Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  The Count stretched his hand out over Captain Contreras’s desk, ready to suffer in silence the tight grip of a fist that could throttle a horse.

  “Thanks, Fatman.”

  He left the office in the fallout from Fatman’s guffaws and walked up to the Boss’s office. Maruchi was typing, and the Count wondered at the fact she could talk, even look at him and still type.

  “You’re late, Marquess. I mean, Count. The major went out a minute ago,” the girl told him. “He went to a meeting at Political Headquarters.”

  “Uh-uh, just as well,” replied the lieutenant, who preferred to defer his confrontation with Major Rangel. “Can you tell him to wait till five thirty? I think I’ll sort this case today. All right?”

  “No problem at all, Lieutenant.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he asked, and the secretary stopped typing and looked resigned. “Do you have a couple of aspirins?”

  “What’s new?” smiled the Count.

  Manolo, Patricia and her experts in the Fraud Squad looked at him in a state of shock. He’d only left the enterprise an hour ago saying he’d be back in the afternoon, and now here he was demanding results. The lieutenant cleared a space on the desk in the deputy financial manager’s office they’d been lent for the investigation and sat down, giving respite to less than one buttock.

  “Nothing as yet, Mayo,” said Patricia as she closed the folder labelled SERVICE ORDERS. “I warned you it wouldn’t be easy.”

  “I don’t understand why the hell they need so much paper,” protested Manolo, opening his arms as if trying to embrace the huge office space occupied by the files that comprised the daily records of the enterprise. “And that’s only for 1988. We’ll soon have to invent an enterprise to deal with the papers of this enterprise.”

  “But just imagine, Mayo, despite all the controls, audits and checks, there’s more theft, embezzling and siphoning off of funds than anybody could imagine. If there were no paperwork, it would be impossible to control.”

  “And have you found everything on Rafael’s trips abroad and the business he was doing there?” asked the Count, who’d decided not to light up.

  “There are the contracts, cheques and expenses records. And, of course, the breakdown for each business deal,” replied Patricia Wong, pointing to two mountains of paper. “We had to start at the beginning.”

  “And how long will you need to make sense of it, China?”

  The lieutenant laughed again, with that Chinese laugh of resignation that closed her eyes. No, she can’t see, she can’t.

  “Two days at least, Mayo.”

  “No, China!” shouted the Count, and he stared at Manolo. The sergeant’s eyes were begging “Get me out of here, man” and he seemed skinnier and more helpless than ever.

  “I’m not Chan Li Po, that’s for sure,” protested Patricia, crossing her monumental legs.

  “Fine, let’s do two things, China. Use any excuse to get Maciques’s file because I need a photo of him. And secondly, prioritize, you know, just prioritize, and while you’re at it, right, look into all the agreements and payments in relation to allowances for Rafael, Maciques and the deputy financial director who’s currently in Canada. Also look out the marketing expenses, in Cuba and abroad, and take a long hard look at the presents declared as the result of good contracts. I’m sure nothing extraordinary will turn up, but I need to know. And in particular, look at two areas, China: what Rafael did in Spain, the country he most visited, and check out all the deals he signed ever since he started to direct the enterprise, with the Japanese firm . . .” and then extracted his notebook from his back trouser pocket and read, “. . . Mitachi, because these Chinamen will be in Cuba in a couple of days and there may be something about them.”

  “This is all quite feasible, but don’t call them Chinamen, if you don’t mind,” protested the lieutenant, and the Count remembered how Patricia had recently had an attack of nostalgia for Asia and had even joined the Chinese Society of Cuba, given her status as a direct descendent.

  “Patricia, it boils down to the same thing more or less.”

  “Oh, Mayo, don’t be so pigheaded. Go and tell my father that and see if he invites you back for dinner.”

  “Forget it, forget it. It’s not that important.”

  “Hey, you seem very chirpy. You got something on the go?”

