“How many chickens, Jose?” enquired the Count.
“Three and a half.”
“And did you add peppers?”
“Yes, for decoration. And cooked it in beer.”
“So three and a half chickens . . . Do you think that’ll do for us?” The Count went on with his questions, as he pushed Skinny’s chair towards the dining room, with a skill acquired from years of practice.
The final judgement from those round the table was unanimous: the rice could do with green peas, although it tasted good, they added, after ingesting three big plates of rice transfigured by chicken gravy and juices.
They shut themselves up in Skinny’s room for their after-supper rum and chat, while Josefina dozed in front of the television.
“Put something on the deck, Mario,” insisted Skinny, and the Count smiled.
“The same as usual?” he asked, purely for rhetorical pleasure, and got a smile and a nod from his friend.
“You bet . . .”
“Now then, what do you fancy?” asked one.
“The Beatles?” responded the other.
“Chicago?”
“Formula V?”
“Los Pasos?”
“Credence?”
“Right on, Credence,” they both chorused perfectly as in a routine rehearsed a thousand times, over countless, knowing years. “But don’t tell me Tom Foggerty sings like a black. I’ve told you often enough before that he sings like God, haven’t I?” And the two nodded, revealing a deeply rooted accord, for they both knew that was right: the bastard sang like God, and started to show it when the Count pressed play and Foggerty, with the Credence Clearwater Revival, launched into his unique version of “Proud Mary” . . . How often had he lived that scene?
Sitting on the floor, a tot of rum by his side and a lighted cigarette in the ashtray, the Count yielded to pressure from his friends and told them of the latest developments at Headquarters and his irrevocable decision to leave the force.
“I really couldn’t care less what happens to those sons of a bitches . . . Every day there are more of them. Battalions of sons of bitches . . .” “Regiments . . . armies,” was the opinion of Andrés, who extended the quantitative, logistical power base of invaders, more resistant and fertile than roaches.
“You’re crazy, Conde,” concluded Carlos.
“And if you leave the police, what will you do?” came the question from Rabbit, a viscerally historical individual, always in need of reasons, causes and consequences for the slightest incident.
“That’s the least of my worries. I want out—”
“Hey, wild man,” interrupted Carlos, putting his glass of rum between his legs. “Do whatever you want, whatever, it’ll be fine by me, because that’s what friends are for, you know? But if you’re going, enjoy, don’t hide in a cloud of alcohol. Stand bang in the middle of Headquarters and shout: ‘I’m going because I fucking well want to’, but don’t slip out the back, as if you owed something, because you don’t owe anybody anything, do you?”
“Well, I’m happy for your sake, Conde,” commented Andrés, looking at the hands he devoted three times a week to cutting open abdomens and sickly voice boxes, with a view to repairing what could be and excising and ditching what was worn out and useless. “I’m glad one of us is prepared to call a day on this load of shit and sit it out and wait for whatever shows up.”
“A hurricane,” whispered the Count, taking another gulp, but his friend carried on, as if he hadn’t heard him.
“Because you know we are a generation that obeyed orders and that is our sin and our crime. First, our fathers gave us orders, to be good students and citizens. We were ordered around at school, also to make us be good, and then we were ordered to work where they wanted us to work. But nobody ever thought to ask us what we wanted: we were ordered to study in the school they thought best, to pursue the degree it was our duty to get, to work at the job it was our duty to do, and the orders kept coming, nobody ever asked us fucking once in our damned lives if that was what we wanted. Everything was pre-planned, wasn’t it? From playschool to the spot in the cemetery assigned for us, everything decided for us, and they didn’t even ask what disease we wanted to die of. That’s why we are a pile of shit, because we don’t dream, we just exist to carry out our orders . . .”
“Hey now, Andrés, don’t exaggerate,” said Skinny Carlos, trying to salvage a crumb of comfort, as he poured himself more rum.
“What do you mean ‘don’t exaggerate’? Weren’t you ordered to the war in Angola? Wasn’t your life fucked up and you stuck in that shitty chair because you were a good little boy who always said yes? Did you ever dream of saying you wouldn’t go? They told us that historically we had to obey and you didn’t even think to refuse, Carlos, because they always taught us to say yes, yes, yes . . . And as for this fellow – ” he pointed at Rabbit, who had performed the miracle of hiding his teeth and for once seemed really serious at the threat of the imminent lethal salvo – “apart from playing with history and changing women every six months, what has he done with his life? Where the fuck are the history books he was going to write? At what point did he give up on everything he said he wanted to be and never got to be in his life? Don’t piss me off, Carlos, at least grant me the right to believe my life is a disaster . . .”
