Havana Fever Read online

  His straightforward decision to apply the guillotine to his morbid curiosity revealed the extent of the exhaustion he’d built up over three long days of bibliographic, alcoholic and nutritional orgies: a yawn brought tears to his heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Violeta del Río can go to hell,” he muttered and was surprised to hear the sound of his own voice. He yawned again, adding, as he stroked his dog’s head: “Well, buddy, don’t know about you but I’m off to bed?”

  Rubbish shook his tail strictly negatively, and the Count followed him downstairs. Back in his kitchen, holding the door open, he asked for one last time: “You coming or going?” Rubbish pranced backwards, and the Count understood he wanted to go out on the town, just like Silvano Quintero before he lost his way in life and half a hand.

  “What kind of dog did I land myself?” he wondered, as he bid him farewell and closed the door. He scattered his clothes on his way to his bedroom, pressed the maximum button on his fan, fell on his bed, and didn’t even consider opening a book. Ten minutes later he was asleep and deep in a pleasant dream, watching a beautiful young woman emerge from a golden sea, where the sun was beginning to sink and dim its fiery light behind the horizon. When the woman was close to him, he realized it was Tamara, but he identified her as Violeta, whispering, in her husky bolerista voice that she’d stay the night with him, looking out to sea, watching the day’s miseries and splendours fade.

  The B side:

  You’ll remember me

  The knocks echoed around the house as if summoning him back from the past. Mario Conde opened his eyes but had a slippery grip on the world: he didn’t know where he was or what the time was, and was surprised his head wasn’t aching and that day was only just breaking, which was what the red numbers 6:47 flashing on his luminous watch informed him in the most obvious way possible. More bangs on the door and his brain cleared: Skinny, he thought immediately, something’s happened to Skinny – his immediate response when he received unexpected calls in the night or early morning visits. Before he got up he shouted: “Coming”, and walked towards the door, then almost collapsed when he saw the figure of Manuel Palacios looming large.

  “Something happened to Skinny?” he asked, his heart thudding.

  “No, don’t worry, it’s not that.”

  The relief brought by the knowledge his friend was still of this world immediately gave way to indignation.

  “So what the fuck are you doing here at this fucking time of day?”

  “I need a few words. Aren’t you going to put the coffee on?” asked Manolo, stepping inside.

  “It better be important. Go on then, come in.”

  The Count went into the bathroom, urinated the usual fetid, early morning quantities, washed out his mouth and wet his face. He dragged his feet into the kitchen and put the coffee on, an unlit cigarette between his lips. With or without a hangover, dawn was the worst moment of his day, and being forced to talk was the most excruciating of tortures.

  “I came to see you because . . .” began Manolo, but Conde’s hand cut him short.

  “After a coffee,” he insisted and pulled up the underpants that were threatening to slip off his lean waist.

  Conde opened the door to his terrace and saw Rubbish curled up on his mat. His belly moved slowly in and out: he was breathing. He coughed and spat in the direction of his sink. Coming back in, he picked up the faded jeans he’d abandoned to their fate the previous night, and pulled them on, leaning on a wall where he scratched his back in the process.

  He handed Manolo a coffee and sat down with his big cup sipping on a liquid able to power the re-establishing of contact with himself after waking. He lit his cigarette and peered into the vaguely squinting eyes of the uniformed captain of the detective squad.

  “I’ve come to see you because we’ve got problems . . . Big ones.”

  “What’s up?” asked the Count routinely, not prompted by any real curiosity. Manolo had sought his advice over the years in a wide range of cases and the Count wondered if he’d not gone too far this time waking him up at that ungodly hour.

  “Dionisio Ferrero is dead. Murdered.”

  The blast hit Conde smack in the chest.

  “What was that?” Conde asked, now completely awake and convinced he’d not heard him right.

  “Amalia got up at three to go to the bathroom, and was surprised to see the light on in the reception room. She thought it was her brother and went to see if he was OK. She found him in the library, bleeding from the neck. He was already dead.”

  Mario Conde’s brain started to process what he’d just heard at an unlikely rate of knots. The policeman he’d once been surfaced in every cell of his body, like a latent gene that had suddenly been activated.

  “Did they take any books?”

  “We don’t know yet. That’s why I’ve come to see you. His sister needed an injection and is quite groggy.”

  “We gave them loads of money yesterday.”

  “Amalia says none is missing, it was under her mattress.”

  “Let me have a quick wash and get dressed,” replied the Count, picking up the shoes he’d worn the day before. He took a shirt from his wardrobe and, as it fell over his shoulders, the real reason for Captain Manuel Palacios’s early morning call finally struck him. He padded back to the living room, where Manolo was smoking, deep in thought.

  “Manolo . . . why did you come here?”

  The detective stared at his former colleague his eyes more free-floating than ever. He looked at the cigarette he was puffing between his fingers and whispered: “Right now you and Yoyi are the main suspects. I hate to say it, but you do understand why, don’t you, Conde?”

