The image conjured up of the lonely Major, gazing at the twilight in the backyard of his house, in his slippers, smoking a long cigar and deciding on the best way to spend his enforced leisure, once more shook the Count’s sensibilities. After working so hard the man didn’t deserve an end like that.
“All right, I’m coming… but tell me just one thing: Where’s Felix got to today?”
“Felix? Felix who, Conde?”
“Felix, the hurricane, my friend.”
“How the hell should I know”
Manolo shook his head after drinking the last drop of coffee.
“What kind of policeman are you if you don’t even know where that bastard has got to! You’re a disaster. Manolo…”
He could be forty-five. Maybe slightly older. The grey hair aged him, but his smooth waxen face – mulatto white or bleached-white mulatto, carefully, even frenetically shaven – suggested a subtraction might be in order. He sported a uniform that looked made to measure by a tailor and not off the peg: the bolero, neatly shaped to his chest, descended over his flat belly to cover the belt to his fine cotton, elegantly hanging trousers, which were in the wrong time and place… And then there was the smell: he wore a delicate but very definite scent, creating around him a dry, manly, exquisite aura ten inches from his oh-so-stylishly uniformed silhouette. As he observed him, the Count thought this man could lead him to bury all his prejudices: he had expected to meet an ogre, not this fragrant, preening fellow; he had wanted to see a despot who refused to grant him his independence and found a man of pacific mien; he was sure he was going to meet an irate prosecutor in the spot now filled by this human being ready to disarm him with a smile and a question: “Do you smoke, Lieutenant? Ah, good, so I can smoke as well,” and he took a cigar out of his export box of H. Upmanns, after first offering one to Mario Conde.
“Thanks, Colonel.”
“Colonel Molina. I’m Alberto Molina… But please take a seat, as I think you and I have lots to talk about. But first let me order two coffees.”
“Lieutenant, I don’t think you slept very well last night, did you…? Well, I can tell you I didn’t. I tossed and turned in bed till my wife got angry because I wouldn’t let her sleep and she sent me to the living room. I threw the bedspread on the floor and started to think about everything that’s happening and the situation they’ve landed me in. Because to be honest I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to go through with it. I almost think I can’t… And it’s very disagreeable to know one is replacing an officer like Major Rangel, the man in the country who knows most about investigations, trials and the work you people do. And I don’t. You know where I come from? From the Executive for the Analysis of Military Intelligence, and that has nothing in common with what you do. And you know something else? For years I dreamed of being a spy. But a real spy, not like the ones in John Le Carre novels, who seem genuine but are only fictional. It seemed the best possible future, and I spent twenty years with this dream, office-bound, processing what the real spies found out: in a word, I was the bureaucrat who seemed like a character out of Le Carre… But if you start playing this game, you soon learn you’re obliged to obey orders, Lieutenant, and when you’re under orders, you have no choice but to belt up and obey. That’s why I’m here and not in Tel Aviv or New York, and that’s why I decided to talk to you, for it can’t be through choice that you have such a reputation as a detective, although there is the odd rumour… Not that these things bother me, I swear: I didn’t come here to judge anyone, but to ensure things keep working more or less the same way they did under Major Rangel… The others out there have come to pass judgement, and let me tell you that I, personally, deeply regret that several of your companions have done the things they did and provoked the investigations that led to all this and to Rangel losing his post. And though I regret it, I fully understand the need to proceed in this way: because a corrupt policeman is the worst of criminals, and I think we must be agreed on that, mustn’t we? The fact is that recently the most peculiar things have been happening… Besides, Lieutenant, if you ask to be discharged in the middle of all this business it may give rise to suspicions, and you should be aware of that. Although I must say I’m not here to suspect anyone and that’s why I want to hear your reasons for asking to be discharged. This place is no longer what I imagined it to be, although it should continue to be what it used to be: a headquarters for criminal investigations, and that’s precisely why I’ve called you in. Right now I’ve got all the detectives on the payroll, old and new, on some job or other, and I need you, Lieutenant. And you won’t think what I’m about to say is very orthodox; I brought you in to offer a straightforward deal: solve this case for me and I’ll sign you off… Please don’t imagine for one minute that I’m using your discharge as blackmail: let’s say rather that I’m