The Neruda Case (36 page)

“He died when his vehicle drove off a cliff on the way to El Alto Airport.”

“Before or after Che’s death?”

“A little while after.”

“Before or after the disappearance of Tamara Sunkel?”

“Before,” the lawyer said laconically.

53

H
e put his coca tea down on the nightstand and gazed out at the dense veil of the Milky Way through the misted windows of his room. The night was a black block of granite encrusted with diamonds. He preened his mustache and thought that he was coming to see the world as the poet did. He couldn’t sleep. Air, thin as a strand of the cotton candy sold near school during his childhood, barely entered his throat.

If the poet’s lover’s last name was Bracamonte in Mexico, Lederer in Cuba, Schall in East Germany, and Sunkel in Bolivia, then there were two possibilities: The first was that there were two different women involved, and he’d been thrown off track early in his search, because detective work was much more complicated than what Simenon described and what the poet imagined. In that case, the woman with whom Neruda had fallen in love had disappeared without a trace and had nothing to do with the women in Havana, East Berlin, and La Paz. But it was also feasible that those women were the very one he was looking for: the unfaithful young wife of a Cuban doctor, a twenty-year-old beauty, seduced by the artist’s verses while he was living with sixty-year-old Delia del Carril. Of course, that possibility did not necessarily mean that Beatriz’s daughter was also a child of
Neruda’s. The second possibility also had a disturbing side, he thought, dizzy from lack of air, reaching for the coca tea on the nightstand. The woman of many names was turning out to be an extraordinarily enigmatic person: in the forties, she’d been the lover of a communist poet, then appeared briefly in revolutionary Havana, and in the sixties she’d settled down in the German Democratic Republic, on the other side of the Wall, working in an ideological indoctrination school for Third World youth. And then, suddenly, she showed up in Bolivia as a businesswoman and companion to a colonel involved in the death of Che Guevara.

He sat up and dialed Adelman’s number. “Simón?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Cayetano.” He exhaled cigarette smoke and put on his glasses, as though they could help him speak better. “I need to talk to you again. Could we do it now?”

“Now?”

“It’s just that I’m leaving Bolivia tomorrow.”

Outside, the night lay curled in wait; cold air and the low moan of trucks slid through the poorly sealed windows.

“Ask the taxi driver to take you to the French Club,” Adelman told him. “He’ll know it. I’ll meet you there.”

When Cayetano arrived in front of the well-lit establishment, Simón was not yet there. He waited in the lamplight, out in the cold, his hands plunged into the pockets of the sheepskin-lined jacket Ángela had bought him in Mendoza. At that hour, his wife—or ex-wife, he no longer knew for certain—would be camping among palms and ceiba trees, listening to the frogs croaking and the gentle murmur of tropical foliage, with her sleeves rolled up to establish socialism in Chile. Poor Allende, he thought. He was caught between a rock and a hard place: on one side, the right wing and the United States denounced him as a radical revolutionary trying to build another Cuba, and, on the other side, the far left of his own nation called him a mere
reformist of the Chilean capitalist system. While he worked around the clock in his house on Tomás Moro Street to strengthen his peaceful revolution, behind his back in Havana others were plotting a people’s war drawn from manuals as distant from the reality of Chile as the streets, bars, and bistros of Georges Simenon’s novels.

Adelman arrived moments later, walking quickly, wrapped in a long coat. A waiter’s flashlight led them through a dark and noisy room to a table with a small red lamp. People chatted, drank, and laughed heartily at tables arranged around a thrust stage, where a man in a suit and tie sang a bolero, accompanied by two guitarists. They ordered pisco with Coca-Cola.

“What’s going on?” Adelman asked gravely. He was wearing the same suit jacket as he had that afternoon, and the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned.

“It’s about Tamara Sunkel. You haven’t told me everything you know.”

“You’re wrong. I told you all of it. I have no reason to hide anything.”

“In that case, you wouldn’t have agreed to meet me here.”

Lethargic applause swirled through the shadows. The bolero singer began to croon “Nosotros” with the melancholy of an exile.

“Are you a detective?” Adelman asked.

Cayetano thought of the novel he was reading. An older Maigret, with gray hair and a few extra pounds, went on vacation, but ended up entangled in a case making headlines in Paris. He felt like that European detective, dragged against his will into a matter that, strictly speaking, was none of his business.

“I’m not a detective, but I sense that you know more about Tamara,” he said, lighting a cigarette. The small flame of his match danced in the lawyer’s pupils. “She must have been part of the German community, and that couldn’t have escaped your notice.”

“I’ve already told you everything I know.”

