Havana Fever Page 13

  “Obviously nobody here works,” the Count said almost to himself.

  “Everybody lives by his wits,” Yoyi reminded him. Those guys are playing dominoes purely for cash, evidently. But one of them rents out the space; another sells beer; that guy does the food; yet another sells cigarettes; another breeds fighting dogs; another rents out his room; another keeps an eye out for the police . . .”

  “How come we walk in and they don’t budge?”

  “Those big black guys looking after my car, man . . . they’re the security and they gave us a safe-pass . . . They circulate the money among themselves and get by that way. At night, one of them changes hats and burgles houses, offers whores to tourists and, obviously, sell drugs , as you know . . .”

  “What the fuck is this? Hell?”

  “Yes . . . but only the surface. Like the first circle. But you can sink even lower, I swear. Been a while since you went around Prado at night? Go take a look and you’ll really see fireworks, and all out in the open . . . Your ex-colleagues take their Alsatians with them when they go there.”

  The Count didn’t look into the interiors of the flats he walked by and came to the door marked number seven, which was shut tight, and knocked.

  Silvano Quintero turned out to be younger than the Count was expecting. He was in his seventies and his extreme – if not genetic – thinness might have flattered him, but the purple shade of his skin marked him out as card-carrying, diehard alcoholic. Silvano needed a shave, a haircut, and was crying out for a good bath. When he ushered them in, Conde noticed the man’s right hand: it was like a stiff, half-closed claw, with a gaping hole in the smooth flesh at the top. The small room was in the same wretched state as its tenant. The foulest stench wafted across the threshold of the small doorless lavatory and the place didn’t appear to have been cleaned since some remote date in the previous century. Under the wooden zinc-covered table supporting a kerosene stove, the Count’s trained eye spotted an army of empty bottles that had certainly been drunk in honour of the man’s leathery liver.

  Silvano pointed them to two rickety chairs and settled himself on the edge of the bed on a steely grey sheet. Conde couldn’t stop thinking about himself and his own alcoholic inclinations and was alarmed to think he might be watching a science-fiction film, perversely intent on showing him his future.

  “Well, then?” asked Silvano.

  The Count took out a packet of cigarettes and handed one to the man, who took it in his left hand, then placed it, as if in an ashtray, between the two fingers of his crippled right, while the other searched his shirt pocket for a cigarette holder where he slotted the cigarette, an operation entirely executed by his left hand.

  “I explained yesterday . . . my friend and I are in the business of buying and selling books and old records . . .”

  “And can you live on that?” asked a suspicious Silvano, drawing on his holder in a rather finicky, old-fashioned way.

  “Sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t . . . In one deal we came across a record of one Violeta del Río, and someone told us you definitely knew her.”

  “Who told you I did?” he rasped, wiping his snot away in the same sophisticated style he adopted when smoking.

  “Rogelito the timbalero.”

  “Is he still alive?” he almost droned.

  “He’s about to hit a hundred,” the Count assured him. “He reckons he doesn’t know how to die.”

  Silvano took a few more drags, as if he were reckoning up his own options, which the Count had reduced to two: speak up or shut up. From then on the situation threatened to get complicated. The Count produced the page from Vanidades devoted to Violeta del Río’s farewell. The old journalist took it in his left hand and rested the fold on his garrotted right.

  “For Christ’s fucking sake,” he whispered, folding the page and returning it to a Count already intrigued by what might have prompted his outburst. “Why are you looking for her? Don’t you know she died in 1960?”

  Conde nodded.

  “We’d like to find out more about her. Pure curiosity.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” the other retorted. “It’s a long story which I don’t like telling . . .”

  “Nobody seems to know anything about Violeta, not even that she committed suicide and—” the Count implored.

  “Why do you say she committed suicide? As far as I know, that was never resolved . . .”

  The Count half-closed his eyes, trying to process the old man’s words.

  “What are you implying?”

  “As far as I know, it wasn’t clear whether she took her own life or someone else saved her the bother.”

