Havana Blue Read online

  “Why not?”

  “Because he went abroad. A whole year in Canada, I think.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around October, I told you.”

  “Did he give you presents?”

  “Little things.”

  “What kind of little thing?”

  “Perfume, bracelets, a dress, that sort of thing.”

  “From abroad?”

  “Yes, from abroad.”

  “So he had dollars?”

  “I never saw any.”

  “How did you get to see each other?”

  “Simple, he always had lots of work on, and when he had a chance he’d call me at home. If I wasn’t busy, he’d come for me. In his car. Naturally.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “He had two. Almost always the newer one, a private Lada, and sometimes in another Lada, state-owned I think, with tinted glass.”

  “Zoila, now I want you to think carefully what you say: for your own good and for the good of your friend René Maciques. Where might he get so much money from?”

  Zoila Amarán Izquierdo leaned her head to one side to look at the lieutenant, and her eyes tried to say how the hell should I know? Then she looked at Manolo and replied:

  “You know, comrade, you don’t ask that kind of question on the street. I’m not a whore because I don’t go to bed for money, but if someone shows up with money and invites you to a meal at L’Aiglon and to a beer by the pool and then wants to hang out at a night club and go up to a room overlooking the Malecón, you don’t dig any further. You enjoy yourself, comrade. Things are very bad these days, and you’re only young once, right?”

  Of course you’re only young once, he thought, so much was obvious. A warm lazy voice and cloudless sky-blue eyes were the only visible reminder of the attributes of the mythical Baby-Face Miki, the lad who set the record for the number of girlfriends in one year at high school in La Víbora: twenty-eight all told, snogged to a woman and some explored more thoroughly. Now he didn’t have enough hair to attempt Afro curly waves but plenty enough to declare his bankruptcy and assume his baldpated fate. His beard was an explosion of reddish grey stubble, like the last Viking in a comic. His previously handsome face now had the consistency of a poorly kneaded biscuit: uneven, cracked, with mountains and valleys of poorly distributed, prematurely aged flab. He laughed and displayed the jaundiced sadness of his teeth, and if he laughed a lot, his smoker’s lungs regaled him with a two-minute coughing fit. Miki was a warning, the Count told himself: his appearance was evidence that they would soon hit forty, were no longer spring chickens able to greet every morning afresh, and had good reason to be exhausted and nostalgic.

  “This is a disaster area, Conde. Mariíta left me a month ago, and look at this pigsty.” And his spreadeagled arms tried to embrace the endless mess in his living room. He picked up two glasses soiled by several generations of dirt and put them back in almost the same spot. Cursed the absent woman five times and went over to the record player. Without thinking, he took the LP on the top of the pile and put it on the turntable. “Listen to this and die: The Best of the Mamas and the Papas . . . It’s not fair, the bastards sing so sweetly, right? With Mariíta I’m on my fifth divorce and third kid, and I get more miserable by the day. They share out my pay, and I can’t even afford a smoke. Talking of which, give me a cigarette. Do you think anyone in this state can write? No shit, you don’t feel like writing, let alone living, but it’s important not to give up, though sometimes you get tired and do give up a bit. It’s not easy, Conde, not easy at all. Listen to that... ‘California Dreams’, that’s from when we were at secondary school. Oh, to be that young again. I listen to this song and I swear I even feel like getting married again. And have you finally got down to writing something?”

  The Count shifted a pair of trousers and two shirts from an armchair and could sit down. He was intrigued by the fact that, apart from Lamey, Miki was the only writer spawned by that literary workshop at high school, which Miki basically attended to see what he could pull. But at some stage the bright spark had expressed his enthusiasm for literature, set his lights on becoming a writer and somehow or other had made it. Two books of short stories and one novel published: he was what was considered a prolific writer, although in a vein that the Count could never have tapped had he had the time or talent to defeat the defiantly white page. Miki wrote about literacy campaigns, the first years of the revolution and the class struggle, whereas he would have preferred to write a story about squalor. Something squalid and moving, because even though he’d not experienced many squalid things that were also moving, he’d more need of them than ever.

