Havana Black (23 page)

“The row we had that night is irrelevant, as is my discomfort at the crime my son had committed and the one he was planning to commit. He had confided in me and I couldn't betray him, and that was enough to keep me silent. What I did do was to research for years the gold Buddha that had belonged to Riva de la Nuez and put together this whole story from when it embarked on the Manila Galleon to the day the Mena y Carbós stole it or commissioned its theft in 1951 and buried it under their patio before leaving Cuba . . .

“In all those years I waited for someone to come at night and talk to me about the Buddha in the Boulle escritoire, but I never thought it would be Miguel who would mention it, a week ago. He explained how he had come to prepare the Buddha's removal to the United States and that Fermín, his wife's brother, would be responsible for taking it out on a launch,
though Fermín still didn't know what he was taking out or where it was. And he told me that truly elusive Buddha was going to be his salvation . . .

“Are you content, Lieutenant . . .? I think I've told you what you wanted to know: that was what Miguel came to Cuba for: to remove a fifteen-hundred-year-old Buddha that must be worth several million dollars in any art market . . . Please, Lieutenant, open that drawer, yes, the one on the left, and touch the protuberance at the bottom. It's not giving? Push a little harder. Ah, finally the spring to the Buddha in the Boulle escritoire whirred into action. You know, I think I will now finally see with my own eyes that sculpture that has turned so many people crazy over so many centuries . . . including my son Miguel.”

 

 

Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde couldn't recall many cases in which the prospect of a visible solution produced the emotional charge that shook him when old Alfonso Forcade pointed to the escritoire whose beauty had triggered in him a promising sense of wonder, and that, perhaps impelled by Forcade's incisive mind, the policeman had imagined to be related to the history of the lost Buddha. Consequently, he was looking for more straightforward explanations for that excitement: perhaps his imminent liberation; perhaps the certainty his intuition was proving yet again to be his best ally: everything was food for thought. Nevertheless, the policeman was convinced that if he could get the information to lead him to a magnificent gold Buddha, shaped fifteen centuries ago by an artist whose name would now remain unknown for ever, and whose artistry had withstood every risk posed by greed and history, he had reason enough to feel that
excitement now making his hands tremble as he unsuccessfully felt the bottom of the drawer and imagined Rabbit's historical enthusiasms when he told him of that imbroglio of deceit and thieving, the weft of which was threaded by the most basic human motives, driven by ambition. That was why he took a deep breath, tried to calm his nerves, and then persisted with the silent drawer-bottom, until he finally released the spring concealed by a disciple of Boulle.

The map extracted from the quasi-imperceptible drawer bottom had been sketched on a sheet of paper that, despite the years, retained a pale sheen, from which a few marks, letters, numbers and lines drawn in black ink proclaimed their millionaire secret, converging on that precise spot in the patio – almost under a laurel that was surely a hundred years old – where Crespo and el Greco now dug to depths that had begun to dismay the Count.

“Can it really be so far down, Lieutenant?”

“Dig deeper, dig deeper,” he insisted, lighting another cigarette and looking at the sky, which had turned into a leaden mantle across which dirty, spongy clouds scurried northwards, laden with water, electricity and evil intent.

A warm, humid breeze from the south was already rustling through the treetops, a prelude to the furies that might assail the city that same morning or, at the very latest, tomorrow morning. The noise of the spade and shovel, striking, moving, extracting earth, brought him right back to a keen awareness of what he was witnessing, but the idea of Miguel Forcade's final dramatic failure, after he'd been preparing himself for almost thirty years to make the leap to the fortune resting on a gold Buddha, concentrated his mind, despite what his eyes could see. Ever since he'd come to possess
that Buddha who still refused to put in an appearance, Miguel Forcade must have lived completely in the thrall of a statue endowed with enough magnificence to change his karma in the most radical way: money and power would flow through his hands, the deceased must have dreamed, as he lived in a perpetual state of hypocrisy, waited to seize his moment in a country where millionaires no longer existed and where power, for a man like him, was based solely on capricious decisions that went beyond his will: today you have it, tomorrow you don't . . . The Count imagined the number of deferments that must have altered that desired, attainable fate, while the would-be millionaire lived a diminished life, always looking out for ways to enhance it, as resonantly as he could. Good luck as hell on earth. In fact his fear of the sea must have been a real sickness: because a well-equipped launch would have been the shortest route between that hole in the ground and the financial glory for which he'd betrayed all trust and faith. Then there were the years Fermín had spent in prison, while he worked in an office in Miami for a Cuban who'd got rich somehow or other and who'd die of envy when he discovered his employee's prospect of millions, and that must have been the worst sojourn in hell on earth the Buddha ever prepared for Miguel Forcade, in his desperate confinement to a small house in the South West, while his dreams furnished him the best mansions in New York, Paris or Geneva . . . That pit, which still hadn't given birth, which had in fact been a grave for Miguel Forcade's life, and apparently for his death: a straight line ran from that Buddha for whose appearance the Count prayed to all the gods of the Orient and even the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and the corpse found five days earlier in the sea, and in the Count's
mind the only person able to trace that line was taciturn Fermín, the man in whom the deceased millionaire who never was had placed all – or part of – his trust, he who, as a result of that elusive Buddha, had entered most unpleasantly, and most physically incomplete, into the perfect state of Nirvana: the one that goes by the common, profane name of death.

