Havana Blue Page 3

“Go on, say something,” said Skinny, and his voice sounded thick and sticky, as horrible as his must have sounded when the Boss woke him up.

  “I’m going to get rid of your hangover,” announced Mario with a smile.

  “Fuck, that would be handy, because I feel wiped out. Hey, you brute, never another one like last night, I swear on your mother.”

  “Got a headache?”

  “It’s the only thing that’s not aching,” replied Skinny. He never got a headache, and Mario knew that: he could drink any amount of alcohol at any time, mix sweet wine, rum and beer and drop down drunk, but his head never ached.

  “Well, I just wanted to say . . . I got a call this morning.”

  “From work?”

  “I got a call this morning from work,” the Count continued, “to put me on an urgent case. Someone’s disappeared.”

  “You’re kidding, what? Baby Jane gone missing again?”

  “Joke on, my friend, this will kill you. The man who disappeared is none other than a chief executive with a rank of deputy minister and is a friend of yours. By the name of Rafael Morín Rodríguez.” A long silence. Right between the eyes, he thought. He didn’t even say “fucking hell”. “Skinny?”

  “Fucking hell. What’s happened?”

  “What I said, he’s disappeared, gone off the map, AWOL, nobody knows where he is. Tamara made a statement on the night of the first, and the prick’s still missing.”

  “And nobody’s got a clue?” Expectation grew with each question, and the Count imagined the look on his friend’s face, and as Skinny’s cries of shock crescendoed he managed to tell him what he knew about the Rafael Morín case. “And what you goin’ to do now?” asked Skinny after taking in the information.

  “Follow routine. I’ve not had no brainwaves as yet. Question people, the usual, who knows?”

  “Hey, and is it Rafael’s fault you’re not coming for lunch?”

  “Well, while we’re on that subject, tell Jose to keep mine back and not to give it to the first hungry bastard passing through. I’ll be around yours as soon as I’m finished.”

  “Keep me informed, right?”

  “Will do. As you can imagine, I’ll soon be seeing Tamara. Do I give her your regards?”

  “And congratulations, because the New Year’s begun with new life. Hey, you wild animal, tell me if the twin’s as juicy as ever. I’ll be expecting you tonight.”

  “Hey, hey,” rapped the Count. “When the haze lifts, put your mind to this mess and we’ll talk later.”

  “What do you think I’m going to do? What else will I have to think about? We’ll talk later.”

  “Enjoy, my brother.”

  “I’ll pass on the message to my old dear, brother,” said Skinny and hung up, and Mario thought life is shit.

  Skinny Carlos is skinny no more, weighs over two hundred pounds, reeks of the sour smell of the obese, and fate had it in for him. When I first met him he was so skinny he looked as if he would snap in two at any moment. He sat down in front of me, next to Rabbit, not knowing that we’d occupy those three desks next to the window for the duration at high school. He had the sharpest of knives to sharpen pencil-points, and I said: “Skinny, old pal, lend me the blade you got there” and from then on I called him Skinny, although I could never have imagined he would be my best friend and that one day he’d no longer be skinny.

  Tamara sat two rows in front of Rabbit, and nobody knew why they’d put her twin sister in another group, given they came from the same school, were the same age and shared the same surnames and prettiest of faces. But we felt happy enough because Aymara and Tamara were so alike we’d probably never have told one from the other. When Skinny and I fell in love with Tamara we almost stopped being friends, but along came Rafael to put us straight: she was to be neither Skinny’s nor mine. Rafael declared his love to Tamara, and they were an item within two months of the start of term, the kind that stick together like limpets at break and chat for twenty minutes, holding hands, looking deep into each other’s eyes and so far from the madding crowd that they’d snog shamelessly. I could have killed them.