  “No, I’m not writing.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know, I try occasionally but nothing comes.”

  “It happens, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Give me another cigarette. If I’d got any coffee, I’d invite you, but I’m up shit-creek. Not even ciggies, you hound. How’s it going, any sign of the guy yet?”

  “No, he’s not put in an appearance,” said the Count trying to make himself comfortable in the sofa-chair, despite the spring that kept poking into him.

  “When Carlos told me you were after Rafael, I almost pissed myself laughing. You must agree it’s funny.”

  “It’s not funny at all as far as I’m concerned.”

  Baby-Face Miki crushed his cigarette on the floor and coughed a couple of times.

  “Rafael and I had some trouble five or six years ago. Did you know that? No, most people don’t, and the old crowd from high school I keep bumping into ask me about him and think we’re still good pals. It used to annoy me no end lying to the effect that everything was fine. You can’t spend your whole life making out everything’s fine . . . Don’t you have the slightest fucking clue what might have happened to Rafael? Do you reckon he’s gone off with a little number and will turn up acting as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”

  “What’s up, man? You’re very downbeat. Look, I have this strange thing with Rafael: I sometimes think I still like him, because once we were as close as brothers, and at others I pity him a little, just a very little, and then I feel indifferent, as if I don’t care a fuck what’s happened to him, because I didn’t deserve all the trouble he got me into with the party check-up.”

  “What trouble?”

  “Well, that’s why I told Carlos you should make sure you saw me today. Listen, Conde: I know Rafael is up to his neck in something big. I don’t know if what I’m going to tell you will be much use, maybe, you’ll tell me. And if I’m telling you, it’s because you’re the policeman in charge of this case, because if it were someone else, he’d never find out. Look, the trouble came about because when they were vetting him for the party, Rafael gave them my name as a person they could ask, and the couple doing the audit on him did come to see me. I remember it happened when I’d left the Youth Organization, and they told me it was just routine, that if I’d known Rafael well from his time as a student that was all they needed. Imagine, had I known him? Then they started to question me, and I answered, and everything went just fine. Well, kid, two months later Rafael showed up here in a right rage: he said it was my fault they’d deferred his joining the party, that I shouldn’t have said his mum went to church or that he went to see his father when he came back to the country, that his old man was more fucked than a dog without teeth, a poor sucker who was still a third-rate Miami plumber, although he and his mother told people his father was a drunkard and dead. And what most got his goat was that I said he still loved his dad and was very pleased they’d seen each other again after twenty years, because since we’d been at primary school he’d been traumatized by what happened to his father and the fucking fact he’d left the island. You know, I looked for the human side of the story . . . I only wish Yoly was here to tell you. He went mad, shouted in my face that I
was a cunt, that I was jealous of him plus a few excremental pleasantries. But that’s not the worst of it, and don’t look at me like that. The worst is that I went to the office where he worked and talked to the guys who questioned me because I didn’t think any of what I’d said was that bad, and that’s what they said, that it was just another element in his dossier, and of no great consequence because they could understand he’d wanted to see his father but that they had deferred his entry into the party because he’d shown signs of arrogance and been in a silly dispute with the union, I don’t remember what, but they were sure he’d get there, blah, blah, blah. That was the spot of trouble.”

  “I had a vague idea about all that. Sounds just like him,” said the Count, and he anticipated Miki’s desires. Gave him a cigarette and lit his. “But what’s all that got to do with the trouble he’s causing now?”

  “It has to do with the fact that, in his eyes, I’m a liar. The truth is that he thought I’d told the investigation that he accepted the suitcase of clothes his father had brought and that they went to the Diplomat Shop and that I even gave him one hundred and fifty pesos for jeans that were too big for him. But I said nothing of the sort but said what I said to defend him, not because I’m naturally a liar, but because those days all that was lethal ammunition to militants and I’d invented a sentimental tale about him and his . . .”

