“See you soon,” said Patricia, grabbing Manolo by the arm and dragging him out of the cubicle.
“Hey, China, wait a minute,” the Count asked, and he whispered in her ear. “What did the quail taste like yesterday?”
“What the kid said,” she whispered back. “Foul. But Dad scoffed the lot.”
“Just as well.” And he smiled at Manolo as he waved goodbye.
“Business deals involving lots of money are like jealous women: you can give them no reason to complain,” said Rene Maciques, and the Count looked at Manolo; the lesson was for free and he’d got it quite wrong. Rene Maciques was barely forty and not the fifty he’d imagined; and was no librarian but a television presenter persuasively using his voice and hands and constantly trying to tidy his bushy eyebrows with index finger and thumb. He was wearing a guayabera that seemed enamelled, it was so white, with a white embroidered pattern down the sides that was even brighter, and he flashed a glib gleaming smile. Three gold pens poked out from one pocket, and the Count thought only an asshole would try to show off his status with a display of pens. “If one is involved in that kind of business, one has to look trustworthy, appear relaxed as if the deal were already signed and exude quiet conviction. As I said, like a jealous woman: because at the same time, one must hint, quite matter-of- factly, that signing is no life or death matter, that one is aware of more attractive options, although one knows this couldn’t be bettered. Big business is a jungle where every animal is dangerous and one needs more than a rifle over one’s shoulder.” And the Count thought, the king of the metaphor, this one! “And I know no comrade more adept than Rafael at doing deals. I had the opportunity to work a lot with him here in Cuba and in negotiations abroad, on really challenging contracts, and he behaved like an artist, sold at the top and always bought at below market price; and buyers and sellers were very satisfied, although they knew in the end that Rafael had hoodwinked them. And best of all: he never lost a customer.”
“And why did he spend
“Because he felt fulfilled doing it and knew he was the best. Each commercial area within the enterprise has its own expertise, whether according to line or geographical area, do you see? However, if the deal were very important or threatened to get stymied in some way, Rafael would advise the experts, draw on the business contacts he’d established over the years and enter the ring.”
So he was a torero as well? the Count wanted to ask because he guessed Maciques might be a hard nut to crack as his obsolete if irrefutable verbiage spewed out. He looked down at his notebook, where he’d written BIG MONEY BUSINESS, and allowed himself a moment for thought: was Rafael Morin everything he was cracked up to be? Although from a considerable distance, he’d seen the social and professional rise of a man now declared missing. He leaped like a clever, well trained acrobat, one who jumps fearlessly into the void because they’ve put in place a safety net that assures them, up you go, just do it and you’ll triumph, I’m here to protect you. Marriage into a wealthy family was half the battle: Tamara, her father, and her father’s friends, must have smoothed the path for him, but for justice’s sake he must accept the rest was down to him, no doubt about that. When Rafael Morin spoke from a microphone at high school twenty years earlier, his mind was already dead set on the idea of making it, of climbing all the way to the top, and was getting in training. At the time people’s ambitions were usually abstract and vague, but Rafael’s were already well formed, and that’s why he got on the fast track and set out to secure every certificate, every recognition, every award and to be a perfect paragon, self-sacrificing and worthy, cultivating
“So where did he get the money to give the presents he gave?” asked the Count when he finally managed to read the only thing he’d jotted down. And was surprised how quickly Rene Maciques responded.
“I imagine he saved it from his daily allowances.”
“And would that be enough for the hi-fi system he had at home, to buy his mother Chanel N° 5, for the big and small gifts he gave his subordinates and even to say his name was Rene Maciques and rent a room at the Riviera and take a twenty-three-year-old sparkler to dine at L’Aiglon? Are you sure, Maciques? Did you know he used your name with the women he picked up or did he never tell you, even in confidence as it were?”
Rene Maciques got up and walked towards the air conditioning unit built into the wall. Fiddled with the controls, straightened the curtain that had got caught up in one corner of his office. Perhaps he felt cold. That same night, while pondering the latest twist in the fate of Rafael Morin, Lieutenant Mario Conde recalled this scene as if he’d lived it ten or fifteen years earlier, or as if he’d never wanted to experience it, because Maciques returned to his chair, glanced at the policemen and no longer looked like a television presenter but the timid librarian the Count had imagined when he said:
“I just refuse to believe that, comrades.”
“That’s your problem, Maciques. I’ve no reason to lie to you. Now tell us about those presents.”
“I told you: they must have come from what he saved out of his daily expense allowance.”
“And could that run to so much?”
“I’ve no idea, comrades, you’d have to ask Rafael Morin.”
“Hey, Maciques,” said the Count as he stood up, “would we also have to ask Rafael Morin why you came here at lunchtime on the thirty-first?”
But Rene Maciques smiled. He was back on camera, stroking his eyebrows, when he said:
“What a coincidence! I came to do just that,” and pointed at the air conditioning unit. “I remembered I’d left it switched on and came to turn it off.”
Now the Count smiled and put his notebook back in his pocket. He was praying Patricia would find something that would allow him to pulverize Rene Maciques.
The only time Mario Conde shot at a man, he’d learned how easy it was to kill: you aim at the chest and stop thinking as you pull the trigger; the act of firing almost spares you the moment the bullet hits the man and knocks him to the ground like a hail of stones where writhing, wracked in pain, he does or doesn’t die.
The Count was on leave that day, and for months he’d tried, as with everything else in his life, to find the thread to the tangled events that had put him, pistol in hand, in front of a man and forced him to shoot. It was two years after they moved him from the General Information Department to Investigations, and he’d met Haydee while investigating a violent robbery that had taken place in the office where she worked. He chatted to her a couple of times and realized the future of his marriage with Martiza was a thing of the past. Haydee became the obsession of his life, and the Count thought he’d go mad. The passionate onslaught of their love, expressed daily in rooming houses, borrowed flats and other happy hunting grounds, was violently animal and offered him innumerable unexplored pleasures. The Count fell outrageously in love and performed the most extravagantly satisfying sexual deviations he’d ever experienced. They made love time and again, never endingly. When the Count was exhausted and blissful, Haydee knew how to extract that little bit more: he only had to hear her releasing a powerful yellow jet of pee or feel the magnetic tip of her tongue licking its way up his thighs and curling round his member to want to start all over again. Like no other woman, Haydee made him feel a male object of desire, and in each encounter they played love-games like inventive explorers or pent-up celibates.
If the Count hadn’t fallen for that frivolous innocent abroad who was transformed whenever sex was nigh, he’d never have been standing, fretful yet happy, on the corner of calle Infanta, half a block away from the office where Haydee worked until five thirty pm. If that afternoon Haydee, in her rush to their next dose of delirium, hadn’t made a mistake adding six and eight and getting twenty-four, as she noted in an impossible tally, she would have left at five thirty-one, and not five forty-two, when the din in the street and blast from the gun got her up from her desk all