  Conde tried to make his buttocks comfortable before continuing.

  “You mean she might have been killed?”

  “I believe I am speaking Spanish.”

  “And how do you know?”

  “It was what I heard. There were doubts; her death was never cleared up . . . But, wait a minute,” Silvano changed his tone of voice, “what do I get for telling you all this?”

  Conde didn’t think he’d understood the question, but was then sure he’d heard right after Yoyi, quick as a flash, put a price on the conversation.

  “A bottle and two packets of cigarettes. Give me that little bag . . .”

  The Count couldn’t get over the shock. It had to be the first time ever that someone had charged him for a conversation, and Pigeon was the one sorting it for him, to the extent of pointing out the straw basket tied to a piece of rope, that was most certainly what Silvano used to lower and raise goods in and out of the central yard.

  “All right,” he demurred and gave Yoyi the basket, after he’d put an empty bottle into it.

  “How much, granpa?” enquired Yoyi.

  “Twenty-five a litre and eight pesos a packet of cigarettes . . .”

  The young man left and the Count looked at Silvano, who diverted his gaze to his mutilated right hand. He blew his cigarette out of its holder, and the Count was confirmed in his belief that he understood less and less by the day, because the codes and languages in current use were beyond him. He thought yet again that Yoyi was right: he was like a fucking Martian who’d just popped out of a test tube.

  I was twenty-five and had everything: drive, intellect, a welloff, if not exactly rich family, a job on one of the country’s best newspapers, no energy-sapping vices . . . That’s why I think I might have had another life and still think I could have if Violeta hadn’t crossed my path. Or if I’d not crossed hers . . . When I met her, it was all going her way too: that sculpted body and face which gave her power over men, the slightly husky, but utterly convincing voice, the spurs of a real fighting cock – ready to fight in whichever arena life might cast her.

  I remember the first time I saw her, in the Las Vegas, on one of those crazy Havana nights at the end of the fifties, after the attack on the Palace, when Batista saw things were getting serious and the police got bloodthirsty. It was really dangerous being in the thick of it, but one was irresponsibly bohemian, going out on the town all night, as if going to bed were a sin. You started to knock around, a glass here, another there, your hook baited to catch a beautiful fish to justify the hours drinking, smoking and street-crawling.

  I saw and heard her for the first time on one of those thrilling nights when sleep’s not on the agenda, which suddenly turned into a magical night, because as soon as I heard her voice in that shadowy cabaret I was dazed, convinced after just two minutes that I was listening to something unique, and worse fucking still, I knew at once the experience was contagious, because her voice got under your skin and gave you the shakes, as if something had turned your insides upside down. Naturally, that night she sang several songs, but the one that really got to me was Be gone from me; it was her battle hymn, and she always sang it as if her life depended on it . . . The illness’s complications surfaced several days later, when I began to realize something had lodged in me that night and was refusing to go away. Almos
t unawares I began to trail her, to try to befriend her, to see if I could take it any further, because her voice was embedded in my brain, and so were her face, hair and damned body . . . I wasn’t a child, I was twenty-five, I’d covered a lot of the scene, particularly since I’d been writing for the entertainments page of El Mundo, and as all those singers, dancers and chorus girls wanted to see themselves in print, by publishing a story on one, or just promising to do so for most, I laid a good number of the sexiest females in Havana, back when women were really sexy, with good bums and busts on them . . . Have you noticed how women now don’t have tits, and are even happy when they go hungry so their bum doesn’t get fat?... Well, I laid a lot of them, especially singers who were my weakness, Katy Barqué, for example . . . who was more wrapping than goods, really. Anyway I started to throw some candy Violeta’s way, but not coarsely, because I realized straight away she wasn’t one who was desperate to get into the newspapers, so I approached her cautiously, elegantly, or at least so I thought, following her across the whole of Havana, two or three nights a week, inviting her for a drink, asking her for a song . . . And when it came to act I was already madly in love with her, or rather fucking stupidly in love, the only way you can be in love.

