in, conscious the curtain was about to fall, when postmodern Polly snuck away from him, half-turned on the bed and presented her sparrow’s bun to his eyes, increased in size by its nearness and pert position.

  “Give it me in the arse,” she asked, unsmiling.

  The Count took one look at his selfless comrade, inelegant but ready for combat, and gripped her buttocks tight to open up the exit door more widely.

  “God, how horrible!” she said when he drilled her little hole. Then the Count felt he was the right measure for polyphonic Polly’s proportions, and stuck to his task as he heard the girl’s anxious lament, which, between push and pull, changed to a smile, a laugh, a guffaw, a cry begging split my arse, split it down the middle, though now there was nothing left to heft and he could only keep up the rubbing which the man tried to do tirelessly. Ay, Polly the prostrate . . .

  But everything has an end. The Count was surprised by his own powerful, triumphant macho whoop, as Polly’s guffaws faded to a laugh, to a smile before ending on a whimper: “God, how horrible,” only to add, with a judgement the Count assumed he fully deserved: “Ay, darling, what a lovely fucker you are, you are!”

  There was a face there. He could almost see it, if he stretched out his hand he could almost touch it, but his eyes and hands slipped and slid, entwined by viscous veils and nets that suddenly loosened their knots, let him escape, close in on the face, almost touch it, only to wrap round him again, distance him, refuse him a revelation that evaporated in a luminous heat cloud, swept along by a dirty river, as it finally faded forcing him to wake up, stressed, at the first loud rings of his telephone, his breathing agitated, his body soaked by the sad, sad sweat of doubt. I know him, of course I do, he told himself as he reviewed his passage from dream to a more objective reality, as he tried to find out what was happening. It was a clear, brutal telephone ring, as the sun penetrated the windows to his room, to impose yet another day of aggressive heat.

  “You motherfucker,” he said, crawling to the receiver, eyes stunned by the brightness. He picked up the phone and asked, “What’s the time?”

  “Ten past nine, Conde, ten past nine,” repeated the voice at the other end of the line, perhaps of the world.

  “Shit, Manolo, I didn’t hear my alarm clock, or didn’t set it. Who knows . . .”

  “When did you hit the sack?�
�

  “Around four.”

  “Alcohol level?”

  “Only two glasses.”

  “Just as well, because there’s bother: Salvador K. hasn’t showed since yesterday afternoon.”

  The Count finally felt he was awake. “And how come?”

  “El Greco and Crespo tailed him. They say he went out yesterday at around five, as if he was going to his studio, and went down the passageway of a house that’s on Nineteen and A. They waited for him for more than an hour and then discovered the passageway led to a garage facing Twenty-First Street. He vanished. He’s not in the house or his studio.”

  “Did they talk to his wife?”

  “Yes, but only to ask after him, and she just said he was at the studio.”

  The Count lit a cigarette, trying to cast off the last chains of sleep, and then he remembered.

  “Hey, Manolo, I had the strangest of dreams: I could and couldn’t see the murderer . . . You know, those funny dreams: when I thought I was going to see him, I didn’t, because he also wore this kind of disguise . . . Fuck me if I’m not obsessed with transvestites, the transfiguration, wandering souls and all that shit.”

  “It wasn’t Salvador?”

  “I don’t know, I really don’t, but now I’m convinced I know him, I’m not sure why, but I’m convinced I do. Hey, go and speak to Salvador’s wife, put the squeeze on her, though not too tightly, and pick me up at . . . well, when you’re finished.”

  The Count hung up and looked around: there were only traces of more or less distant disasters. Clothes on the ground, a crushed cigarette butt, Rufino the fish swimming in waters murkier by the minute. I must clean the pigsty, he told himself, but forgot this priority as he observed his own nakedness, which sent him back to the previous night’s erotic adventure. God, how horrible, she says she’s almost always heterosexual, what the fuck have I got into? he wondered, smiling as he congratulated himself on having enough coffee for two more breakfasts.