Skinny Carlos, who had long since ceased to be skinny, looked at Andrés. The friendship existing between them had been cementing for twenty years and there were very few secrets between them. But recently something had turned in Andrés’s brain. That man they’d first admired when he was the best college baseball player, applauded by all his comrades, with the manly merit of losing his virginity to a woman so beautiful, so crazy and so desirable that they all would have loved to give up everything, even their lives, to her. The very same Andrés who would become the successful doctor they’d all consult, the only one who had managed an enviable marriage, two children included, and had been privileged to have his own house and private car, was now revealing himself as a man full of frustrations and rancour, which embittered him and poisoned the atmosphere around him. Because Andrés wasn’t happy, was dissatisfied with his lot and made sure all his friends knew it: something in the projects he held most dear had failed, and his path in life – like all of theirs – had taken predetermined undesirable turnings to which they’d never consented as individuals.
“All right, let’s assume you are right.” Carlos nodded resignedly, drinking a long draught and then adding: “But you can’t live thinking like that.”
“Why not, wild man?” the Count intervened, puffing out smoke and recalling that afternoon’s alcoholic suicidal impulses.
“Because then you have to accept it’s all a load of shit.”
“And isn’t it?”
“You know it isn’t, Conde,” declared Carlos, looking at the ceiling from his wheelchair. “Not everything, right?”
He collapsed on his bed, head thick with alcoholic vapours and Andres’s lament for a generation. Lying there, he started to undress and throw each garment on the floor. He could already predict the headache he would have at daybreak, a just punishment for his excesses, but he felt his mind racing along enjoyably, strangely active, spawning ideas, memories and obsessions endowed with a feverish fleshly quality. With a supreme physical effort, he abandoned his bed and went to the bathroom in search of the analgesics that could thwart his recurrent migraine. He reckoned two would suffice, and dissolved them in water. He then walked to the lavatory, where he piddled a weak, amber trickle that splashed on the bowl’s already stained edges and made him consider the proportions of his member: he’d always suspected that it was on the small side and now he was certain – pitifully so – after the strip show he’d offered his friends that evening. But mentally he shrugged his shoulders at its nonimportance, for, even as it was, the currently moribund strip of meat had always been an effective companion to his binary or solitary erotic outings, even rising up rapidly when necessity
required it to be on a war footing. Ignore those sons of bitches, he told it, looking at it head on, right in the eye: don’t feel pathetic, because you’re a good’un, aren’t you? And he gave it a last shake.
He was pleasantly surprised when he realized he didn’t have to go to work the following day, and, lungs full of the air of freedom and cigarette smoke, he decided to waste no more time in that lonely bed. You are going to change your life now, Mario Conde, he reproached himself, and decided on a useful wakefulness. The exercise of independence was one of the privileges of his new situation. He quickly went into the kitchen and put a flame under the coffee pot, ready to drink his morning infusion in order to trick his body and restore the energy necessary for what he wanted to do: sit down and write. But what the fuck are you going to write? Well, about what Andrés said: he would write a story of frustration and deceit, of disenchantment and futility, of the pain of discovering you had taken the wrong turning at every point, whether you were to blame or not. That was the great experience of his generation, which was so secure and well nourished that it grew with every year, and he concluded it would be good to put it in black and white, as the only antidote against the most pathetic oblivion of all and as a practical way of reaching once and for all the diffuse kernel of that whole unequivocal equivocation: when, how, why and where had it all begun to fuck up? How much were they each to blame, if at all? How much was he? He sipped his coffee slowly, now seated in front of the white sheet, bitten by the platen of his Underwood, and realized it would be hard to transmute those certainties and experiences, twisting in his gut like worms, into the squalid and moving story he needed to tell. A tranquil story like that of the man who tells a child about the habits of the bananafish and then blows his brains out because he can’t find anything better to do with his life. He looked at the unpolluted paper, and realized that his desires alone wouldn’t suffice to defeat that eternal eight and half by thirteen inch challenge into which the chronicle of an entire wasted life should fit. He needed an illumination like Josefina’s, able to provoke the poetic miracle of extracting something new from a daring mix of lost, forgotten ingredients. And so he started to think of the hurricane again, still only visible in the newspaper: something like that was necessary, ravaging and devastating, purifying and righteous, for someone like him to regain the possibility of being himself, myself, yourself, Mario Conde, and for that deferred state to be resurrected that could beget a little beauty or pain or sincerity on to that mute, empty, defiant paper, where he finally wrote, as if overcome by an irrepressible ejaculation: “The youth slumped to the ground, as if pushed, and rather than pain he felt the millenary stench of rotten fish issue forth from that grey, alien land.”
“What are you doing here, Manolo?” asked the Count when he opened the door to see the unexpected, skeletal face of Sergeant Manuel Palacios, his companion in detection over recent years.
