Havana Red (16 page)

“And what about the mulatto the other day? The one the fight was over?”

Now Candito smiled, but looked fed up and sad.

“He said he'd come to speak to me so I'd let him in for a piss . . .”

“I told you. You're all mad.”

“No, Conde, we're not mad. You know your business and I know mine . . . That guy's a debt-collector.”

“What do you mean a debt-collector?”

“What I said. People hire him to collect their debts: he collects money owed or any kind of debt: settling accounts, spying on wives, people wanting to get their own back on someone. And the guy's a pro.”

The Count shook his head, refusing to believe all that, though he knew it must be true coming from Candito.

“But was it true the guy wanted a leak?”

“Nobody gets in here just to piss. Everybody knows
that, it was just bullshit. And if it was true he wanted a piss, then the poor guy was fucked, but I wasn't going to get fucked, nor were you. Nor Carlos.”

The Count shook his head, denying something words couldn't deny.

“Sure he wasn't after me?”

“He said not, but who knows . . .”

“I'm the one who's never in the know, Red. You know I'm beginning to feel as if I was no longer a player? It's strange, but I understand less by the day. Either everything's changing very quickly, or I'm losing it. I really don't know, but my head feels like a football . . . How about another coffee, go on,” he asked, and lit another cigarette. “Let me tell you one thing, Red. After you shut up shop, make yourself scarce, try going to the beach for a week, or the moon, as you put it . . . But if anyone comes after you, the first thing you do is find me wherever I've gone to ground. Because if they put the heat on you, they'll have to burn me too . . . Anyway, go to church tomorrow, and ask God, on my behalf as well, to lend a hand, if he can.”

“What a character you've turned into, Conde!”

“Hey, while we're at it. As you're shutting up the office, how about another beer to help the windingdown process?”

 

The Count contemplated himself in the mirror: head on, in the eyes, observing the shifty rake of his profile, and when he'd finished the self-scrutiny he had to agree: it's true, I've got a policeman's face. And whatever will I do with this policeman's face if they kick me out of the force? To start with, I won't shave today, he told himself, and it was then he decided to call Alberto Marqués and accept his invitation. Nine
o'clock? That's fine. On Prado and Malecón . . . Careful you don't get knocked off your feet, my prince . . .

Already by nine fifteen the Count had stood on each street corner three times at the stretch of pavement configured by the crossroads where the Paseo del Prado meets the Malecón, for he'd made the mistake of not specifying an exact spot for his rendezvous with the Marquess. The worst was feeling his hands moistening all the time, as if he was going on a first date with a new woman. This is queer shit of my own making, he reproached himself, but the awareness that he was carrying that terrible burden wasn't enough to mitigate a sweat not warranted by the heat. At that time of day a light but strongish breeze blew in from the sea, refreshing that ancient corner of the city, while intermittent gusts wafted along various women who reeked of the port, who'd flown in like dusky butterflies from some flower in its lunar cycle, perhaps summoned by the penumbra recently installed where their shadowy occupation always prospered. The Count understood his anxiety was down to uncertainty. Where would they go? What would Alberto Marqués propose they should see (or do)? Although he was sure the old dramatist wouldn't try to cross swords with him, the Count had tangibly blushed before leaving home, and reckoned that if he looked like a policeman and was under investigation because he was a policeman, he should take his policeman's pistol with him tonight, the cold weight of which his hands felt for a moment, before he convinced himself that tonight's dangers couldn't be fought off with bullets and opted to consign his weapon to the depths of his desk drawer. When he thought of his pistol, he again thought of his friend Captain Jesús Contreras, the dreadful Fatman, and the news Manolo had brought him. Fuck my mother,
he said to himself, surveying the dark expanse of sea he couldn't grasp, like happiness or fear, thought the Count. And then he heard his voice.

“Don't think so hard, Mr Lieutenant Policeman Mario Conde. Please forgive my being so late.”

