“I stayed at home waiting for Fermín, who arrived at nine fifteen, and I talked to him as if nothing had happened. What he wanted to tell me before his brother-in-law got there was simple: if what we were about to take out of Cuba was really worth several million, there was no reason to share them with Miguel Forcade, because after all he must have stolen it when he worked for Expropriated Property. Of course, I said yes to everything, without letting on I knew about the painting, and then at ten Fermín began to ring to find out why Miguel hadn’t come, and when he didn’t show he decided to leave at about ten thirty.
“My problem was how to get a corpse out of my house. The only way I could think of was Fermín’s car and I called Miriam. She told me where she’d left it and that she’d thrown the keys in a rubbish container on the corner. I waited till midnight and went to Old Havana and when I saw the street was empty I shifted the things in the container and got the keys, drove the car to my house and removed the body from the outhouse and wrapped sacks around it. You know what most upset me? The way the son of a bitch smelled of shit and the way the stench stuck to my hands. You know, I think I can still smell it . . .”
The Count, who had been imagining the stages in the tragedy Adrian Riverón was now relating, quickly put the rest together: a corpse swathed in sacks, dragged to the garage, placed in the car boot . . . What about the castration?
“And why did you mutilate him before throwing him into the sea?”
“I don’t know. I think I thought I could put you lot off the scent if the corpse appeared . . . It came out of the blue, but it was if I’d had the idea in the back of my mind for years, because I enjoyed doing it,” he said, and squashed the ash of his cigarette, which had been burning his fingers. “Then I drove the car back to Old Havana, gave it a thorough clean and left it where you found it. And I went home and went to bed . . . May I have another cigarette?”
“Help yourself,” said the Count, who could hear the powerful whistle of the wind through the window.
It seemed the hurricane had arrived. And he looked up at the sky, over the church tower, afraid he might see a nun fly by.
“Adrian, everything you did was very intelligent . . . What I don’t understand is why you kept the bat . . .”
The man coughed, as he took another cigarette and lifted it to his lips. When he went to light up, he hesitated, as if ashamed by what he was doing.
“I’d owned that bat for twenty years . . . Miriam gave it to me as a present when we got engaged and it was in the bedroom because I’d just showed it to her . . . I couldn’t throw it out, could I?”
“I think I understand. But I’m not sure if Miriam would . . . Look, keep those cigarettes and smoke if you want,” whispered the Count as he left his cubicle.
He switched off his recorder just as Adrian Riverón was declaring “I couldn’t throw it out” and he contemplated Miriam’s eyes and saw they were still beautiful, with that diffuse, changing colour, dominated by poisonous lashes that had been the ruination of two men. But her eyes were too dry.
“The bit I saw was as Adrian described it. I don’t know about the rest,” she affirmed, and the Count was not surprised she was still the strong, confident woman he’d been struggling with for three days. That was why he looked at Manolo to deal the final blow.
“Are you sure you two didn’t plan to kill your husband in order to make off with the painting?” began the sergeant, bending over in his chair so his face almost struck Miriam’s.
“No, because I was going to separate from him . . . as soon as I had the painting.”
“Which turned out to be fake.”
“Yes, he deceived me over the painting as well.”
“And why did you try to make us suspicious of your brother Fermín?”
“Because he was innocent. You wouldn’t be able to implicate him, and that would give me time to leave and then it would difficult for you to think of Adrian.”
“But you already knew about the gold Buddha?”
“How many times do I have to tell you I didn’t. Miguel deceived me because he trusted no one. Or haven’t you realized he didn’t have a single friend?”
“The poor man,” whispered the Count, and fell back into the requisite silence.
“And what did you and Riverón expect to live on in the United States?”
“On the money he’d get from what we were going to take out of Cuba . . . from the painting. But in the end I wasn’t particularly worried. I was going to leave Miguel even if it meant sleeping under a bridge. Nobody can imagine what it’s like to live with a man like that . . . It’s a pity it’s all turned out like this.”
“Who’s it a pity for?” the Count interjected, unable to restrain himself.
“For Adrian . . . and for me.”
And the policeman saw the armour of a thousand skirmishes fall from Miriam’s shoulders, the woman with the perverse eyes. She was now going to cry, from her own eyes and with real reason. And it would be better if she did cry a lot, and bellowed if she wanted to, at the loss of her last chance to be happy.
“Let her be, Manolo,” said the lieutenant, bored. “Let her cry. It’s the best thing she can do.”