  But Skinny and I are still friends, are still in love with her and shared our frustration by wishing all manner of evil upon Rafael: from a broken leg upwards. And when we felt really down, we’d imagine we’d become the boyfriends of Tamara and Aymara – it didn’t matter then who got who, although we both always loved Tamara, for some reason or other, as they were both very beautiful – and we’d marry and live in houses as alike as the twin sisters: everything identical, one next to the other. And as we got flustered, we’d sometimes get the wrong house and sister, and Aymara’s husband would be with Tamara and vice versa, and thus we consoled ourselves and had a great time, and we’d have boy twins, born on the same day – four at a time – and the doctors, who were also flustered and so on, would get the mothers and children mixed up and say: two to that bed and two to the other and as they grew up together they sucked on the teat of whichever mother was nearby and then always got the wrong house. We spent hours talking about such shit, until the kids grew up and married a quadruplet of girls who were equally identical and it was a big fucking hoot, until Josefina got home from work and turned down the radio, I don’t see how you can stand that racket all day, she’d protest, hell, you’ll go deaf, but she’d make us milkshakes – sometimes mango, sometimes strawberry, if not chocolate.

  Skinny was still skinny the last time we played at marrying the twins. We were in the third year at high school. He was Dulcita’s boyfriend and Cuqui had already fallen out with me when Tamara announced to the class that she and Rafael were getting married and that they were inviting us all to the party at her place – and although they had fantastic parties there, we swore we wouldn’t go. That night we had our first memorable binge: at the time a quart of rum could be too much for us, and Josefina had to wash us down, give us a spoonful of belladonna to cope with our sickness and sore heads and even wrap a bag of ice round our balls.

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios put the car in reverse, stepped on the accelerator, and the tyres screeched painfully as the car swung backwards in order to leave the parking lot. He seemed less fragile when, from the driver’s seat, he looked towards the entrance to headquarters and saw the deadpan expression on Lieutenant Mario Conde’s face; perhaps he’d not impressed him with a manoeuvre that was wilder than anything Gene Hackman does in French Connection. Although he was so young and people said in a few years he’d be the best detective at headquarters, Sergeant Manuel Palacios displayed rampant immaturity when he got his hands on a woman or a driving wheel. The Count’s phobia at what was for him an overly complex activity, your hands steering, your eyes following what was in front and behind, simultaneously accelerating, changing gear or using the footbrake, allowed Manolo to be the perpetual driver whenever the Boss insisted on assigning them to the same case. The Count had always thought such vehicular cohabitation – he saved on a driver – was the reason the major coupled them so often. At headquarters some reckoned the Count was the best detective on the payroll and that Sergeant Palacios would soon overtake him, but few grasped the affinity that had sprung up between the dreadfully penny-pinching lieutenant and an almost emaciated, baby-faced sergeant who must certainly have cheated his way into the Police Academy. Only the Boss realized they might hit it off. In the end that was what happened.

  The Count walked over to the car: cigarette between lips, jacket unbuttoned, bags under eyes hidden behind dark glasses. He seemed preoccupied as he opened the car door and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Good, finally, off to the wife’s house?” asked Manolo, raring to go.

  The Count stayed silent for a few minutes. He put his glasses into his jacket pocket. Extracted the photo of Rafael Morín from the file and placed it on his lap.

  “What do you read in that face?” he asked.

  “That face? You’re the one into psychology, why don’t you tell me?”

  “In the me
antime, what’s your take on all this?”

  “I’m not sure yet, Conde, it makes no sense. I mean,” he checked himself and looked at the lieutenant, “it’s real fucking odd.”

  “You tell me,” replied the Count, egging him on.

  “Well, for the moment there’s no sign of an accident and no evidence he’s fled the country, at least according to the latest reports I’ve just read, although I’d not bet on it. I don’t think he’s been kidnapped. That wouldn’t make any sense either.”

  “Forget about any sense and go on.”

  “Well, a kidnapping doesn’t make any sense because I can’t see what anyone could ask him for, and I don’t figure he’s run off with a woman or anything of that sort, because he’d know there’d be one hell of a fuss and he doesn’t seem that kind of guy. He’d lose his position, right? I’ve got one solution with two possible angles: he’s been killed by accident or because people wanted to steal something, or because he was mistaken for somebody else, or else was killed because he was involved in some fucking scam. And the only other possibility is quite ridiculous: he’s hiding for some reason, but if that’s the case, I can’t understand why he didn’t think up something to delay his wife filing a statement. A trip to the provinces or whatever . . . But the guy stinks like a dead dog on the highway. In the meantime we’ve no choice but to look everywhere: his home, work, barrio, anywhere, to find something to explain all this.”

