imagined. He still seemed young for his age, in that tight pullover emphasising the pectorals of a practised swimmer and squash player. Not even rejection or fear of those who were once his friends and colleagues seemed overly to affect the true grit of a man born to be a policeman.
“Not right now. But I can tell you now it is down to you whether I remain a policeman or not.”
“What are you on about, Mario Conde?”
“It’s quite simple: when I heard they were kicking you out, I handed in my resignation, and now they’ll accept it if I solve just one more case. And it’s a really tasty case. But I’ll only take it on if you tell me to…”
The Boss stood up and walked over to the shutters. He looked out at the quiet street, shimmering under the midday sun, and looked at the garden, in need of some attention, and drew gently on his Cohiba Lancero.
“Mario, do me a favour,” his voice started off quite amiably but suddenly switched tone with that facility the Count had always envied, “stop talking nonsense and tell me what this tasty case is all about. Remember I was also a policeman until only three days ago. Why is it so tasty? Come on. I’m all ears.”
A single, well-aimed brutal blow had been enough to put an end to the life of Miguel Forcade Mier: like a ball angrily repelled by a powerful hitter, his brain burst inside his skull, putting an end to the ideas, memories and emotions of the man who in a moment made the transition from life to death. But then the second part of that savage sacrifice was performed: his penis and testicles were excised at the root by a clumsy, furious hand, which scored the flesh, pulled at it, sawed at it, till the entire masculinity of a man who’d returned from the beyond was severed. His body was finally thrown into that turbid sea, a possible offering to certain lethal gods, at a spot where water black with shit, urine, vomit and menstruation issued forth from the city to which Miguel Forcade had returned quite unsuspecting he would never leave it again.
The Count and Major Rangel exchanged looks of disgust: the infinite cruelty of that murder smacked of enraged sacrifice, livid revenge perhaps years in the planning and finally executed when oblivion had apparently buried for ever the unpredictable source of a hatred unleashed now like an October cyclone on the tropics.
And they thought: Miguel Forcade Mier must have died from some ancient crime; perhaps from his time as a repossessor of expropriated goods, when so much wealth abandoned by the Cuban bourgeoisie running for cover with such a hue and cry was confiscated in the name of the people and its government, who should now own everything. Furniture, jewels, works of art, coins ancient and modern, accumulated over more than two centuries by a dialectically defeated social class, had now to pass through the hands of the Official Expropriator charged with the mission of assigning them a more just destiny. Would he always do that? Logic began to suggest not: the bewildering temptations offered by those historically doomed fortunes might have corrupted the vanguard ideology of the man who almost thirty years later, the sign of a traitor cut into his forehead, would die castrated. One could imagine that a part of those recycled riches, minimal no doubt but very valuable (say a Degas that never reappeared, a Greek amphora lost to an oblivious Mediterranean, a Roman bust lost to memory, or collection of Byzantine coins never again exchanged by merchant owners of every temple there ever was?), passed through his hands with the promise of a revolutionary redistribution that never happened and that he perhaps finally paid for in that death of blood, wood and iron… But, why was it necessary to castrate him?
Although the crime may not have been that distant or remarkable, perhaps it was no less forgettable for a memory perversely trapped by the physical or moral consequences of that sin: Miguel Forcade Mier had later climbed the ladder of power via the technocratic route, under the hospitable shadow of five-year plans imported from Asian steppes littered with efficient
The origins of such a perverse murder contained all the ingredients of revenge, but the most important item remained unknown: what recipe had created that stew and who had done the cooking?
“What if it was just a matter of jealousy and cuckoldry?” asked the Count, and Major Rangel looked him in the eye from behind his Lancero’s infernal glow, before declaring: “Then best not tangle with the wife of the guy who cuts the balls off everyone else, right?”
Whenever he travelled by bus, Mario Conde tried his best to get a window-seat. In his university student days, he would get up twenty minutes earlier than necessary to queue for an empty bus. Unhurriedly, he would randomly choose one of the two sides of the vehicle and keep close to the metal to defend the privilege of the window-seat. Far from the aisle, he enjoyed the material advantages of not having his shoulder knocked by unattractive appendages, his foot trodden on or banged by crates. But there were two much more valuable rewards, which he would alternate according to need, state of mind and interests: he either read for the thirty-five minutes the journey took from his neighbourhood to the stop nearest to the faculty (he only did that on exam days or when he had a really good book), or devoted himself (as he preferred) to studying the buildings the bus encountered on its route, enjoying the second or third floors on the old roads of Jesus del Monte and la Infanta, hidden to anyone not prepared to raise their eyes toward their elusive heights. The Count had acquired that habit from his friend Andres – who learned it in turn from beautiful Christine, that sexual being with whom they had all fallen in love – and it became such an organic need that when he looked at the buildings he would feel body and mind separating out their most connected atoms, releasing part of his self from his seat to float several yards above the street’s dark, greasy surfaces, to penetrate forgotten mysteries, remote histories, dreams wandering behind the walls of places with which he communed, as if they were other souls in distress, also liberated from perishable, onerous matter. That was how he’d discovered the most beautiful, audacious balconies, sculpted on city facades with the most extravagant motifs, eaves decorated with wedding-cake piping, anti-neighbour wrought-iron grilles forged by blacksmiths militant in every baroque art, and he had also discovered that death hovered, nearer every minute to all those centennial wonders of iron, cement, plaster and wood, which turned their best faces to the road, filthy from neglect of historic proportions, from petrified dust and apathy immemorial, whose inhabitants crammed into houses that had lost their dignity and character, degraded by the need for living quarters bereft of water, with communal bathrooms and congenital promiscuity. And although he knew that the pleasure at car level wasn’t the same as from the dais of a bus window-seat, which favoured more spiritual outpourings, on that afternoon the Count made of Sergeant Palacios two special requests for which he would be eternally grateful to him: first, for him to keep quiet; second, for him to drive at twenty miles an hour. He wanted only silence and humane speeds in order to observe yet again those elusive landscapes he knew and loved, as he felt afraid it might be his last encounter with the most abandoned, ill-treated architecture of his city of birth: the raging hurricane that at midday was heading towards the South of Hispaniola, after it had devastated tiny Guadalupe – even uprooting some of the trees Victor Hugues himself had ordered to be planted there two centuries ago in a Place de la Victoire dedicated to revolutionary ideals – that same bastard of a cyclone might enter these streets in a few days and demolish the decrepit beauty of second and third floors, which he alone – he was convinced – contemplated, reflecting on their inevitable, regrettable demise, prepared by years of neglect. What other destiny could that city expect if not violent death forged by the protracted agony of oblivion? Or would it also die castrated, a new Atlantis submerged beneath the sea by an unforgivable yet still unknown sin? Fuck it, he told himself from the gloomy depths of such reflections: it doesn’t matter how it dies: we all die in the end. Even you will die. And to usher that transition a little nearer he lit another cigar and puffed with relish as if it were the last wish granted a man on death row.
When he got back to Headquarters and told Colonel Molina: I’ll take the case on, his new boss patted him gleefully on the back and agreed to another request: Sergeant Palacios could work with him. But now the Colonel began to name his conditions: he had a maximum of three days to solve the mystery of the castrated death of
