“I need something from you…” And he saw his boss’s lips smile sceptically. “Don’t worry, it’s very simple. Have you smoked the Montecristo I gave you the other day?”
“Yes, why?” asked Rangel startled, finally turning to look at the Count.
“Where’s the butt?”
“Now what’s got into you, Mario?”
“I need that butt. I’ve got an idea…”
“You’ve got an idea. How strange… Look, it must be in the basket, they didn’t empty the rubbish yesterday,” said the Major, picking the wastepaper basket from the floor and exclaiming, “Here it is. Its thickness gave it away… Why do you need this, Conde?”
The lieutenant took the piece of cigar, which had been consumed as far as the Major took things. He observed how the end was chewed, half broken, and concluded that the Boss had enjoyed it, though while he was smoking he must have been anxious or upset to bite it like that.
“Give me half an hour, Major,” he pledged, and left the office, imitating Rangel holding a cigar.
“Don’t play games with me, Mario,” he heard as he left.
“Well, Conde, this is not definitive, but you could say the two cigars have the same origin. Steady on, that only means they’re made from a similar leaf, though it’s obvious they weren’t twisted by the same person. The one from the Woods is bigger, has a slightly tighter twist to it and appears to have been lit only once, because it’s accumulated less tar and nicotine round the mouth end, apart from being only half smoked, and that’s probably why it’s still got its band. No other clues. A little earth, that’s all. But remember, cigars made by more than one person may go into the same box, because they pack them as they come. But what I am sure of is that they’re a similar quality tobacco, the same harvest, I mean, though that means nothing.”
“Then I can’t say the two bastard cigars are brothers?”
The laboratory man looked at the Count and smiled: “But why make them relatives like that? They originated from the same place, period. But don’t ask me to say they’re brothers from the same leaf or plant.”
“And if I were to bring you more cigars from the same box, do you think you could be any surer?”
The laboratory man looked at the remains of the two cigars, their guts opened up as if for an autopsy.
“That could be really helpful.”
“Well, I’ll get some. When will you work till today?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be here till four, but if necessary, I can wait. Or what are friends for?”
The Count went into the corridor and walked down a flight of stairs to his cubbyhole. His prejudices kept digging at him and he wanted to make them reality as soon as possible. He entered his small office and found Manuel Palacios brandishing a piece of paper.
“Look at this, Conde: we’ve tracked down Salvador K.”
“I’d forgotten all about that insect. Where might he be?”
“He turned up in El Cerro. Living a new romance.”
“With a woman?”
“Almost, but not quite a woman. El Greco says he went and talked to him after they’d tracked him down; the rooster told him that since everybody knew about his thing with Alexis, he wasn’t going to hide any more and would live life as it should be lived. He says the guy seemed as happy as anything now he’d come out a swashbuckling queer. What do you reckon?”
“I think he’s the only one to have got something out of this mess, don’t you?”
“What shall we do? Bring him in?”
“Let him enjoy himself for the moment… Then we’ll see if we need to speak to him. But they should keep an eye on him.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Manolo, and he put the paper and the address away in a folder on the table on which was written in red, irregular letters: Alexis Arayan/Homicide/Open.
“Now let’s play our last card. Give me the telephone.”
The sergeant pushed the receiver over to the corner of the desk where the Count was and watched him dial, as he lit a cigarette.
“Maria Antonia?… Yes, Lieutenant Mario Conde here. How are you? Look, Maria Antonia, we need you to do us a favour… No, it’s very simple… We want to talk to you… No, no. I said talk, talk over a few things to do with Alexis, because we know you and he were very fond of each other and that you saw much more of him than Faustino or Matilde, right?… Yes, I’d also prefer it to be here. .. OK? I’ll send a car… Where? Uhuh, on the corner of Thirty-Second, of course… And, oh, Maria Antonia, I’d like to ask you another favour. Could you bring me a cigar from the box of Montecristos on the coffee table?”
