Havana Gold (11 page)

“And how much is true in all that?”

“Every word.”

She took advantage of the break the musicians took to ask him that, then stared into his eyes. He poured the rum out, adding ice and cola to her glass. The lights dimmed and silence brought relief that was almost unbearable. Every table in the club was full and the spotlights tinged in amber the cloud of smoke floating against the ceiling, searching for an impossible escape route. The Count contemplated those night birds assembled by alcohol and jazz, a style that was too strident and flamboyant for his own taste: from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong, from Ella Fitzgerald to Sarah Vaughan, his traditional bent had only very recently allowed him to bring into the fold – urged on by Skinny's enthusiasm – Chick Corea and Al Dimeola and a couple of pieces by Gonzalo Rubalcava Jr. But the subdued lighting and glints gave the place a palpable magic Conde appreciated: he liked nightlife, and in the Río Club you could still breathe a bohemian cellar atmosphere that existed nowhere else in town. He knew the deep soul of Havana was being transformed into something opaque and humourless, as alarming as any incurable disease, and he felt the nostalgia he'd nourished for a lost world he'd never known: the old dives by the beach ruled over by Chori
and his bongos, the bars in the port where a now nearly extinct fauna spent hours with a bottle of rum next to a jukebox singing passionately along to boleros by Benny, Vallejo and Vicentico Valdés, the dissipated cabarets that shut at dawn, when people couldn't stand another shot of rum or their headache. The Havana of the Sans Souci cabaret, the Vista Alegre café, the Market Place and cheap Chinese restaurants, a shameless city, at times tacky, always melancholy in the remote memories of times he'd never lived, that no longer existed – just like the idiosyncratic signatures Chori chalked up round the city no longer existed, erased by the rains and oblivion. He liked the fact he was in the Río Club for his momentous rendezvous with Karina and only regretted a black dinner-jacketed pianist wasn't playing
As time goes by
.

“You come here often?”

Karina tidied her hair as her eyes soaked up the atmosphere.

“Sometimes. It's the place rather than the music. I'm a woman of the night, you know?”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that: I like to live by night. Don't you? I should really have been a musician and not an engineer. I still don't understand why I'm an engineer and go to bed early almost every day. I like rum, smoke, jazz and living the life.”

“Marijuana too?”

She smiled and looked him in the eye.

“You don't tell that to a policeman. Why do you ask?”

“I'm obsessed by marijuana. I'm on a case with a dead woman and marijuana.”

“I'm afraid the story you told me is true.”

“It scares me. Is a happy ending possible after all that? I think the youngster deserves one.”

She sipped a little rum and decided to take one of his cigarettes. She lit up but didn't inhale. The maracas sound of a cocktail being expertly mixed came from behind the bar. The Count scented the distinct heat of a woman up for it, and wiped away imaginary beads of sweat from his forehead.

“Aren't you going rather fast?”

“Not quite the speed of light. But I can't stop . . .”

“A policeman,” she said smiling, as if she found it hard to believe they existed. “Why a policeman?”

“Because the world also needs policemen.”

“And are you happy you're one?”

Somebody held the entrance door open for a few minutes and the silvery light from the street flooded the shadowy club.

“Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. It depends how I settle up with my conscience.”

“And have you investigated who I am?”

“I trust to my policeman's nose and the visible evidence: a woman.”

“And what else?”

“Does there have to be anything else?” he asked sipping his rum. He looked at her because he never tired of looking at her and, very slowly slipped his hand under the damp table and took one of her hands.

“Mario, I don't think I am who you think I am.”

“You sure? Why you don't tell me who you are so I know who I'm with?”

“I don't how to spin a story. Not even a life story. I'm . . . yes, OK, a woman. And why did you want to be a writer?”

“I don't know, one day I discovered that few things were as beautiful as telling stories which people then read and know I've written. I suppose out of vanity, right? Then, when I realized it was very difficult, that writing is something almost sacred and even painful, I thought I just had to be a writer because I myself had to be one, driven by myself, for my own sake, and perhaps for a woman and a couple of friends.”

“And now?”

“I'm not sure. I know less by the day.”

The silence ended. The instruments were still quiet on the small stage, but recorded music started to come from the sound room. A guitar and organ played by a young married couple still on good terms. The Count couldn't identify the voice or the tune, thought it sounded familiar.

“Who's this?”

George Benson and Jack McDuff. Or rather the other way round: Jack McDuff first. He was the one who taught Benson everything he ever got out of a guitar. It's Benson's first record, but still his best.”

“And how come you know all this?”

“I like jazz. Just like you know about the life and miracles of the Glass Children's septet.”

The Count then saw several couples taking to the dance floor. The Benson and McDuff music was clearly too strong a temptation and he felt he had enough rum in his veins to dare.

“Come on,” he told her, already on his feet.

She smiled again and put order and harmony into her hair before getting up to give full rein to the flowery wings of her generous, loose-fitting dress. Music, dance and then the first of their kisses on a night made for kissing. The Count found Karina's saliva tasted of fresh mangoes, a flavour he'd not met in a woman for a long time.

“It's been years since I've felt like this,” he confessed before kissing her again.

“You're a strange one, aren't you? You're gloomier than hell and I like that. You know, you seem to walk the world apologizing for the fact you're alive. I don't understand how you can be a policeman.”