  While he was waiting the Count grabbed the newspaper seller who was walking along the pavement with his precious treasure of news under his arm, and, as he wasn’t a usual customer, he had to pay double – after the inevitable pleas – to get a copy. Still shirtless, in the doorway to his house, he greeted passing acquaintances as he digested headlines and skimmed items to get a round-up that still left him with a few doubts. According to the paper’s international pages, the world was in a pretty bad state, though the socialist countries – despite difficulties and continuous external pressures – were intent on not abandoning the uphill, triumphant path of history. The national pages, for their part, made it plain that the island wasn’t in bad shape at all, except for the odd episode, like the railway accident which had left several dead (and which naturally wasn’t planned). They were planting worms, the sacrosanct CAME, the Council for Mutual Economic Aid, promised it was going to solve the problems of Cuba’s telephone system, it would even rain and there’d be an eclipse of the moon in a week’s time. That was the bit of news he most liked: the eclipse would be on Skinny’s birthday. And when was Dulcita arriving? Moreover, the paper said that this afternoon the famous Eligio Riego would give a poetry reading, and he decided that, as he’d like to talk to him, he’d call Major Rangel so that he’d put him in touch with his friend the poet . . .

  The Count breathed in till he filled his lungs, just as a lorry belched out its unrefined fumes. But he felt reading the newspaper had fortified him so he could face another day of hard labour.

  “And where the hell can this guy be?”

  The car wove round the potholes left by the last nuclear bomb that stretch of La Calzada must have suffered. After picking him up, Sergeant Manuel Palacios told him about his interview with Salvador K.’s wife: she insisted her husband had gone to the studio and, if he wasn’t there, she couldn’t imagine where he might be, and she’d asked the policeman rather anxiously: “Should I tell the police?”

  “Manolo, you really think she doesn’t know?”

  “I don’t know, Conde, you’re the psychologist here. I don’t know if she wanted to put us on the wrong track.”

  “Did you ask her for a photo of him?”

  “Of course. Shall we circulate it?”

  The Count shut his eyes and let his head fall backwards. “Let’s wait a day. He’ll probably turn up and we won’t need to create a stir.”

  “If only, but don’t pin your hopes on it. If that guy did the little pansy in, he might make a break for it, Conde. Get a boat out of here, or whatever . . .”

  “We’ll wait a bit longer,” the lieutenant decided, as the car stopped at a traffic light. A bus halted next to them and, from his seat, the Count saw the bus driver. He was a man in his fifties and the policeman saw his was a bus-driver’s face: he was looking at the street while, bored out of his mind, he hit the steering wheel with the wedding ring he wore on his left hand. He had that slight though visible hump professional drivers get after a few years in the saddle, and something about his face warned: this man could do nothing else with life: he was a bus driver, the Count concluded, and then he saw a girl waving at the driver asking please to open the bus door. From his Olympian height the bus driver seemed to ponder long and hard, before agreeing to her request, one second short of the woman kneeling down in the middle of the street, begging for her ride. Then she smiled, thanked him and put her coin in the collection box, just as Sergeant Manolo Palacios put his foot down and left the bus behind.

  “Hey, Manolo, go down Luyanó, I want to see Fatman Contreras.”

  “Fatman?” asked Sergeant Palacios as if he hadn’t understood, though the Count knew that wasn’t the sense of his question. Suddenly the vision of the bus driver with a bus-driver’s face had helped him grasp the inevitability of certain destinies which were prescribed for ever, and he immediately felt the need to speak to Captain Jesús Contreras as if under orders. About what? Anything. He just had to see him.

  “What’s up? Did they tell you it was forbidden to speak to him?”

  “No, Conde, don’t fuck about, you know it’s not that, the fact is . . . Remember what I told you yesterday.”

  “Don’t fuck about yourself, Manolo. Are you frightened?”

  The sergeant sighed and turned right.

  “Okay then,” he agreed, shaking his head to underline his disagreement. “Yes, I am frightened. I told you yesterday . . . And why are you doing this? Just to show you’re a tough guy and aren’t frightened or because you really are?”

  Contreras’s house was on the corner, a block before the Calzada de Luyanó. It was one of those typical old buildings in the area, with a door directly on to the pavement and very high windows with grilles, covered in pernicious soot from nearby factories. A long, long time ago, when the Count hadn’t even dreamt that one day he’d be a policeman and know Captain Jesús Contreras, he’d already decided he didn’t like those squat houses or that dingy district which was too grey, too monotonous, without gardens or porches, and for a long time now with very few healthy panes of glass.

  “You stay in the car,” he told Manolo. He got out and knocked with the wrought-iron knocker.

  Fatman Contreras opened the door and beamed a smile the Count feared like death.

  “Well, well, well,” said the captain, “Look who we have here. Come in.”

