Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  “But this is madness . . .”

  “No, it’s just a hunch,” retorted the Count, and he pointed Adrian Riverón to one of his own armchairs. “Manolo, you talk to him and see if he has anything useful to say,” added the lieutenant and, when the neighbours came, he explained the reasons for the search and went into the house followed by Crespo and el Greco.

  “What are we looking for, Conde?” El Greco seemed confused and the lieutenant stopped in his tracks. He looked at the policeman, remained silent for a few seconds, then responded: “Whatever, how do I know? Something useful for making a secret departure, but above all a sign that Miguel Forcade was here the day he was killed.”

  “But what might that be, Conde?”

  “I told you, whatever, for fuck’s sake. Let’s just take a look and forget everything else. Use your heads . . . Oh, and see if you can find a box of cigars.”

  While his helpers searched the garage, the Count started on Riverón’s bedroom. He looked in the wardrobe, under the bed, and reviewed a few books of socialist economics somnolently gathering dust on a small bookcase, as abandoned as the planned ideal they had proposed for their real, near, dialectically historical future. Then he opened the chest of drawers: Adrián Riverón was an organized man despite his prolonged bachelordom, and the Count envied a quality he had never possessed. Pullovers, underpants and handkerchiefs were clean and neatly folded, and his socks were inside each other, like small soft balls. Towels and sheets were also clean and neatly folded, looked almost ironed, and the envious policeman greeted them with a look of displeasure, noticing a slight shininess at the bottom of the second drawer. He lifted the linen up and took out two disturbing and conflicting photographs: the bigger one was a black and white enlargement of a young couple at what must have been a coming-of-age birthday party: she, wearing a long, lacy, light-coloured dress, already stared with the provocative eyes that had stirred the Count’s fear and desire. By Miriam’s side – green fruit, but already edible at fifteen – smiled her dancing partner, a pitifully thin Adrian Riverón, hair combed over forehead and growing down under his ears, stuffed into the worst cut, even worse worn suit Mario Conde had ever clapped eyes on. Everything was ingenuous, youthful, distant and even slightly squalid in that photo of lost innocence. But the other snapshot was raucous and risqué: there, in full-colour, on card three by two, was a naked Miriam, looking slightly surprised at the camera she’d perhaps set up herself. The woman lay there, lifting her arms over her head to secure a more provocative pose and project her breasts more pointedly, breasts crowned by nipples that exceeded the Count’s wildest imaginings. At the same time, her legs were slightly parted to reveal to the eyes of the recipient the dramatic darkness of her sex. I knew it, thought the Count, this fucking piece isn’t blonde, and he turned over the card and read: TILL I’M YOURS AGAIN IN FLESH AND BLOOD. YOUR MIRIAM, and at the bottom a date: 12 – 7 – 84. He couldn’t avoid taking another look at the woman who had undressed for the photo and thought it was a pity he hadn’t had better opportunities with her: she was food for the gods without a doubt, as the progressive hardening he felt between his legs told him, forcing him to turn the photos over and leave them on the bed, feeling he’d peeped through a keyhole at an act of rapturous love meant for someone else.

  “Nothing in the garage, Conde,” announced Crespo, and got the reply, “One of you go to the kitchen and the other to the bathroom.”

  He went out in search of the back door, and, when he saw Adrian, he commented: “A pretty set of photos,” and carried on to the patio, imagining what the fellow must be thinking.

  There was a covered terrace at the back of the house, with a clothes sink, and a small cupboard for cleaning tools. The rest of the patio had been covered in cement, except for two circles of earth where clumps of seemingly ancient mangos were growing. There was a small shed against the back wall separating Adrian’s patio from his neighbours’ that the Count supposed must be ideal for storing tools and things for use in the house. An open padlock, hanging from a ring, alerted him to the possibility that something of value might be kept there and the policeman took a deep breath before going in. There he saw shelves as well organized as the bedroom drawers, with boxes for nails, clips, parts for the plumbing and electricity: what you’d expect in a place like that. In one corner he found two gloves and a baseball helmet. So he was a baseball player as well, he thought and couldn’t stop himself picking up one of the gloves, putting it on his hand and hitting it against the other, as if he were anticipating some really big hits. Feeling nostalgia aroused by memories of his happy days as a street baseball player, the lieutenant put the glove back in its place and crouched down to see what was in some jute bags, when the two policeman came up behind him.