“Thanks, Maria Antonia,” said the Count when the black woman opened her bag and gave him the cigar. He looked at it lingeringly, as if spellbound by the pale, polished beauty of an excellent cigar grown in Vueltabajo, and smiled as he handed it to Manuel Palacios. “Come in, please,” and he opened the door to his cubicle. Maria Antonia’s feet didn’t seem as light as usual; she had rather the wary tread of a hunted animal, and the Count imagined the doubts raining down on the woman’s consciousness, as she turned round to see if the door was closed. He felt pity for her again as he pointed her to a chair, talked to her about the heat in the street, the tranquil view he enjoyed from his cubicle window and how that was why he preferred it to the big offices that faced the other wing of the building, and finally asked her if she was married.
“No, single,” she replied; wearing a flowery Sunday dress, her bag on her knees, her hair gathered beneath an imitation silk scarf and lips painted blood-red, she seemed like an escapee from a scene in The Color Purple, thought the Count.
“And how long have you known the Arayan family?”
“From ’56, when I started to work for them. Matilde and Faustino had just married and at the time lived in Santos Suarez with Matilde’s mother, who was widowed. After the Revolution I decided to leave the house, I wanted to make a life for myself, quite away from them, and intended looking for another job, but the child was born and I developed an affection for him and kept postponing and postponing my departure, until four days ago, when this happened… Now I think I will leave, though I don’t know where I’ll go. As I’ve always lived with them, I don’t have a home, or a right to a pension… I’d have to go and live with my brother and that’s a real hell, with his wife, three children and who knows how many grandchildren.”
“Did you get on well with the Arayans?”
“Yes, Fabiola, Matilde’s mum, behaved very well towards me, and I loved the kid as if he were my own. For many years we three lived alone in the house, especially here in Miramar, when they began to give Faustino work outside Cuba. The boy spent more time with me and his grandmother than with his parents, and we went out a lot, to the cinema, the theatre, museums, because Fabiola had been a university teacher and was very cultured. Faustino says it’s our fault the way he turned out, well, you know how, but I swear I brought him up like my own child. The fact he was such a loving, helpless child, and that Faustino put so much pressure on him, threatened him a lot, even hit him more than once, I think it was Alexis’s way of taking his revenge on him. They had a very difficult relationship, for a father and son. They didn’t speak to each other for several years…”
“What do you think of Faustino?”
Maria Antonia looked for a pocket handkerchief in her bag and wiped the sweat from her top lip. The air in the cubicle was perfumed by a wave of that handkerchief, which made the Count feel even sorrier for her: the woman had assumed a perfectly aristocratic manner that seemed out of kilter with her submissive attitude in the Arayan household. How many of her real aspirations and aptitudes had she hidden for years, as she deferred her own life to be close to the child of another she’d adopted as her own?
“I don’t think it’s my place…” was her response, finally.
“Tell me something,” the lieutenant continued. “Nothing will go beyond these walls.”
“Well, what is there to tell? He’s somebo
dy in high favour with the government, you know, that’s why he travels so much, has been an ambassador and the like. He’s always behaved well towards me, although never like Fabiola or Matilde, you understand. And I never forgave him for the way he acted towards his son. The poor boy got to be afraid of his father. That’s why he left home. I was very, very happy, and we decided if he ever got his own house, I’d go and live with him.”
As he saw the tears running down Maria Antonia’s black cheeks, the Count thought the end of this soap would more than consume his Sunday quota of pity. He reproached himself for mistaking, in a flash judgement, the face of love for the mask of submission and tried to imagine the woman’s stellar solitude, her life lived at the wrong time and place, whose only reason to live was the strangled transvestite she’d reared and cared for like her own son. The Count stood up and let her cry: he supposed her pain to be as deep as her boundless solitude. Then he heard her asking him to forgive her, just as he looked at his watch and calculated that Manuel Palacios must be about to arrive, and he wanted to see a victory “V” on the sergeant’s hand more than ever. For the sake of Maria Antonia, hapless Alexis, even the Marquess and himself and his blessed prejudices. He wanted it so badly that his cubicle door swung to let in the skeletal form of Manuel Palacios, right hand signalling a “V”.
