Havana Gold (7 page)

I don't like this area much either,” confessed the Count as he spat out of the car window.

 

Red Candito was born in a tenement on Milagros, in Santos Suárez, and still lived there thirty-eight years later. Things had improved in the tenement in recent times; the death of the next-door neighbour had freed up a room they'd gained without major legal complications – “because of my ballsy father” Candito had commented – to the only room in the family's original dwelling, and thanks to the high ceilings of that old
fin-de-siècle
building, devalued and turned into a rooming-house in the fifties, his father had built a wooden mezzanine reached by a ladder so it now began to seem like home: two bedrooms in the part closest to heaven, and the final fulfilment of the ancestral dream of owning their own bathroom, a kitchen and a dining room on the ground floor. Red Candito's parents were now dead, his elder brother was into the sixth year of his eight-year sentence for violent robbery and Red's wife had divorced him and taken their two children with her. Candito now enjoyed his extensive home with a placid, twenty-something mulatto who helped him in his work: the production of home-made women's shoes which were permanently in demand.

The Count and Red Candito had met when the Count started at La Víbora Pre-Uni and Candito was making his third attempt to pass an eleventh grade he'd never pass. Out of the blue, one day when they'd both had the door shut in their face because they'd arrived ten minutes late, the Count handed a cigarette to that coppery raisin-coloured youth and thus sparked off a friendship that had lasted sixteen years and which Conde had always made best use of: from the night when Candito's protection prevented people stealing his food during a school camp to the sporadic rendezvous of recent times when the Count needed advice or information.

When he saw him come in, Red Candito looked surprised. It was months since he'd had a visit and, although the Count was his friend, a visit from the policeman was never just a friendly occurrence for Candito – at least until the Count showed this one was any different.

“Well, fuck me, if it isn't the Count,” he said after looking down the passageway and checking nobody was around, “what's brought you to this neck of the woods?”

The lieutenant shook his hand and smiled.

“Hey, pal, how come you always look so young?”

Candito stepped back and pointed out to him one of the wrought-iron armchairs.

“Alcohol preserves me on the inside and my head, that handy gift from God, on the outside: it's as hard as
nails,” and he shouted inside. “Put the coffee on, our pal the Count's here.”

Candito raised his hands as if asking an umpire for more time, and went over to a small wooden cabinet and extracted his personal medicine for internal conservation: he showed the Count an almost full bottle of vintage rum that stirred up the thirst provoked by Caridad Delgado's impregnable bar. He put two glasses on the table and poured out the rum. Cuqui pulled to one side the curtain separating the living-room from the kitchen and smiled in at them.

“How's things, Conde?”

“Here I am, waiting on my coffee. Although it's not so urgent now,” he replied, as he took the glass Candito was offering him. The girl smiled and silently popped her head back behind the curtain.

“Hey, that girl's a handful for you, isn't she?”

“That's why I get up to my tricks to bring in a few pesos,” nodded Candito tapping his pocket.

“Until the day you get caught.”

“Hey, guy, this is all legal. But if I get stuck in a corner I can send for you, can't I?”

The Count smiled and thought that, of course, he could. Ever since he'd started working as a professional detective, Red Candito had helped him to solve various problems and both knew the Count's helping hand in times of need was the other side of the coin. Apart from
the one old debt and their years as friends, the Count muttered, as he downed a big gulp of luscious rum.

“This place is real quiet, isn't it?”

“They gave a house to the people in the front room and it's quieter than a morgue. Just listen to that silence, pal.”

“Just as well.”

“What's up then?” asked Candito leaning back in his chair.

The Count downed another big gulp of rum and lit a cigarette, because it was the usual scene: he never knew how to broach with Candito the fact he wanted him to act as his informer again. He knew that despite friendship, discretion and the business of doing an old friend a favour, his jobs went against the strict, street ethics of a guy like Red Candito, born and bred in that dicey tenement where macho values excluded from the onset any kind of collaboration with a policeman: with any sort of police. So he decided to put out a few feelers.

“Do you know a young lad by the name of Pupy, who lives in the Settlers Bank building and rides a motorbike?”

Candito looked in the direction of the kitchen curtain.

“I don't think so. You know, Conde, there's two worlds in this place, rich little boys and street kids, like me. And it's rich little boys who drive Ladas and ride motorbikes.”

“But it's only three blocks away.”