“Conde, I don't think there's anything here,” protested Crespo, wiping the sweat from his scalp, which got less hairy by the day.

“Did you get the measurements right?” enquired el Greco, leaning breathlessly on the edge of the grave.

The Count looked back at the map, checked each of the references again, took the line and placed it between the roots of the laurel and measured a third time. The centre of the grave fell on the nine-and-a-half-foot spot marked by Miguel Forcade.

“Come on, out of there, for fuck's sake,” he told his subordinates, feeling his sweaty hands getting the shakes again. “Come on, Manolo, give me a hand,” requested the lieutenant, who threw himself at the ditch and began sinking the pick into the ground at a furious rate, as if his only task in life was to dig to the other side of the world, which in Disney cartoons was always to be found in remote China.

Manolo used the spade to extract the soil dislodged by the Count, who raised the pick once more, when the sergeant asked him: “And what if someone's already been and taken it, Conde?”

“Nobody's taken it, for fuck's sake, nobody!” shouted the lieutenant, and he lifted the pick as high as he could and brought it down with all his remaining might on earth moist because it was so deep and felt the metal point shiver as it hit something solid, compact, definitely metallic, maybe divine. The sergeant's
spade dug hurriedly, spurred on by the tenacious Count, until a man-made surface revealed all its opaque brilliance, clouded by twenty-seven years of contact with soil. The Count thrust his hand into the mud and began to extract from the entrails of the world a nylon covering, which in turn contained a cloth wrapping, beneath which a heavy, almost round object slumbered, bound tightly round: the Count managed to retrieve the bag and cut the ropes securing the protective layer of cloth, and there, at the bottom of the pit, he pulled off the gauze that had begun to disintegrate, to reveal before the eyes of the police a yellow gleam capable of dazzling the world. Yes, it was lean and strong, like a real Buddha ready to distance himself from all non-transcendental materiality, and the smile on his face seemed to express sardonic satisfaction: and with good reason, thought the Count, for that pagan god had triumphed over the most incredible vicissitudes for fifteen centuries, and defeated a risk of death by melt-down that had threatened several times. Neatly draped in a metal cloak that fell in the most amazing folds, the body must have been over sixteen inches high, from the feet on the lotus leaf to the final twist of its Hindu headdress. Various men, over countless years, had risked their all for that smiling face, which was able to hallucinate, enrich and even kill those who tried to hold on to it, as if one could grasp the unattainable: old Forcade was right when he stated that the image of the Buddha was merely an illusory reflection of a truth situated beyond all dimensions and categories, because the creator of that powerful religion always recognized that his strength and permanence were rooted in his ultimate spiritual essence, far from the world of the terrestrial and tangible, beyond the realm of appearance: hence
the triumphant smile. A right bastard, the Count told himself, keeping his eyes on the sardonic statue, but feeling his waist curse him as he reverted to the vertical. He turned painfully round to the house and on the upper floor balcony saw the old man on his wood and willow chair, and his wife, at his side, also watching the search. Then the policeman yelled at a volume the whole neighbourhood could have heard: “We've got the gold Buddha!”

 

 

He looked at his watch and the time gave him a fright: his deadline was running out; it was almost twelve o'clock and, though he had a Buddha, which was almost certainly golden, possibly T'ang dynasty, presumably extremely valuable, he didn't have what he most needed: a murderer who had confessed. Or even a murderess. That's why he decided to move his pawns quickly: while he dispatched Crespo and el Greco to find Fermín Bodes – wherever he is, he insisted – and take him to Headquarters. He called Colonel Molina and asked him to come to that house in Vedado, as they had uncovered something too important for him not to. Then he ordered Manolo to alert the Patrimony people who had authenticated the fakery of the Matisse to send their leading specialist in antique Chinese statuary. Finally, he left his sergeant next to the Buddha, drowsy, but still smiling, at the bottom of the pit, and got into the car they had sent so he could hotfoot it back to Headquarters.