He had to run and lock himself in the bathroom. He turned on the tap in the washbasin and watched the water flow crystalline and pure, before putting his hands in the jet and wetting his face, again and again, in an attempt to wipe away the oppressive filth and angst: the knowledge that he’d just witnessed the definitive collapse of several lives had provided him with the most glaring evidence of why he hadn’t been able to write that squalid and moving story he’d been dreaming of for years: his real experiences instinctively headed elsewhere, far from beauty, and he realized he should first rid himself of his frustrations and hatred if he was ever to be – or had been – able to engender something beautiful. It was only then that he grasped the realm of fear that prevented him from letting rip on paper, from making real, alive, independent, and perhaps everlasting, the dark flow of lava that had swept away his life and his friends’, and transformed them into what they were: less than nothing, nothing at all, nothingness itself. Candito was right: cynicism had become the antibody that allowed him to carry on, and Andrés had also discovered his double-think: irony, alcohol, sadness and a few doses of scepticism provided a carapace, while the rationale he had fabricated for his inability to write what he wanted served as a soothing, enduring wall of self-deception.
Finally he dared look up and contemplate himself in the mirror: once again he didn’t like what he saw. It wasn’t his face, which was beginning to line; nor his hair, beginning to thin out; nor his teeth, beginning to yellow: nor any of those first signs of predictable decline, but the feeling that the end was already cast in stone, and a painful conviction: only a miracle could bring him back to his true path – if miracles existed, and if that path existed – and only one decision could set him on the road to redemption: we’re either saved or fucked together: he just had to write, squeeze the seed, lance the boil, empty his intestines, spit out the bitter saliva, execute that radical operation, begin to be himself.
He didn’t think about it: his cupped hands splashed water over the mirror and his image became elusive and difficult to retain: transfigured and blurred, with no definite outline and always half hidden, that had been his real face, the policeman’s face he’d been showing to the world for the last ten years: and with it he must finish this story of ambition and hate, until he could finally relinquish the shards of that battered carapace.
The Count looked at his watch again: now it indicated five twenty-five.
“Please forgive me, Colonel. I promised I’d deliver the case at five ten and I’m fifteen minutes late. But the fact is the typewriter ribbon jammed.”
“Is everything here?” asked the new chief of Headquarters, licking his lips, and Mario handed him the folder of preliminary case-findings.
“All that’s missing is the authentication certificate for the Buddha. Th
e people at Patrimony need to seek more advice, but it is definitely gold, Chinese and pretty old. And also worth much more than the five million Miguel told everybody.”
“But that’s incredible, over five million,” responded Colonel Molina, laughing nervously.
His new boss, thought the Count, was no doubt already savouring the congratulations that he would receive for his evident efficiency as a leader of efficient criminal investigators.
“Are you pleased?”
“Of course I am, Lieutenant. I’ve very happy I wasn’t mistaken when I sent for you and gave you all the freedom you required for this case. It seems incredible: in three days you discovered a fake painting, you found a sculpture that had been lost for forty years and which is worth millions and millions and you even solved the story of a murder that at the end of the day had nothing to do with the sculpture worth millions.
“I’d hardly say that,” suggested the Count.
“Well, not directly,” agreed the Colonel, smiling again.
If I call his mother a whore, he’ll split his sides, thought the Count and went on the offensive.
“Now I hope you’ll keep your promise, as I did mine.”
Alberto Molina’s broad smile faded quickly.
“But, Lieutenant, have you thought it through? I think your future lies here,” and his gesture, which indicated the boss’s office, rapidly extended, to other less specific limits within the building. “You’ve shown me what an excellent policeman you are, and I’m going to promote you here and now.”
“Don’t harp on, Colonel. I want my release, not a promotion. I’m done with all this.”
And Molina still couldn’t understand.
“But why?”
The Count mentally fanned out before him the possible reasons and decided to select the least aggressive.
“I just don’t like solving cases like this one: the most innocent character in the whole story is the one who will rot in jail . . . First, I’m fed up with wallowing in shit, lies and deception. Second, I can’t stand the idea that half the police who were my colleagues for ten years, including people I really believed in, have been kicked out, rightly or wrongly. Third, I want a house by the sea, where I can start to write. I want to write a story that is squalid and moving.
“Squalid?”
“And moving” added the Count, elaborating. “Because I want to speak of love between men. That’s what I want. Over to you, Colonel.”
“I swear by my mother I really don’t understand you. Love between men, Lieutenant?”
Molina left the folder on his desk and preened his magnificent officer’s jacket. He edged round his desk and opened the centre drawer.
“Here you are,” he said, and opened out the sheet of paper on to the table.
The other stood up and grasped it. He read the opening sentences and felt satisfied, but he continued to the end: Lieutenant Mario Conde was granted the discharge he had requested for personal reasons, and it stated, in the second paragraph, that he had shown an exemplary attitude in ten years of service, demonstrating through his efficiency that he had been the best detective at Headquarters and an excellent work colleague, among other praises sung single-spaced. The Count swallowed, he didn’t know if it was because he felt emotional or full of doubt, and dared to ask: “Colonel, why did you write these things about me?”