“Maria Antonia,” he said, and returned to his seat opposite the woman, now putting her small handkerchief back in her small bag. “For some days I’ve been under the impression you wanted to tell us something which perhaps had to do with Alexis’s death. Or did I get it wrong?”
The woman looked him in the eye.
“I don’t know why you imagine that.”
“Rather than imagine it, I’m sure, particularly after yesterday when you phoned Alberto Marques and told him you’d found the medallion in Alexis’s trinket-box. I don’t know why, but I’m also convinced you knew it was Alexis’s and that you called the Marquess so he’d call us. Or have I got it all wrong?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure…”
“Let me help you, for you’re the only one who can help us now, if you know something, which I think you… Listen carefully: next to Alexis’s corpse they found a piece of Montecristo cigar which, according to the laboratory, belongs very probably to the box Faustino Arayan has in his lounge… That and Alexis’s medallion placed in his trinket-box don’t prove anything, but they might mean a lot. Do you understand?”
At each of the Count’s words the woman’s head sank a little lower, as if the world had deposited the burden of truth on her neck and all she wanted to contemplate, as she suffered her punishment, was the bag her two gnarled hands were fingering nervously. The Count waited, feeling his hopes fading, defeated by fear, until he saw the burden disappear and Maria Antonia’s face look up, and meet his beseeching gaze. The woman’s eyes now gleamed, though she didn’t look about to cry.
“There were two threads of red silk on the trousers he wore that night. He put them in the washing machine, but I took them out because it was a blue dye that might have stained other clothes. I was surprised because the turn-ups were muddied and that’s why I inspected them closely… Let him fucking rot,” she said, and the Count was surprised by the power in her voice, the evil glint in her eye and the way her hands twitched murderously, oh, Maria Antonia, so fleet of foot. “The son of a whore,” she said, pronouncing every syllable, and she burst into an aristocratic, disconsolate flood of tears.
“I’ve brought you a present, but it’s not to smoke,” the Count warned, placing on Major Rangel’s desk the tray with three transparent envelopes where the massacred cigars were visible.
“What the fuck’s that?”
“It’s the second piece of evidence in the case against Faustino Arayan for murdering his son, Alexis Arayan.”
Major Rangel slapped the palm of his hand down on his desk.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Don’t play deaf… The great Faustino killed his son in the Havana Woods. Get it now?”
But before Major Rangel really got it, the Count had to relate the results of his conversations with Maria Antonia Galarraga, the fact that Faustino was AB blood group, the story about the medallion with a line etched under the arm and the two threads of red silk on mud-stained trousers which belonged to that same Faustino Arayan.
“But what I still don’t understand is why he killed him,” the ever sceptical Major Rangel insisted.
“The only people who know are Alexis himself, who can talk no more, and God, who gets less of a look in now but was involved in this affair… For what it’s worth, Major, I suppose Alexis did, said, demanded or reminded his father of something so terrible that Faustino decided to kill him. It seems the boy was beside himself and suicidal, and blamed Faustino for all his personal tragedy. Look what he wrote in this page from his Bible… Then he dressed as a woman, went to meet him, they had a row and Faustino killed him. That simple.”
“Has this country gone mad?” the Major asked, and the Count thought that was his moment.
“It seems to be the case. Must be the heat. Look what they did to Maruchi and Fatman Contreras…”
The Old Man stood up.
“Don’t start, Conde, don’t start,” and now his voice floated in the air, exhausted and bitter. “What they did to Fatman? Do you know why I’m here now? Well, because of Captain Contreras… because Captain Contreras shat outside the pan, Mario Conde, and they caught it all sides.”
The Count tried to smile. The Boss was bad at jokes, that’s why he never told any. But this just had to be a joke.
“Are you mad, Major?”
“This is no madness, Conde. For starters, foreign currency trafficking, bribes and cooked investigations. For seconds, extortion and smuggling. And they’ve got loads of proof. What do you reckon now?”