  “If only, Patricia . . . All I’ve got is an ancient prejudice and what you can find now. Help me. Look, it’s eleven thirty. You could get what I asked for by two . . .”

  “By four at the earliest.”

  “No can do. I’ll be here at three. Now let me have my boy back.”

  Patricia looked at Manolo and could read the torture in his squinting eyes.

  “No problem, given his level of knowledge of finance and accounting . . .”

  “Thanks for the compliment, Lieutenant,” replied Manolo, already settling his pistol in his belt and smoothing his shirt so the weapon was less visible.

  “OK, see you at three.”

  “Yes, but go now, Mayo, because if you stay around I won’t be finished by five. Rebecca,” she gave an order to one of her team of experts, “get that photo for the lieutenant. Enjoy, Manolo.”

  After ten years on duty Mario Conde had learned that routine doesn’t exist just because of a lack of imagination. But Manolo was still too young and preferred to solve everything through a couple of interrogations, a lead pursued to the end of the trail and, if really necessary, a pause for thought before forcing through a resolution. He’d met success too often in his short career, and the Count, without sharing many of his theories, respected the thin gangling lad. But the lieutenant often insisted on police routine to try to track down the inevitable sore thumb. Lots of routine and ideas that unexpectedly surged out of his deep subconscious were his two favourite tools. The third was always understanding the people involved: if you know what someone is like, you know what he might do and what he’d never do, he’d tell Manolo, because sometimes that’s exactly what people do, namely what they could never do, and he’d add for good measure: “while I’m a policeman I’ll never stop smoking or stop thinking that one day I’ll write a very romantic, very sweet, very squalid novel, but I’ll also plug away at routine enquiries. When I’m no longer a policeman and write my novel, I’d like to work with lunatics because I love lunatics.”

  Out of pure routine and to see whether he still had something new to learn about Rafael Morín’s character, the Count decided to interview Salvador González, the secretary of the party cell, a professional cadre in the organization sent to the enterprise by the municipality barely three months ago.

  “I don’t know how useful I can be to you,” Salvador confessed as he spurned the cigarette the lieutenant offered. He opted to fill his pipe and accept a lit match. He was a man well into his fifties and seemed both straightforward and out of his depth. “I hardly knew Comrade Morín, and I’ve only got impressions of him as a party member and an individual and I don’t like to be impressionistic.”

  “Describe one of those impressions,” asked the lieutenant.

  “All right, at the General Accounts Meeting, he was really very good. His report was one of the best I’ve ever heard. I think he’s a man who’s understood the spirit of the times. He called for quality and high standards at work, because this is a very important enterprise for the nation’s development. And he subjected himself to self-criticism because his style of leadership was to centralize, and he asked comrades to help him in a necessary redistribution of tasks and responsibilities.”

  “And now let’s have another impression.”

  The general secretary smiled.

  “Even though it’s only an impression?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right, if you must. But remember, it is only an impression . . . You know what travel means for anyone, not only in this enterprise but in the country as a whole. A person who travels feels different, chosen, as if he’d broken the sound
barrier . . . My impression is that comrade Morín liked to get people’s good will by offering them opportunities to travel. It’s an impression I picked up from what I saw and from our conversations.”

  “What did you talk about? What did you see?”

  “Nothing very exciting. When we were preparing the Final Accounts Meeting he asked me if I liked travelling.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I told him that, when I was a kid, I read a Donald Duck comic where the duck goes to Alaska with three nephews prospecting for gold, and for a long time I was dead envious of the ducklings whose uncle took them to Alaska. Then I grew up and never went to Alaska or anywhere else and, excuse my French, but I decided that Alaska could go frig itself.”

  “Don’t you have any other impressions?”

  “I’d prefer to keep quiet about them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m no longer an ordinary worker or even an ordinary party member. I’m general secretary in this enterprise, and my impressions could be seen as arising from my present post and not from me as an individual.”

  “What if I turn a blind eye? What if you forget your post for a moment?”