  “Fuck the bastard,” exclaimed the Count, staring at the road opening up before him. “Let’s go to his place. Off you go to Santa Catalina via Rancho Boyeros.”

  Manolo drove them on. The streets were still deserted under the bright sun that beat down and invited thoughts of an early afternoon break. A few dirty clouds lurked high on the horizon. The Count tried to think of Josefina’s lunch, of tonight’s baseball game, of the damage he was self-inflicting by smoking so many cigs a day. He wanted to see off the mixture of melancholy and excitement overcoming him as the car approached Tamara’s house.

  “Hey, Conde, you still on holiday? What do you reckon?” asked Manolo as they sped past the National Theatre.

  “I think more or less the same as you, that’s why I said nothing. I’m sure he’s not hiding or going to attempt an illegal exit,” he replied and took another look at the photo.

  “Why do you think so? Because of his position?”

  “Yes, right. Just imagine him travelling abroad ten times a year . . . But particularly because I’ve known him for twenty years.”

  Manolo missed a gear, and the car almost stalled on him. He accelerated and managed to judder along. He smiled, nodded and looked at his colleague.

  “Don’t tell me he’s a friend of yours.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I knew him.”

  “Twenty years back?”

  “Seventeen, to be precise. I first heard him speechifying in 1972 at high school in La Víbora. He was president of my student federation.”

  “And what else?”

  “You know, Manolo, I don’t want to prejudice you. The fact is he always made me feel sick to my back teeth, but that’s irrelevant now. He should just put in a quick reappearance so I can go to bed.”

  “You really think it’s not relevant?”

  “Get a move on, catch the green light,” he countered, pointing to the traffic light onto Boyeros and the El Cerro highway.

  The Count lit another cigarette, coughed a couple of times and put Rafael Morín’s photo back in his file. The memory of Tamara telling them of her forthcoming marriage to Rafael had resurrected itself violently and unexpectedly. He could now see the three white stripes on her tunic, her stockings rolled down round her ankles and hair cut in a symmetrical oval. After they’d left high school they’d seen each other barely four or five times, and each time the mere sight of her and her female sensual allure made his skin tingle. They were progressing along the Santa Catalina highway, but the Count wasn’t looking at the houses where some of his old school friends lived or the welltrimmed gardens or tranquillity in that eternally tranquil barrio where he’d partied so often with Skinny and Rabbit. He was thinking of another party, Tamara and Aymaras’ fifteenth birthday party, almost at the start of the second year at high school, on the second of November, his memory recalled to the day, and the big impression made on him by the house where the girls lived. The garden was like a well kept English park: there was room for tables under the trees, on the lawn and next to the fountain where an old statue of an angel, rescued from some collapsing colonial establishment, pissed on lilies in full bloom. There was even a space where the Gnomes could play, the best, most famous, most expensive of the combos in La Víbora, and more than a hundred couples danced; there were bouquets for every girl and trays of meat croquettes, meat pies and fried cheese balls that were unimaginable in those years of perpetual queues. The twins’ parents, ambassadors in London at the time and previously in Brussels and Prague and later Madrid, knew how to throw a party. And Skinny, Rabbit, Andrés and himself were sure they’d never been to a better one. A bottle of rum to each table! “It’s like a party in another country,” pronounced Rabbit, and they all agreed. Then he thought how even the great, great Gatsby would have enjoyed that gala do. In conquistador mode, Rafael Morín spent the whole night dancing with Tamara, and the Count could still remember the twins’ white lace dresses flying though the air to the inevitable “Blue Danube”: a white dress that for him was black and backstitched entirely in grey.

