Havana Gold (26 page)

“Contreras, you can tell the Committee what you think. I couldn't care less. The Count did something to his credit and I congratulated him and I'll put it on his file. Besides that's why he's paid. But he played it wrong and fouled up. That's clear enough. The three of you can go. Back here at nine, Conde,” he said and slowly
flopped into his chair. He pressed his white intercom button and asked: “Maruchi, bring me a glass of water and an aspirin.”

The Count, Contreras and Cicerón went out into the hall and the lieutenant whispered to his secretary: “Give him an analgesic. He didn't ask for one because I was there,” and walked out.

 

“Manolo, I'd like to ask you a favour.”

“I love you asking favours of me, Conde.”

“That's why I do it: draw up the report to give to the Boss in the morning. I want out of here,” he said, and opened his hands out to signal the space that was attacking him. The cubicle seemed more than ever like a hot, narrow incubator where he'd burst out of his shell. The feeling that he was at the end of a line and the prospect of having to confront the investigation pointed up by Major Rangel left him in a limbo he'd no purchase on, in which every move was out of his control. He collected together the last papers that were still on his desk and put them in a file.

“Hey, Conde, it can't be so bad, can it?”

“No, it can't be, can it?” he replied, by way of saying something, as he handed the file to his subordinate.

“Don't let them get you down, pal. You know you won't have problems. Cicerón told me as much. I know what you're thinking, Conde: everybody at headquarters is
talking about the dirt we've raked up in this case and people are taking bets on which big fish will be wriggling in the net . . . And Fabricio is known to be an incompetent arsehole, even the cat says so. Besides the major is your best friend and you know it,” Manolo argued, trying to soothe an evidently troubled Conde. Although they were two very dissimilar characters, the months they'd been working together had created a mutual dependence they both enjoyed as an extension of their own abilities and desires. Sergeant Manuel Palacios found it hard to believe that tomorrow he'd no longer be working for Lieutenant Mario Conde and would answer to orders from another officer. He wanted the Count to fight back. “Don't worry about the report, I'll write it, but take that look off your face.”

The Count smiled: lifted his hands to his chin and began to remove a mask that refused to budge.

“Drop it, Manolo. It's not just this. It's everything. I'm fed up, at the age of thirty-five, and don't know what I'm going to do or what the fuck I want to do. I try to do things right and always end up putting my foot in it: it's my fate, as a
babalao
once told me. I've got the curse of the slug: it all looks beautiful ahead but I leave a trail of slime behind. It's that simple. Look, this is for you,” he said and handed him a folded sheet of paper he'd tucked into his shirt pocket.

“What's that?”

“An epic-heroic poem I wrote to marijuana. Put it with the report.”

“Now you have landed yourself in it, pal.”

The Count felt the need to go over to the window and look out – for the last time? – at a landscape that he'd dubbed his favourite, but he thought it wasn't a good moment to say farewell to that piece of the city and that life. He shook the sergeant's hand and shook it vigorously.

“See you, Manolo.”

“Do you want me to drive you home?”

“No, don't worry, overloaded buses have grown on me recently.”

He didn't feel in the mood to pursue climatic enquiries when he came out into the main lobby at headquarters, but was stirred up by the sunlight insinuating itself through the high windows at the front, and the Count, wanting to assert boundaries and states of mind, looked for his sunglasses. The Lenten wind blew no longer; perhaps it had exhausted its reserves for this year, and a glorious March afternoon greeted him with a clear sky and the perfect brilliance of a postcard spring for tourists fleeing the cold. It was really an ideal afternoon to be by the seaside, close to that house of wood and tiles the Count had occasionally dreamed of owning. He would have spent the morning writing – naturally, a simple, moving tale of love and friendship – and now,
with his lines baited up and in the sea, he'd wait for fate to put a fine fish on his hook for tonight's dinner. A woman bronzed by a torrid sun was reading the pages he'd written that day on a nearby rock that jutted out to sea like an outstretched hand. He'd make love with her in the shower when night fell, with the smell of the fish in the oven wafting through the space in that recurrent dream. Perhaps at night, while he read a novel by Hemingway or one of Salinger's immaculate stories, she'd play her saxophone, and bring a sad sound to that blissful scene.

