to a spot marked with a cross, by the side of which a word had been written that at the time I found both enigmatic and devoid of meaning. Can you guess what it was? Of course, it’s easy now: the word written there was ‘Buddha’.
“That same night I called Miguel to this room and showed him the map. He laughed and told me it must be pirate treasure, but that he would go and investigate what was there. I didn’t see him for three days. We were very busy at the time, myself in the university and Miguel running the Department of Expropriated Property, and when I asked him he said the famous treasure was the corpse of a dog that was probably called Buddha. And we concluded that the spinster aunt who had died of a heart attack had buried her dog and kept the location alongside that poem she had written or received from an old suitor. And I forgot the whole business.
“I forgot so completely that that April day in 1978, when Miguel asked me to come up here and asked me if I remembered the map, I had to dig deep to unearth the story of a dog called Buddha and the love poem. Then Miguel told me the truth: the cross marked the place where a solid gold statue of a Buddha was buried, which he imagined to be particularly valuable not just for the gold, but in and of itself, and that a name was engraved on the marble base: Riva de la Nuez. And after telling me not to tell anyone about it, he confessed that thanks to the map in the bureau he had taken the statue from the Mena y Carbo household and since then it had been buried in the garden of this house. And he handed me a map as rudimentary as the one I’d found in the bureau sixteen years earlier. He asked me to put it back in the escritoire and said that only if something very serious happened to him that made it necessary to use the treasure should I dig it up and sell it. He also told me he intended to stay in Spain on his return from Moscow and it was then that he said if anyone ever asked me about the Buddha in the Boulle bureau, it was a sign I should give them the map and let them dig it up, for that person would take it from wherever it was hidden. And that if I died and Caruca died, my nephew Agustin, Miguel’s cousin, should inherit it, so that the bureau with the map stayed in the family.
“The row we had that night is irrelevant, as is my discomfort at the crime my son had committed and the one he was planning to commit. He had confided in me and I couldn’t betray him, and that was enough to keep me silent. What I did do was to research for years the gold Buddha that had belonged to Riva de la Nuez and put together this whole story from when it embarked on the Manila Galleon to the day the Mena y Carbos stole it or commissioned its theft in 1951 and buried it under their patio before leaving Cuba…
“In all those years I waited for someone to come at night and talk to me about the Buddha in the Boulle escritoire, but I never thought it would be Miguel who would mention it, a week ago. He explained how he had come to prepare the Buddha’s removal to the United States and that Fermin, his wife’s brother, would be responsible for taking it out on a launch, though Fermin still didn’t know what he was taking out or where it was. And he told me that truly elusive Buddha was going to be his salvation…
“Are you content, Lieutenant…? I think I’ve told you what you wanted to know: that was what Miguel came to Cuba for: to remove a fifteen-hundred-year-old Buddha that must be worth several million dollars in any art market… Please, Lieutenant, open that drawer, yes, the one on the left, and touch the protuberance at the bottom. It’s not giving? Push a little harder. Ah, finally the spring to the Buddha in the Boulle escritoire whirred into action. You know, I think I will now finally see with my own eyes that sculpture that has turned so many people crazy over so many centuries… including my son Miguel.”
Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde couldn’t recall many cases in which the prospect of a visible solution produced the emotional charge that shook him when old Alfonso Forcade pointed to the escritoire whose beauty had triggered in him a promising sense of wonder, and that, perhaps impelled by Forcade’s incisive mind, the policeman had imagined to be related to the history of the lost Buddha. Consequently, he was looking for more straightforward explanations for that excitement: perhaps his imminent liberation; perhaps the certainty his intuition was proving yet again to be his best ally: everything was food for thought. Nevertheless, the policeman was convinced that if he could get the information to lead him to a magnificent gold Buddha, shaped fifteen centuries ago by an artist whose name would now remain unknown for ever, and whose artistry had withstood every risk posed by greed and history, he had reason enough to feel that excitement now making his hands tremble as he unsuccessfully felt the bottom of the drawer and imagined Rabbit’s historical enthusiasms when he told him of that imbroglio of deceit and thieving, the weft of which was threaded by the most basic human motives, driven by ambition. That was why he took a deep breath, tried to calm his nerves, and then persisted with the silent drawer- bottom, until he finally released the spring concealed by a disciple of Boulle.