  “Zilch, zilch to filch: not even a cigar,” quipped el Greco and the Count turned round to look at him from where he was crouching.

  “So, you’ll be filching zilch, as usual. Well, it seems there’s no lead here. The bags contain stuffing for cushions,” he confessed, standing up, feeling the threat of defeat deal a blow to his knees.

  After all it didn’t make much sense for anything to turn up there linking Miguel and his death to Adrian Riverón – beyond the links to be drawn from those nostalgia-provoking photos, real desire and hatred, and the gloves, which betrayed a dangerous liking for baseball shared with millions of Cubans – so his painful hunch would have to contain itself till it found richer pastures. But which ones? He couldn’t see any offering themselves and quaked at the idea of having to shut himself up with Miriam – now he knew her better and could testify to her state as an apocryphal, almost pornographic blonde – or with Fermín and Gómez de la Peña to find some light at the end of the tunnel, he thought, as he abandoned that small room and grabbed the door in order to shut it behind him.

  “Wait a minute, Conde,” said el Greco, who took one look in the room and then stared at his boss: “What was the instrument the forensic said the dead man was beaten with?”

  The Count looked at him and the pain from his hunch vanished as if by magic, for the words spoken by that lad were like the wave of a wand and he would put him forward as the Most Intelligent Policeman of the Month, so that the Union would place him on its wall display for labour rewards and bear him in mind for the next handout of electrical goods: yes, he deserved a freezer and a week on the beach that genius of a policeman who made him yell: “Fucking hell, Greco, have you seen the bat?”

  “Well, I can see a bat, Lieutenant: look up there,” replied the policeman and the Count looked up: between roof-tiles and iron beams there lay a wooden bat, crouching as conclusive as death itself.

  The last time Mario Conde had played baseball was at university. He was in the third year of his degree and, as usual, volunteered to be part of the worst baseball team in the whole history of Cuban university sport. It was as if the central-European scientific model for the planning of economic and social life proposed by Gómez de la Peña had also penetrated the hidden recesses of the student body, and it was considered necessary, one fine day, to restructure – yet again – the country’s universities and their faculties. That’s why one morning the School of Psychology, which had always been part of the science faculty, was transformed, through some mysterious administrative design, into an independent faculty, as rigorous as all the other university faculties. Then, in order to meet all the necessary norms and obligations, the faculty had to participate in the University Games with its own teams, in which inevitably the names of the same athletes cropped up again and again because of the lack of students matriculated in that new faculty, more renowned for its intellectual activities than its crude physical aptitudes. And that last year when the Count played baseball he also kept goal for the football eleven, defended for the basketball team, ran for the 4×400 relay team, as well as playing first base and third bat in the baseball team . . . The Count as third bat . . .! Because the Psychologists’ only sporting virtue was their enthusiasm: although they
were doomed to come last in almost all competitions, they were proud to hold aloft the Olympic motto that competing was more important than winning – for they almost never won; among other reasons because of the exhaustion their sportsmen accumulated over a week of non-stop action.

