Havana Black (7 page)

 

 

“What do you think of my story?” asked Gómez de la Peña when his wife left the room, after she'd poured their coffees.

“More of the usual,” responded the Count, looking for the precise, meaningful adjective that would seem inoffensive to the man who might lead him to Miguel Forcade's past, which is where he tried to move him on to. “And why did Miguel come to see you after what he had done to you?”

“As far as was possible, Miguel and I were friends. Perhaps you know that friendship doesn't prosper when power is at stake: anyone could be a regicide and Miguel had all the qualifications to become my successor. But even so I trusted him, in as much as you could trust anyone, obviously. And now we were both nobodies he came to see how I was and apologize to me for what he'd done.”

“Is that all?” persisted Manolo, making himself comfortable on the edge of his chair.

“I think so . . . Unless he wanted to see what the life of a deposed leader was like . . . That's possible, isn't it?”

“Did he by any chance tell you why he'd stayed in Spain?”

Gómez de la Peña smiled wanly and shook his head.

“I didn't ask him directly, but we did have a good chat . . . And he said nothing in particular: only that he'd anticipated what would happen three years later, and knew the development programmes weren't going to work . . . In short, a display of prophetic gifts I found unconvincing.”

“And didn't he say why he'd returned to Cuba?” continued the sergeant, not deigning to look at his boss.

“He just told me his father was ill. He was very old. I even thought he'd died.”

“And you believed him?”

“Was there any reason not to, Sergeant?”

“Perhaps, as you knew him well . . . And didn't he say where he was heading once he left here?”

“He left at about seven, or just after, because it was already dusk. He said he wanted to see a relative of his, but didn't mention who. But he did say it was very important to him.”

“He said it was important to him?”

“Yes, I'm sure he did.”

“Did he say he was afraid of returning to Cuba?”

“He said something of the sort. But I tried to reassure him. After all, a thousand others have done what he did . . . Lately it's almost become a fashion, hasn't it? And he had no cases pending or anything similar. As far as I know, he didn't take anything with him.”

“Not even one of those objects he expropriated in the '60s and which could fetch as many dollars as that painting?”

“Not as far as I'm aware. But I didn't check his suitcase at the airport, though chance would have me accompany him that day.”

“And do you remember if anyone in Customs checked it?”

Gómez de la Peña looked at the ceiling before answering.

“Forgive me, Sergeant, but I'm moved by your naïveté . . . As a leader, Miguel Forcade left through the diplomatic channel.”

Manolo elegantly assumed his moving innocence
and continued. “So no one checked anything and he could have taken out whatever he wanted.”

“Forgive me, Manolo,” interjected the Count, troubled by his subordinate's naïveté and by his own for thinking a mere copy of a Matisse could be on that privileged wall in that equally privileged residence, permanently enjoyed by a logically privileged civil servant, who in some safe spot in the house must also possess, in his own name, the documents crediting him as the owner of the building. “Tell me, Gerardo, but please tell me the truth: did you give Miguel Forcade the house where he used to live?”

The old dethroned minister restrained his smile, but didn't banish it from his face entirely: “That's what you'd expect, I suppose?”

“Yes, in the same way you assigned yourself this house.”

“True enough,” admitted Gómez de la Peña. “Just as it's true I assigned all the houses abandoned by the
gusanos
for several years, in Miramar, in Siboney, in Vedado, in the Casino Deportivo, and so on and so forth . . . It was our turn, after all. The judgement of history, a reward for our sacrifice and struggle, the time of the dispossessed, you remember?”

