“Which hotels?”
“You can imagine. The Riviera, the Mar Azul, that kind of hotel.”
“What did he say his line of work is?”
“Was it foreign affairs? Or foreign trade, something like that?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
“Well, I think it’s foreign affairs.”
“Did he have lots of money?”
“How else do you think you pay at the Riviera?”
“Watch what you’re saying, Zoila. Give me an answer.”
“Of course he had lots. But as I told you we only went out a few times.”
“Didn’t you meet up again?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he went abroad. A whole year in Canada, I think.”
“When was that?”
“Around October, I told you.”
“Did he give you presents?”
“Little things.”
“What kind of little thing?”
“Perfume, bracelets, a dress, that sort of thing.”
“From abroad?”
“Yes, from abroad.”
“So he had dollars?”
“I never saw any.”
“How did you get to see each other?”
“Simple, he always had lots of work on, and when he had a chance he’d call me at home. If I wasn’t busy, he’d come for me. In his car. Naturally.”
“What kind of car?”
“He had two. Almost always the newer one, a private Lada, and sometimes in another Lada, state-owned I think, with tinted glass.”
“Zoila, now I want you to think carefully what you say: for your own good and for the good of your friend Rene Maciques. Where might he get so much money from?”
Zoila Amaran Izquierdo leaned her head to one side to look at the lieutenant, and her eyes tried to say how the hell should I know? Then she looked at Manolo and replied:
“You know, comrade, you don’t ask that kind of question on the street. I’m not a whore because I don’t go to bed for money, but if someone shows up with money and invites you to a meal at L’Aiglon and to a beer by the pool and then wants to hang out at a night club and go up to a room overlooking the Malecon, you don’t dig any further. You enjoy yourself, comrade. Things are very bad these days, and you’re only young once, right?”
Of course you’re only young once, he thought, so much was obvious. A warm lazy voice and cloudless sky-blue eyes were the only visible reminder of the attributes of the mythical Baby-Face Miki, the lad who set the record for the number of girlfriends in one year at high school in La Vibora: twenty-eight all told, snogged to a woman and some explored more thoroughly. Now he didn’t have enough hair to attempt Afro curly waves but plenty enough to declare his bankruptcy and assume his baldpated fate. His beard was an explosion of reddish grey stubble, like the last Viking in a comic. His previously handsome face now had the consistency of a poorly kneaded biscuit: uneven, cracked, with mountains and valleys of poorly distributed, prematurely aged flab. He laughed and displayed the jaundiced sadness of his teeth, and if he laughed a lot, his smoker’s lungs regaled him with a two-minute coughing fit. Miki was a warning, the Count told himself: his appearance was evidence that they would soon hit forty, were no longer spring chickens able to greet every morning afresh, and had good reason to be exhausted and nostalgic.
“This is a disaster area, Conde. Mariita left me a month ago, and look at this pigsty.” And his spreadeagled arms tried to embrace the endless mess in his living room. He picked up two glasses soiled by several generations of dirt and put them back in almost the same spot. Cursed the absent woman five times and went over to the record player. Without thinking, he took the LP on the top of the pile and put it on the turntable. “Listen to this and die:
The Count shifted a pair of trousers and two shirts from an armchair and could sit down. He was intrigued by the fact that, apart from Lamey, Miki was the only writer spawned by that literary workshop at high school, which Miki basically attended to see what he could pull. But at some stage the bright spark had expressed his enthusiasm for literature, set his lights on becoming a writer and somehow or other had made it. Two books of short stories and one novel published: he was what was considered a prolific writer, although in a vein that the Count could never have tapped had he had the time or talent to defeat the defiantly white page. Miki wrote about literacy campaigns, the first years of the revolution and the class struggle, whereas he would have preferred to write a story about squalor. Something squalid and moving, because even though he’d not experienced many squalid things that were also moving, he’d more need of them than ever.
“No, I’m not writing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, I try occasionally but nothing comes.”
“It happens, right?”
“I think so.”
“Give me another cigarette. If I’d got any coffee, I’d invite you, but I’m up shit-creek. Not even ciggies, you hound. How’s it going, any sign of the guy yet?”
“No, he’s not put in an appearance,” said the Count trying to make himself comfortable in the sofa-chair, despite the spring that kept poking into him.
“When Carlos told me you were after Rafael, I almost pissed myself laughing. You must agree it’s funny.”
“It’s not funny at all as far as I’m concerned.”
Baby-Face Miki crushed his cigarette on the floor and coughed a couple of times.
“Rafael and I had some trouble five or six years ago. Did you know that? No, most people don’t, and the old crowd from high school I keep bumping into ask me about him and think we’re still good pals. It used to annoy me no end lying to the effect that everything was fine. You can’t spend your whole life making out everything’s fine… Don’t you have the slightest fucking clue what might have happened to Rafael? Do you reckon he’s gone off with a little number and will turn up acting as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”
“What’s up, man? You’re very downbeat. Look, I have this strange thing with Rafael: I sometimes think I still like him, because once we were as close as brothers, and at others I pity him a little, just a very little, and then I feel indifferent, as if I don’t care a fuck what’s happened to him, because I didn’t deserve all the trouble he got me into with the party check-up.”
“What trouble?”
“Well, that’s why I told Carlos you should make sure you saw me today. Listen, Conde: I know Rafael is up to his neck in something big. I don’t know if what I’m going to tell you will be much use, maybe, you’ll tell me. And if I’m telling you, it’s because you’re the policeman in charge of this case, because if it were someone else, he’d never find out. Look, the trouble came about because when they were vetting him for the party, Rafael gave them my name as a person they could ask, and the couple doing the audit on him did come to see me. I remember it happened when I’d left the Youth Organization, and they told me it was just routine, that if I’d known Rafael well from his time as a student that was all they needed. Imagine, had I known him? Then they started to question me,