  The last day he played baseball, the Count felt he could hardly lift his arms up and failed three times with the bat when it was his turn at the end of the eighth innings and they were trailing two zero to the Philology Tigers. Because of a mistake, a base and a dead ball, the Count had a historic opportunity to enter the batter’s box with the possibility of an advantage at first base, even though two of his team were out and it was at that precise moment that he suffered one of his first memorable hunches: like all his colleagues, the Count now preferred to use one of those newfangled aluminium bats, which were considered more efficient and sturdier than the old wooden bats. But his hunch warned him that perhaps the old scorned bat made of green-veined majagua hardwood that nobody now used might be the only one able to achieve the miracle and save that last championship game – which, without his imagining it, would also be the last time he’d play. Before the astonished gaze of his colleagues and shouts of alarm from Skinny Carlos, who was still skinny and who almost hurled himself from the terraces to stop his friend committing such an idiocy, the Count slung his aluminium bat to the ground, went over to the bench for the wooden bat and got ready to bat. After passing on two hits, making no attempt to strike the ball, in spite of Skinny shouting, “Hit it, for fuck’s sake,” the Count looked towards Carlos and calmly executed the dramatic ritual he’d practised in his years as an amateur playing for fun: he asked the referee for some time, moved away from the home-plate, picked up some earth in one hand and spat in the other, rubbed them both together and wiped them on the backside of his trousers. After that he placed the blade of the bat between his legs and cleansed it of impurities, rubbing it on the material, before he spat once more on the ground and returned to the batter’s box, where he played out the final act of his mise en scène: he scratched his balls and looked Dog, the Philology Tigers’ best pitcher, in the face . . . Only someone whose wrists have felt the crisp thud of solid ball against compact wood, produced in a microfraction of a second, one that can send the white sphere flying amazing distances, is endowed with the understanding of what Mario Conde felt at that moment when he steadied himself, carried through his swing and the blade of the bat hit the ball and sent it hurtling into the far depths of the park on the right, so he could run like crazy round the bases, as if he hadn’t been doing baseball, football, basketball and athletics for almost twenty-four hours a day throughout the whole week, and calmly reach third base, to the jubilant cries of a skinny Carlos, who had thrown himself on the pitch shouting: “Fuck, what you need is real balls!” and hugged the Count’s three companions who had scored thanks to his great batting, which put the game at three – two in favour of the Psychologists, who finally won their only game the day Mario Conde played baseball for the last time, in the 1977 University Games.

  “So what’s the story on the bat?”

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios nodded and the Count felt a shiver run down his spine: the adrenalin hoping that that bat might tell the whole story, ending up in the hands of Adrian Riverón, a batter of forbidden balls, was similar to the adrenalin hoping the other guy would be guilty and not that useful suitor. Once again his policeman’s craft confronted him with the sordid evidence of human intrigue that transcended the limits of what was permissible and wrecked people’s lives for ever: and he started to function again as the choreographer of that performance, giving it a final structure, finding a sadly satisfactory end before the definitive fall of the curtain.

  “That was the bat,” said Manolo, flopping into the armchair where Miriam had been sitting.

  The sergeant, who was always alert, now seemed tired, bored or disappointed.

  “What’s the matter, Manolo?”

  “You’ve found Miguel Forcade’s killer. Now you’ll leave the force. Hey, is that really what you want to do?”

  “Uh-huh,” mumbled Mario Conde after a moment, and he tried to redirect the conversation. “What did they find in the laboratory?”

  “First of all, the fingerprints are all Riverón’s, so he was the only one to touch the bat. Secondly, the blood: although the blade of the bat was wiped with a cloth soaked in spirit, there were blood cells on the wood fibres. The blood group was O, the same as Forcade’s. Finally, other traces of blood were found on the bathroom floor that the water hadn’t washed away and they are also O, and it’s almost certain they belonged to the dead man.”

  The Count left his armchair to look out of the window: gusts of wind were beginning to comb the tops of the trees, as a precursor of worse evils to come. In the churchyard, on the other side of the street, skirts and coifs blowing in the wind, nuns were nailing planks on the doors to the holy precinct, to prevent the tentacles of the Evil One entering the Lord’s house in the form of rain and wind. This was an autumn landscape different from the one imagined by Matisse, in rational, measured Europe: the tropical sign of autumn had nothing in common with leaves that fell at a precise change in the seasons or light filtered through high clouds. The trees the Count could see never let go of their leaves if a force superior to gravity didn’t snatch them away, and the light in the country had only two real dimensions: either the intense blue of a clear sky, able to flatten objects and perspectives, or the deep grey of the storm, which mired the atmosphere and brought on nightfall. But the hurricane now pushing against the island’s southern coast, wanting to take it with her, was the most tragic climax to autumn in that part of the world where nature was dispensed in exaggerated measures: rain, wind, heat, thunder and waves, and where evergreen leaves only fell under the weight of those catastrophic arguments. It was a nature that periodically decided to demonstrate to man his inability to control her and warn of her infinite scope for revenge.

  “I don’t really understand why the asshole never got rid of the damned bat . . . Well, Adrian is well and truly fucked now,” was the verdict delivered by the Count, and he asked him to bring in the man who’d been Miriam’s first boyfriend, her great love for more than fifteen years, to ask him to tell the truth. A truth perhaps beyond fake pictures and authentic statues, and able to drive ambition and deceit: because Adrian had perhaps only killed for love. In the end the truth was pathetic.