The map extracted from the quasi-imperceptible drawer bottom had been sketched on a sheet of paper that, despite the years, retained a pale sheen, from which a few marks, letters, numbers and lines drawn in black ink proclaimed their millionaire secret, converging on that precise spot in the patio – almost under a laurel that was surely a hundred years old – where Crespo and el Greco now dug to depths that had begun to dismay the Count.
“Can it really be so far down, Lieutenant?”
“Dig deeper, dig deeper,” he insisted, lighting another cigarette and looking at the sky, which had turned into a leaden mantle across which dirty, spongy clouds scurried northwards, laden with water, electricity and evil intent.
A warm, humid breeze from the south was already rustling through the treetops, a prelude to the furies that might assail the city that same morning or, at the very latest, tomorrow morning. The noise of the spade and shovel, striking, moving, extracting earth, brought him right back to a keen awareness of what he was witnessing, but the idea of Miguel Forcade’s final dramatic failure, after he’d been preparing himself for almost thirty years to make the leap to the fortune resting on a gold Buddha, concentrated his mind, despite what his eyes could see. Ever since he’d come to possess that Buddha who still refused to put in an appearance, Miguel Forcade must have lived completely in the thrall of a statue endowed with enough magnificence to change his karma in the most radical way: money and power would flow through his hands, the deceased must have dreamed, as he lived in a perpetual state of hypocrisy, waited to seize his moment in a country where millionaires no longer existed and where power, for a man like him, was based solely on capricious decisions that went beyond his will: today you have it, tomorrow you don’t… The Count imagined the number of deferments that must have altered that desired, attainable fate, while the would-be millionaire lived a diminished life, always looking out for ways to enhance it, as resonantly as he could. Good luck as hell on earth. In fact his fear of the sea must have been a real sickness: because a well- equipped launch would have been the shortest route between that hole in the ground and the financial glory for which he’d betrayed all trust and faith. Then there were the years Fermin had spent in prison, while he worked in an office in Miami for a Cuban who’d got rich somehow or other and who’d die of envy when he discovered his employee’s prospect of millions, and that must have been the worst sojourn in hell on earth the Buddha ever prepared for Miguel Forcade, in his desperate confinement to a small house in the South West, while his dreams furnished him the best mansions in New York, Paris or Geneva… That pit, which still hadn’t given birth, which had in fact been a grave for Miguel Forcade’s life, and apparently for his death: a straight line ran from that Buddha for whose appearance the Count prayed to all the gods of the Orient and even the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and the corpse found five days earlier in the sea, and in the Count’s mind the only person able to trace that line was taciturn Fermin, the man in whom the deceased millionaire who never was had placed all – or part of – his trust, he who, as a result of that elusive Buddha, had entered most unpleasantly, and most physically incomplete, into the perfect state of Nirvana: the one that goes by the common, profane name of death.
“Conde, I don’t think there’s anything here,” protested Crespo, wiping the sweat from his scalp, which got less hairy by the day.
“Did you get the measurements right?” enquired el Greco, leaning breathlessly on the edge of the grave.
The Count looked back at the map, checked each of the references again, took the line and placed it between the roots of the laurel and measured a third time. The centre of the grave fell on the nine-and-a-half-foot spot marked by Miguel Forcade.
“Come on, out of there, for fuck’s sake,” he told his subordinates, feeling his sweaty hands getting the shakes again. “Come on, Manolo, give me a hand,” requested the lieutenant, who threw himself at the ditch and began sinking the pick into the ground at a furious rate, as if his only task in life was to dig to the other side of the world, which in Disney cartoons was always to be found in remote China.
Manolo used the spade to extract the soil dislodged by the Count, who raised the pick once more, when the sergeant asked him: “And what if someone’s already been and taken it, Conde?”
“Nobody’s taken it, for fuck’s sake, nobody!” shouted the lieutenant, and he lifted the pick as high as he could
