smoked. What can you tell us about any of that?”
The youngster looked back at Conde, who’d lit a cigarette.
“Nothing, comrade, how could I?”
“Are you sure? Call Greco,” Manolo addressed Crespo. The policeman picked a phone up and whispered something. He hung up. In the meantime, Manolo leafed through a small notebook he was holding and opted to read, an apparently enthralling read, while the Count smoked and looked all casual, as if present at a very familiar performance. Seated in the centre of the tiny room, Lazaro San Juan shifted his gaze from one to the other, as if waiting for them to award him a deferred mark in a final examination. Doubt grew in his gaze, for all to see, like a well-nourished weed.
Two knocks on the wooden door, and in walked Greco’s sharp-pointed bones. I’m surrounded by skin and bones. I’m even turning skin and bones, recalled the Count. Greco was carrying a piece of paper. He handed it to the Count and left. The lieutenant glanced at it and nodded, when he looked up at Manolo. Lazaro San Juan’s gaze flew from one to the other. Still waiting for his mark.
“All right, Lazaro, we’ll get down to the serious stuff. On the eighteenth you were in the house of your teacher Lissette. Your fingerprints are there. And it’s very likely you were the one who went to bed with her that night: your blood is group O, the same as the man whose semen she had in her vagina when she died.” Manolo walked towards the curtain which was to the left of Lazaro, drew it back to reveal the translucent glass that, as in a game of mirrors, gave a to-scale reproduction of the room where they were, but with less backdrop, action and characters. “Your cousin, Orlando San Juan, sits in there, accused of possessing and peddling drugs, attempted illegal departure from the country and the theft of a motor launch belonging to the State. He has confessed to all his crimes and told us moreover that on the eighteenth, at around 7.30 p.m., you went to his house and stayed there for a while. Moreover it transpires that the marijuana your cousin possesses is the same kind as the stuff that turned up in the toilet in Lissette’s place. As you can see, Lazaro, you’re more trapped up in this tale of drugs and murder than mincemeat in a pie. Even if you don’t confess, any court will have a ball with all these facts I’ve given you. What’s more, the colleague who brought me these papers has just gone to get Luis Gustavo Rodriguez and Yuri Samper, your little Pre-Uni friends, and when we talk to them, you bet they will confirm lots of things. OK, as you can see, very serious stuff. You got anything to say?”
The Count watched the mutation take place. It was like a wave that advanced from the guts and surfaced through the skin. Lazaro’s muscles lost their ripple and his chest deflated. His hair was no longer neatly parted down the middle, but awry like a badly fitting wig. The spots on his face turned dark and he no longer seemed beautiful, strong or young and instinct told the Count that they’d reached the epilogue to that tale. Why would he have killed her? Why would an eighteenyear-old youth do something so bestial and definitive as that? Why could the quest for happiness end in that degeneration that had only just begun and would never finish, not even after the ten, fifteen years Lazaro San Juan was going to spend surrounded by the degrading rigours of prison life, by murderers like himself, thieves, rapists and conmen, who would fight over the dark heart of his beauty and youth like a trophy they would sooner or later devour with great pleasure. No miracle would save this Lazarus.
