Havana Blue

concern. Finally seated on the edge of his bed, the other man tried to relieve the tension.

“And he’s not in my trouser pocket. Cross my heart.”

“Mario, Mario, you can cut the backchat right away,” and he switched to another tone now. “The case is down to us, and I want you here in an hour. If you’ve got high blood pressure, give yourself a fix, then get here quick!”

He found the packet of cigarettes on the floor. It was the first pleasant thing to happen that morning. The packet was grimy and had been trampled on, but he gazed at it optimistically. Slid off the edge of the mattress and sat on the floor. Put two fingers in the packet, and the saddest of cigarettes seemed like a reward for his titanic effort.

“Got any matches, Boss?” he asked down the telephone.

“Why you asking, Mario?”

“Nothing really. What’s your smoke of the day?”

“You’ll never guess,” and his voice sounded pleasantly viscous. “A Davidoff, a New Year’s Eve present from my son-in-law.”

He could imagine the rest: the Boss gazing at his cigar’s ultra-smooth skin, exhaling a slender thread of smoke and trying to sustain the half-inch of ash that made it the perfect smoke. Just as well, he thought.

“Keep one for me, right?”

“Hey, you don’t smoke cigars. Buy some Populares on the street corner and get your body here.”

“Yes, I’ve got you… Hey, what’s the man’s name?”

“Wait a minute… Here it is. Rafael Morin Rodriguez, head of the Wholesale Import and Export Division within the Ministry for Industry.”

“Hold on there,” begged Mario as he watched his cigarette wilt. It was shaking between his fingers, although the cause was possibly not alcoholic. “I don’t think I heard you properly, Rafael what did you say?”

“Rafael Morin Rodriguez. Did it register this time? Well, now you’ve got fifty-five minutes to get to headquarters,” said the Boss before he slammed the phone down.

The belch crept up on him like his nausea: a taste of steaming fermented alcohol hit Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde’s mouth. He saw his shirt on the ground next to his underpants. Kneeled slowly down and crawled over till he reached a sleeve. Smiled. Found matches in the pocket and finally lit the cigarette that had gone moist between his lips. The smoke invaded his body, and after the redeeming recovery of the mangled cigarette, it became the second pleasant sensation of a day that had begun with machine-gun blasts, the Boss’s voice and a name he’d almost forgotten. Rafael Morin Rodriguez, he pondered. He leaned on his bed, pulled himself up and en route his eyes stared at the morning energy of Rufino on his bookcase, his fighting fish racing round the endless circle of his goldfish bowl. “What happened, Rufo?” he whispered as he contemplated the spectacle of his latest shipwreck. He wondered whether he should pick up his underpants, hang up his shirt, iron his old blue jeans or turn out his jacket sleeves. Later. He trod all over his trousers when he walked towards the bathroom after recalling he’d been close to pissing himself for ages. Standing in front of the bowl he contemplated the spurt creating fresh beer foam at the bottom of the pan, though it was nothing of the sort, since it stank, and the rotten stench from his offload reached even his benumbed nose. He watched the last drops of relief splash on the glaze, and his arms and legs felt weak like a broken puppet’s longing for a quiet corner. To sleep, perchance to dream, if only.

He opened his medicine chest and looked for the packet of painkillers. It had been beyond him to swallow one the night before, an unpardonable error he now regretted. He placed three pills on the palm of his hand and filled a glass with water. Tossed the pills down a throat sore from retching and drank. Shut the chest and in the mirror confronted the image of a face that seemed both distantly familiar and unmistakeable: the devil, he muttered, and leaned his hands on the washbasin. Rafael Morin Rodriguez, he thought, while remembering that in order to think he needed a large cup of coffee and a cigarette that he didn’t have and resolved to expiate all known sins under the caustic coldness of a shower.

“What a fucking disaster,” he muttered as he sat on his bed and smeared his forehead with the warm refreshing Chinese pomade that always brought him back to life.