Something about his face revealed a state of shock – the squinting eye more lost than ever behind an ample nostril – and the Count knew immediately that his own face was the cause.
“You ill, Conde?”
“Like hell I’m ill. I was up writing all night,” he replied, and felt an aesthetic well-being as he offered that explanation: he imagined the marinated bags under his eyes and the exhausted eyelids, but was happy to have the poetic justification, even if it wasn’t altogether true: various badly scarred sheets of paper were the only real fruits of hours of application.
“Ah, so you’re back on that track. So be it,” declared the sergeant, wagging a finger at him.
“And might one enquire what brings you here?”
Manolo smiled sweetly.
“I came to get you.”
“But I left the force three days ago.”
“That’s what you think. The new boss says he wants to you to come in and discuss your departure with him.”
“Tell him I can’t today, tell him I’m writing.”
Manolo smiled, broadly this time. “He told me not to accept any excuses.”
“And what will they do to me if I don’t go? Kick me out of the police?”
“Or put you inside, for lack of respect. That’s what he said . . .” went on Manolo, spelling out the details of his orders before finally finding his own voice. “Do you really want out, Conde?”
“Yes, I really do. Come in, I’ll make us some coffee.”
They sat in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to percolate, while Manolo recounted recent events at Headquarters. Only eleven out of sixteen detectives remained and it was like an angry hornets’ nest. The files of all those who still survived were under review yet again, and there was talk of a fresh round of interrogations of each and every one of them: it was a merciless hunt to the death, as if someone had decreed the necessary extinction of a dispensable species.
“And what’s the line on Major Rangel?”
“That he did nothing, and that’s why he’s guilty. I don’t think he’s been back there, but I heard he’ll be retired with full honours.”
“He won’t want that kind of honour,” rasped the Count.
Finally, Manolo related, the new chief had gathered them together that morning to ask them to make an effort until the situation returned to normal. What was happening at Headquarters didn’t stop life on the outside from going on the same – more or less the same, perhaps worse – and all manner of crimes were being committed . . .
“It never will be normal,” said the Count, pouring out two big cups of coffee. “At least as far as I’m concerned.”
“But come with me, Conde, talk to him and then do what you want. Don’t throw overboard what you’ve achieved in ten years. Didn’t you like people saying you were the best detective at Headquarters? Don’t fuck about, Conde, show them what you’re made of . . .”
“And what do I get out of it, Manolo?”
The sergeant looked at his friend and attempted a smile. They knew each other too well and the Count was perfectly well aware of the scares Manolo had suffered in the recent months of investigations, purges and expulsions, during which they’d all been questioned several times, and the most unexpected hares had been flushed out: colleagues of twenty years, bitter mutual betrayals, old policemen beyond suspicion revealed to be outright scoundrels, cases buried under incredible piles of loot, favours exchanged for the most unlikely goods: from a youthful, throbbing sex to a university degree awarded to someone who never went to class, via a simple handshake from Somebody able to repay a favour at an opportune moment, and the fuse was still lit, apparently set to burn everybody in its path. Manolo looked at the Count, downed his coffee and gave the best possible reply: “You get to leave without being kicked out. You get to leave the shit smelling of roses. You get respect. And you get a bonus when they find out that Major Rangel wasn’t wrong about you . . . or me.”
The image conjured up of the lonely Major, gazing at the twilight in the backyard of his house, in his slippers, smoking a long cigar and deciding on the best way to spend his enforced leisure, once more shook the Count’s sensibilities. After working so hard the man didn’t deserve an end like that.
“All right, I’m coming . . . but tell me just one thing: Where’s Felix got to today?”
“Felix? Felix who, Conde?”
“Felix, the hurricane, my friend.”
“How the hell should I know”
Manolo shook his head after drinking the last drop of coffee.
“What kind of policeman are you if you don’t even know where that bastard has got to! You’re a disaster. Manolo . . .”
He could be forty-five. Maybe slightly older. The grey hair aged him, but his smooth waxen face – mulatto white or bleached-white mulatto, carefully, even frenetically shaven – suggested a subtraction might be in order. He sported a uniform that looked made to measure by a tailor and not off the peg: the bolero, neatly shaped to his chest, descended over his flat belly to cover the belt to his fine cotton, elegantly hanging trousers, which were
in the wrong time and place . . . And then there was the smell: he wore a delicate but very definite scent, creating around him a dry, manly, exquisite aura ten inches from his oh-so-stylishly uniformed silhouette. As he observed him, the Count thought this man could lead him to bury all his prejudices : he had expected to meet an ogre, not this fragrant, preening fellow; he had wanted to see a despot who refused to grant him his independence and found a man of pacific mien; he was sure he was going to meet an irate prosecutor in the spot now filled by this human being ready to disarm him with a smile and a question: “Do you smoke, Lieutenant? Ah, good, so I can smoke as well,” and he took a cigar out of his export box of H. Upmanns, after first offering one to Mario Conde.