  The first spurts of blood, pumped by his heart, had hit the bottom right corner of the mirrored door, and the stains ran into those created by leaking mercury, trailing down and drawing elusive abstract art shapes, that joined and extended the pool still being fed by the last secretions from the body that had fallen to the ground. A blackish puddle had coagulated, forming a narrow-mouthed bay on the chessboard tiles, its shores opening out to the interior of the library. The chalk line marked out Dionisio Ferrero’s final position, and the first thing to catch the Count’s eye was that he’d died with his hands splayed open. Or had someone prised something out of them?

  While Manolo argued in one corner of the room with the forensic doctor who’d ordered the body to be moved without his authorization, Mario Conde, under the scrutiny of a sergeant who’d been introduced as Atilio Estévañez, began to think the situation through. Apparently, Dionisio had been stabbed from behind by someone still in the library. If that were the case, it must have been a person Dionisio wasn’t expecting to attack him, otherwise he wouldn’t have turned round so tamely, and left his rearguard unprotected, as any manual of war would point out. He clearly knew his aggressor, a right-handed one at that, judging by the slash on that side of his neck. Whoever the murderer was, he’d been intent on killing his man. If it had been a fight that had got out of hand, he might have stabbed him in the back first, but the killer had gone straight for his neck arteries, trying to murder him at a stroke and simultaneously choke and silence him with the flow of blood. The idea that the murderer was someone familiar to Dionisio was supported by the fact that no door into the house had been forced, which meant, the ex-policeman presumed, that the man had opened the door to his own executioner. The only feasible explanation, among those the Count ran through, was that Dionisio, enticed by figures he’d heard in recent days, had started negotiating with someone behind his sister’s back, possibly the mysterious buyer who’d put in an appearance the previous day, as if out of the blue, or someone similar, who wasn’t even known to Amalia. The probable absence of particular books might clarify the motivation for the crime, although that spelt danger for the murderer: the missing items would be clues that could be easily tracked down.

  Manolo came over and the Count looked him in the eye. The captain gestured to Sergeant Estévañez
to move away.

  “It’s the fucking last straw, these forensics have more power than us these days . . . They’re the scientists . . . Wait, before we go in,” he pointed to the library. “I wanted to say a couple of things so you understand . . .”

  “A couple of things?” asked Conde, wanting to grab Manolo by the neck of his uniform.

  “Conde, I know it’s beyond you . . . but try . . . for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Do you think if I really thought you were a suspect, you’d be here with me now? Don’t take the piss . . . But remember the high-ups don’t know you and you’ve been a renegade as far as they’re concerned ever since you left the force . . .”

  “Look, I don’t give a shit what the high-ups think, or the lowdowns for that matter . . . Anyway, go on, say what you—”

  “The murderer took his knife with him, judging by the kind of gash inflicted the forensic says it’s a normal kitchen knife, sharppointed but pretty blunt.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He was killed between twelve and two this morning. That’ll be more precise after the autopsy. The murderer is right-handed—”

  “Yes, I’d worked that out.”

  “He was attacked from behind, and the angle of entry indicates that the murderer is about four inches shorter than Dionisio.”

  Conde put the squeeze on his brain and recalled that the mysterious buyer described by Dionisio was a tall black man.

  “About my height then,” the Count acknowledged.

  “Another important detail: they cleaned the door handle. So far we’ve only found fresh fingerprints of five people . . .”

  “Dionisio, Amalia, Yoyi, the buyer who came yesterday and myself . . .”

  “Maybe. The footprint in the blood was Amalia’s doing, when she went to see if he was dead. They’re going to check Dionisio’s fingernails now, but I don’t think there was any fight. And we’ll take your prints, Yoyi’s and those two, and see if the fifth person’s on file.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all . . . The high-ups want me to resolve this as soon as possible. Dionisio was in the military, part of the clandestine struggle against Batista and his friends are going to create a fuss any minute now.”

  “Something they didn’t do when he was starving to death,” Conde recalled. “Dionisio worked in a corporation for two or three years and was booted out when he started to notice things he didn’t like. That was at the worst bloody moment of the Crisis . . . And nobody expressed any interest in him after that.”

  “I’ll find out what happened in the corporation,” agreed Manolo. “OK, now let’s look at the books. See if any have gone astray . . .”

  Manolo gave Conde a pair of nylon gloves and they went into the library, taking care not to step on the dried blood or the silhouette that had been marked out. Conde paused in the centre of the room to get an initial overall view: on the left, the section of shelves they’d yet to inspect; on the right, next to the door, the books Conde and Yoyi considered to be unsaleable, piled higgledy-piggledy on the bottom of the shelves; the books held back for a second phase in their deal, on the shelves either side of the window, also looking as if they’d been piled up in a rush; perching precariously on the shelves opposite, the three expanding piles where they’d put particularly valuable items the Count refused to let loose on the market. Almost unthinkingly he went over to the most coveted volumes, rubbed a finger twice over their spines and concluded that, if his memory wasn’t playing tricks, they were all present and correct, even the most valuable Cuban editions, each of which he remembered perfectly.