“Step on it, if you like,” he told the driver, and, immediately, the Count discovered how much he'd been hijacked by the prickly feeling of shedding his own skin, of seeing himself in the third person, as he was consumed by a hot-blooded character at once
admired and intimidating, living in a story already written . . .

From the day he'd become fond of reading and felt a corrosive envy of people able to imagine and tell stories, the Count learned to respect literature as one of the most beautiful things life could create. Perhaps the main reason for that respect was his own inability to throw himself into the ring and live on what literature brought. Because his desire to write was more a challenge than a dream and the extended deferral of his vocation found a unique relief in reading. At the end of the day, the sweet envy he felt of writers who wrote well was not so much a sickness as the conviction that he could perhaps never do it, even poorly.

However, that sublime, literary part of his life rarely connected with a real, everyday existence that was drab and downtrodden, which he tried to soak in rum in order to render it more bearable; consequently he was surprised by a pleasantly aesthetic feeling that he was embodying a literary character: though he had yet to test out the Buddha with a small knife to see if it was gold or lead, as happened with the bird of evil in the story he felt he was reliving.

It was then he remembered Washington Capote, his hot-blooded university friend who, unlike him, could see himself as a literary character, thanks to an astonishing memory for quotations and a facility for performance that allowed him to double theatrically as narrator and character in a novel. Because Washington would have loved to be in the Count's place, repeating confidently and emphatically the eight reasons Sam Spade had to send Brigid O'Shaughnessy to jail: “Listen. This isn't a damn bit of good. This is bad all round”, and Washington would review the detective's barbed, cynical monologue till he reached the reason
he preferred: “Seventh: I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker,” said that literary lunatic, smiling for the cameras even better than Bogart.

“ ‘One chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker,'” the Count repeated mentally, able, unusually, to recall that sentence straight off, in order to understand that he really had no right to feel he was a fictional character but should accept he was a sucker: literature's uses in illuminating life were yet again vividly demonstrated to the policeman, who rabidly suspected one thing: almost a hundred per cent chance existed that several people might play him for a sucker.

 

 

The duty officer welcomed him with the best possible news: Crespo and el Greco had come in ten minutes ago with a man under arrest by the name of Fermín Bodes. “Good, good,” whispered the Count, who at last realized why he was beginning to feel totally in thrall to this case, and not just because of the way it challenged his intellect. From the initial story about an image of the Buddha hidden or transfigured more than a thousand years ago by the faithful who had publicly to deny their faith, if only to guarantee the survival of their god's image, to these sadly contemporary characters waiting for him now, swayed by less altruistic ambitions, the serial deceptions that had dropped into his lap represented a heady mix. Betrayals, frauds, chases, and all manner of lies and fakery had become entangled in a farce that he, Mario Conde, would put an end to. Could this be the end . . .? But when he mentally reviewed the protagonists of the last act, he again felt angry at the insult to his intelligence – and
even to his hunches: Miguel Forcade who feared the sea and accepted all the corrupt opportunities power sent his way; Gerardo Gómez de la Peña, the man with ugly feet and the petulance of those blessed by fate, blatantly opportunistic and indefatigably cynical; beautiful Miriam, perchance a blonde, a pawn crowned as queen and equipped with a voracious rapidity of movement that made her distinctly fearsome, with every histrionic resource necessary to live a life of lies, and even to throw her brother into the fire and her beloved husband into the sea; and Fermín Bodes, the sarcastic gymnast, always at half-cock, a joker, sometimes at his own expense, at other times at others', only lightly punished for his multifarious crimes and sins . . . The Count had coexisted with such people, same city, same time, same life, looking up at the Forcades, the Gómezes, the Bodes from the lowly spot that they'd assigned him and so many other poor buggers like himself: they were right up at the top, while others were right at the bottom, they were surrounded by Tiffany lamps and Matisse paintings that might even be genuine, residencies swapped like second-hand books – and he regretted the bibliographical simile – and handled real and putative millions while they acted like implacable judges in tribunals driven by ethical, ideological, political and social purity (where those on trial were almost always the “others”); and silenced and manacled, those “others” suffered from the chronic, incurable disease of life in a hovel, like Candito the Red, or were confined for ever to a wheelchair like his soul brother, or persecuted in the hills for believing the truth of life was to be found in the spurs of a rooster, like his deceased grandfather Rufino; or definitively fucked because they wanted a bit of what was up top, like his old acquaintance Baby-Face Miki, a
sinner beyond redemption, who prostituted his scant literary talents by writing self-serving stories of praise. And, what about you, Mario Conde? Better shut up he told himself, as the lift-doors opened.