“All right, all that’s true, except for the idea I killed her and went to bed with her, I swear on my mother. I didn’t kill her and wasn’t with her either that day, and Luis and Yuri will tell you that’s so, you’ll see. Yes, she thought up the party, told me about it during break at Pre-Uni, hey Lacho – that’s what she called me – you know what? Why don’t you drop by tonight for a while, I’ll have rum? She and I, you know, were an item for a few months, from December, she partied with me and I’m only human and we started to go to bed, but nobody knew in Pre-Uni, and I told only Luis and Yuri and they swore not to tell, and that was it, nobody knew. Then I told them, come one, let’s go and have a drink or two, and had the bright idea of going to Lando’s and stealing a few of the joints he liked smoking, I knew he put them inside a packet of Marlboro, one of the cardboard kind, in a pocket in his jacket in his bedroom, because I saw him take one from there once and I went and stole a few but only two or three times. And that was all, I met up with my pals on the street corner near her house and we went up at about eight-thirty, started to drink, listen to music and dance and I lit a joint and we smoked but she didn’t because she said she wanted more rum. Yuri went as far as El Niagara and bought two more bottles with the money she’d given him, and that was all, she was half drunk when we left at about eleven, we were incredibly hungry because she never had any food in the house, and we went to the stop and caught our buses, they the number 15 and me the 174, that drops me nearer my house, and that was all, that was that. We found out the next day and were incredibly scared and decided it would be better not to say anything to anybody, because somebody would jump to conclusions, like you have. That was all, I swear to you. I didn’t kill her or go to bed with her that night. I swear I didn’t. You ask Yuri and Luis who were with me, you ask them, go on…”
Far too many mysteries by half, the Count told himself. He wanted to think about the mystery concocted around Lissette’s death, but the unexpected riddle of Karina’s disappearance kept getting in the way, where could she have got to last night, he rang her again after speaking to Lazaro and the same female voice as on the previous night spoke to him: “No, she didn’t come here yesterday, but she phoned and I gave her your message. She didn’t ring you?” That statement was like a gust coming from the poop deck, swelling the sails of his doubts and fears and setting them off at top speed across a choppy, uncertain Sargasso Sea. He knew the company Karina worked for was based in El Vedado, but his enthusiasm prevented him doing his policeman thing and he’d never asked her for her exact address, after all, she lived around the corner from Skinny, and he didn’t dare ask the woman at the other end of the line. Karina’s mother? Something irrevocable had happened, as on the night of the eighteenth, he thought. Leaning against the window in his office, he looked at the defiant crests of the weeping figs and their evergreen leaves that resisted everything. He wished time would fly, so he could go home and wait next to his phone. She’d ring him with a good excuse, he tried to tell himself. I was on duty and forgot to tell you. We had a work crisis and I stayed back, and you know how terrible the phones are, I couldn’t get through, my love. But he knew he was lying to himself. A miracle? Only a miracle of springtime, old Machado would say, also touched by a love that finally eluded him.
He heard someone open his office door. Manolo, carrying a sheaf of papers, flopped down in the big chair, imitating the exhaustion of a victorious runner. He was laughing.
“It’s a real pity about the lad, but he’s shot it, Conde.”
“He’s shot it?” asked the lieutenant, allowing the flow of his thoughts to get back on track. “What has the laboratory got to tell us?”
“The semen belongs to Lazaro. No doubt about that.”
“And Yuri and Luis?”
“What you’d thought, they caught the bus first and left Lazaro at the stop. They say they always went together to the stop in La Vibora and then got off to go to Acosta Avenue, but that night he told them to go, that he was going to catch the 174 so as not to have to walk so far.”
“And the white shirt?”
“Yes, it was his and he’d taken it that night. She’d sometimes wash clothes for him. Poor Lazaro, and he had it all on a plate, didn’t he?”
“Yes, poor Lazaro, he doesn’t know what will hit him. And what did they tell you about the party?”
“It was different to the one Lazaro invented. They say that when she got drunk she got very stroppy because Lazaro told her to give him the physics and maths exams and she started to talk straight, she wouldn’t give him any more exams, because he played the big man with everyone else saying what was going to come up and he would get her into trouble, that was all he wanted her for, apart from
The Count lit a cigarette and glanced briefly at the data Manolo had brought from the central laboratories. He left them on the table and went back to his window, stared at a single scrap of skyline and said: “Then Lazaro went back from the bus stop. He didn’t have a key, so she opened the door. He persuaded her she’d made a mistake and they had sex on the living room sofa. A great reconciliation, I can almost hear the background music. But why did he kill her?” he wondered, and lost sight of the scrap of skyline he’d selected when he saw Lazaro on Lissette, saw
