Havana Blue (3 page)

“Since you
are
a policeman, why not start dressing like one, hey? And why not shave properly? Look at yourself, you look sick.”

“You've asked three questions, Major. You want three answers?”

The Boss smiled and shook his head.

“No, I want you to find Morín. I'm really not interested in why you joined the force and even less in why you don't ditch those faded trousers. I want this sorted quickly. I don't like ministers pressurizing me,” he added, mechanically returned his military salute, went back to his desk and watched Lieutenant Mario Conde depart.

 

 

SUBJECT: MISSING PERSON

Informant: Tamara Valdemira Méndez
Private address: Santa Catalina,1187, Santos Suárez,
Havana City
ID Card: 56071000623
Occupation: Dentist

Case Outline: At 21.35 hours on Thursday 1 January 1989 the informant presented herself in this station to report the disappearance of citizen Rafael Morín Rodríguez, the informant's husband and resident at the above address, ID 52112300565, and following physical features white skin, light brown hair, blue eyes, approximately five foot nine inches tall. The informant explained that, it being the early hours of 1 January and after being at a party where she and her friends and work colleagues had seen in the New Year, the informant returned home accompanied by the said Rafael Morín Rodríguez and that after checking that their mutual son was asleep in his bedroom with the informant's mother, they went to their bedroom and got into bed, and that the following morning, when the informant woke up, citizen Rafael Morín had already left the house, but that initially she was not particularly worried because he often went out without saying where he was going. Around midday,
the informant, by now rather concerned, telephoned a few friends and work colleagues as well as the enterprise where Rafael Morín Rodríguez works, without eliciting any information as to his whereabouts. And by this stage she was really worried, since citizen Rafael Morín hadn't used the car that was his property (Lada 2107, number-plate HA11934), or the company car, which was in the garage. By the late afternoon, and accompanied by citizen René Maciques Alba, workcolleague of the Missing Person, they phoned several hospitals to no avail and then visited others they'd been unable to communicate with via phone, with equally negative outcomes. At 21.00 hours, the informant and citizen René Maciques Alba presented themselves in this station with a view to making this statement on the disappearance of citizen Rafael Morín Rodríguez. Duty Officer: Sgt. Lincoln Capote.

Report Number: 16 – 0101 – 89
Station Chief: First Lieut. Jorge Samper.
Annexe 1: Photograph of the Missing Man
Annexe 2: The Missing Man's personal and work
details.
Initiate investigation. Raise to priority level 1, Provin-
cial Headquarters Havana C.

 

 

He visualized Tamara making her statement and looked back at the photo of the man who'd disappeared. It was like a talisman stirring up distant days and hidden melancholies he'd often tried to forget. It must be recent, the card was shiny, but he could be twenty and would still be the same. You sure? Sure: he seemed impervious to the sorrows of this life and urbane even on his passport photos, always untouched by sweat, acne or fat or the dark threat of stubble,
always that air of a perfect pristine angel. Yet now he'd gone missing, was almost a spit-ordinary police case, one more job he'd have preferred to pass on. “What the hell is up, mother?” he wondered and abandoned his desk with no desire to read the report on the personal and work details of squeaky clean Rafael Morín. From the window in his little cubby hole he enjoyed a vista that seemed quite impressionistic, comprising the street lined by ancient laurel trees, a diffuse green smudge in the sunlight yet able to refresh his sore eyes, an unimportant world whose every secret and change he noted: a new sparrows' nest, a branch beginning to wither, a variation in foliage highlighted by the darkness of that diffuse, perpetual green. Behind the trees, a church with high wrought-iron grilles and smooth walls, a few glimpses of other buildings and the very distant sea that could only be perceived as a light or distant smell. The street was empty and hot and his head was fuzzy and empty; he thought how he'd like to sit beneath those laurels, to be sixteen again, to have a dog to stroke and a girlfriend to wait for; then, seated there as ingenuously as possible, he'd play at feeling very happy, as he had almost forgotten you could be happy, and perhaps he'd even succeed in reshaping his past, that would then be his future, and logically calculate what life was going to be like. He was delighted by the idea of such a calculation because he'd try to make it different: there couldn't be a repeat of the long chain of errors and coincidences that had shaped his existence; there must be some way to change it or at least break out and try another formula, in reality another life. His stomach seemed to have settled, and now he wanted a clear head to get into a case that had emerged from his past to plague the sweet void he'd dreamed of for the weekend. He pressed the red
intercom button and asked for Sergeant Manuel Palacios. Perhaps he could be like Manolo, he thought, and then thought how lucky it was people like Manolo existed, able to cheer up routine days at work just by their optimistic presence. Manolo was a good friend, acceptably discreet and quietly ambitious, and the Count preferred him to all the sergeants and assistant detectives at headquarters.

