Havana Gold (5 page)

 

The bell brought an end to his oration: the previous gentle hum turned into the raucous shouting of an overflowing stadium and, youths rushed down corridors in search of the cafeteria, their boy or girlfriends and the lavatories where they'd inevitably indulge in a spot of clandestine smoking. While Manolo jotted down some details from the murdered woman's work-record, and the address of the teacher by the name of Dagmar, Conde went out into the playground longing to smoke a cigarette and inhale the ambience from his memories. He found the corridors packed with white and mustard coloured uniforms, and smiled liked someone cursed. He was going to kill a friendly ghost, by lighting up right there, in the most forbidden place, in the middle of the playground, on the compass of winds that marked the
heart of the school. But he held back at the last moment. Downstairs or up on the first floor? He hesitated for a moment about where to do it. I preferred upstairs, he concluded, and went up to the male lavatories on the top floor. The smoke escaping through the door was like a signal from the Sioux: he could read “here we smoke pipe of peace” in the air. He entered and caused an inevitable stir among the clandestine smokers; cigarettes disappeared and everyone suddenly had an urgent need to pee. The Count quickly raised his arms and said: “Hey, I'm not a teacher. I've come for a smoke too,” and tried to look relaxed as he finally lit up, the focus of the youths' suspicious gazes. To compensate those who'd been cut short by his appearance he passed round his packet of cigarettes, although only three took up his offer. The Count kept staring at them, as if wanting to see himself and his friends in those students and once again he thought there'd been a change: either they'd been very small or these fellows were very big; they'd been smooth-cheeked and innocent and this lot had full grown beards, adult muscles and over-confident stares. Perhaps it was true that they were only interested in getting laid; so what? It was their prime time. At the age of fifteen had
they
ever worried much about anything else? Perhaps they hadn't, for in those same lavatories, above the first sink, a famous piece of graffiti had captured the irrepressible desire of a sixteen-year-old: I WANT
TO DIE DOING IT: DOING IT, EVEN UP AN ARSE. That legend had declared its basic erotic philosophy, now covered by paint, alongside generations of more intellectual graffiti like the one the Count now read: DO COCKS HAVE IDEOLOGIES? He decided to put a question to them when he'd put his packet of cigarettes away: “Were any of you Lissette's pupils?”

Suspicion returned to the faces of the smokers who'd stayed in the lavatories, momentarily placated by the offer of a ciggie. They stared at the Count as he knew they would, and some of them exchanged glances, as if to say, “Watch out, this guy's got to be police.”

“Yes, I'm a policeman. I've been ordered to investigate the teacher's death.”

“I was,” spoke up a pale, skinny youth, one of the few who'd kept smoking when the Count violated the collective privacy of the lavatories. He took a drag on his minimal fag end before taking a step towards the policeman.

“This year?”

“No, last year.”

“And what was she like? As a teacher, I mean.”

“And if I say not much good, what will happen?” probed the student and the Count thought he'd met up with Skinny Carlos's
alter ego
: far too suspicious and sarcastic for his age.

“Nothing whatsoever. I told you I'm not from the
Ministry of Education. I want to find out what happened to her. Whatever help you can give me . . .”

The skinny lad held out a hand to ask a friend for a cigarette.

“No, she was really nice-natured. She was good to us. She helped those who were in trouble.”

“They say she was a friend to her pupils.”

“Yeah, she wasn't like the old fogeys who're on a different wavelength.”

“And what
was
her wavelength?”

Skinny looked at his smoking-den mates, expecting a helping hand that never came.

“I don't know. She went to parties, things like that. You get me?”

The Count nodded, as if he got him.

“What's your name by the way?”

The skinny fellow smiled and nodded. As if to say: I knew it . . .

“José Luis Ferrer.”

“Thanks, José Luis,” said the Count, shaking his hand. Then he looked at the group. “And please, if somebody knows anything that might help, tell the headmaster to ring me. If the teacher was really that nice, I think she deserves that much. See you,” and he went out into the passage, after crushing his cigarette in the sink and reflecting for a second on the ideological conundrum etched on the wall.

Manolo and the headmaster were waiting in the playground.

“I was a pupil here, you know,” he announced, without looking at their host.

“You don't say. And you've not been back for some time?”

The Count nodded and paused before answering.

“Quite a number of years, in fact . . . I spent two years in that classroom,” and he pointed to the corner of the second floor, on the same wing as the lavatories he'd just visited. “I don't know if we were very different to the boys you have now, but we hated our headmaster.”

“Headmasters do change from time to time,” he replied, slipping his hands into the pockets of his
guayabera
. He seemed about to launch into another harangue, to demonstrate his insights and skilled control of that performance space. The Count looked at him for a moment, to see if such a change were possible. Possibly, but he'd take some convincing.

“If only. They sacked ours for fraud.”

“Yes, we all know about him.”

“But what nobody said was that several teachers were implicated. They threw out the headmaster and two heads of department, who were apparently the ones most involved in the affair. Perhaps the odd one of those teachers is still festering here.”

“You trying to alarm me?”

“I'm just telling you the truth, maybe because that headmaster got rid of the best teacher we had, one who taught Spanish and did things the way Lissette did. She preferred to be with us and taught lots of people to read . . . Have you read
Hopscotch
? She thought it was the best book ever and said so in such a way that for many years I believed her. But I don't know if these youths are very different. Do they still smoke in the lavatories and play truant over the wall in the PE yard?”

The headmaster tried to smile and took a few steps towards the middle of the playground.

“Did you truant?”

“Ask Julián the guard-dog, the caretaker on the door. He probably still remembers me.”

