Havana Fever (28 page)

“Hey, it’s not that important. I only wanted to know whether you’d identified him.”

The sergeant grumbled, too loudly.

“The prints found in the library aren’t on file.”

“And what did the autopsy reveal about Dionisio Ferrero?”

“He was killed around 1 a.m. There are no other signs of violence, nothing on his nails, so he was caught by surprise and killed by a single blow.”

“And what about the books missing from that last bookcase?”

“They walked the same day as they killed Dionisio. The only other thing we know is that Amalia can’t find the knife that Dionisio used in the garden. We think that may be the murder weapon . . .”

“Too many mysteries all told,” whispered the Count. “It’s like it’s a put-up job.”

“Just what Captain Palacios says. He thinks it was all set up by someone who knows only too well how to make life difficult for detectives.”

Conde smiled, imagining what Manolo might be imagining.

“When you see your captain, remind him on my behalf that what’s most hidden is always visible. And also tell him from me not to be such an asshole. If he starts hiding things from me, you can bet he’s only making it harder for himself to get to the bottom of this heap of shit.”

The Count tired of banging on Juan the African’s door and quickly concluded he’d scarpered from callejón Alambique with net earnings of thirteen hundred pesos and a sarcastic smile of satisfaction on his yellowy teeth. The risks implicit in the situation, that sooner or later the identity of that supposed cousin of his ex would get out, must have persuaded the African that his best option was to extract money from the former policeman – revenge is sweet – placate his creditors and disappear from the barrio or hide in its deepest catacombs.

To help weigh up his options, the Count walked the shaky planks again and reached the bright light and less fetid air on the roof terrace. The African’s absence put him in a delicate situation, because it was more than likely that, before vanishing into thin air, his old informant had explained, in the appropriate quarters, how he’d acted under pressure from a policeman. If that were the case, the Count was completely exposed, in real physical danger, transformed into a pale-face in Apache territory, with all the connotations such intrusions brought. Leaning back on one of the water tanks, where the African had smoked his joint the previous evening, the Count decided the most rational option would be to leave the barrio immediately. He wouldn’t be very welcome in Michael Jordan’s beer shop or Veneno’s chop shop, and it now seemed obvious that his stroll through the barrio and chats on various street corners might have been part of the African’s plan to show him to all those who ought to register him in their mental files, in a more subtle, no less efficient way than the police grilling his former colleagues had subjected him to. If his speculations were at all on target, that venture had shut off any avenue to the possible whereabouts of the volatile Lotus Flower, and right now he couldn’t see any practical way to make a breakthrough. His investigative foray had just set him up to be blatantly doublecrossed.

“You fucking idiot . . .”

A cigarette on his lips, the Count smiled, laughing at himself and his incredible naivety that had included an invitation to beers and a lobster and beefsteak lunch. He gazed up at the cloudless sky and felt oppressed by the relentless midday sun: he’d been left empty-handed, devoid of hope, and even more burdened by the mysteries harassing him. He coughed, cleared his throat and spat to his right. He puffed twice on his butt and dropped it down the air vent next to him and only then recalled it was the African’s little hidey hole. Kneeling down, taking care not to burn himself on his still-glowing cigarette butt, he put his arm down the cast-iron pipe and felt in a bend a smooth surface his touch recognized as a piece of plastic. A two-finger pincer-like movement enabled him to extract a small transparent envelope containing a poorly rolled joint and a scrap of paper, where round, unsteady writing, allergic to apostrophes and commas, informed him: Her names Carmen and she lives in the tenement at Factoria 58. Leave what you owe me and lets call it a day. Fella you don’t know what you missed and I boned the mulatta on behalf of us both. Watch it.