  “Hell, Miki . . .”

  “Hey wait a minute, don’t start on me, I don’t need your absolution. I didn’t ask you to come here to make a confession to you. The nitty-gritty is that Rafael came back here on the afternoon of the thirty-first, at about three pm, after years of ignoring me. Now you’re interested, I bet, Conde. I know you only too well.”

  “Why did he come, Miki?”

  “Now wait another minute, let me turn the record over, the one Rafael gave me for New Year. He knew I’m addicted to the Mamas and the Stones . . . I was very, very surprised to see him round here, but I was really pleased, as I’m not one to harbour a grudge. Well, I borrowed a packet of coffee from my next-door neighbour, and we drank the pint of rum I had left, and we chatted as if nothing had ever happened. We raked over a stack of shit about secondary school, high school, the barrio, the usual. Rafael had a chip, you know? In the end he was the one who envied me, and he told me so right where you’re sat now. He told me I’d always done what I damned well wanted and lived as I wanted: fancy, me as fucked as I am, with three books published that I reckon are pure cow dung I don’t even like opening. When I told him that he laughed his head off. He always thought I was joking.”

  “But what did he want, man? Why the hell did he pay you a call?”

  “He came to say he was sorry, Count. He wanted me to forgive him. You know what he said? He said I’d been his best friend.”

  Mario Conde couldn’t help himself: yet again he had visions of Tamara stripping off and felt sure he was being sucked into a deadly quagmire.

  “Was he a cynic or just an asshole?”

  Miki repeated the exercise of crushing his cigarette end on the floor but destroyed it carefully, and after he’d destroyed it, kept stomping his foot down.

  “Why talk like that, Count? You’re another one with a chip, right? That’s why you’ll never be a mediocre writer like me, or an elegant opportunist like Rafael or even a good person like Carlos. You will never make it anywhere, Conde, because you want to sit in judgement on everyone but yourself.”

  “You’re talking shit, Miki.”

  “I’m not talking shit at all, and you know it. You’re afraid of yourself, and you’ll never face up to it. Why aren’t you a real policeman? You’re always going off at half cock. You’re the typical representative of our hidden generation, as a professor of philosophy at the university once told me. He said we were a faceless, aimless, gutless generation. That we didn’t know where we stood or what we wanted and so preferred to hide. I’m a lousy writer, I don’t want to get into trouble over what I write: I know that much. But what are you?”

  “Someone who doesn’t give a fuck about what you just said.”

  Miki smiled and held out a hand. The Count gave him the last cigarette from the packet he then crumpled into a ball and lobbed at the window.

  “That LP is really good, right?” asked the writer, enjoying the smoke from his cigarette.

  “Hey, Miki,” asked the lieutenant, looking his old schoolmate in the eye, “was that record of yours at high school just another of your lies?”

  He never heard the bullet, and first he thought, my waist’s been opened up, but hardly, because he lost his balance, and by the time he hit the ground he was already unconscious, and he only recovered consciousness two hours later, when he learned what real pain was, when he was flying in a helicopter to Luanda, with a drip in one arm, and the doctor said: Don’t move, we’ll soon get there, but he didn’t need to be told, for he couldn’t move any part of his body, and the pain was so intense he passed out, and his next memory was from after his emergency operation in the Luanda Military Hospital.

  Once he’d heard that story, the Count repeated it to himself so many times he’d turned it into a film and could visualize every detail of the sequence: the way he fell facedown on the hot sandy ground that smelled remotely of dry fish; the sound of the helicopter, and a very young doctor’s pale face saying: Don’t move, the 0187 is about to land, and he could also see the inside of the aircraft, he must have felt cold, and remembered seeing an immaculately white cloud scud by in the distance.