With a nostalgia he found increasingly irritating, the Count surveyed the main street in his barrio, overflowing rubbish containers, wrappings from late-night last-minute pizzas blowing in the wind, the wasteland where he’d learned to play baseball transformed into a repository for junk generated by the repair shop on the corner. Where do you learn to play baseball now? He greeted the beautiful warm morning he’d anticipated, and wasn’t it a pleasure to stroll still savouring the taste of coffee? But then he saw the dead dog, its head crushed by a car, putrefying by the kerb and thought how he always saw the worst, even on a morning like this. He lamented the luckless destiny of those animals cut painfully down by a slice of injustice he couldn’t attempt to remedy. It had been too long since he’d owned a dog, since Robin suffered that miserably drawn-out old age, and he’d stuck to his pledge never again to become infatuated with an animal, until he plumped for the silent companionship of a fighting fish, which he insisted on calling Rufino, after his Granddad, a breeder of fighting cocks: plain characterless fish that could be replaced on death by similar beasts, also dubbed Rufino and confined to the same bowl where they could proudly parade the fuzzy blue fins of a fighting fish. He’d have preferred his women to succeed each other as easily as those fish without a history, but women and dogs were totally unlike fish, even the fighting kind: moreover, he couldn’t rehearse in respect of women the hands-off pledges he’d sworn in relation to dogs. At the end of the day, he predicted, he’d join a society for the protection of street animals and men who were out of luck with women.

He put on his dark glasses and headed towards the bus-stop thinking that the barrio must look like he did, a landscape after an almost devastating battle, and he felt some innermost memory stirring. The evident reality of the main street clashed too sharply with the saccharine image of his memory of that street, an image the truth of which he’d come to doubt, or had he inherited it from the nostalgic tales his grandfather told him or simply invented it in order to pacify the past? You can’t spend your whole fucking life thinking, he muttered, while registering that the mild morning heat was helping the painkillers in their mission to restore weight, stability and primary functions to whatever he carried in his head, as he promised never again to repeat such alcoholic excess. His eyes were still smarting from sleep when he bought a packet of cigarettes and felt the smoke complementing the taste of coffee; once again he was a being in a fit state to think, perchance to remember. He regretted saying he wanted to die and to demonstrate his regret ran to catch an unimaginable almost empty bus that made him suspect that the New Year was off to an absurd start and that the absurd wasn’t always so benign as to appear in the form of an empty bus at such a time in the morning.

It was twenty past one but everybody was there; sure, nobody was missing. They’d divided into groups, and there were some two hundred students, and you could recognize them from their appearance: beneath the majagua trees, against the wrought-iron fence, were the people from Varona, long-time owners of that privileged spot with the best shade. For them, high school was about crossing the street that separated them from their lower school and no more than that: they talked loudly, laughed and listened to a very loud Elton John on a Meridian transistor radio that picked up to perfection the WQAM Miami wavelength, and by their side they had the tastiest lookers of the afternoon. That much was beyond dispute.

The cocky contingent from the backwoods of Parraga was fighting the September sun in the middle of the Red Square, and I bet they were as nervous as anything. Their bravado made them wary; they were the type who wore heavy-duty underpants just in case; men are men and all else is pansy shit, they’d say, as they scrutinized everything and wiped a handkerchief over their mouths, said little and flaunted their polka dot scarves, a front crew with side tails and manliness. Their gals really weren’t at all bad, would make good dancers and more, and they chatted quietly, as if they were rather scared to see so many people for the first time in their life. The Santos Suarez crowd was another matter, seemed more elegant, blonder, more studious, altogether cleaner and better ironed, I reckon: they looked as if they were in the revolutionary vanguard and had powerful mums and dads. The Lawton lot were almost like the bunch from Parraga: most were brawny and eyed everything suspiciously, also wiped handkerchiefs over their mouths, and right away I thought those toughs would be fighting each other.

Those of us from the barrio were the most difficult to pin down: their haircuts and swagger made Loquillo, Potaje, el Nanara and gang look to be from Parraga; their clothes perhaps made El Pello, Mandrake, Ernestico and Andres seem from Santos Suarez; others looked to be from Varona because they smoked and talked so self- confidently; and I seemed a right idiot next to Rabbit and Andres, my eyes trying to take everything in, searching the crowd of strangers for the girl who would be mine: I wanted her to be oliveskinned, long-haired, with great legs,