folded, and his socks were inside each other, like small soft balls. Towels and sheets were also clean and neatly folded, looked almost ironed, and the envious policeman greeted them with a look of displeasure, noticing a slight shininess at the bottom of the second drawer. He lifted the linen up and took out two disturbing and conflicting photographs: the bigger one was a black and white enlargement of a young couple at what must have been a coming-of-age birthday party: she, wearing a long, lacy, light-coloured dress, already stared with the provocative eyes that had stirred the Count’s fear and desire. By Miriam’s side – green fruit, but already edible at fifteen – smiled her dancing partner, a pitifully thin Adrian Riveron, hair combed over forehead and growing down under his ears, stuffed into the worst cut, even worse worn suit Mario Conde had ever clapped eyes on. Everything was ingenuous, youthful, distant and even slightly squalid in that photo of lost innocence. But the other snapshot was raucous and risque: there, in full-colour, on card three by two, was a naked Miriam, looking slightly surprised at the camera she’d perhaps set up herself. The woman lay there, lifting her arms over her head to secure a more provocative pose and project her breasts more pointedly, breasts crowned by nipples that exceeded the Count’s wildest imaginings. At the same time, her legs were slightly parted to reveal to the eyes of the recipient the dramatic darkness of her sex. I knew it, thought the Count, this fucking piece isn’t blonde, and he turned over the card and read: TILL I’M YOURS AGAIN IN FLESH AND BLOOD. YOUR MIRIAM, and at the bottom a date: 12 – 7 – 84. He couldn’t avoid taking another look at the woman who had undressed for the photo and thought it was a pity he hadn’t had better opportunities with her: she was food for the gods without a doubt, as the progressive hardening he felt between his legs told him, forcing him to turn the photos over and leave them on the bed, feeling he’d peeped through a keyhole at an act of rapturous love meant for someone else.
“Nothing in the garage, Conde,” announced Crespo, and got the reply, “One of you go to the kitchen and the other to the bathroom.”
He went out in search of the back door, and, when he saw Adrian, he commented: “A pretty set of photos,” and carried on to the patio, imagining what the fellow must be thinking.
There was a covered terrace at the back of the house, with a clothes sink, and a small cupboard for cleaning tools. The rest of the patio had been covered in cement, except for two circles of earth where clumps of seemingly ancient mangos were growing. There was a small shed against the back wall separating Adrian’s patio from his neighbours’ that the Count supposed must be ideal for storing tools and things for use in the house. An open padlock, hanging from a ring, alerted him to the possibility that something of value might be kept there and the policeman took a deep breath before going in. There he saw shelves as well organized as the bedroom drawers, with boxes for nails, clips, parts for the plumbing and electricity: what you’d expect in a place like that. In one corner he found two gloves and a baseball helmet. So he was a baseball player as well, he thought and couldn’t stop himself picking up one of the gloves, putting it on his hand and hitting it against the other, as if he were anticipating some really big hits. Feeling nostalgia aroused by memories of his happy days as a street baseball player, the lieutenant put the glove back in its place and crouched down to see what was in some jute bags, when the two policeman came up behind him.
“Zilch, zilch to filch: not even a cigar,” quipped el Greco and the Count turned round to look at him from where he was crouching.
“So, you’ll be filching zilch, as usual. Well, it seems there’s no lead here. The bags contain stuffing for cushions,” he confessed, standing up, feeling the threat of defeat deal a blow to his knees.
After all it didn’t make much sense for anything to turn up there linking Miguel and his death to Adrian Riveron – beyond the links to be drawn from those nostalgia-provoking photos, real desire and hatred, and the gloves, which betrayed a dangerous liking for baseball shared with millions of Cubans – so his painful hunch would have to contain itself till it found richer pastures. But which ones? He couldn’t see any offering themselves and quaked at the idea of having to shut himself up with Miriam – now he knew her better and could testify to her state as an apocryphal, almost pornographic blonde – or with Fermin and Gomez de la Pena to find some light at the end of the tunnel, he thought, as he abandoned that small room and grabbed the door in order to shut it behind him.
“Wait a minute, Conde,” said el Greco, who took one look in the room and then stared at his boss: “What was the instrument the forensic said the dead man was beaten with?”
The Count looked at him and the pain from his hunch vanished as if by magic, for the words spoken by that lad were like the wave of a wand and he would put him forward as the Most Intelligent Policeman of the Month, so that the Union would place him on its wall display for labour rewards and bear him in mind for the next handout of electrical goods: yes, he deserved a freezer and a week on the beach that genius of a policeman who made him yell: “Fucking hell, Greco, have you seen the bat?”
“Well, I can see a bat, Lieutenant: look up there,” replied the policeman and the Count looked up: between roof-tiles and iron beams there lay a wooden bat, crouching as conclusive as death itself.
The last time Mario Conde had played baseball was at university. He was in the third year of his degree and, as usual, volunteered to be part of the worst baseball team in the whole history of Cuban university sport. It was as if the central-European scientific model for the planning of economic and social life proposed by Gomez de la Pena had also penetrated the hidden recesses of the student body, and it was considered necessary, one fine day, to restructure – yet again – the country’s universities and their faculties. That’s why one morning the School of Psychology, which had always been part of the science faculty, was transformed, through some mysterious administrative design, into an independent faculty, as rigorous as all the other university faculties. Then, in order to meet all the necessary norms and obligations, the faculty had to participate in the University Games with its own teams, in which inevitably the names of the same athletes cropped up again and again because of the lack of students matriculated in that new faculty, more renowned for its intellectual activities than its crude physical aptitudes. And that last year when the Count played baseball he also kept goal for the football eleven, defended for the basketball team, ran for the 4?400 relay team, as well as playing first base and third bat in the baseball team… The Count as third bat…! Because the Psychologists’ only sporting virtue was their enthusiasm: although they were doomed to come last in almost all competitions, they were proud to hold aloft the Olympic motto that competing was more important than winning – for they almost never won; among other reasons because of the exhaustion their sportsmen accumulated over a week of non-stop action.
The last day he played baseball, the Count felt he could hardly lift his arms up and failed three times with the bat when it was his turn at the end of the eighth innings and they were trailing two zero to the Philology Tigers. Because of a mistake, a base and a dead ball, the Count had a historic opportunity to enter the batter’s box with the possibility of an advantage at first base, even though two of his team were out and it was at that precise moment that he suffered one of his first memorable hunches: like all his colleagues, the Count now preferred to use one of those newfangled aluminium bats, which were considered more efficient and sturdier than the old wooden bats. But his hunch warned him that perhaps the old scorned bat made of green-veined