Almost elated by the African’s demonstration of ethics which restored his faith in the human race, the Count put his lighter on top of the note. A breach had been opened and a feeling of joy restored to his body. With no second thoughts he placed the remaining 700 pesos in the envelope as payment for information received. He shut the envelope and, as he was about to put it back in its hidey hole, realized that the presence of the joint was no coincidence either: it seemed like a gift or invitation from the African, intent on reducing the distance between an ex-cop and an ex-convict. Intrigued, Conde extracted the spliff and returned the plastic bag to its place. He took another look around and checked that he was completely alone. Did he dare? He then remembered his demeaning experience in the knocking-shop the night before, and muttered that some of his wholesome values were obviously being eroded if he’d got as far as the bedroom of a real whore on set rates. And now an open invitation to try out the wonders of marijuana pulsated there, another real temptation. What the fuck’s got into me? He wondered whether it wouldn’t be best to take the joint home and decide what to do with it in the privacy of his own home, though he was dissuaded by the risk entailed in walking the streets of that barrio with drugs on his person, particularly when he was under investigation for murder. As he went to put his hand in the vent and return the marijuana, he recalled his conversation with Yoyi on the subject of his one hundred per cent virginity in narcotics, and hesitantly put his lighter’s flame to the end of the joint between his lips. He inhaled and held the sweet, light smoke from the mythical Indian cannabis leaf in his lungs. A force greater than any desire immediately rebounded across his brain, blocking off all other options and leaving him with no choice but to crush his smoke on the tiles of the terrace roof, frenziedly rubbing it into the scorched clay with his shoe. A sense of relief spread through his body and, giving himself no time to think, he stood up, determined to cross the barrio and find the answers only a reformed prostitute, in flight from her past, could supply.

After he left the building he took almost a minute to locate the whereabouts of calle Factoría, which he concluded must be several blocks to his left. As in his days as a policeman, he began to prepare for what might be a trying interview. He walked along the pavement, his mind in ferment, hardly hearing the music that switched and changed from house to house, or noticing the hectic activity in the barrio.

Stripped of his capacity to react, Mario Conde only realized something was amiss when they’d pushed him violently through the open door of a tenement. Propelled by a violent shove, his feet twisted like slack ropes and, in a free, seemingly endless fall downwards, Conde’s retina registered electric cables dangling next to a staircase, plastic sacks full of rubbish, a bicycle’s deflated tyre, and even a dirty, bare concrete floor inexorably approaching his face, as his nose was hit by the horrifically acidic stench of stale urine, and he felt them pull his head back and put out the light.

