And yet I really need a good cigar today: I don’t mean a Rey del Mundo or a Gran Corona or a Davidoff… I’d settle for a Montecristo… Maruchi, bring us a cup of coffee, be so good… See if I can get rid of the taste of this muck. Right, if this is coffee, get God to come and vouch for it… Anyway, to the point. I need you to get stuck into this case and be on your best behaviour, Conde. I don’t want you moaning and groaning, or going on the bottle; I want it solved now. Work with Manolo and whoever you want, you’ve got carte blanche but get on with it. Listen hard, this is between the two of us: something big is in the offing and I don’t want us to be caught napping or in a daydream. It must be something big and ugly because I don’t know the people pushing it. It’s coming from very high up and heads will fly: Get this into yours right?… And don’t ask me because I’m not in the know, you understand? Look, here’s the paperwork to do with the case. But don’t start reading now, my friend. I can sum up: a twenty- four-year-old high school teacher, single and a member of the Communist Youth; killed, strangled with a towel, first beaten every which way, a broken rib and a finger with a double fracture and raped by at least two men. They didn’t take anything of value, apparently: neither clothes nor electrical goods… and traces of a joint were found in the water in the lavatory pan. Like the sound of it? It’s dynamite, and I, Antonio Rangel Valdes, want to know what happened to that young woman, because I’ve not been a policeman for thirty years for the pure pleasure of it. There must be a lot of dirt swept under the carpet for them to kill her like that, torture, marijuana and a gang bang… But what kind of a cigar do you call this? It’s as if the end of the world were nigh, I swear by my mother, it is. And remember what I said: behave yourself, people aren’t in the mood for any of your pranks…
The Count thought he had a good nose for aromas. It was his only attribute he considered to be in reasonable working order and his sense of smell told him the Boss was right: that whole business reeked of shit. So much was obvious from the moment he opened the door to the flat and inspected a crime scene that only lacked the victim and her assailants. The silhouette of the young murdered teacher in her final position had been marked out in chalk: one arm had come to rest very close to her body and the other seemed to be trying to reach her head, while her legs were folded up tight against her torso in a vain effort to protect a stomach that had already been battered. It was a gruesome sight, between a sofa and the central table that had been yanked to one side.
He went into the flat and shut the door behind him, then inspected the rest of the room: an inevitably Japanese colour television and twin-deck cassette recorder with a tape, which had come to a finish on the A side, stood on a multi-use piece of furniture filling the entire wall opposite the balcony; he pressed STOP, took out the tape and read:
… then put it back, because he’d got the same edition at home. She doesn’t seem a very keen reader, he concluded, shaking the dust off his hands.
He walked to the balcony and opened the shutters: the light flooded in, the wind blew and a copper mobile, that the Count hadn’t noticed before, started rattling. By the side of the outline chalked on the floor he spotted another silhouette, a smaller patch that had almost disappeared, staining the bright shiny tiles. Why did they kill you? he wondered as he imagined the girl raped, beaten, tortured and strangled, lying in her own blood.
He went into the only bedroom in the flat and found the bed made up. A poster of an almost beautiful Barbra Streisand from the time of
He went back into the living room and looked out from the balcony. That fourth floor in Santos Suarez had a privileged view of a city which from that height looked especially decrepit, dirty, unapproachable and hostile. He noticed several pigeon lofts on the flat roofs and a few dogs sunbathing in the sun and wind and identified jerry-built additions to the rooftops, stuck like fish-scales to rooms that now housed entire families; he contemplated water tanks open to the dust and rain, rubbish abandoned in dangerous places, and breathed out when he saw opposite a small roof garden made out of milk churns that had been sawn in half and planted with shrubs and flowers. It was then he realized that Skinny’s house was to his right, just over a mile away behind clumps of trees that blocked his view, and, round the corner, Karina’s – and he again reminded himself it was Thursday already.
He went back into the living room and sat down as far away as possible from the chalk figure. He opened the report the Boss had given him and, as he read, told himself that it was sometimes worthwhile being a policeman.
Who was this Lissette Nunez Delgado?
Lissette Nunez Delgado would have been twenty-five in December, in that year of 1989. She had been born in Havana in 1964, when the Count was nine, wore orthopaedic shoes and was in his full childhood glory as a street urchin, one who’d never imagined for a single minute – and never would for the next fifteen years – that he’d become a policeman and have occasion to investigate the death of that girl born in a modern flat in the district of Santos Suarez. The young woman graduated two years ago with a chemistry degree from the Havana Higher Institute for Teaching and, contrary to what one might expect in that era of vacancies in the rural schools of the island’s interior, was immediately allocated to the Pre-University High School in La Vibora – the very same where the Count studied between 1972 and 1975 and made friends with Skinny Carlos. The fact she was a teacher at the Vibora Pre-Uni could count against her: almost everything related to that place aroused the Count’s fond nostalgia or implacable rejection. Lissette’s father had died three years ago and her mother, who’d divorced him in 1970, lived in Casino Deportivo, in the house belonging to her second husband, a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Education – a position that explained why the young girl hadn’t done her social service outside Havana. Her mother, a journalist on the magazine
Lissette had been a member of the Youth from the age of sixteen and her ideological record sheet seemed pristine: not a single caution or minor sanction. How come she never had a slip of memory, never made a slight error of judgement or swore at anybody? She’d been a leading cadre in the Pioneers, the School and University Student Federations, and although the report mentioned nothing specific she must have participated fully in the activities programmed by these organizations. She earned 198 pesos a month because she was still in the so-called period of Social Service, paid twenty in rent, was docked eighteen a month for the refrigerator voted to her in a mass meeting and must have spent around thirty on lunch, afternoon snack and transport to Pre-Uni. Were 130 pesos enough to assemble that wardrobe? Recent fingerprints from five people had been found at her place, not including hers, but none was on file. Her third-floor neighbour was the only one who’d said anything at all useful: he heard music and rhythmic dancing the night of her death, 19 March 1989. End of report.
The photo of Lissette accompanying the report didn’t look very up-to-date: it had gone dark round the edges and the face of the young girl caught there forever didn’t look very attractive, despite the fact her eyes were deep set and sultry, with thick eyebrows that might have given her one of those so-called enigmatic looks. If I’d have known you… Standing up, leaning against the balcony rail again, the Count watched the sun rise determinedly to its zenith; he saw a woman struggling against the wind to hang out her washing on a flat roof; he saw a young boy in