  He went back to the centre of the room, closed his eyes, and tried to chase any preconceived notions from his mind. He looked around again and, apart from a few strange spaces between the books on the bottom shelves of the area they hadn’t yet inspected, he didn’t think he noticed any changes, although he regretted not scrutinizing the room more carefully the previous afternoon. At that precise moment Conde had a feeling that Dionisio or Amalia, in one of their conversations, had mentioned something crucial about the library, an important revelation now floating in his memory that he couldn’t pin down. What the hell was it? he wondered, before deciding to leave the self-interrogation until later.

  Conde racked his memory as he moved towards the area they’d yet to explore, trying to recall whether at some moment Yoyi or Dionisio had taken a volume from that bookcase. Using the torch Manolo had given him he could see changes in dust levels indicating that six books had recently been removed and he noted that the remaining volumes concentrated in that section were old tomes to do with legislation, customs tariffs, trade regulations in the colonial era, and a long row of magazines specializing in business topics, all published between the thirties and fifties.

  “I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think a single book is missing,” he told Manolo as he pointed out the jewels in the library, “and there are books worth several thousand dollars—”

  “Did you say several thousands? For an old book? How many thousands?”

  “This one,” he indicated the black spine of the Book of Sugar Mills, “could fetch ten or twelve thou in Cuba . . .”

  “Twelve thousand dollars?” Manolo reacted in a state of shock.

  “At least. And double that outside Cuba.”

  “Shit,” exclaimed the Captain, shaken from head to toe by that statistic. “More or less what I’ll earn in my lifetime on my wages . . . They’d kill anyone for a book like that.”

  “We hadn’t touched that part of the library, but six books have gone missing from there. The most valuable are still here . . . I don’t get it. It must be a sextet of very special books . . .”

  “What about them?. . .”

  “We’ll ask Yoyi and Amalia, I certainly didn’t take any from there. Perhaps Dionisio . . . They might be somewhere else in the library or perhaps were stolen.”

  “But could they be worth even more than the others?” Manolo ventured. “If there are books that could fetch twelve thousand dollars . . .”

  “Could be, though I doubt it. The books on that side are legal and commercial, and I don’t think any would be worth that much. I reckon that’s the case because if anyone was in it to steal books and knew the trade, they’d have removed some of those we’d put aside. If you can carry six, you can carry ten . . . So if six were taken, it wasn’t because they’ll fetch a lot of money, but because they were valuable to someone in particular, and that could only be because of the story they told and not because they were antiques or very rare . . . Unless they weren’t books but manuscripts that were important for other reasons,” he concluded, thinking that cold logic threw out of court the idea that any items in the legal and commercial section should have been in a safe: although what about the extremely slim, much coveted General Tariff for the Price of Medicines believed to be the first text printed on the island?

  “So what do you reckon?”

  “I expect Dionisio was so excited by the cash flow from the books that he took six he thought were very valuable and put them somewhere else or sold them behind our back and his sister’s . . . But that’s pure supposition. If he did do something like that, the money can’t be far away.”

  “Despite what you say, perhaps those six books were valuable and the murderer settled for them, knowing you hadn’t looked at the books concerned?”

  “All very plausible . . . Can I tell you something?” Conde observed the library silently. “When I entered this room four days ago, I had a hunch there was or is something very special here. Then when I started looking at the books, I thought it might just be that some were priceless items. I even thought there might be a manuscript or some missing piece to an unsolved puzzle . . . When I found the photo of the bolerista, I decided it must be that and her forgotten story . . . Now I’m sure it wasn’t those books or manuscript or the photo. But something that’s probably not here.”

  “And what the h
ell might that be?”

  “If I had a sixth sense . . . What’s more, Dionisio or his sister said something important about this library, but I can’t for the goddamn life of me remember what . . .”

  “I’ll ask these genius scientists to tell me when those books disappeared yesterday. They can probably say if they went before or after you were working here.”

  “Right you are.”

  Manolo stretched his hand out and took the gloves the Count had just slipped off. The men looked each other in the eye until Manolo averted his gaze.

  “It’s not right so many valuable books are kicking around here, Conde . . . You realize you’ve got to come with me to Headquarters? For fingerprinting and—”

  “Don’t worry, Manolo. I’ll only make one request: that you’re not the one to interrogate me . . . Right now, as calm as I am, I’d like to take you by the neck and throttle you. You know what I’m like when I go crazy.”

  Mario Conde looked round, trying to escape from Yoyi Pigeon’s imploring eyes. His temples were pounding at the degradation he was being professionally and efficiently subjected to: the forensic put each of his fingers on the inky pad in turn and lifted them, like inert fishes, on to the card set out with ten greedy spaces, where he imprinted those personal marks, prints of a man now on file, by the name of Mario Conde, alias “the Count”, born in . . . son of . . . inhabitant of . . . Till that precise moment, the ex-policeman had never really grasped the levels of harassment a human being suffered when experiencing that humiliating treatment, which appeared painless but was in fact similar to what cattle must feel when metal tags are attached to their ears: now, despite his obvious innocence, he’d become one more name on the handy list of people registered in police files and, with each case, his details would be run through the cold memory of a computer, in the malign hope they’d coincide with some incriminating prints.