suffered in the past, that most tangible of fears, later inherited and assumed by other men who came in other centuries and stayed on those coasts that dazzled them with their beauty, despite the terrible autumnal scourge that, in diffuse reminiscences, was said to have provoked downpours of blood, fire, sand, fish, trees, fruit and even of strange anthropomorphic beings, unlike any other of this Earth’s inhabitants, transported from unknown climes by the hurricane’s fury. And fear followed its course, because the new islanders also became familiar with the hurricane’s treacherous ability to deceive, which Mario Conde himself now recognized, as he observed the patch of sky, visible from his kitchen window, that was still blue, an intense blue, as if it were in the eye of the hurricane, even as the man on the radio was declaring that Felix, with winds of a maximum speed of 130 miles an hour and a minimum pressure of 910 hectopascals – and what the fuck were hectopascals? – could be seen, according to the six a.m. report on that day, 8 October 1989, between 81.6 degrees latitude north and 18.1 degrees latitude west, some seventy-five miles south of Georgetown, Grand Cayman, and two hundred and eighty miles south of Cienfuegos, in central Cuba, and that its estimated route over the next twelve to twenty-four hours would take it north-north-west, at a rate of speed that had reduced to some seven miles an hour, perhaps so the phenomenon could recharge its zone of intensity, like a cunning long-distance runner conserving his greatest burst of energy for the final strait. That is why they said it might gather speed in the evening, and the island’s western provinces should be alert to this shifting meteorological organism, particularly the province of Havana, Radio Reloj added yet again, and the Count didn’t hear the time announced because he proclaimed loudly: “I knew it. The bastard’s heading here.”
And he calculated, with an arithmetical effort worthy of Hector Pascal: at a rate of seven an hour, that’s seventy in ten hours, one hundred and forty in twenty hours and a hundred and fifty-four in a day. No, that’s one hundred and sixty-eight a day and three hundred and thirty-six in two, so that possibly on the 10th the Count would be watching cyclone Felix walking round his house, crossing the road through the barrio and finishing off everything and everybody, as if the destructive forces of nature were rebelling against man, like a curse from on high, like an act of righteous revenge wrought by the atmosphere against its predators, despite all the wretched newscaster might say, who read what had been written by an equally wretched weatherman, who must know nothing of curses, punishments, or the debts and sins that could only be atoned for in that terrible, awesome way: by hurricane, for example. An earthquake was another such. Armageddon or the Apocalypse as prologue to a Final Judgement?
The Count lit his cigarette after he’d finished his huge cup of coffee, the only magical potion able to take him out of his beetle-like state and turn him back into a person after he woke each morning, and he remembered that, officially, this might be his penultimate day as a policeman and, certainly, his final day as an inhabitant of his thirty- fifth year, and what he saw around and within him didn’t seem particularly pleasant.
“My wife wants me to clean up the garden today, what do you reckon?”
“That you’d be mad to buckle down… It’s the beginning of the end: she’ll want you painting the house, cleaning the cess-pit and even washing that ugly dog of yours. Then you’ll be fucked for good, because she’ll hand you a bag and the ration book and I’ll be seeing you in the queue at the grocers, collecting the bread every day and finding out whether they’ve got chicken or fish at the butchers. And there’s no salvation: you’ll be what is universally known as a crusty old man.”
“You’re right,” agreed Major Rangel, after he’d finished listening unusually attentively to the oh-sopredictable array of concrete dangers outlined by the Count. “Do you know what I’ve found out now I’m always at home? That Ana Luisa always keeps a plate of cooked yucca for a week. You know, she puts it on a plate in the fridge and you’ve got to move the bastard plate and its four hard yuccas to get at the jug of water… And yesterday I’d had enough of the wretched yuccas and asked her why she was keeping them and she said she wanted to fry the yuccas but the store hadn’t got any oil yet. They’ll stay put till some oil turns up… Don’t you think that’s taking it too far?”