  By the beginning of 1958 she’d stopped singing in second-rate cabarets. It was then they contracted her at the Parisién. I wrote about her show and christened her The Lady of the Night, and it stuck, because what Violeta sung only made any sense if you heard it at night, and the later, the better. I’d written two or three short pieces on her, but decided to go on the offensive and did a half-page report that made a lot of singers loathe me, to publicize her new spot in the second show at the Parisién. By that time, we’d got to know each other, even become vaguely friends, lots of nights we were the last two drinking in the bar, but Violeta never raised my hopes, and that made it worse, I got more hooked, wanted to flirt more outlandishly with her, even get serious if she’d allow me too, although Violeta was a girl, well, a woman with lots of secrets, and I never did find out who she was or what she was like . . . She knew how to shield herself. Her name, for example: she once confessed to me her real name was Catalina, that at home they called her Lina, but she never told me her surname, and my only explanation for that mystery was that the story about her coming from a country village was pure hearsay and the truth was that she had a surname with too high a profile in Cuba which was why she wanted to hide it, because being a high-class lady and a singer in mafiosi-run cabarets didn’t go together. I finally decided that she sang because it was what she most liked doing and not because she was trying to make a living. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t give me much rope and didn’t ask me to write about her, unlike the others: it was as if she couldn’t care less about anything provided she had a little stage to sing on and people ready to listen to her . . . All in all, Violeta was a strange one . . . What I couldn’t get my head round was why that woman, who mixed up with other women of the Havana night, wasn’t footloose and fancy-free like them and apparently didn’t have a boyfriend or lover, although people were beginning to talk about a wealthy man who was with her or after her. But mystery was part of her charm, of her powers of seduction . . . And I was so desperate I consoled myself by thinking that Violeta’s problem might be she preferred women – Katy Barqué said so, with that viperish tongue so typical of her – and that was why she didn’t take any notice of me or the guys chasing her every night, wanting a fling with her. And as she was very friendly with strange women, that idea got stuck in my brain. One of those friends, the one she most seemed to like, was Lotus Flower, the blonde who made a name for herself dancing naked in the Shanghai Theatre and then started up as a Madame of exclusive whores . . . Lotus Flower always hung around the cabarets where Violeta was singing, and you could see she loved listening to her. The pair of them liked talking together, and would often sit together at the end of a show and chat endlessly, drinking cocktails – Violeta always asked for a Bacardí and ginger ale highball – and they never let other people in on their conversations, as if there was a secret between them . . . although I never saw anything that indicated anything sexual between them: it all made Violeta yet more enigmatic and desirable.

  But a true journalist is like a bloodhound, and you know what a dog’s like when it’s after a devious bitch: that was me. I started sticking close, following her even during the day, until I finally discovered the reason for so much mystery. Violeta lived in a flat on Third Street, in one of the best parts of Miramar. It was a modest place compared with the palaces on Fifth Avenue, but the truth is, it was very nice and she had a little English car, a very chic Morris, shaped like a wedge twisted backwards. I started investigating whose name the car and flat were registered in, with the help of a couple of banknotes and my El Mundo card, and one Louis Mallet, resident in New Orleans, appeared as the legal owner. I first wondered whether this Mallet might be Violeta’s father or lover, or even her husband, which would explain why the house and car were in his name, and, as he lived in New Orleans, he surely came to Cuba from time to time if he were her lover or husband, or never, if he were her father . . . But it struck me as strange that people in Violeta’s walk of life could have a lover or husband, providing her with a home and car, and that she was being so faithful. In other words, my suspicion that she liked women held firm, particularly when I saw how, two or three nights later, she spent the evening talking to Lotus Flower and they then spent the night together in the Miramar flat. What’s more, when I began trailing her during the day, I saw a woman in her forties going into Violeta’s flat – I found that out when one day she looked over the balcony – she was good looking and spent hours there, God knows what she was up to; she didn’t look like a maid or cook . . . I kept my chase up for several weeks, until one day I realized they’d been flying me a kite and, as I had my nose in the air, I’d not seen what I should have seen. A man seemed to be living in one of the flats, but wasn’t there very often. He was in his fifties, an elegant dresser, and drove the latest Chrysler, the most expensive model, and although he only popped in for ten minutes, he’d park his Chrysler in the garage to the block. I always thought it strange that the guy went two or three days without showing up, but I didn’t smell a rat until one afternoon I spotted Violeta with a potted plant, on his balcony. Then I realized he must be Violeta’s lover and that for some reason he was taking precautions and pretended to live in the flat under Violeta’s. It wasn’t so hard to find out this gentleman’s name and then I started to put two and two together: Alcides Montes de Oca was in big, big business in Cuba, belonged to an well-established family, society people, real top-hat high society, as people used to say, grandson of General Serafín Montes de Oca, son of Senator Tomás Montes de Oca. The icing on the cake was that he was married to a Méndez-Figueredo, that is, to a mountain of money. I thought I’d got to the bottom of Violeta’s mystery, but I wish I’d obeyed my first inclination to disappear and forget the whole affair, knowing what I then knew and convinced that playing in the First Division wasn’t for an amateur like me.