“You must have found out more. You frequented the German Club, you must have met Tamara Sunkel and the colonel. They’re exactly the kind of people who awaken your interest as an investigator.”

“I told you all of that this afternoon.”

“All of that, but not something that surely must have caught your attention: the sudden disappearance of Tamara Sunkel after the colonel’s death.”

“That’s a matter for the police.”

“Adelman, I need your help,” said Cayetano. “I came to Bolivia because I need help. It’s a humanitarian issue.”

The bolero players left the stage, and the indifference of the audience upset Cayetano, since those men probably had wives and children, rented modest homes at the outskirts of La Paz, bought their outfits on installment, and had once dreamed of capturing that slippery creature called fame. But the room burst into loud applause when a blonde in a tight dress and high heels appeared onstage, swinging her hips to the rhythm of “The Pink Panther Theme” as her painted lips smiled into empty space.

“I’ve already told you what I know.” Adelman followed the stripper’s steps with hungry eyes.

Cayetano paused a moment for the woman to remove her blouse and expose her breasts, which were scarcely covered by a skimpy black bra, but when he realized the whole procedure would take a while, he said, “I don’t need to know what Tamara was involved in. I only need to see her on behalf of someone she was very close to a long time ago.”

“Who is that person?”

“I can’t reveal his identity, except to say that he’s terminally ill and wants to speak to her. That’s why I came to La Paz, Simón. I mean it: this person is dying.”

“I’ve already said I don’t know where she is, or how to get in touch with her.” Adelman drank his pisco and Coke, his eyes glued to the blonde. Now she was dancing in nothing but a bra and panties.

“I don’t believe you. If you know of a way of getting in touch with her, you wouldn’t have asked me who was trying to reach her.”

Adelman kept silent, watching the dancer, stroking his glass with the back of his hand. The blonde shook her hips furiously, proving the firmness of her flesh and stirring murmurs and whistles of approval in the audience.

“They just need to see each other briefly,” Cayetano insisted. “Tamara will be grateful. She probably thinks my client died years ago, taking their shared secret to his grave.”

The blonde circled the stage and turned her back to the spectators as her hands slowly unclasped the bra. She let it fall and faced the audience again, her arms over her breasts, moving to the rhythm of a sad cumbia, until she finally bared her fruits, which were remarkable and slightly drooped, and took off her panties. It was a kind of magic trick that made the whole place go silent. She stood completely naked, center stage, smiling, arms high, legs crossed, as the spotlight caressed her perfect body. The public gave her a long ovation, peppered with shouts and whistles. She wasn’t a real blonde, Cayetano observed as he put out his cigarette and sipped his drink.

“Nobody will find out that you told me her whereabouts,” he said when the applause had abated.

“I have no idea where she lives.”

“If Tamara was a businesswoman, I can believe that she disappeared from Bolivia overnight, but not that she could liquidate her assets with the same speed.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

Cayetano crossed his arms on the table, adjusted his glasses, and looked solemnly at the lawyer. “You must know who kept her books.”

When the false blonde disappeared behind the curtain, a bald, scrawny old man emerged and reluctantly gathered her clothes from the floor.

“They say that’s her father,” Adelman said, watching the guy skeptically. “I don’t buy that nonsense.”

“Don’t change the subject on me, Simón. Tamara Sunkel’s accountant has got to know where she is,” Cayetano replied, a new cigarette between his lips, though he couldn’t light it because the club’s stuffy air barely filled his lungs. “And don’t even try telling me you don’t know how to get in touch with that accountant.”

54

T
hank goodness you called!” the poet exclaimed with impatience. “The curiosity is making me restless. I’m headed for another sleepless night. It happens to us when we’re old. It must be so we can better say good-bye to the realm of the living. Matilde is in Isla Negra, so we can talk freely. How’s it going in La Paz?”

Though it was late, Cayetano had called La Sebastiana because he sensed the poet needed to hear from him. He didn’t expect to find him in such a good mood. All the better: he hurried to catch him up.

“I’ve got good news: the woman we’re looking for lived here.”

“So where is she now?”

Fortunately, Neruda seemed to have recovered his optimism. Cayetano explained what he’d found in a day’s work, though he didn’t mention the new change to Beatriz’s identity. Now the poet almost seemed to enjoy hearing about his adventures, as though he were reading a crime novel with Cayetano as the protagonist.

“The East German embassy sent me a brochure for the Berliner Ensemble,” he said. “It includes photos of the actors in
Galileo
, with Tina playing Virginia, but she isn’t clearly visible. And what a stage name she picked for herself! Well, those grandiloquent ways ease up
with time. Did you know that in my youth I once named a book
The Attempt of the Infinite Man
?”