“I may know him by sight, but he don't ring any bells. And don't measure life in blocks: those people live the life of Riley while I have to try every trick in the book to get my wad. Don't put me in the shit. You know what the street's like. Anyway what's this fellow been up to?”

“Nothing so far. It's to do with a crime and a half I need to solve. An ugly crime. Murder,” he said finishing his drink.

Candito poured out some more and the Count decided to get to the point: “Red, I need to know if there's a drug scene at Pre-Uni, marijuana, specifically, and who's supplying it.”

“In
our
Pre-Uni?”

The Count nodded and lit up.

“And they've done someone in?”

“A teacher.”

“Nasty . . . And what's the deal?”

“What I said . . . The night they killed her they smoked at least one joint in her house.”

“But that's got nothing to do with Pre-Uni. I expect they got it somewhere else.”

“Fucking hell, Red, who's the policeman here?”

“Easy, pal, take it easy. I'm just telling you: I don't reckon Pre-Uni has anything to do with this.”

“The connection is she lives near here, about eight blocks away, and Pupy was her boyfriend, though it
seems he was falling out of favour. I tell you: if someone's pushing dope in the barrio, it can get to kids at Pre-Uni.”

Candito smiled and indicated he'd like another cigarette: his fingers were now crowned by long, sharp nails as befitted a cobbler.

“Conde, my Conde, you know every barrio has its pushers and it's not only dope that's in the air . . .”

“Naturally, my friend. Find out from people in the barrio if anyone at Pre-Uni is buying: a woman teacher, a pupil, a caretaker, whoever. And find out if Pupy smokes pot.”

Candito lit his cigarette and took two drags. Then stared into the Count's eyes, stroked his moustache, and smiled.

“So pot hits Pre-Uni? . . .

“You know, Candito, that's another thing I wanted to ask you: was it around in our day?”

“At Pre-Uni? No. There were two or three hotheads snorting lines in those parties when the Gnomes or the Kents were playing, or people popped pills and knocked back rum – remember how those parties ended up? It was sometimes around, but one joint between a hundred. Blond Ernestico handled some in his barrio.”

“Ernestico, you're kidding?” the Count reacted in a state of shock as he recalled Ernestico's mellow voice and tranquil demeanour: some said he was a shitbag;
others reckoned he was a shitbag times two. “OK, but that's past history. Now is what concerns me. You going to give me a hand?”

Candito looked at his sharp nails for a moment. He'll not say no, thought the Count.

“All right, all right, I'll see what I can dredge up . . . But you know the usual: no names, as the Yanks say.”

The Count smiled sweetly wanting to take it a step further.

“Don't do that on me, pal, if they're pushing it to someone at Pre-Uni, there'll be one hell of a scandal, what with a murder thrown in.”

Candito thought for a moment. The Count was afraid of a no-go he could almost understand.

“One day you'll get me burnt, guy, and no one will be there to drag me from the stake. By the time you get to me, you'll need to send the vultures packing,” he replied, and the Count took a breath. He gulped another mouthful of rum and sought the best way to seal the deal.

“While we're about it, I've got a little number I'd like to lay . . . Are the shoes you're making any good these days?”

“Soft as peaches, pal, and a knock down at fifty little pesos for you. If you're broke, I'll give them away. What's size your chick wear?”

The Count smiled and shook his head.

“Fuck if I know what size she is, pal,” he answered and shrugged his shoulders, and thought how he'd ask the next woman he met her shoe-size before he glanced at her bum or tits. You never know when the info might come in useful.

 

Mario Conde, like almost everybody, owed his most distant memory of love to his nursery school teacher, a pale-cheeked, long-fingered young woman, who sprayed him with her breath when she took his hands and placed his fingers on the piano keyboard, while a gentle feeling of disquiet stirred in a vague spot between his stomach and knees. From then on, asleep or awake, the Count started dreaming about his teacher, and one evening he confessed to Grandfather Rufino that he wanted to grow up so he could marry that woman – to which the old man replied: “Me too.” Many years later, on the eve of his marriage, the Count discovered how that young woman about whom he'd never heard a word more after the summer holidays was back in the barrio. She'd arrived from New Jersey on a ten-day visit to her family and he decided to pay her a visit since, although he rarely recalled her now, he'd never been able to forget her entirely. And he was very pleased he did, because not even time, grey hair and flab had managed to erase the serene beauty of that teacher to whom he owed his first erection through touch, and a remote awareness of the necessity of love.