  A pale and sweaty Adrian Riverón coughed as he always coughed, and asked the Count: “What do you want to know?”

  “You really don’t want a cigarette?”

  “I told you I never smoke . . .”

  “Just as well.”

  “Go on, tell me . . .”

  “No, you tell me: how and why did you kill him?”

  The man still found the energy to smile, and lifted up the packet, asking the lieutenant’s permission to take a cigarette. The Count nodded, with the knowledge that he was finally nearing the truth, and also raised a cigarette to his lips.

  “The fact is Miriam doesn’t like me smoking. It’s not good for me, you know. I had to give up rowing because of tobacco.” He paused, adding: “I killed him because he tried to hit Miriam.”

  “Don’t try to justify yourself, Adrian. I only require the truth, please.”

  “That is the truth: Miguel and Fermín were coming to my place at nine. Fermín spoke to me about possibly leaving the country on a motor launch, taking something out that would earn me in the region of a hundred thousand dollars in Miami. I agreed right away. And I told him I had two reasons: because if I went I could be near Miriam, and because, ever since Miguel Forcade threw me out of Planning, I’d never been able to lift my head in this country. It didn’t matter if afterwards Miguel defected to Spain or Gómez de la Peña was defenestrated: my file says I’m not to be trusted and no boss of any important enterprise will take a risk with me, do you understand? Well, you know what my line of business is . . . That was why I wasn’t bothered if I had
to deal with Miguel Forcade and see his cynical face again, if it was a means to get what I wanted.

  “But it seems my fate is marked by this man. If not, you tell me, how is it possible he gets to my place an hour early, on the very first day Miriam and I got together after so many years? All I can imagine is that he was coming to suggest a way to betray Fermín, because that was his style. The fact is Miriam knew we had the meeting with Miguel at nine, and as Fermín had arranged to be at my house at eight thirty to talk to me first, she thought if things got messy and her husband saw her there, she could always say she’d come with her brother. Consequently, when Miguel left to see Gómez, she came over here to my place and we went to bed after all these years . . . Because she was on a high now she’d finally found out what Miguel wanted to take out of Cuba.”

  “So she knew?”

  “No, she found out that day. For some time she’d been on at Miguel to get him to say what it was, and that afternoon, before going to see Gómez de la Peña, he finally told her they were going to take out a Matisse painting Gómez de la Peña had kept for him.”

  The Count couldn’t stop himself: he smiled.

  “The Matisse painting?”

  “Yes, one that Miguel had left that bastard . . .”

  “I’m more convinced by the day: Miguel Forcade was a man of many talents.”

  “He was just one big son of a bitch, Lieutenant.”

  “I already knew that. Carry on with your story, Adrian.”

  “That night Miriam swore that if I went to the United States she would leave Miguel, because she couldn’t stand any more of his depressions, his envy and even his impotence, and she proposed a real act of madness: that we should steal the painting after Miguel and Gómez had done their business. We were talking about that when Miguel knocked on the door . . . You know, when I saw it was him through the window, I felt my whole world collapse. It didn’t make any sense for him to find out Miriam was there, so I told her to hide in the bathroom until I thought of a way to get her out of the house, perhaps with Fermín’s help. But when I opened the door the first thing Miguel did was to ask me where the treacherous whore Miriam was; he pushed past me and went into the room. I don’t know if he’d been spying through the windows, or had heard her talking, I don’t know, but he knew she was with me, and he walked in shouting her name. And then something happened that made me see red, drove me mad, because the mere thought that Miguel might touch Miriam drove me crazy and I grabbed the bat in my room and shouted to him not to take another step. Then he tried to grab me and I hit him on the head. It was horrific: the guy fell to the ground and started to convulse, foaming at the mouth and pissing himself, but hardly losing any blood, until he started to go stiff and then still. Miriam had come out of the bathroom and saw the grand finale. We both stood there speechless for a time and she said the best thing would be to hide the body and act as if Miguel had never arrived. The first thing we decided was to hide him and she helped me take him to the outhouse and then she went off in Fermín’s car, which Miguel was using, and parked it in Old Havana.