Manolo padded stealthily over, and stood next to his boss, but a long way from the conversation. Conde knew he must be eying up the girls, enjoying the scent of so many maidenheads under threat or freshly sacrificed, and then imitated him, but only for a few seconds, because he immediately felt old, terribly remote from those young blossoming girls, their yellow smocks cut to their thighs, cool as he would never be again.

“Well, I do apologize, but the fact is I . . .”

“Don't worry, headmaster,” replied the Count, smiling at him for the first time. “We must be off. But I'd like to ask you a question . . . a difficult one, as you might
say. Have you heard any rumours about your youngsters smoking marijuana?”

The headmaster's smiling face, which had expected another kind of difficult question, turned into a caricature of a bad frown. The Count nodded: yes, you heard me aright.

“Hey, why do you ask?”

“No reason in particular, just to find out whether they are really that different.”

The man thought for a moment before answering. He seemed at a loss, but the Count knew he was searching for the most politically tactful response.

“I really don't think so. At least I don't believe it to be the case, though anything can happen at a party in their barrios, I don't know if the drop-outs smoke . . . But I don't think so. They maybe couldn't care less and are rather frivolous, but I wouldn't say they were evil, you know.”

“Nor would I,” said the Count shaking the headmaster's hand.

They walked towards the exit where several students were trying to persuade Julián the caretaker to let them out on a really urgent errand. No, don't go spinning tall stories. If you don't have a headmaster's note then nobody's leaving, Julián was surely telling them, repeating the spiel he'd been rehearsing the past thirty years. So, they're not so different, it's the same old game, thought
the Count, who, as he walked past the caretaker, looked him in the eye again, and while the man was opening the gate to let them out, he said: “Julián, it's me the Count, the one who used to get out over the back to go and hear the episodes of Guaytabó,” and he happily left the past to return to the gusts in the present blowing away the last spring blossom from the
majaguas
. Only then did he notice that they'd cut down the two trees nearest to the steps, beneath which he'd won a couple of girls to his love. Sad, isn't it?

 

“I'm sorry, but I'm not free till about seven,” and the Count thought that recently everyone was saying they were sorry and that the woman's voice was still as charming and confident as when she'd stated publicly that long hair down to the jaw best suited an angular face. “I'm finishing an article I have to give in tomorrow. Is that time all right?”

“Of course it is. We'll be there. Goodbye,” he answered, checking his watch and seeing it was barely three-thirty. He hung up and walked back to the car, as Manolo started the engine.

“Well, what did she say?” he asked sticking his head out of his window.

“Not till seven.”

“Blast her,” responded Manolo hitting the steering wheel with both hands. He'd already told the Count he'd
be going out tonight with Adriana his current girlfriend, a mulatto with the firmest butt you ever did touch, tits that got you horny and a face to . . . you know what. Look what she's done to me, he'd said, opening his arms, blaming his latest sexual conquest for the irretrievable deterioration in his physique.

“Come on, drop me home and pick me up at six-thirty,” suggested Lieutenant Mario Conde, thinking he was not prepared to bus it to Casino Deportivo because Manolo had a desperate need to finger Adriana's backside.

The car drove off down the black slope of Red Square towards the grimy 10 October Highway.

“Call your lady-love and tell her you'll see her at nine. Caridad will be a quicky,” suggested Conde attempting to relieve his colleague's frustrations.

“I don't have any option, do I? Why don't we go to see that Dagmar woman?”

Conde looked at the notebook where Manolo had jotted down the teacher's address.

“I'd rather not do anything until we've spoken to the girl's mother. Why don't you ring Dagmar and see her tomorrow? I need you to look into something else. Go to headquarters and have a word with the Drugs people. Try to speak to Captain Cicerón. I need them to tell me all they know about marijuana in this area and to analyse what turned up in Lissette's lavatory. There are several very strange things about this case and I'm most
interested in the remnants of marijuana in the lavatory. It was really real amateurish to leave something behind like that.”

Manolo waited for the lights to change on Acosta and then said: “They didn't steal anything either.”

“Yes, if only a couple of things had gone missing, we could think that was the motive.”

“Hey, Conde, are we really going to finish early?”

The lieutenant smiled.

“You're worse than a bedbug with insomnia.”

“Conde, your problem is you've never seen Adriana.”

“Fuck, Manolo, if it's not Adriana, it's her sister, you're always at it.”

“No, my friend, this time, it's special. Just imagine if I'm thinking of getting married. You don't believe me? I swear by my mother . . .”

The Count smiled because he couldn't for the life of him recall how often Manolo had made the same pledge. It was astonishing that his mother was still among the living after he'd invoked her so often. He looked out at the Highway, packed with people desperately trying to catch a bus to return home to lives that rarely managed to be normal. After so many years working in the police he'd got used to seeing people as potential suspects whose wretched existences he'd have to scavenge, like a carrion crow, only to uncover tons of heaving hatred, fear, envy and frustration. None of the people he got
to know on any investigation was ever happy, and that absence of happiness, now also impacting on his own life, seemed a sentence that was too long and wearisome for him to bear, and the idea of leaving his job began to shape into a firm decision. After all, he thought, what a joke: me putting order into other people's lives, how about setting my own right?

“Do you really like being a policeman, Manolo?” he asked, almost without thinking.

“I think I do, Conde. Besides, it's all I know.”

“But if you like it, you must be mad. Like me.”

“I like a bit of madness,” Manolo confessed crossing the railway line without slowing down. “Just like that headmaster.”

“What did you make of that guy?”

“I don't know, Conde, I don't think I like him, but don't take any notice of me. It's only an impression.”

“As impressions go, mine's no different.”

“Hey, Conde, I'll tell Adriana eight-thirty, right?”

“That's what I said, Manolo. Hey, you're a man who says he's had lots of women, did one ever play the saxophone?”