  “Park there,” he ordered the sergeant when they crossed Mayía Rodríguez, and he threw his cigarette end on the road. There on the opposite pavement, right on the corner, stood the two-storey house where the twins had lived, a spectacular house splendid with large swathes of dark glass and red brick and a wall around a professionally manicured garden at the right height not to hide the line of concrete sculptures that denoted the shaping hand of a Wifredo Lam.

  “This is it,” exclaimed Manolo. “Whenever I drove by here I’d stare at that house and think how I’d like to have lived in a house like that. I even started to think there’d never be problems with the police in such a place and that I’d never get to see the inside.”

  “Well, it’s no house for policemen.”

  “It was given to him, I suppose.”

  “No, not this time. It belonged to his wife’s parents.”

  “What can life be like in this kind of house, Conde?”

  “Different . . . Hey, Manolo, wait a minute. There’s an idea I want to work on: the party on the thirty-first. Rafael Morín disappeared after going to that party. Something may have happened there that impacts on all this business, because I’m not into coincidences. I want to ask you a favour.”

  Manolo smiled and struck the steering wheel with both hands.

  “The Count asking me for a favour? Of a personal or work nature? Go ahead, I’ll be pleased to do anything for you.”

  “Hey, shut that trap and let me interview Tamara. I’ve known her for some time, and I think I can handle her better like that. That’s the favour: not much to ask, is it? You can tell me later of any thoughts that may come to you. OK?”

  “OK, Conde, it’s not a problem,” the sergeant replied, preparing to make a sacrifice in order to be present at what he guessed would be a settling of accounts with the past. As he locked the car Manolo saw the Count cross the road and disappear between the box-hedges and the head of a terrified concrete horse that seemed more Picasso than Lam. At any rate, that house continued to be far beyond the reach of any policeman.

  Her eyes were two classic almonds, polished and slightly moist. Just the minimum to suggest they really were two eyes that might even shed tears. A lock of her artificially curled hair twisted down over her forehead, almost engulfing her thick, very high eyebrows. Her mouth attempted to smile, in fact did so, and her dazzlingly white teeth, like a healthy animal’s, deserved the reward of a broad smile. She didn’t look thirtythree, he thought as he stood in front of his former schoo
lmate. Nobody would believe she’d given birth, could still perform ballet pirouettes, although she was now clearly more in control of her profound beauty: rounded, exuberant and provocative, and at the peak of her bodily charms. She could still get into her school tunic and tight-clinging blouse, he thought as he tightened the pistol in his belt and introduced Sergeant Manuel Palacios, whose eyes were bulging out of their sockets. The Count wanted to leave as soon as he sat down on the sofa next to Tamara and she pointed Manolo to an armchair.

  She was wearing a gaudy yellow loose-fitting dress, and he noted she was not at all unnerved: even wrapped in that garish colour she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, and now he didn’t want to leave but to stretch an arm out when she stood up.

  “Well, life is full of surprises, isn’t it?” she remarked. “Wait a minute while I get you some coffee.”

  She walked towards the passage, and he observed the movement of her buttocks under the fine yellow material. He followed the faint outline of her knickers on her thighs and exchanged glances with an almost panting Manolo. He recalled how that memorable bum had led to lots of tears when her ballet teacher inevitably advised her to revisit her artistic ambitions: those earth-shaking hips, fleshy buttocks and rounded thighs weren’t a sylph’s or a swan’s, but rather an egglaying goose’s, and she’d suggested an immediate transfer to a sweaty, liquor-laden rumba beat.

  “A sad fate, right?” he commented, and Manolo shrugged his shoulders and prepared to investigate that inexplicable sadness when she came back and forced him to look at her.

  “Mima’s just made it, it’s still hot,” she assured them, offering a cup first to Manolo and then to himself. “Incredible, the Count in person. By now you must be a major or captain? Right, Mario?”

  “Lieutenant, and sometimes I wonder how,” he replied, tasting the coffee but not daring to add: It’s good coffee, bloody hell, especially for friends; it really was the best coffee he’d tasted in years.