He saw the shadow loom against the glass in his door, and Sergeant Manuel Palacios walked in without knocking.

“I didn't think you'd got here yet . . .” he said and sat down in one of the chairs opposite the Count's desk. “This is no life, my friend. Fuck, you look really half-asleep.”

“You can't imagine how plastered I got last night. Terrible . . .” – and he felt himself shudder simply at the memory. “It was old Josefina's birthday, and we started on beer that I'd got hold of, then we downed a red wine, half-shitty Rumanian plonk that goes down well nevertheless, and Skinny and I finished up tangling with a quart of vintage rum he was supposedly giving to his mother as a present. I almost died when the Boss rang.”

“Maruchi says he was livid with you because you hung up on him,” smiled Manolo as he settled down in the chair. He was only just twenty-five and clearly threatened by scoliosis: no seat felt right for his scrawny buttocks, and he couldn't stand still for very long. He had long arms, a lean body and loped like an invertebrate; of all the Count's acquaintances he was the only one able to bite his elbow and lick his nose. He seemed to float along, and on sighting him one might think he was weak, even fragile and certainly much younger than he tried to appear.

“Fact is the Boss is stressed out. He also gets calls from his superiors.”

“This is a big deal, right? Otherwise he personally wouldn't have phoned me.”

“More like heavy duty. Take this with you,” he said, placing the items back in the file. “Read this, and we'll leave in half an hour. Give me time to think how we should tackle it.”

“You still into thinking, Count?” asked the sergeant as he made a lithe exit from the office.

The Count looked back at the street and smiled. He
was
still thinking, and thought was now a time bomb. He went over to the telephone, dialled, and the metallic ring reminded him of his drastic awakening that morning.

“Hello,” said someone.

“Jose, it's me.”

“Hey, what state did you wake up in, my boy?” the woman asked, and he felt she at least was cheerful.

“Best forgotten, but it was a good birthday party, wasn't it? How's the beast?”

“Still not up.”

“Some people are so lucky.”

“Hey, what's up? Where you calling from?”

He sighed and looked back out at the street before replying. The sun in the blue sky was still beating down. It was a made-to-measure Saturday, two days before he'd closed a currency fraud case in which the endless questioning had exhausted him, and he'd intended to sleep in every morning till Monday. And then that man went missing.

“From my incubator, Jose,” he complained, referring to his tiny office. “They got me up early. There's no justice for the just, my dear, I swear there ain't.”

“So you won't be coming for lunch?”

“I don't think so. But what's that I can smell down the telephone?”

The woman smiled. She's always laughing, great.

“Your loss, my boy.”

“Something special?”

“No, nothing special but really delicious. Get this: I cooked the
malangas
you bought in a sauce and added plenty of garlic and bitter orange; some pork fillets left over from yesterday, imagine they're almost marinated and there's two apiece; the black beans are getting nice and squashy, like you lot like them, they're getting real tasty, and now I'll add a spot of the Argentine olive oil I bought in the corner store; I've lowered the flame under the rice, and have added more garlic, as advised by that Nicaraguan pal of yours. And salad: lettuce, tomato and radishes. Oh, well, and coconut jam with grated cheese . . . You died on me, Condesito?”

“Just my fucking luck, Jose,” he replied, feeling his battered gut realigning. He was mad about big meals, would die for a menu like that and knew Josefina was preparing the meal especially for him and for Skinny and that he'd have to miss it. “Hey, I don't want to talk to you no more. Put Skinny on the line, wake him up, get him up, the skunky drunk . . .”

“Tell me the company you keep . . .” Josefina laughed and put the telephone down. He'd known her for twenty years and never seen her look defeated or resigned even in the worst of times. The Count admired and loved her, sometimes much more tangibly than his own mother, with whom he'd never identified or trusted as he'd trusted the mother of Skinny Carlos who was no longer skinny.

“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.