compelling you to help me, because I need your assistance now and because you know that if I don’t sign the paper here on my desk, you won’t be discharged for several months… I told you I didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t I? I should tell you that the truth is it was your fault I didn’t sleep properly: I couldn’t think how to suggest something to you that might sound like blackmail and persuade you in the nicest possible way to take on this specific case. So I decided the best thing was to be completely frank with you… But first of all I’ll run through the case and you can say yea or nay, and we’ll see what happens, because although you’re hearing me being so polite and calm, I can also dig my heels in and make things difficult. Believe me… The problem is that on Saturday night they found a man’s corpse, a Cuban with US citizenship who’d come to visit his family… A real problem, you know? The man went out for a drive by himself on Thursday evening in his brother-in-law’s car; he’d said he wanted to see a bit of Havana, and that was the last that was seen of him, he didn’t appear until eleven p.m. Saturday when some fishermen found the corpse on Goat Beach, at the exit to the bay tunnel. You with me? According to the forensic, the man was dead before he was thrown into the sea, a blow to the head from a blunt instrument. He died of a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage. From the nature of the blow, the forensic thinks the object could have been something like a baseball bat, one of the old wooden sort… So far, so reasonably mysterious and politically complicated, but one can’t overlook a detail that makes things even more difficult: the dead man’s penis and testicles had been cut off, evidently with a blunt kitchen knife… What do you think, then? Doesn’t the story grab you? Of course, it must be revenge, but we have to prove it and find the guilty party, before the scandal blows up in Miami and the government’s accused of doing the evil deed. Because the man who died from several blows to the head, the man whose genitals were mutilated comes with a name and a history: he was Miguel Forcade Mier, and in the sixties he was deputy head of the Provincial Office for Expropriated Property, and national deputy director for Planning and the Economy until he stopped off in Madrid in 1978, on his way back from the Soviet Union… Now, doesn’t this case really grab you?”
In his ten years working as a policeman Mario Conde had internalized a few basic lessons to guarantee his survival: first of all came the concept of loyalty. Only by preserving the group spirit, by protecting the other members of the police tribe to which he himself belonged, could he guarantee that the others would provide him with similar protection and that their unity was really genuine. Even when he never felt like a real policeman, and preferred to operate without a pistol or uniform and even hated the idea of employing violence, when he dreamed he would soon jettison all that to embark on a normal life – now what the fuck was normality? he would also wonder, imagining a log cabin with a tiled roof facing the sea, where he would live and write – the Count always practised that code, perhaps to excess, as Major Rangel also did, only to end up betrayed by those bastards he’d stubbornly defended, even to the point of putting his own neck on the block when sentences were meted out. Consequently at that moment Mario Conde’s police and street ethics walked a dramatic tightrope: either he kept to his decision to leave Headquarters because they’d removed Major Rangel, or he took on that rancid-smelling case he’d already started to like the sound of and would thus earn the freedom awaiting him when it was solved and demonstrate into the bargain why the Boss had singled him out from all his detectives. As he listened to the alternatives offered by his new sweet-smelling, smartly uniformed chief, the Count lit another cigar and looked at the white folder on his lap, which contained the known facts about the life of defector Miguel Forcade Mier and the part of his death that had been revealed. He looked out of the big office window and noted that the sky was still blue and quiet, oblivious to the existence of Felix, and decided to negotiate a way out: “Colonel, as we are forging a deal between gentlemen, before I respond I want to ask you a question or two, and make one demand.”
The well-shaven and better-dressed man who was now his boss, smiled.
“You are mistaken, Lieutenant, it’s no gentleman’s deal, because I’m now your boss. But I’ll go along with you… What’s your first question?”
“Why had a man like Miguel Forcade been let back in the country? From what you tell me he was a pretty high ranker and defected when he was coming back from an official mission? As far as I know, it’s not usual for someone like that to attempt a comeback and even less to get permission to return to Cuba. I know of people who’ve been refused entry for much less… When this man left, did he take with him documents, money, something to incriminate