His throat felt on fire, as if he’d swallowed a cup of boiling sand . . . He would die for a drop of water, would give his kingdom for a mouthful of water . . . A remote instinct made him put his hand in his pocket and dig around, until his fingers touched a small metal pot and he thought: an oasis, I’m saved. Trying to keep his movements to a minimum to avoid setting off more pain, he forced open the tiny container and dabbed Chinese pomade on his forehead. It was a shock to find his head in its usual place, not entirely centred maybe, although it was clear the afflicted mass was not the same head he’d had that afternoon: it felt as if it had grown, overflowed its bone structure and that its swollen version was about to explode. With the edge of his nail he placed a dab of pomade on the tip of his tongue: the heat from the Asiatic ointment was soothing and reminded him vaguely but unmistakably, that in some murky, not too distant place and time, he’d talked to a pale, slow-moving man, who’d emerged from the deepest shadows in an absurd orange tunic that had almost made him roar with laughter. Why did the images from that hallucination seem so real? Could it be the memory of a real experience? He remembered how the man who was perhaps too tall to be true, had walked over to him, his silhouette swathed by a thick luminous halo – could he be God himself ? he’d wondered at the time – and immediately, without even introducing himself, he’d begun to talk, in a deliberate, guttural tone, of noble truths and suffering. Although he still couldn’t decide where he’d met him before, when he saw him close-up and heard him hold forth, he was quite sure he already knew who he was, even felt he was very familiar and struggled to follow his argument on pain as an intrinsic element of the human condition, from birth to death, because life is only a cycle that’s renewed with each reincarnation. Reincarnation? So I’m dead, am I? wondered the Count, thinking that state would better explain the presence of the Enlightened One – I know this bastard – but the man shook his head and he told him: “You’re wrong on every front, you are always wrong, you are wrong too often . . . And you’re stubborn: you want to find an explanation for everything, that’s your problem, and you refuse to understand that nature cannot be explained by any single or fixed system of definition,” he embarked on a protracted pause. “The world, Conde, is as it is, independent of any specific thought one may have about it. And you’re full of terribly specific thoughts, you even want your thoughts to change the world, and forget that all your mind can change is yourself. Get rid of your prejudices and meditate . . .” “Where do I know you from, how come you know me and are able to speak of my thoughts and prejudices” the Count remembered asking, and felt those words were sounding increasingly familiar when uttered by this spectre hovering between this world and another. “Suffering comes from the desire for possession. Our mind and feelings malfunction when they cling to the prejudices of experience. Don’t prevaricate any more: meditate and ascend, meditate and set yourself free. You will then understand that nothing is random: everything that has happened wanted to happen . . .” These words suddenly assumed their full meaning in the Count’s mind and unleashed tremors in his brain: “wanted to happen”. “No, that’s impossible,” he told the Enlightened One, “is it really
you
? I don’t believe it . . .” “Do you understand what I was saying?” his pale interlocutor reproached him: “You only dare believe in what you think you should believe in and never open your mind . . .” “Don’t tell me it’s
you
?” the Count persisted, overjoyed, ignoring his interlocutor’s reproaches: of course,
wanted to happen
, and for many years the Count had wanted it, even when he knew it was impossible. The slow, pale man was one of his unmovable gods, right, an Enlightened Being, almost a
mukta
, a man who knows God – or at least someone who’d got very, very close to him, along the way to perfection – and to have him there, at his side, and hear him, was a priceless privilege. “I’ve always wanted to speak to you,” he finally whispered, his voice overcome by emotion, “though not to speak of death and suffering, or even of reincarnation, which, if truth be told, I couldn’t give a fig for. This shit life is hard enough to cope with, and I don’t hanker after another. I want to talk to you about something much trickier, more intangible, as you say . . . Tell me please, what do you do to write stories that are really squalid and moving? What’s the secret? Why does Seymour commit suicide on his honeymoon night? And what about Buddy, what happened to Buddy Glass after he moved to that cabin outside New York? And did Esmé ever find happiness? Did she get the story the soldier wrote for her? Tell me that and also tell me: is it true you wrote nothing in all these years?. . .” Reeling from this flood of questions, the Enlightened One looked uncomfortable in his orangey tunic, frowned severely, and shook his head refusing to spill forth, but was unable to repress a brief smile, when the Count renewed his onslaught: “I can’t believe it’s true you’ve not written again. You do know that’s a crime? It’s all very well meditating, enlightening yourself – you must see really well with all that light you radiate, to be sure – and distancing yourself from the world, hell, but you can’t stop writing, you can’t. I can’t accept you’ve given up writing in order to meditate,
you
of all people. That’s more than criminal . . . What’s your name?” “Call me J.D.,” conceded the man. “Uh-huh, J.D., J.D.,’ the Count repeated, happy to have done the necessary reading and meditation to merit that trust that enabled him to call him J.D., and went on: “Yes, it’s a crime, J.D., because you had lots more to write and we had lots more to read.” “How do you know?” the Enlightened One interjected, and Conde began to feel several hidden sorrows surface again, as the light emanating from J.D. faded into the darkness, his pallor deepened, and his tunic melted away. But Conde shouted: “I know because when I read you I want to go on reading you. I love reading you . . . Do you know what else? Yes, you do: what I most cherish, when I’m feeling totally exhausted after I’ve read a book, is my wish to be the author’s friend and be able to ring him at any time. I would have rung you lots of times. It’s that simple, you see?” J.D. nodded and his blurred face reflected invincible pride in the fact someone could quote a character of his from memory. But he shook off the hint of earthly vanity and looked pitifully at his interrogator: “Never meet a writer if you like his book,
dixit
Chandler. And he was right: writers are a strange breed. Better read than meet them, that’s for sure,” and he straightened his orange tunic before fading into the Havana night, although the Count thought he heard, or at least thought he recalled hearing the increasingly ethereal voice of the Enlightened One telling him, before he vanished completely: I must leave myself things to do in my other lives . . . and besides, too many books have already been written. Remember what the Buddha taught: there is only one essential time to wake up; and that time is now. So wake up now, you bastard . . . Darkness returned, as if obeying an order, and, now totally conscious, Conde became painfully aware of his body and the thirst burning his throat. He quickly tasted a little more Chinese pomade, wondering if that was the magic formula to bring J.D. back, but J.D. didn’t return and he felt sorrow rather than pain, because J.D. hadn’t given him a little telephone number so he could ring him after he’d read one of his squalid and moving stories for the hundredth time.