The Count took a deep breath to relieve the tension. He felt a desire to twist the neck of that expert in cynicism who had enjoyed the socio-historico-politicomaterial privilege of giving, granting, conceding, deciding, administering, distributing favours from his position as a trusted leader, and in the name of the whole country. He felt his arrogant confession of the way he wielded power to be an insult: he created networks of compromise and debt, corrupted all the byways where he left his slimy tracks. It was no doubt because of people like Gómez de la Peña that he'd
been in the police for more than ten years, deferring his own life, to try to dent their overbearing complacency and, if possible, make them pay for some of the crimes that could never be paid for. But this bastard's slipping from my grasp, he thought, as he observed the pyjamas that represented the comfortable sentence he was seeing out: a remoteness from power that, nevertheless, didn't deprive him of a house in the best part of Havana, of the Soviet car he kept in the garage nor even a Matisse worth three and a half million dollars, which he'd legally acquired – and no one would ever know if that was true – for five hundred Cuban pesos, for personal enjoyment and the morbid game he could play with his visitors. If only I could catch you out some way, you son of a bitch, he told himself, trying to smile as he spoke: “If you can bear to be frank yet again, please answer a further question: don't you think it's really shameful that you've got a painting worth millions hanging on your wall, one you bought using your position, when down in the city there are people who spend their week eating rice and beans after working an eight- or ten-hour day and sometimes without even a wall on which to hang a calendar?”

Yet again Gerardo Gómez de la Peña smoothed the pathetic camouflage over his embarrassing bald pate and looked the detective lieutenant straight in the eye: “Why should I personally feel ashamed, a retired old man who likes to look at that painting? From what I gather, Lieutenant, you don't know this neighbourhood very well; there are houses just as comfortable as mine, with other equally beautiful paintings and heaps of beautiful African wood and ivory sculptures, acquired by more or less similar means, where Nicaraguan furniture is all the rage, where they call their
servants ‘comrade' and breed exotic dogs that enjoy a better diet than sixty per cent of the world's population and eighty-five per cent of the nation's . . . No, of course I'm not ashamed. Because life is as the old conga ditty says: if you hit the jackpot, go for it . . . And too bad for the fellow who doesn't, but that fellow got well and truly fucked, didn't he?”

 

 

Night cloaked the city in two minutes, but the dark sky was still empty, completely indifferent to the flurry of clouds on its predestined path towards the island. His mouth lined by the sour aftertaste left by interviews with characters of that ilk, the Count asked Manolo to drive back to Headquarters so he could fulfil one of the agreements he made: to give the first of his daily reports to Colonel Molina.

“What are you going to say, Conde?”

“That I'm beginning to be grateful to him for giving me this case. Because I'm sure I'll break one of these bastards' legs.”

“I hope it's this fellow's. Calling me naïve . . .”

“But he really got under your skin.”

Manolo forced a smile and asked his boss for a cigarette. He sustained his habit of smoking a little without ever making prior investments.

“And do you think he's connected to Forcade's death?”

“I don't know, I'm not convinced. What do you think?”

“I'd rather not say as yet, because if Forcade did come to reclaim the painting or anything else of value he might have given Gómez de la Peña, this guy would be capable of anything, wouldn't he? But what we really need to find out is who the relative was Forcade
had to see in order to resolve important business. I mean, if it's true what de la Peña says and that relative exists . . .”

Mario Conde lit his own cigarette as the sergeant turned into the parking lot at Headquarters.

“Perhaps Miriam knows . . .” he said.

Manolo's violent braking spoke for itself. “Conde, Conde, you want to burn in that fire?”

“What fire are you on about, Manolo? I need to speak to her, right now . . .”

“I know you only too well,” he muttered, parking the car in its space. “You couldn't keep your eyes off that blonde.”

“Well, she was worth some attention, wasn't she?”

Mario Conde wasn't surprised by the news that Colonel Molina had left at five p.m. The new boss was too much of a novice to know there were no fixed hours and that Major Rangel would be at Headquarters every day, including Sundays and the First of May. But perhaps if they'd have given him the chance, he might have been a good spy . . .

Back in his cubicle, the Count wrote his report, in which he told the Colonel he'd started the investigation, that he'd called in at Headquarters at half past six and that he'd try to carry out another interview that night. He took a breath, picked up the telephone and dialled the number of Miguel Forcade's old house.

“Is that you, Miriam?”