Then he saw him: it was the same man, but was perhaps someone else, as if he'd donned a disguise for an impromptu carnival. A short, thick crop of fair hair now covered his originally bereft head, making him look like a living caricature. He tried to improve things by making constant adjustments to his helmet of hair, while his carefully, abundantly powdered face imitated the yellow pallor of a Japanese mask . . . A pink shirt, open at the neck like a dressing gown, floated over his skinny, sombre skeleton, and he wore the tightest black trousers over his skinny thighs, and sandals but no socks, allowing one sight of his fat toes with nails like gruesome hooks. Then the Count understood: he'd committed a folly, not just made a mistake. That was why he looked at the three meeting-points on the two avenues, looking for possible tails, for if they were watching him, as Manolo said, they'd kick him out not because he was corrupt or inefficient, but for being plain stupid. He tried to imagine the image he and Alberto Marqués must cut from the pavement opposite and was horrified by what he saw.

“Go on then, out with your compass,” he finally said, ready to meet his fate.

“Let's go up Prado, for though lots of people won't believe it, the south also has a life.”

“You're in charge,” nodded the Count, and they crossed over the Malecón, going away from the sea.

The policeman followed in the footsteps of the Marquess, a route he marked out across the old avenue, flanked by oleanders getting more battered by
the day, and by the queues which swelled and lengthened at each bus stop. The surviving street-lights lit up the dirty terrain which, for the first time, the Count began to imagine as a boulevard.

“Did you know this road is a tropical replica of the Ramblas in Barcelona? They both peter out in the sea, have almost the same buildings on either side, although the birds they sell in cages in Barcelona once flew free and wild here. The last delight this place lost was its long-beaked
totí
birds that came and slept in the trees. You remember them? I used to enjoy watching their evening flights in bigger and bigger flocks as they got nearer to Prado. I never found out why those black birds chose to sleep in these trees in the centre of Havana every night. It was magic seeing them fly, like black gusts of wind, weren't they? And they disappeared because of an act of witchcraft. Where can those poor
totís
be now? I once heard the sparrows blamed for their departure, but the fact is neither's around now. Were they kicked out or did they go voluntarily?”

“I don't know, but I can ask if you like.”

“Well, ask then, because any day now you'll wake up and the bronze lions will have gone too . . . It's pitiful, this place, isn't it? But it still retains some of its magic, as if it had an invincible poetic spirit, right? Look, though the ruins keep spreading and grime's winning, this city still has soul, Mr Count, and not many cities in the world can boast they have soul, bubbling on the surface . . . My friend the poet Eligio Riego says that's why there's such a flowering of poetry here, although I don't think the country deserves it: it's much too frivolous and sun-loving . . .”

The Count nodded silently. He wanted to sidestep that metaphysical turn in the conversation and drift back to levels of concrete reality.

“Well then, what are we doing?”

“Well,” the Marquess readjusted his blond wig and said: “Didn't you want a close-up of the nocturnal habits of Havana gays?”

“I don't know . . . I wanted to get a sense of the scene . . .”

The Marquess looked in front, just after they'd walked by a group of youths who'd brazenly eyed them over. “Well, you've just seen a bit . . . And what you want to see and know isn't that pleasant, I warn you. It's sordid, alarming, stark and almost always tragic, because it's the result of loneliness, eternal repression, mocking, hostility, contempt, even of monoculture and under-development. Do you understand?”

“I understand, but I still want to take a look,” the Count insisted, covering the nostrils of consciousness as a prelude to jumping into that dark, bottomless pit of invert sex.

“Well, let's take a stroll and then go to a little party at Alquimio's place, a mate of mine and an alchemist by any other name . . . There'll be people there who knew Alexis, though I did my detective enquiries and he'd not been there for more than a week. You know, I'm beginning to like being a bit of a policeman . . .”