  But when things start happening, they do just that. Three days after making these discoveries, I was out once again keeping an eye on Violeta’s place, like an idiot, and saw Alcides Montes de Oca drive up in his Chrysler, but this time with a chauffeur, a big black guy who looked like a prize fighter. Ten minutes later who should appear but Lotus Flower with a man in his fifties, and a bit later another man in another chauffeured car, whom I recognized, although lots of people in Havana wouldn’t have, because he didn’t let people take photos and rarely appeared in the newspapers. I knew this guy was Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano’s partner, who now ran the gambling and brothel trade in Havana. He had invested a lot of money in building new hotels with the say-so of Batista, who naturally got a healthy cut of the bacon. For anyone, especially a journalist, that blend of cabaret singer, respectably rich Cuban, brothel Madame and a Jewish Mafiosi was a strange, heady mix, and I got sucked into trying to
find out what they were hatching, since it was too big a deal to be about sex and only sex, however recherché that might be. Violeta and Lotus Flower? Violeta and Lotus Flower and Lansky? All together? Whatever one imagined it was clearly a man and woman thing and no one was going to get too excited, apart from the fact no newspaper would ever print this kind of story, because the combined brawn of Lansky and Montes de Oca was one hell of a lot of muscle power. My second mistake was to think that maybe Violeta del Rio was the victim in that strange business, perhaps it was even true she was a poor little country girl who’d got drawn in that murky scene because she wanted to sing. That night I went home, slept for a few hours and in the morning stocked my car up so I could keep watch for several days. By nine I was on the corner opposite the building on Third and Twenty-Sixth, my eyes glued to the flats on the second and third floor. Right now I couldn’t tell you what the hell I was hoping to get out of my espionage, whether I did it because I was in love with Violeta or out of curiosity, or if I was just narked because the rich guy and mafiosi had what I couldn’t get my hands on. Violeta came home alone that night, at two a.m., drove her car in and went to sleep. The following day she emerged around six p.m. and came back at two a.m., by herself again. The same the following day and the next . . . I’d spent four days in my car, shitting and pissing as best I could, eating the bits and pieces I’d brought with me, sleeping on and off, when I decided I was wasting my time. What I should have done was leave and forget what I’d seen, but as I wasn’t thinking straight, I did the most stupid thing imaginable. I got out of my car, walked to the ground floor of that block and pissed right there, in a final act of revenge, and it was then I heard Violeta’s voice: she was singing her song, Be gone from me . . . You just have to believe this: something took hold of me which I couldn’t resist and which made me enter the building, climb the stairs to the third floor, and start kicking on the door that voice from hell was still singing through, like it was trying to drive me insane . . .