  And he held out his hand. But on that occasion the Count told himself it was time to fight for the lowly and dispossessed on earth: Fatman’s greatest pleasure was squeezing hands, whether friendly or hostile, with those five-fingered mechanical diggers, capable of lifting one ton of weight, and making the knees of the ingenuous creature greeted thus buckle from the devastating pressure on their carpals, metacarpals, phalanges, mini-phalanges . . .

  “Squeeze your own mother’s hand, you fat pansy.”

  And he exploded. Fatman’s second greatest pleasure was laughing, those sonorous guffaws, like a human earthquake, that set dancing the fat neck, tits and ever sweaty, enormous belly o
f Captain Jesús Contreras, head of the Foreign Exchange Dealing Department at Headquarters.

  “You’re a sonovabitch, Conde, that’s why I like you. And now I see you really like me. Are you after something?” And he laughed again, as if it were inevitable. “You are the first sonovabitch policeman to come and see me . . .”

  And he burst out laughing for a whole minute more, convulsing, obscenely, sweatily, as the Count looked up, expecting to see the first fragments of ceiling crash down.

  “It’s hard, Conde, hard, real hard, I swear by my mother. You know I’d even put my pyjamas on if that was an option: if they put me on the pyjama game, well I’ll obey and put my pyjamas on, but what I’m certainly not going to do is to go begging to anyone. Not to the Major, the investigation team, anyone, because I’m cleaner than the Virgin Mary. And if I smell of shit, it’s because I work in shit, wash in shit, like any self-respecting policeman, and I’m not going to let anyone daub me with shit that’s not mine. It’s not mine, Conde. No, wait a minute. This is rich: they’re accusing me of fuck all, but as there are problems in currency black markets they want to implicate me because they say I must be in the know . . . Know what? Know what some police were doing who were fine yesterday and are now into God knows what? My speciality was being on the street, making life difficult for those milking foreigners for their dollars, and I was good at that and you know it. Not a dollar moved in the street I didn’t know about, and if I had informers, I gave them protection, if not, who the hell would ever inform? Now if there were accounts in banks in Panama, and people upstairs in dollar deals, and into credit cards and all that jazz, I couldn’t touch them, there’s no black guy in Old Havana or white wheelerdealer in Vedado or whore from La Lisa who could take me there. That kind of thing isn’t my patch and I don’t touch it . . . but don’t worry, Condesito, there’s no way they can pin things on me. Everything in this house is mine, mine and earned with the sweat of my brow or because someone gave it me as a present, and it’s not my fault if that individual’s now fallen out of favour, is it? And you know how anyone told to take something took it, right? And now they’re talking about my standard of living, about undue privileges, you know. But what do they want, Tibetan monks dressed in a strip of donkey hide? I know I never stole a cent, not a single one. You know me, Conde, don’t you? But the hardest thing is seeing how the people who only two days ago practically went on bended knees for me to help them, and did anything to be my friend, and brought coffee beans to my office and said Serpico was shit useless compared to me, they don’t want to hear my name because I might harm them, might infect them . . . The only person who has called is Major Rangel, to ask me if I needed anything, and do you know what I told him? That my balls were aching and he shouldn’t call me again unless it was to say they wanted to apologize. That’s all I can accept now, Conde: apologies, medals and honours . . . No, I’m not shutting the door, but one has one’s pride, because if not, what the hell does one have, hey, you tell me? And as I’m clean, my morale is higher than Mount Turquino in the Sierra Maestra, higher than the Himalayas, fucking hell . . . But it’s terrible, Conde. I’ve only been suspended for a day and I’m worse than a tail cut off its dog. I’m up in the air and don’t know where to come down. I’ve been police for twenty years, and the worst bloody thing is that it’s all I can do and I even like being a policeman. What the hell am I going to do with my life, Conde, you tell me? Now I’ve got the plague, I’ll tell you one thing: for your own sake, don’t come to see me again. I’m the one who doesn’t want you back here, because you’re my friend, you’ve shown that today, and I don’t want to put you in the shit, Conde. You look after yourself, because this is no joke and when they throw shit at the fan, anyone can get it . . . Even a guy like you, a real man and a friend, as they say on the street . . . Shake my hand, Conde, don’t be a pansy. Shake my hand, I swear by my mother I won’t squeeze you . . . That’s right . . . I caught you, you motherfucker . . . Ha, ha, ha . . . That’ll teach you never to trust a policeman, ha, ha, ha.”