 

 

To go up or go down: that had always been the question. Because going down and up, going up and down the Rampa was the Count and his friends' first experience beyond their barrio. Catching the bus in the barrio and going on the long journey to Vedado, with
the single purpose of going up and down, or down and up that luminous slope that was born – or died – in the sea, signalled the end of childhood and the onset of adolescence just as their older brothers' had been marked by the Literacy Campaign and that of their parents' generation by sexual initiation in the Pajarito or Colón neighbourhoods: it was tantamount to signing a Declaration of Independence, to feeling your own wings had grown, to knowing yourself physically and spiritually adult, although it really was not the case: now or ever. But they came to believe that all frontiers to adulthood were marked by that alluring avenue, which belonged to the sinful side in their adolescent lore, a slope they were to go up and down – or down and up – in droves, always aiming for an ice-cream at the top and the prize of the sea – always the sea, accursed and inevitable – at the bottom, though their only real obsession was to walk up and down the Rampa, unaccompanied by parents, hoping to find love on one of its street corners. It was almost a second baptism to ascend and descend that street that was like life itself, the only avenue in the city with pavements carpeted in polished granite, where you trod, aesthetically unaware, on unique mosaics fashioned by Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez and Martínez Pedro, because your eyes were glued to the captivating neon signs of night clubs that were banned till the hurdle of a sixteenth birthday was cleared – The Vixen and the Crow, Club 23, The Grotto Cocktail Club – to the mysteries of the Cuba Pavilion and May Salon, exhibiting the last cry of the avant-garde, flanked by the two best cinemas in Havana, showing strange films with titles like
Pierrot le Fou, Citizen Kane, Stolen Kisses
or
Ashes and Diamonds
, which you struggled to see though they were impossible
to enjoy. And you also practised urban mountaineering to catch a fleeting glimpse of a few underfed tropical hippies, fake and already damned, or else take a mocking glance at those pansies who insisted on showing what they were, and conduct a drooling survey of the mini-skirts that had only just hit the island, first worn on that incline where all the rivers of the new times seemed to flow: including the first rapids of intolerance, whose rigours they had to flee, though they were still such young, correct and dewy-eyed students, when the politically and ideologically correct hordes started to persecute youths, armed with scissors ready to snip any hair that fell beneath the ear or widen trousers whose thighs couldn't encompass a small lemon: sad recollections of scissors and armoured cars exorcising pernicious cultural penetration, led by four long-haired English lads who repeated such reactionary, pernicious slogans as All You Need Is Love . . . Politics and hair, consciousness and fashion, ideology and arse, the Beatles and bourgeois decadence, and at the end of the road the Military Units to Aid Production with their prison-like rigours as a corrective to shape the New Man.

The Count was surprised by the exaggerated innocence of his own youthful initiation as he made that unexpected autumnal ascent, on the cusp of thirty-six, more than twenty years after he'd made his first ascent – or was it descent? – with Rabbit, Dwarf, Andrés, perhaps Pello as well, each armed with a cigarette, chewing a rubber band as if it were enemy chewing gum, with a dream in their hearts – or perhaps a bit lower down. (
All you need is love
, right?) The Count rediscovered on that very same Rampa, which Heraclitus of Ephesus would have dialectically described as different, his hunting ground from the old days, now
all in darkness, closed clubs, a dingy Pavilion, the boarded-up pizzeria and the absence of that long-gone girlfriend he would wait for on the corner by the Indo-China shop, where they now sold what must be the last watches sent from a Moscow that was every day more distant and impervious to tears. It was all far too pathetic, but at once moving and squalid, as he replayed that innocent snapshot of his awakening to life, and the policeman on active service thought he could see some remote causes of later disappointments and frustrations: reality had turned out not to be a question of capricious, wilful ascents and descents, unconsciously alternated, with the sea or an ice-cream as a goal, but a struggle to go up and not down, to keep on up, to go up and stay up, for ever and ever, pursuing a philosophy of finding a room at the top from which they had been excluded and definitively locked out – Andrés was right again – and sentenced – almost to a man – to the eternal labour of Sisyphus: to go up only to go down, to go down only to go back up, knowing you'd never stay at the top, getting older and more exhausted, as when he climbed up that night, after walking down, looking for the blonde now waving at him from the corner of Coppelia and who enquired of the Count as he walked up to her: “What's up, Lieutenant? Anyone would think you're about to burst into tears.”