  “That’s very difficult for either of us, Lieutenant, but as you’re so insistent, I will tell you something and hope I’m not making a mistake,” he declared, and he initiated a pause that he prolonged as he knocked his pipe against the ashtray. He’s not going to tell me anything, thought the Count, but he didn’t despair. “They say a cautious man is worth two, and I’d always thought Rafael Morín a cautious man par excellence. But of the two men who surface from such caution, there’s always one who’s less so: he’s the one who’s gone missing.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because I’m almost certain your colleague, the slant-eyed mulatta, will find something. You can feel it in the air. Naturally, it’s only an impression. I could be wrong, right? I’ve got it wrong with other comrades. I hope I’m wrong in this case, because if I’m not, I won’t just have made a mistake as an individual, if you follow me?”

  “Just a bit of routine, OK?”

  “Get fucking lost, Conde,” said Manolo, sprawling over the car boot. It was just gone twelve, a feisty midday sun was trying to chase the cold off, and its warmth was pleasant, you could even take your jacket off, put your sunglasses on and feel like saying: “Let’s have another go at Maciques, but at headquarters, not here. Let’s go.”

  The Count rubbed his specs on the hem of his shirt, looked at them against the light and returned them to his pocket. Unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled his sleeves twice and thrice in uneven bulges up to his elbows.

  “We’ll wait, it’s only just twelve, and China said three o’clock, and Fatman will only have just got going. I reckon we deserve lunch . . . don’t you? Who knows when we’ll get finished today?”

  Manolo stroked his stomach and rubbed his hands together. The sun’s efforts weren’t enough: a persistent perfumed breeze blew in from the sea and chased off the timid warmth.

  “Do you reckon I’ve got time to go to see Vilma?” he asked, not looking at his colleague.

  “So did she or did she not kick you out?”

  “No, she’s just a jealous bitch.”

  “Like a business with lots of money.”

  “More or less.”

  “But you like her, don’t you?”

  Manolo tried to kick a car-flattened bottle top and then rubbed his hands together again.

  “I think so, comrade. She wears me out in bed.”

  “Take care, kid,” replied the Count, smiling. “I once had one like that, and she almost killed me. The worst of it is that afterwards none can compete. But he who dies from pleasure . . . Come on, hit the road, drop me off at Skinny’s and pick me up at two, two fifteen. Does that give you enough time?”

  “Why do you think I’m faster than Fangio?” he asked and was already opening the car door.

  The Count preferred not to talk to him on the road. He thought driving at fifty miles an hour in Havana was slightly barmy and decided it was best to let Manolo concentrate on his driving and Vilma’s frenzied love, and that way they’d perhaps arrive intact. The worst thing about the speeding was that he couldn’t think, although he was happy enough: he didn’t have much to think about, he could wait and perhaps start exercising his brain later.

  “Two o’clock here,” he repeated to Manolo as he got out in front of Skinny’s house and went to cross himself as he saw him career round the corner. Two tits always have more pull than a carthorse, he reflected as he crossed the very minimal garden that Josefina kept as pretty as she could with what her hands could get hold of. Roses, sunflowers, red mantos, picuala and an old set of chopsticks blended colours and scents on a clean dark earth where it was a mortal sin to throw a cigarette end, even if Skinny Carlos were the culprit. The door to the house was open as usual, and as he went in he was hit by the smell of a strong sauce: juices from bitter oranges, peeled garlic, onion, pepper and olive oil were bubbling in the pan, juices to bathe the victuals that Josefina would present to her son whose scant pleasures she cultivated more lovingly than her garden. Ever since Skinny had returned, maimed for life, that woman who retained the freshness of her smile had devoted herself to living for her son with a cheerful, nunnish resignation now in its ninth year, and the daily act of feeding him was perhaps the ritual that most expressed the pain of her love. Skinny had refused to abide by the advice of his doctor who warned him of the dangers of his obesity, as he assumed that death had been deferred only briefly and he wanted to live with his usual gusto. If we’re going to drink, let’s drink; if we’re going to eat, let’s eat, he’d say, and Josefina satisfied him well beyond her means.

