Havana Blue

our sickness and sore heads and even wrap a bag of ice round our balls.

Sergeant Manuel Palacios put the car in reverse, stepped on the accelerator, and the tyres screeched painfully as the car swung backwards in order to leave the parking lot. He seemed less fragile when, from the driver’s seat, he looked towards the entrance to headquarters and saw the deadpan expression on Lieutenant Mario Conde’s face; perhaps he’d not impressed him with a manoeuvre that was wilder than anything Gene Hackman does in French Connection. Although he was so young and people said in a few years he’d be the best detective at headquarters, Sergeant Manuel Palacios displayed rampant immaturity when he got his hands on a woman or a driving wheel. The Count’s phobia at what was for him an overly complex activity, your hands steering, your eyes following what was in front and behind, simultaneously accelerating, changing gear or using the footbrake, allowed Manolo to be the perpetual driver whenever the Boss insisted on assigning them to the same case. The Count had always thought such vehicular cohabitation – he saved on a driver – was the reason the major coupled them so often. At headquarters some reckoned the Count was the best detective on the payroll and that Sergeant Palacios would soon overtake him, but few grasped the affinity that had sprung up between the dreadfully penny-pinching lieutenant and an almost emaciated, baby-faced sergeant who must certainly have cheated his way into the Police Academy. Only the Boss realized they might hit it off. In the end that was what happened.

The Count walked over to the car: cigarette between lips, jacket unbuttoned, bags under eyes hidden behind dark glasses. He seemed preoccupied as he opened the car door and climbed into the passenger seat.

“Good, finally, off to the wife’s house?” asked Manolo, raring to go.

The Count stayed silent for a few minutes. He put his glasses into his jacket pocket. Extracted the photo of Rafael Morin from the file and placed it on his lap.

“What do you read in that face?” he asked.

“That face? You’re the one into psychology, why don’t you tell me?”

“In the meantime, what’s your take on all this?”

“I’m not sure yet, Conde, it makes no sense. I mean,” he checked himself and looked at the lieutenant, “it’s real fucking odd.”

“You tell me,” replied the Count, egging him on.

“Well, for the moment there’s no sign of an accident and no evidence he’s fled the country, at least according to the latest reports I’ve just read, although I’d not bet on it. I don’t think he’s been kidnapped. That wouldn’t make any sense either.”

“Forget about any sense and go on.”

“Well, a kidnapping doesn’t make any sense because I can’t see what anyone could ask him for, and I don’t figure he’s run off with a woman or anything of that sort, because he’d know there’d be one hell of a fuss and he doesn’t seem that kind of guy. He’d lose his position, right? I’ve got one solution with two possible angles: he’s been killed by accident or because people wanted to steal something, or because he was mistaken for somebody else, or else was killed because he was involved in some fucking scam. And the only other possibility is quite ridiculous: he’s hiding for some reason, but if that’s the case, I can’t understand why he didn’t think up something to delay his wife filing a statement. A trip to the provinces or whatever… But the guy stinks like a dead dog on the highway. In the meantime we’ve no choice but to look everywhere: his home, work, barrio, anywhere, to find something to explain all this.”

“Fuck the bastard,” exclaimed the Count, staring at the road opening up before him. “Let’s go to his place. Off you go to Santa Catalina via Rancho Boyeros.”

Manolo drove them on. The streets were still deserted under the bright sun that beat down and invited thoughts of an early afternoon break. A few dirty clouds lurked high on the horizon. The Count tried to think of Josefina’s lunch, of tonight’s baseball game, of the damage he was self-inflicting by smoking so many cigs a day. He wanted to see off the mixture of melancholy and excitement overcoming him as the car approached Tamara’s house.

“Hey, Conde, you still on holiday? What do you reckon?” asked Manolo as they sped past the National Theatre.

“I think more or less the same as you, that’s why I said nothing. I’m sure he’s not hiding or going to attempt an illegal exit,” he replied and took another look at the photo.

“Why do you think so? Because of his position?”

“Yes, right. Just imagine him travelling abroad ten times a year… But particularly because I’ve known him for twenty years.”

Manolo missed a gear, and the car almost stalled on him. He accelerated and managed to judder along. He smiled, nodded and looked at his colleague.

“Don’t tell me he’s a friend of yours.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I knew him.”

“Twenty years back?”

“Seventeen, to be precise. I first heard him speechifying in 1972 at high school in La Vibora. He was president of my student federation.”

“And what else?”

“You know, Manolo, I don’t want to prejudice you. The fact is he always made me feel sick to my back teeth, but that’s irrelevant now. He should just put in a quick reappearance so I can go to bed.”

“You really think it’s not relevant?”

“Get a move on, catch the green light,” he countered, pointing to the traffic light onto Boyeros and the El Cerro highway.

The Count lit another cigarette, coughed a couple of times and put Rafael Morin’s photo back in his file. The memory of Tamara telling them of her forthcoming marriage to Rafael had resurrected itself violently and unexpectedly. He could now see the three white stripes on her tunic, her stockings rolled down round her ankles and hair cut in a symmetrical oval. After they’d left high school they’d seen each other barely four or five times, and each time the mere sight of her and her female sensual allure made his skin tingle. They were progressing along the Santa Catalina highway, but the Count wasn’t looking at the houses where some of his old school friends lived or the welltrimmed gardens or tranquillity in that eternally tranquil barrio where he’d partied so often with Skinny and Rabbit. He was thinking of another party, Tamara and Aymaras’ fifteenth birthday party, almost at the start of the second year at high school, on the second of November, his memory recalled to the day, and the big impression made on him by the house where the girls lived. The garden was like a well kept English park: there was room for tables under the trees, on the lawn and next to the fountain where an old statue of an angel, rescued from some collapsing colonial establishment, pissed on lilies in full bloom. There was even a space where the Gnomes could play, the best, most famous, most expensive of the combos in La Vibora, and more than a hundred couples danced; there were bouquets for every girl and trays of meat croquettes, meat pies and fried cheese balls that were unimaginable in those years of perpetual queues. The twins’ parents, ambassadors in London at the time and previously in Brussels and Prague and later Madrid, knew how to throw a party. And Skinny, Rabbit, Andres and himself were sure they’d never been to a better one. A bottle of rum to each table! “It’s like a party in another country,” pronounced Rabbit, and they all agreed. Then he thought how even the great, great Gatsby would have enjoyed that gala do. In conquistador mode, Rafael Morin spent the whole night dancing with Tamara, and the Count could still remember the twins’ white lace dresses flying though the air to the inevitable “Blue Danube”: a white dress that for him was black and backstitched entirely in grey.

“Park there,” he ordered the sergeant when they crossed Mayia Rodriguez, and he threw his cigarette end on the road. There on the opposite pavement, right on the corner, stood the two-storey house where the twins had lived, a spectacular house splendid with large swathes of dark glass and red brick and a wall around a professionally manicured garden at the right height not to hide the line of concrete sculptures that denoted the shaping hand of a Wifredo Lam.

“This is it,” exclaimed Manolo. “Whenever I drove by here I’d stare at that house and think how I’d like to have lived in a house like that. I even started to think there’d never be problems with the police in such a place and that I’d never get to see the inside.”

“Well, it’s no house for policemen.”

“It was given to him, I suppose.”

“No, not this time. It belonged to his wife’s parents.”