of love and melancholy that forced him to hug her as tightly as a strangler and say “I love you so much, Jose” before he let her go and walked over to the sidetable where the thermos of coffee stood and thus he fought off the tears he felt were imminent.
“What you doing here, Condesito? You finished work early?”
“If only, Jose,” he replied as he drank his coffee. “I came to eat yucca in that sauce.”
“Hey, kid,” she replied and left off preparing food for a moment. “What’s the mess you sorting now?”
“You can’t imagine, love, one of my usual piles of shit.”
“With that girl who was at school with you?”
“Hey, what’s your beast of a boy been telling you?”
“Don’t be silly. You could hear your carryings on yesterday half a block away.”
The Count shrugged his shoulders and smiled. What could he have said?
“Hey, and why are you looking so elegant?” he asked as he looked her up and down.
“Me elegant? Forget it, you can’t imagine how elegant I can be when I put my mind to it… No, I’ve just come from the doctor’s and not had time to change.”
“What’s wrong, Jose?” he asked as he bent down to see her face, that was looking over the stove.
“I don’t know, love. It’s a pain that goes back a long time and it’s getting unbearable. It starts burning here under my belly, and sometimes I feel a knife’s been buried down there.”
“And what did the doctor say?”
“He didn’t really say anything. He sent me off for tests, an X-ray and that thing when you have to swallow a hosepipe.”
“But didn’t he say anything else?”
“What else do you expect him to say, Condesito?”
“I don’t know. But you never told me. I’d have spoken to Andres, the one who studied with us. He’s a fantastic doctor.”
“Don’t you worry, this doctor is good too.”
“What do you mean ‘don’t worry’, dear? You never do say anything. Tomorrow I’ll talk to Andres about the tests, and Skinny should ring…”
Josefina put the saucepan down and looked at her son’s friend.
“Should ring no one. Not a word to him, please?”
Then the Count decided to pour out another dose of coffee and light another cigarette, but not to hug Josefina and tell her he was really scared.
“Don’t worry. I’ll call. The stew smells good, doesn’t it?” And he walked out of her kitchen.
Mario Conde’s strolls down memory lane always ended in melancholy. When he crossed the watershed of his thirtieth year and his relationship with Haydee petered out in the last whimpers of unbridled sexual combat, he found he liked remembering in the hope that he would improve his life and treated his destiny like a guilty party he could bury under reproaches and recriminations or moans and groans. His own work suffered from such an attitude, and though he knew he wasn’t a hard or particularly wise man, or even exemplary in his behaviour, although some of his colleagues considered him a good policeman, he thought he might have been more useful in another profession, but he then transmuted his gripes into punctilious efficiency that earned him a reputation he considered fraudulent and quite inexplicable. And now Tamara had come back to disturb the considerable calm he’d reached after his fallout with Haydee by dint of nights at baseball games, drinking, nostalgia-provoking music and overflowing plates, while he chatted to Skinny, all the time wanting it not to be true, for Skinny to be skinny again, for him never to die and not look like a giant greasy meatball, shirtless and trying to soak up the midday sun in his backyard. The Count saw the rolls of fat gather over his belly and the small red spots covering his back, neck and chest, like bites from voracious insects.
“What you thinking about, you wild man?” he asked as he ruffled his hair.
“Nothing, you savage. I was thinking about the whole Rafael business, and my mind suddenly went a complete blank,” his friend responded, looking at the clock. “What time they coming to pick you up?”
“I’m off now. Manolo will be here in two ticks. If I can’t come tonight, I’ll ring you and tell you where it’s at.”
“But don’t think too much. You’ll get indigestion.”
“Do I have any choice, Skinny?”
“No, my friend. Just clear some of the shit out that head of yours because what’s fucked won’t get unfucked by you spending your whole day thinking. You know, it’s just like baseball: if you’re going to win, you need a good set of bongos. And ours rumble away, even when we’re awake. That’s why you and I almost beat the lanky coal- merchants from the high school in Havana, you remember that?”
“Like it was yesterday,” he replied and stood up ready to hit and then took a swing. They both watched the ball fly off and hit the fence right under the scoreboard in the loneliest reaches of centerfield.
“Surprise, surprise!” exclaimed Lieutenant Patricia Wong in English, her eyes vanishing with her laughter as her right hand brandished the stapled papers which seemed to be the source of her cheerfulness. China’s outburst of excitement went through the Count like a transfusion: went straight into his body and began to course through his veins at a startling rate, making his heart beat fast.
“Have we got him?” he asked as he searched his jacket pocket for a cigarette and almost shouted when he saw his comrade’s eyeless face sway affirmatively.
“Fuck, we’ve finally got something,” snorted Manolo, intercepting in midair the cigarette the Count was lifting to his lips. The lieutenant, who hated his colleague’s sporadic but often repeated jape, forgot his usual insults and pulled up a chair next to Lieutenant Patricia Wong.
“Come on, China, how’s it looking?”
“Like you said, Mayo, like you said, but more complicated. Look, this is what must be behind it all and we still have to review a stack of paper, one hell of a stack,” she emphasized and started looking for something among the forms. “But it’s red hot, Mayo, just listen. In the last half of 1988, which is all we’ve looked at, Rafael Morin went on two trips to Spain and one to Japan. He’s got more flying hours than Gagarin… Look, he went to Japan to do business with Mitachi, but more of that later.”
“Go on, go on,” insisted the Count.
“Listen, he went to Spain for sixteen and eighteen days respectively and to Japan for nine, and in each case had to wrap up four contracts, except on his first visit to Spain when there were only three. He had a heap of dollars for marketing expenses – I’d never imagined people got so much – I’ll tell you exactly how much later. There’s a sheet that lists them by the business contacts to be made, but cop this, he’d always double his numbers, as if he were going to work or be away more time. That’s bad enough, but the daily expenses beggar belief, Mayo. The pro- formas he must have filled in for the three trips I mentioned aren’t here, but what’s more incredible is that he filed a claim for expenses for a trip to Panama that was cancelled and didn’t reimburse them. I can’t explain that. Any auditor would spot it.”
“Yes, it’s odd, but is there more?” the lieutenant asked as Patricia put the sheets on top of the desk. His glee began to wane; such hamfistedness didn’t bear the stamp of Morin.
“Hey, wait a minute, Mayo. Let me finish.”
“On your way, China, show us you’re better than Chan Li Po.”
“I will. Look, this is the fuse to a real time bomb: the import and export enterprise holds an account in the Bank of Bilbao and Vizcaya in the name of a limited company registered at a post box number in Panama and which has a branch in Cuba. It’s a kind of corporation and is called Rose Tree and was apparently set up to sidestep the American embargo. The Rose Tree account can be accessed via three signatures: those of Deputy Minister Fernandez-Lorea, our friend Maciques and, naturally, Rafael Morin, but there always had to be two signatures… You with me?”
“I’m giving it my best, my most heartfelt shot.”
“Well, hold on to your chair now,
“And who was responsible?”