  After he’d had another operation in Havana, Skinny told him the story of his only engagement with an enemy he’d not even seen. Josefina looked after him by day, and the Count, Pancho, Rabbit and Andrés took it in turns by night and chatted till they fell asleep and even Mario Conde convinced himself that that had been his war, though his hands never held a gun and the face of his enemy was self-evident: a bedridden Skinny. He already knew it was unlikely his friend would walk again: the easy, carefree, cheerful relationship they’d enjoyed till then had been tarnished by a feeling of guilt the Count never managed to exorcize.

  “Why do you have to get like that, you wild man?”

  “What do you expect me to be like after what those wankers did to you? The cowardly assholes. And when they lost on Saturday I imagined this was coming, because it seemed that luck was on their side but they couldn’t score and left everybody on base and the Vegueros won with just a couple of ridiculous runs. And feel pleased you didn’t see today’s game: they belted fifteen hits in the first inning, went ahead nine-one, and in the second, the one they really had to win, they lost nine-zero. Hell, how can you spend your whole life waiting for these wankers to win a championship when they always open their legs like hookers when they really need to concentrate on winning? But I get like this because I’m an idiot, I should just give up watching bloody baseball . . .”

  “So you don’t want a shot of rum?”

  “Take it easy, Count, take it easy. Give it here,” and he grabbed the glass the Count had put next to the ashtray, as if making a real sacrifice.

  “Hey, and what got into you, buying rum?”

  “Conde, I’m in a right state. Either you drink rum or piss off as if I’d never seen you.”

  “I’ll drink rum, but let’s change the subject, because I’m not the team manager, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  Skinny poured himself another shot and seemed to have declared a truce. His deep breathing returned to normal.

  “How you getting on with the Rafael thing, my brother?”

  “It’s getting better. We’ve got a good lead.”

  “Did you see Miki?”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve just come from his place. He was really odd. I thought he was more in need of a priest than a policeman.”

  “And did you forgive his sins?”

  “I consigned him and his three books to hell. For being a liar and a bad writer. Pour me some more, quick.”

  “And what’s the lead?”
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br />   “That lots of money passed through Rafael’s hands and he’d probably run into difficulties with finances at the enterprise. Guess what the bastard did when he picked up a chick? He’d tell her his name was his department head’s: see the kind of dick-head our pal is.”

  “We’d all do the same, kid,” replied Skinny, gulping his rum down anxiously. The Count did likewise and didn’t even think how good the rum was. “You had something to eat?”

  “No, I don’t feel like food. Let me down a few shots and then go to sleep.”

  “Did you see the twin today?”

  “Yes, around midday. Nothing new to report. I drank two whiskies with her . . .”

  “Yours is a hard life, isn’t it?”

  The Count opted for another rum rather than to start another argument with Skinny. That’s what he’s after, the bastard, he’s lost it after the baseball, he told himself, and used his feet to take his shoes off. He was beginning to feel comfortable, slumped in an armchair, Jose was looking at television in the living room and he suddenly remembered the Mamas and the Papas and felt an urgent need to listen to music.

  “I’ll put something on,” he said and walked over to the sideboard where the cassette player stood. He opened a drawer and studied the cassettes Skinny had numbered and put in order. The complete Beatles; almost all of Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears; several tapes of Serrat, Silvio and Pablo Milanés; and one of Patxy Andión, selections from Los Brincos, Juan and Junior, Formula V, Stevie Wonder and Rubén Blades. What a mixture, hell, and he chose the tape of a record sung in English by Rubén Blades that he’d given Skinny as a present. He switched on the deck, gulped down a generous measure and poured out Skinny and himself some more rum. Now the pain had gone from his back and butt that had been tortured by Miki’s armchair.

  He liked that record and knew Skinny did, and they felt morbidly carefree singing the ballad “The Letter”, the epistle a friend writes to another who knows he’s going to die, and they drank and drank like thirsty pilgrims. The bottom of the bottle was beginning to show; and Skinny moved his wheelchair over to the glass cabinet and pointed to the pint left over from the day before, and they thought great, we’ve got another pint of rum, we can handle it, and they wanted to down all that alcohol.