“Which things?” came his reply.
“The stuff under the granting of permission . . .”
Molina smiled again and flopped into his comfortable armchair.
“Did you notice the date on the letter?”
The Count looked and understood even less.
“It says October 4, and it’s the 9th today . . .”
“Yes, it says the 4th. Did you look at the signatures?”
He glanced back at the paper and couldn’t believe what he saw: there, on that same horizontal line, sat the signatures of Colonel Alberto Molina and Major Antonio Rangel. No, that was impossible, he thought.
“When you told me you were going to hand in your file on the crime solved within the hour, I realized it was a pity to lose you as a policeman, but that I had no right to hold on to you. I thought it through, took a decision and went to see Major Rangel to ask him to write this letter, backdated a week, and for it to carry two signatures. You owe the praise to him. My role was to grant you the discharge that you’d asked for.”
The Count was taken aback: flattery came his way very rarely and that sweet-smelling colonel, in cahoots with the Boss, was praising him and had even managed to move him. So he had been a good policeman, had he?
“Thanks, Colonel,” he said, and began to prepare his best salute, knowing it would never satisfy the rules and regs. For fuck’s sake, he said to himself, stretching his hand over the desk, ready to make a run for it. Like Miriam, though for different reasons, the Count wanted to cry.
Wanted to, really: and from his own eyes.
Violins accompanied the oboe, pianissimo, bathed dreamily in the agony of the passage, before yielding to the vigorous instrumental crescendo and choir rapturously singing Schiller’s verses to joy. By some phonetic or poetic miracle, the German voices were not at all the harsh growl usually associated with that language, and they grew into an expansive cantata that, like few human creations, succeeded in communicating, in an ecstatic epiphany, the feeling of life, the certainty of hope and possibility of optimism: for the first time the Count thought that ode was like a primitive song to fruitfulness, an invocation to the hidden gods of heaven and earth in order to gain their favour.
His eyes turned towards the garden: the old man, Alfonso Forcade, seemed impervious to the music booming out from the cassette recorder perched on the iron bench, at maximum volume so it reached the remotest corner of that arbour. Nonetheless, as the Count observed him more leisurely, he noticed slight tremors in the neck of the old man, who naturally carried within him the whole chorus and orchestra, perhaps under the orders of Beethoven himself: Forcade tried to communicate his own emotion to the plants, to make them share in the redeeming spirit. That was why the Count waited for the choir to end before he interrupted the concert.
“You like Beethoven?”
“They like him . . . As well as Wagner, Mozart and Vivaldi. It is well known that wheat is particularly sensitive to the sonatas of Bach. And no secret that plants grow and produce more when they are given symphonic music to listen to.”
“Wouldn’t it be a cruel shame if the hurricane put an end to all this?”
“No, you are quite wrong. Nature is never cruel, because she doesn’t know how to be. Cruelty is a sad privilege of human beings. That is why the pre-Hispanic cultures of the Caribbean personified the hurricane and gave it a human figure. For them it was the terrible god of the Tempest, and they called it ‘hurracane’, ‘yurricane’ or ‘yoracane’, according to their dialect, but in each and every case the word meant Malign Spirit, more or less what the devil is to Christians, and that’s why they gave songs and dances as peace-offerings . . . as I’m doing now . . . The fact these disasters occur never ceases to be regrettable: perhaps tomorrow all of this garden that I have planted and tended for nigh on thirty years will be gone. That also makes one want to weep.”
Leaning on his wooden crutches, old Forcade got up and walked slowly between the garden paths where a threatening breeze was already rising, and Mario Conde puffed on his cigarette. The policeman waited for the symphony to finish before telling him how the investigation had ended. He didn’t seem overly surprised by the news that his son had died at the hands of Adrian Riverón and because of Miriam. Perhaps he mind-read one of them? wondered the Count, knowing that any answer would be unimportant. As a scientist, Dr Forcade knew Miguel’s death was irreversible and merely commented: “Do you know something? I was right to let you do the thinking, because you’re much more intelligent than I am . . . I thought Miriam might have done the whole lot . . . And look who it was, the poor man. Well, I’m glad I was able to be of
some help. And that justice has been done. May God be merciful . . .”
Then they began to walk slowly back to the wrought-iron bench, as if making a final tour of a landscape that would be definitively different after the god of the Winds had passed by.
“At the end of the day these plants and I will suffer the same experience: that is where we surely share the same destiny of birth and death. What is terrible is to see the beings one has begat and loved die before oneself.”
The Count felt a desire to remind him that there were many other differences between Miguel and those plants, but concluded it would be too cruel on his part. A privilege of human nature. And he also thought how Alfonso Forcade knew precisely what manner of man his son had been. And then decided to think no more: the old man might read his thoughts again.
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