The Polish Fiat was crouching next to the kerb, and the Count noticed its four tyres at rest, full of air. The house door was still shut and the Count walked towards it across the small garden of
marpacíficos
and crotons that had been stripped of their leaves by so many windy days. The iron knocker, wrought like the tongue of an astigmatic lion, raised a deep roar that ran terrified into the house. He took his sunglasses off, settled his revolver against the waistband of his jeans, hoping against hope she had some good excuses. Any good excuse, because he was ready to accept any and ask no questions. At this stage in life he'd learned – practising it in the most objective reality – that to stand excessively on your dignity only brings more hurt: he preferred to demur, forgive, and even promise to forget to obtain the minimal space he required. Why hadn't he let Fabricio's petulance pass
him by? He sometimes thought this mean-spirited, but he knew he'd finally acquiesce.

Karina opened the door and didn't look surprised. She even tried to smile and opened a breech he didn't dare cross. She was in the shorts she had worn on the day they had first met and a man's sleeveless shirt that the Count found very titillating. Its armholes slackened to reveal the precise spot where her bosom swelled into a mountain of breast. She'd just washed her hair that fell soft, dark and damp over her shoulders. He was too fond of this woman.

“Come in, I was expecting you,” she said, moving to one side. She closed the door and pointed him to one of the wicker chairs set out where the passage leading to the back of the house opened out.

“Are you by yourself?”

“Yes, I just arrived. How's your case going?”

“I think that's fine: I discovered an eighteen-year-old youth who smoked marijuana and killed a twenty-four-year-old girl who also took drugs and had several boyfriends.”

“How awful!”

“Not that bad, I've had much worse. What happened to you yesterday?” he finally asked, looking her in the eye. She was on duty. Lots of work. Had to go into hospital. Was taken inside; blame a policeman. Any excuse, for fuck's sake.

“Nothing much,” she replied. “I had a phone call.”

The Count tried to understand: only one. But understood nothing.

“I don't get you. We'd agreed . . .”

“My husband rang,” she replied and the Count thought he'd not understood again. The word “husband” sounded simply ridiculous and out of place in that conversation. A husband? Karina's husband?

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“That my husband gets back tonight. He's a doctor. He's been in Nicaragua. His contract has been ended and he's coming back early. That's what I'm trying to tell you, Mario. He rang me yesterday morning.”

The Count searched his shirt-pocket for a cigarette but gave up. He didn't really want to smoke.

“How's that possible, Karina?”

“Mario, don't make things any harder for me. I don't know why I started on this madness with you. I felt alone, I liked you, I needed sex, do hear what I'm saying, but I chose the worst man in the world.”

“Am I the worst?”

“You fall in love, Mario,” she said, tidying her hair behind her ears. In her shorts and T-shirt, she was like an effeminate boy. He'd always fall in love with her again.

“So what?”

“So I'm going back to my house and my husband, Mario, I can't and don't want to do anything else.
I'm happy I got to know you but I'm sorry, it's not possible.”

The Count refused to hear what she was saying. A whore? He thought there must be a mistake, and couldn't find the logic behind any possible mistake. Karina wasn't for him, he concluded. Dulcinea didn't materialize because she didn't exist. Mythology pure and simple.

“I understand,” he said finally, and now really did feel he needed a smoke. He dropped the match in a vase full of red-hearted
malangas
.

“I know how you feel, Mario, but it all happened like that, on the spur of the moment. I should never have met you.”

“I think we should have met, but at another time, in another place, in another life: because I'd have fallen in love with you just the same. Ring me some time,” he said getting up. He lacked arguments and energy to fight the inevitable and knew in advance that he was defeated. He felt he had no option but to accept failure.

“Don't think ill of me, Mario,” she replied, also standing up.

“Does it matter to you what I think?”

“Yes, it does. I think you're right, we should meet up in another life.”