“I don't either. I think I'm too easy-going.”

“I like that as well,” she smiled, and he stroked her hair, trying to steal the softness he anticipated in more
intimate hair that remained hidden for the moment. She ran the edge of her fingertips along the back of the Count's neck, unleashing an uncontrollable frisson down his back. And they kissed, rubbing their lips together.

“By the way, what's your shoe size?”

“A five, why?”

“Because I can't fall in love with women who wear less than a four. It's against my regulations.”

And he kissed her again and met a slow, warm tongue attacking him, violating the space in his mouth with devastating dedication. And the Count decided to ask to take up residence: he would become a citizen of the night.

 

On mornings like that, the phone ringing was always like an assault and battery: machine-gun fire penetrating the inner ear, ready to pulp the painful remains of grey matter still adrift between the walls of his skull. History repeated itself, always as tragedy, and the Count managed to stretch out an arm and pick up the cold, distant receiver.

“Fuck, Conde, about time, I was ringing you till two this morning but you'd vanished.”

The Count breathed in and felt his headache was killing him. He didn't bother to swear to no avail that this would really be the last time.

“What's new, Manolo?”

“What's new? Didn't you want Pupy? Well, he slept at headquarters last night. What do you think I should offer him for breakfast?”

“What's the time?”

“Twenty past seven.”

“Pick me up at eight. And while you're about it bring a spade.”

“A spade.”

“Yes, to dig me out,” and he hung up.

Three analgesics, a shower, coffee, shower, more coffee and a single thought: how I like that woman. While the analgesics and the coffee worked their magic-potion effect, the Count was able to think again, and be pleased she'd asked him to hold off for the moment, because in the drunken emotional state that came upon him at the start of the second bottle he couldn't even have pulled his trousers down – as he'd discovered in the early hours when he woke up dying of thirst and found himself still fully dressed. And now when he looked at himself in the mirror he was glad she'd not seen him like that: bags under his eyes hanging down like grimy waterfalls and eyes belligerently orange. He even seemed balder than the day before and, although it didn't show, he was sure his liver was down to knee level.

“Take it very easy, Manolo, for once in your life,” he begged his subordinate when he got in the car and wiped
a layer of Chinese pomade over his forehead. “Tell me what happened.”

“You tell me what happened: did you get run over by a train or was it an attack of malaria?”

“Much worse: I went dancing.”

Sergeant Manuel Palacios understood his boss's sorry state and didn't go above eighty kilometres an hour as he recounted: “Well, the man turned up around 10 p.m. I was just about to go and leave Greco and Crespo on the corner of his block, when he drove up. He was on his bike and we went after him in the parking lot. We asked him who the bike belonged to and he tried to spin us a yarn. Then I decided to put him in to soak. I think he's probably softened up by now, don't you? Oh, and Captain Cicerón says you should call in on him. Also, although the marijuana in Lissette's house was waterlogged, it's stronger than normal and the laboratory doesn't think it's Cuban: they say more likely Nicaraguan or Mexican – a month ago they caught two fellows selling joints in Luyanó and apparently it's the same kind.”

“And where did they get it?”

“There's the rub. They bought it from a guy in Vedado but although they told us a lot about the guy we can't track him down. They're probably giving cover to someone.”

“So it's not Cuban . . .”

The Count adjusted his dark glasses and lit a cigarette.
They should erect a monument to the inventor of analgesics. FROM THE DRUNKS OF THE WORLD . . . should be at the start of the inscription. He'd take flowers. He'd be human again.

 

“Full name?”

“Pedro Ordóñez Martell.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Place of work”

“I don't have one.”

“So what do you live on?”

“I'm a motorbike mechanic.”

“Right, bikes . . . Go on then, tell the lieutenant the story about your Kawasaki . . .”

The Count moved away from the door and came and sat down opposite Pupy, inside the red-hot arc from the powerful spotlight. Manolo looked at his boss and then at the young man.

“What's the matter? Forgotten your story?” asked Manolo, leaning over and looking him in the eye.

“I bought it from a merchant sailor. He gave me a document that I gave you last night. The sailor stayed in Spain.”

“Pedro, you're lying.”

“Hey, sergeant, don't keep calling me a liar. It's really insulting.”

“Oh really? So it wasn't insulting to assume the lieutenant and I are a couple of idiots?”

“I've not insulted you.”

“All right, we'll accept what you say for the moment. What do you reckon if we accuse you of illegal sales? I've been told you sell things from the diplomatic shop and make loads of money?”

“You've got to prove it. I've not stolen or dealt in anything, or . . .”

“And what if we do a thorough search of your place?”

“Because of the bike business?”

“And if some little green bills turn up, and such like, what are you going to say then, that they grew on trees?”

Pupy looked at the Count as if to say “get this fellow off my back”, and Conde thought he should give a helping hand. The young man was a late, transplanted version of a Hell's Angel: long hair, parted down the middle, cascading over the shoulders of a black leather jacket that was an insult to the climate. He even wore high boots with double zips, and biking jeans with reinforced buttock pads. Those eyes had seen too many films.

“If you'll allow me, sergeant, can I ask Pedro a question?”

“Of course, lieutenant,” replied Manolo leaning on the back of the chair. The Count switched off the lamp but remained standing behind his desk. He waited for Puppy to stop rubbing his eyes.