“That’s what I’m telling you: you’ve got to fight back,” the lieutenant continued, sinking his hand, if not his arm, into the sore where he’d just stuck a finger. “Tell her you’re not a crusty old man and that if you aren’t a policeman anymore you’re going to be, let’s say, a cigar taster.”
“Now you
“Well, I might be talking nonsense, but can you imagine what a good job it would be. You know, you’ll be in an office in a Montecristos, H. Upmanns or Cohibas factory, or whichever turns you on most, and they’ll bring you cigars made that day, all lying in their boxes. And you’ll pick them up one at a time, light them, take two or three puffs, not too many, so you don’t die within the week, and if the cigar’s good, you put it out and give your approval, and place it back in its box. And you go on like that with the ones they’ve been twisting that day. The boxes will get a bit smelly from all the cigars you put out, but any buyer has a guarantee, unique in the world, that an expert smoker has tested his cigars.”
The Boss smiled as broadly as he knew how. “I don’t know if I can let you in the house. If Ana Luisa hears you, she’ll stop me seeing you.”
“Women don’t understand these niceties.”
“But there are others they do… Now she’s cottoned on to the fact I’m off work and she’s taking the opportunity to order me around all day.”
“It’s a bugger,” agreed the lieutenant. “You spent your life giving other people orders and now… Don’t you miss that power, Boss?”
Rangel looked at his clean desktop and coughed before answering.
“That ordering thing is like an illness. After you get used to it you almost prefer life with it, though you know it will take you to the grave. I think it’s a terrible vice, and one that isn’t so easy to give up.”
‘But you liked it?’
“In a way yes, I used to enjoy it, though you know I was never unfair towards others. I demanded of them what I demanded of myself. Do you want to know something else, now I’m confessing all this? I haven’t been to bed with a woman who wasn’t Ana Luisa for twenty-eight years. And not because I was never propositioned, believe me. It was because I didn’t have the time, because I didn’t want to complicate my life, to be at risk, I wanted to carry on as chief… It was as if I’d picked up all the other things life has and put them in a bag and thrown it into the back of a cupboard; and only kept what I needed in order to be a good boss… And look where it’s got me. They’re kicking me out because I wasn’t a good boss and now I’m like a snuffed-out cigar nobody wants to smoke.”
“You feel empty inside?”
The Boss tried to smile, but laughter must have been one of the things consigned to the bag he’d hidden: the good intentions aborted on his lips and his last routine as a boss came to his rescue.
“Hey, that’s enough tomfoolery. How’s the case going?”
The Count looked at the garden opposite and saw it needed a good clean-out, just as the walls of the house needed a good lick of paint and his sense of smell indicated that the Major’s psychotic dog, a long-legged poodle that ran at the sight of a stranger, could do with a good deep bath: and he felt mildly sorry for the Boss and his empty life. Not even Candito’s Jehovah had the power to revamp those historical sources of satisfaction truncated by other concrete historical necessities: a sorry final destiny for a monogamist like Antonio Rangel, now condemned to live among yuccas shelved for want of cooking oil.
“Yesterday I spoke to the dead man’s family, in particular his wife, and she told me some pretty interesting things. The strangest was that she almost told me to investigate her brother, one Fermin Bodes. And I also interviewed his former boss in Cuba, Gerardo Gomez de la Pena, you remember him?”
The Boss nodded and the Count related details of his meetings with those characters and the story of the escape planned by Fermin Bodes and Miguel Forcade, twelve years back.
“I reckon I should forget the possibility of revenge prompted by jealousy.”
“Forget it right away,” bellowed the major, as if back at the helm of the Headquarters for Criminal Investigations. “Concentrate on Fermin Bodes: he could be the thread to unravel the skein.”
“And the owner of the Matisse?”
“You’d like to nail him, wouldn’t you?”
“You know I’d be delighted to.”
“But don’t get carried away. Don’t take your eye off him, because he knows something too, but he’s a hard nut to crack. Damn me, a picture worth three million. Well, get one thing straight, Mario Conde: you’ve got two days to solve this one and you’ll solve it in two days: show the spies’ colonel I wasn’t wrong when I said you were the