“Thanks, Colonel.”
“Colonel Molina. I’m Alberto Molina . . . But please take a seat, as I think you and I have lots to talk about. But first let me order two coffees.”
“Lieutenant, I don’t think you slept very well last night, did you . . .? Well, I can tell you I didn’t. I tossed and turned in bed till my wife got angry because I wouldn’t let her sleep and she sent me to the living room. I threw the bedspread on the floor and started to think about everything that’s happening and the situation they’ve landed me in. Because to be honest I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to go through with it. I almost think I can’t . . . And it’s very disagreeable to know one is replacing an officer like Major Rangel, the man in the country who knows most about investigations, trials and the work you people do. And I don’t. You know where I come from? From the Executive for the Analysis of Military Intelligence, and that has nothing in common with what you do. And you know something else? For years I dreamed of being a spy. But a real spy, not like the ones in John Le Carré novels, who seem genuine but are only fictional. It seemed the best possible future, and I spent twenty years with this dream, office-bound, processing what the real spies found out: in a word, I was the bureaucrat who seemed like a character out of Le Carré . . . But if you start playing this game, you soon learn you’re obliged to obey orders, Lieutenant, and when you’re under orders, you have no choice but to belt up and obey. That’s why I’m here and not in Tel Aviv or New York, and that’s why I decided to talk to you, for it can’t be through choice that you have such a reputation as a detective, although there is the odd rumour . . . Not that these things bother me, I swear: I didn’t come here to judge anyone, but to ensure things keep working more or less the same way they did under Major Rangel . . . The others out there have come to pass judgement, and let me tell you that I, personally, deeply regret that several of your companions have done the things they did and provoked the investigations that led to all this and to Rangel losing his post. And though I regret it, I fully understand the need to proceed in this way: because a corrupt policeman is the worst of criminals, and I think we must be agreed on that, mustn’t we? The fact is that recently the most peculiar things have been happening . . . Besides, Lieutenant, if you ask to be discharged in the middle of all this business it may give rise to suspicions, and you should be aware of that. Although I must say I’m not here to suspect anyone and that’s why I want to hear your reasons for asking to be discharged. This place is no longer what I imagined it to be, although it should continue to be what it used to be: a headquarters for criminal investigations, and that’s precisely why I’ve called you in. Right now I’ve got all the detectives on the payroll, old and new, on some job or other, and I need you, Lieutenant. And you won’t think what I’m about to say is very orthodox; I brought you in to offer a straightforward deal: solve this case for me and I’ll sign you off . . . Please don’t imagine for one minute that I’m using your discharge as blackmail: let’s say rather that I’m compelling you to help me, because I need your assistance now and because you know that if I don’t sign the paper here on my desk, you won’t be discharged for several months . . . I told you I didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t I? I should tell you that the truth is it was your fault I didn’t sleep properly: I couldn’t think how to suggest something to you that might sound like blackmail and persuade you in the nicest possible way to take on this specific case. So I decided the best thing was to be completely frank with you . . . But first of all I’ll run through the case and you can say yea or nay, and we’ll see what happens, because although you’re hearing me being so polite and calm, I can also dig my heels in and make things difficult. Believe me . . . The problem is that on Saturday night they found a man’s corpse, a Cuban with US citizenship who’d come to visit his family . . . A real problem, you know? The man went out for a drive by himself on Thursday evening in his brother-in-law’s car; he’d said he wanted to see a bit of Havana, and that was the last that was seen of him, he didn’t appear until eleven p.m. Saturday when some fishermen found the corpse on Goat Beach, at the exit to the bay tunnel. You with me? According to the forensic, the man was dead before he was thrown into the sea, a blow to the head from a blunt instrument. He died of a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage. From the nature of the blow, the forensic thinks the object could have been something like a baseball bat, one of the old wooden sort . . . So far, so reasonably mysterious and politically complicated, but one can’t overlook a detail that makes things even more difficult: the dead man’s penis and testicles had been cut off, evidently with a blunt kitchen knife . . . What do you think, then? Doesn’t the story grab you? Of course, it must be revenge, but we have to prove it and find the guilty party, before the scandal blows up in Miami and the government’s accused of doing the evil deed. Because the man who died from several blows to the head, the man whose genitals were mutilated comes with a name and a history: he was Miguel Forcade Mier, and in the sixties he was deputy head of the Provincial Office for Expropriated Property, and national deputy director for Planning and the Economy until he stopped off in Madrid in 1978, on his way back from the Soviet Union . . . Now, doesn’t this case really grab you?”
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