Something about that woman, that he'd anticipated rather than experienced as a mere five-year-old when Grandfather Rufino took him round the fighting cock pits of Havana, had re-surfaced in the figure of Karina. It was nothing precise, because apart from his school mistress's languid hands and unblemished skin, nothing else had survived in the policeman's memory: it was rather a mood of calm, like a blue veil, created by a miraculous sensuality that was at once restrained and irrepressible. He had no choice in the matter: he'd fallen in love with Karina as he had with that teacher and, when he spied on the house where the girl lived, he imagined he could hear the hot rhythms of the saxophone she was playing, as she sat on the window wall while night-time Lenten gales played havoc with her hair. Seated on the ground, he caressed her feet and his fingers ran over every joint, every hard or smooth place on the soles of her feet, so his hands might possess every step that woman had taken in the world before landing in his heart. Now does she wear a four-and-a-half or a five?

 

“That guy Pupy killed her, I bet you anything. He was jealous and that's why he killed her, but he fucked her first.”

“Don't be ridiculous, nobody does that kind of thing these days. You know, savage, it was a lunatic that did it, one of those psychopaths who assaults, rapes and strangles. I saw the film last Saturday night.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, have you ever stopped to think what would have happened if the girl rather than being a teacher had been, by way of example, you know, an opera singer, a very famous one, naturally, and that instead of killing her in her flat, they'd killed her in the middle of a performance of
Madame Butterfly
, in a packed theatre, at the moment . . .”

“Why don't the three of you go lick your arses?” the Count finally asked quite seriously, as his three friends smiled and Josefina smiled and nodded as if to say, they're only pulling your leg, my little Count. “The fact is they like playing the fool. I'll make the coffee and you lot can wash up,” he concluded and got up to get the coffee pot.

Skinny Carlos, Rabbit and Andrés scrutinized him from a table strewn with what could have been leftovers from a nuclear castastrophe: plates, bowls, serving platters, glasses and bottles of rum bled to death by the voracious, alcoholic appetites of those four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Josefina had thought of the idea of inviting Andrés tonight, who'd now become her general practitioner after a lot of new pain beset her three months ago, and, as usual, she'd anticipated the reasonable rather than random possibility that the Count, as starving as ever, would turn up – and then Rabbit also put in an appearance, he'd brought some books for Skinny, he said, and eagerly signed up for that priority activity, as
he dubbed the repast well seasoned by the nostalgia of four Pre-Uni schoolmates now in the fast lane to forty. But Josefina wasn't daunted – she's invincible, thought the Count, when he saw her smile, after clasping her hands to her head for almost a minute, while the light of her culinary inspiration flashed: she could kill the hunger of that predatory foursome.

“
Ajiaco
sailor-style,” she announced, putting her banquet stew-pot on the stove almost half filled with water, adding the head of glassy-eyed stone-bass, two of the sweetest, off-white corncobs, half a pound of yellow
malanga
, half of white, and a similar amount of yam and marrow, two green plantains and others drippingly over-ripe, a pound of yucca and sweetpotato. She squeezed in a lemon, and drowned a pound of white flesh from that fish the Count hadn't tasted for so long he thought it must be on the way to extinction, and, like someone keen to offload, she added another pound of prawns. “You could also add in lobster or crab,” added Josefina, like a witch from Macbeth before the stew-pot of life, finally throwing onto all that solid matter a third of a cup of oil, an onion, two cloves of garlic, a big pepper, a cup of tomato puree, three, no better four small spoonfuls of salt – “The other day I read it's not as bad for you as they say, just as well” – and half a spoonful of pepper, almost completing that creation which had every
possible flavour, smell, colour and texture, with a last quarter of a spoonful of oregano and another such of cumin, cast in the pot almost in a mood of irritation. Josefina smiled as she started stirring her concoction. “There's enough for ten people, but with four men like you . . . My grandfather used to make this, he was a sailor from Galicia, and according to him this
ajiaco
is the daddy of all
ajiacos
and any day beats Castilian
pisto
, French
pot-pourri
, Italian
minestrone
, Chilean
cazuela
, Dominican
sancocho
and, naturally, Slav
borsch
, that hardly merits a place in this Latin stew competition. The secret lies in the mix of fish and vegetables, but you know, one ingredient is missing that you always add to fish: potatoes. You know why?”