“Pity about the mistake. But don't worry, I'm always getting it wrong,” he said opening the door. The sun was disappearing behind the old Marian Brothers school in
La Víbora and the Count felt like crying. Recently he'd wanted to cry a lot. He looked at Karina and wondered: why? He held her shoulders, stroked her thick, damp hair and kissed her gently on the lips. “Tell me when you need a tyre changing. It's my speciality.”

And he walked down the porch towards the garden. He was sure she'd call out, tell him to hell with everything, she'd stay with him, she adored sad policemen, she'd always play her sax for him, he only had to say “play it again”, they'd be birds of the night, hungry for love and lust, he heard her run towards him, arms outstretched and sweet music in the background, but each step he took in the direction of the street stuck the knife in a little deeper, quickly bled dry his last hope. When he reached the pavement he was a man alone. What a load of shit, he thought. There wasn't even any music.

 

Skinny Carlos shook his head. He refused to give up.

“Piss off, you savage. I've not been to the stadium for years and you've got to come. Don't you remember when we used to go? That's right, you went the day Rabbit made it to sixteen and he celebrated with us in the stadium by smoking sixteen cigarettes. The gungy croquettes and brake-fluid mineral water he vomited in the bus looked like volcanic lava, I swear on my mother. It was steaming, kid . . .” and he smiled.

The Count smiled as well. He looked at the posters that had faded over the time, posters that had seen him visit almost every day over so many years. They were witness to Skinny's anti-Beatles crisis, when he converted to the religion of Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones, from which he then recovered to return to the safe nest of
Rubber Soul
and
Abbey Road
and engage again with the Count in the endless argument pitting McCartney's genius against Lennon's. Skinny was in the McCartney team and the Count was a cheerleader among the dead Lennon's supporters:
Strawberry Fields
was too powerful a lyric not to qualify him as the supreme poet of the Beatles.

“But I don't feel like it, you animal. I just want to flop on my bed, pull the sheet over my head and wake up in ten year's time.”

“Rip Van Winkle in this heat? And what'll you do in ten years? You'd be thinner than a bloody rake, still in the same state and would miss out on ten championships, hundreds of bottles of rum and even the odd celloplaying woman. Do you really prefer the sax to the cello? The shittiest bit would be me being so bored out of mind until you woke up.”

“Are you trying to console me?”

“No, I'm getting ready to piss on your photo if you carry on being so silly. Let's go and eat. Andrés and Rabbit will be here any minute. I'd like the four of us to go alone to the stadium. It's a man's game, isn't it?”

And the Count felt again how he'd lost the will to fight, and let himself be dragged off to his friend's den that was perhaps the only safe place left to him in a war apparently intent on demolishing all his defences and parapets.

“I wasn't inspired today,” warned Josefina when they all were seated round the table. “They only had one chicken and I didn't have any brainwaves. But then I remembered that my cousin Estefanía, who'd studied in France, gave me a recipe one day for fried chicken
à la Villeroi
. And I thought, let's see what that's like.”

“
A la
what? How do you cook that, Jose?”

“It's real easy, that's why I went for it. I quartered the chicken, and added a bitter orange and two cloves of garlic, and let it marinate. It has to be a big chicken, or it won't work. Then I basted it with half a pound of butter and two sliced onions. They say one onion, but I put in two, and kept remembering the story of the pigs that go to a restaurant. You know the one, don't you? Well, when it's golden brown, you pour on a cup of dry white wine and add salt and pepper. Then it starts to go soft. When it's cold, you de-bone the bird. And that's when the fun really begins: you know how the French do everything with a sauce? This one has butter, milk, salt, pepper and flour. Then you place it on the burner until it becomes a thick, double cream, without lumps. Then more dry wine and lemon juice. You pour half
the creamy sauce in a deep serving dish, the other half over the chicken and let it go cold and set, you with me? Then you bread the bits of chicken and it's done: I've just fried them in hot fat. It would be a meal for six French men but you're such a greedy guts . . . Will there be any left for me?”