 

Casting off his wig, as if it were plebeian headgear, the Marquess declared: “This man's a noble, like me, though he's only a Count. Sit here, Mr Count,” and almost pushed him, so the policeman's bum fell hard on to a cushion on the floor, while his material and spiritual guide yielded himself up to multiple embraces, wet kisses on the cheeks, which the dramatist soaked up, laughing coquettishly, like an insatiably
greedy pagan god fond of being worshipped. The reception room in that big house had large balconies open to the mysteries of the night and a high ceiling peopled with friezes, angels blinded by fossilized dust and cornucopias born from the forgotten fruits of the earth, and almost thirty people were gathered there, bent on offering the tribute which the presence of Alberto Marqués apparently deserved, next to whom a Havana chorus had formed, no doubt keen to hear the grisly details of the red death of Alexis Arayán. God, how horrible, exclaimed a girl who had stayed on the periphery, whose thighs the Count inspected from his favourably lower position – he was the only one sitting down – watering at the mouth, thighs visible to within a quarter of an inch of the petite bun of that sparrow fallen from the nest. After two months of manual diet his sexual hunger was stirred and disturbed by a whiff of food, rationed but fresh, distant but tangible.

The praise provoked by the Marquess's presence lasted more than ten minutes, until gradually the chorus deserted and picked up cushions, and the dramatist took his nearest listener by the hand and led him to the Count, signalling to him not to get up.

“Look, Alquimio,” he said, and the policeman thus discovered he was his host at that party, “this is my friend, the Count . . . He is a regrettably heterosexual writer and also knew Alexis . . .”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Alquimio, extending a gentle hand which slipped on the runaway moisture of the Count's. “If you're a friend of the Marquess, you're a friend of mine and everything in this house is yours. Even me . . . Tell me, what would you like to drink?”

“Give him rum, my boy,” interrupted the Marquess. “As he reckons he's a creole macho . . .” and he smiled as he lurched round and swayed towards a corner
where a lad with the face of a fresh fish seemed to be expecting him.

“I'll get you a rum right away, Conde. Do you want it in a glass or a goblet?” Alquimio asked, and the Count shrugged his shoulders: in such cases the content, not the container, were what mattered. Then his smiley host also went off, but in the direction of what must be the kitchen. Meanwhile someone had put on some music, and the Count heard Maria Bethania's voice and assumed she must be a regular visitor to the scene. From the metaphysical, objective solitude of his cushion he could concentrate on scrutinizing aspects of the party: there were more men than women and despite the music nobody danced, they conversed in groups or couples, always changing their place or composition, as if perpetual movement were part of the ritual. It was as if they had itchy behinds and couldn't keep still, the Count concluded. On his visual tour the policeman alighted on various oily glances directed his way, dispatched by pansies of the languishing type who seemed to lament his immaculate heterosexuality, just proclaimed by the Marquess. The Count surprised himself by taking out a cigarette in would-be Bogartian style, as if he wanted to raise his stock in that pink market: he felt desired, with all the accompanying ambiguity, and was enjoying that fatal attraction. Am I turning into a queer? he wondered, as a green goblet, cheerfully brimming with rum, appeared before his eyes.

Sparrow bun smiled as she gave him his drink, and crossed her legs as she stood there before falling in yoga position on the cushion that had mysteriously appeared in front of the Count.

“So you're hetero?” she asked, examining him like a strange beast on the endangered list.

“Nobody is perfect,” quoted the Count, and took a long swig that he felt circulate from mouth to stomach and from stomach to blood, like a necessary liberating transfusion.

“I'm Polly, Alquimio's niece,” she said, as her fingers combed back the fringe falling over her forehead.

“And I'm the Count, though not of Monte Cristo.”

Polly smiled. She must have been in her twenties and wore a purple baby-doll outfit from a sixties movie. She also wore round her neck a cameo brooch tied to a purple ribbon (from which movie did that come?), and though she wasn't pretty or a bundle of visible fleshly charms, she belonged to the category of beddable item of the first order, according to the Count's devalued erotic requirements.

“What do you write?”

“Me? The odd short story.”

“How interesting. And are you postmodern?”

The Count looked at the girl, surprised by that unexpected aesthetic interpolation: should he be postmodern?