  “Set another place,” the Count told her as he entered the kitchen, kissed the woman’s sweaty brow and prepared his own to receive a return kiss which in the event never came, because the lieutenant suffered an attack of love and melancholy that forced him to hug her as tightly as a strangler and say “I love you so much, Jose” before he let her go and walked over to the sidetable where the thermos of coffee stood and thus he fought off the tears he felt were imminent.

  “What you doing here, Condesito? You finished work early?”

  “If only, Jose,” he replied as he drank his coffee. “I came to eat yucca in that sauce.”

  “Hey, kid,” she replied and left off preparing food for a moment. “What’s the mess you sorting now?”

  “You can’t imagine, love, one of my usual piles of shit.”

  “With that girl who was at school with you?”

  “Hey, what’s your beast of a boy been telling you?”

  “Don’t be silly. You could hear your carryings on yesterday half a block away.”

  The Count shrugged his shoulders and smiled. What could he have said?

  “Hey, and why are you looking so elegant?” he asked as he looked her up and down.

  “Me elegant? Forget it, you can’t imagine how elegant I can be when I put my mind to it . . . No, I’ve just come from the doctor’s and not had time to change.”

  “What’s wrong, Jose?” he asked as he bent down to see her face, that was looking over the stove.

  “I don’t know, love. It’s a pain that goes back a long time and it’s getting unbearable. It starts burning here under my belly, and sometimes I feel a knife’s been buried down there.”

  “And what did the doctor say?”

  “He didn’t really say anything. He sent me off for tests, an X-ray and that thing when you have to swallow a hosepipe.”

  “But didn’t he say anything else?”

  “What else do you expect him to say, Condesito?”

  “I don’t know. But you never told me. I’d have spoken to Andrés, the one who studied with us. He’s a fantastic doctor.”

  “Don’t you worry, this doctor is good too.”

  “What do you mean ‘don’t worry’, dear? You never do say anything. Tomorrow
I’ll talk to Andrés about the tests, and Skinny should ring . . .”

  Josefina put the saucepan down and looked at her son’s friend.

  “Should ring no one. Not a word to him, please?”

  Then the Count decided to pour out another dose of coffee and light another cigarette, but not to hug Josefina and tell her he was really scared.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll call. The stew smells good, doesn’t it?” And he walked out of her kitchen.

  Mario Conde’s strolls down memory lane always ended in melancholy. When he crossed the watershed of his thirtieth year and his relationship with Haydée petered out in the last whimpers of unbridled sexual combat, he found he liked remembering in the hope that he would improve his life and treated his destiny like a guilty party he could bury under reproaches and recriminations or moans and groans. His own work suffered from such an attitude, and though he knew he wasn’t a hard or particularly wise man, or even exemplary in his behaviour, although some of his colleagues considered him a good policeman, he thought he might have been more useful in another profession, but he then transmuted his gripes into punctilious efficiency that earned him a reputation he considered fraudulent and quite inexplicable. And now Tamara had come back to disturb the considerable calm he’d reached after his fallout with Haydée by dint of nights at baseball games, drinking, nostalgia-provoking music and overflowing plates, while he chatted to Skinny, all the time wanting it not to be true, for Skinny to be skinny again, for him never to die and not look like a giant greasy meatball, shirtless and trying to soak up the midday sun in his backyard. The Count saw the rolls of fat gather over his belly and the small red spots covering his back, neck and chest, like bites from voracious insects.

  “What you thinking about, you wild man?” he asked as he ruffled his hair.

  “Nothing, you savage. I was thinking about the whole Rafael business, and my mind suddenly went a complete blank,” his friend responded, looking at the clock. “What time they coming to pick you up?”