Lieutenant Mario Conde felt in his pocket for a cigarette and, though his fingers touched the packet, he couldn’t take it out. His friend, Captain Contreras, one of the best policemen he’d known. No, he thought, it can’t be.
“This is shit those guys want to smear him with,” he said, still resisting the idea.
“He did the shit and smeared me as well. It’s his fault they’re investigating even my hair… Wait, let me calm down.” But he didn’t shut up, only changed his tone: ever more exhausted and bitter. “He fucked it, Conde, fucked it, and there’s no excuse… This morning the Chief Attorney put out the arrest warrant and they went after Contreras. That’s how things stand… I think you know me: I trusted Captain Contreras, like I trust you, and got my fingers burnt for him, in fact up to my shoulder, and twice I stopped them investigating him, and put my rank, my position, even my rocks on this table to prevent them even suspecting him… But they were right all along, Conde, and I wasn’t. Now I have to explain why I put my trust in Contreras. Do you know what that means? It’s the end for me. ..”
“I’m off home, Boss,” replied the Count, as he half turned round.
“You just stay there, you’re not going anywhere. You finish your case. What the hell’s up with you? Aren’t you a policeman? Behave like a man, and then like police. Understood?”
The Count finally managed to extract the cigarette, light it and taste shit. He decided to sit down, as infinite exhaustion invaded his muscles and mind. The Boss was still the man he admired and respected, and didn’t deserve him acting like a child. Would they screw the Major as well? No, I don’t want even to imagine that, he thought.
“And since you’re so interested in Maruchi’s final destination, listen to this: she too worked for Internal Investigations and was the agent they planted here to trigger off this investigation, from that bastard desk out there, in front of my office door. How do you like that bit of news?”
“It’s squalid and moving,” he opted to say and nodded: another mask had dropped. “Well, Boss, let’s finish this off: how shall we resolve the case? Should I bring him in and kick Faustino up the backside till he tells us his th
ousand and one nights, or do you have to call in someone and review all this?”
The Major eyed covetously the remnants of cigar in the envelopes. Then he looked in his desk drawer and took out another of those short, sinewy items he’d been smoking over the last few days.
“I’ve got to make a call, Mario. This is a bombshell, and you know it. This will resonate as far as Geneva when Arayan doesn’t go to that conference on human rights… Yes, this country has gone mad. Look, they’re now making cigars in Holguin and putting a Select label on them… A plague on Fatman Contreras’s mother…”
The only thing Lieutenant Mario Conde would regret as investigator in charge of the Homicide Department at Headquarters would be not seeing Faustino Arayan’s face the moment they arrested him, on the charge of murdering his son, and sentenced him, long before his trial, to lose all his perks and trips, all his immaculate affairs and dazzling guayaberas, an embassy close to heaven and his exquisite cigars, a mansion in Miramar with two cars in the garage, the taste of caviar and whisky – and I like whisky and can never drink any – his powerful friendships and the servant who, much to his chagrin, washed his clothes and always inspected them to gather more evidence on his sly sexual adventures which had become shakier and shakier, the same servant who on this occasion hadn’t done her housework properly and had decided to keep to one side those trousers stained with river-mud from which hung two threads of red silk rotted by damp and years of censorship… The Count wondered whether they’d put him in a prison for common prisoners. Surely not. He was Faustino Arayan and, much to the Count’s disgust, they wouldn’t shut him inside a jail with murderers of every kind and type, capable of forcing him to clean out their cells and their sexual backwardness, making his arse as pink as a bunch of carnations without even paying him two copper pesos. Apart from that, he was glad he’d concluded the investigation and could return to his isle of melancholy and longing for coffee which never came, to think about Polly and the next story he was going to write, about Skinny’s birthday in four days’ time, to observe the disorder reigning at home and to think how it might always have turned out differently: even Fatman Contreras might have turned out differently. What would happen to the Boss? he wondered, and refused even to contemplate the response he could imagine.
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