Casamayor Riquelmes, was twenty-eight years old, slightly swollen-chested – hence his pigeonnish nickname – and had an irrepressible propensity for verbal wit. He was moreover a man who thought on his feet and was quick and efficient at complex calculations, as endorsed by the academic diploma in civil engineering, framed in a soberly elegant, wrought bronze frame, that hung on the wall of his living room in Vibora Park. He was patiently waiting, said the engineering laureate, for toilet paper to go into short supply so he could adapt the crackling piece of university parchment to such use, given it had brought him little success and no economic advantage. Although the Count was twenty years his senior, he recognized, with a touch of envy, that Yoyi possessed a cynicism and practical knowledge of life he had never and clearly would never possess, even though those qualities were increasingly necessary for survival in the jungle of Creole life in the third millennium.
Ever since the Count had become one of Pigeon’s suppliers three or four years ago, his earnings from buying and selling second-hand books had rocketed most pleasingly. Out of his many business ventures – the purchase of jewels and antiques, works of art, two cars now ready for hire and the ownership of twenty-five per cent of the shares in a small, entirely illegal building firm – Yoyi’s only official connection with the authorities was his licence to set up a stall for the sale of books in the plaza de Armas, which was in fact supervised by a maternal uncle he visited a couple of times a week in order to supply new goods and control the commercial well-being of the business that served him as a front. The Count had finally concluded that the young man’s innate ability to trade, sell at a good price and cajole potential customers – who, according to his principles, you always tried to rip off – must be the result of a genetic legacy from his general-store-owning Spanish grandfather to whom he also owed the name of Reutilio, for the boy had grown up in a country where scarcity and shortages had banished the art of making a good sale several decades ago. People sold and bought from necessity; while some sold what they could, others bought what their bottomless pockets allowed, with no stock exchange complications and, in particular, without the stress that choice entailed: take it or leave it, it’s this or nothing, hurry up or it will be gone, buy what’s there although right now you don’t need it… But not Yoyi Pigeon. He was a consummate artist, able to place luxury items at unbelievable prices, and the Count bet that even if he realized his dream of leaving the island – to go anywhere, Madagascar included – he’d end up a successful entrepreneur.
When they met, Conde felt he was reluctantly rejecting the youth because of his appearance, his love of the jewels he displayed on his hands and neck and his relentless cultivation of his own body. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two, born of purely commercial motives, had successfully surmounted the iron barrier of the Count’s prejudices and started to turn into friendship, perhaps because their complementary qualities balanced out any apparent shortcomings. The young man’s pitilessly mercantile vision and the Count’s outdated romanticism, the former’s rash impetuosity and the latter’s scrupulous calm, Pigeon’s occasionally unthinking outspokenness and the Count’s guile forged by years in the police gave them a strange equilibrium.
Their friendship had been definitively cemented one afternoon three years ago when the Count called in at his partner’s house on the pretext that he had to tell him he’d be bringing a load of books the day after, although what he really wanted was a cup of the excellent coffee the lad’s mother used to make. But that afternoon, Conde’s presence had saved him – at the very least – from a scam that was proceeding undetected by Pigeon’s beady eyes.
Conde had arrived at Yoyi’s just as the latter, dazzled by a job-lot of jewels offered at an unbelievably reasonable price by two characters who’d come recommended by a jeweller, was about to fetch from his bedroom the 2,200 dollars they’d agreed as an overall amount. When he arrived, Conde had greeted Yoyi and the jewelsellers and discreetly made for the lobby, driven by a hunch that not everything was as it should be. He’d squeezed his memory hard and prised out an image of one of the would-be sellers, implicated years ago in a case of violent robbery. He immediately concluded the deal was fraudulent: either the jewels came from a robbery that had yet to be rumbled or, more dangerously, were simply a ploy to strip Yoyi of his money. Conde had no time to intervene and abort that operation, so he made his way along the passage down the side of the house to the backyard where he picked up a piece of iron piping which he flourished like a baseball bat. He retraced his steps and by the time he’d reached the living room, the scene had reached climax point: one of the sellers was threatening Yoyi with a huge knife, and demanding the money, while the other collected up the jewels. Almost without thinking Conde brought the pipe down on the rib cage of the armed man, who dropped his knife and fell to his knees in front of Yoyi, who kicked him in the jaw and sent him flying on his back. Seeing all this happening, the other thief grabbed the jewels as best he could and ran between Yoyi and Conde to get to the street before the ex-policeman struck again with his makeshift weapon. Feeling his body shaking after he’d acted so violently, Conde handed the iron pipe to Yoyi, kicked the knife away, and flopped down on the sofa, beseeching the young man: “Don’t hit him again. Let him be. Don’t complicate life…”
But this afternoon, as on other lucky ones, Yoyi smiled contentedly when he saw his partner approaching with a bag of books. After asking his mother to prepare the indispensable cups of coffee, Yoyi followed the Count onto the terrace, where several pots of ferns and
“I swear, my partner’s a silly bastard,” he finally commented. “How the hell could you tell those famished creatures there are books you can’t sell? What got into you, Conde?”
“I felt sorry for them. They’re starving to death… And because you know I won’t do that kind of…”
“Yes, you only have to take one look at you… Look at your shirt, man, it’s about to fall apart. You could make money hand over fist but of course you have to bleat on about books you can’t sell…”
“That’s my problem,” Conde tried to cut that conversation dead.
“Of course,” agreed Pigeon, shaking his left hand, where two gold bracelets entwined. “What’s the game- plan?”
“I agreed I’d call back at their place with more money and make an inventory of what they’ve got and take off another batch. So you pay me for this lot and advance me some money to buy more.”
Asking no questions, with a business confidence he reserved solely for the Count, the lad put a hand in his pocket and took out a sheaf of notes that made the other turn pale. He used his impressively nimble fingers to count the bits of paper at a speed the Count’s addition skills couldn’t match.
‘Here’s a thousand, that’s yours, and three thousand more to start the negotiations. Fair dues.”
“If I flash all this at them all, it’ll frighten them to death.” He recalled Dionisio Ferrero’s greedy eyes and his translucent sister’s worm-eaten fingers grasping the money he’d given them. “Remember the two censuses will fetch a really good price.”
‘When I’ve sold them to Giovanni, I’ll settle with you. That Italian bastard’s got a thing about censuses. I’ll take twenty-five greenbacks off him for each… And they’re as good as new. You see what things are like? Just a couple of censuses bring in thirteen hundred pesos, because I’ve got the right customer lined up. Get me? If you really bring me good books, I’ll make you rich, man, I swear…”
Pigeon smiled and waved contentedly at Conde. He went into the kitchen and returned with two cups of steaming coffee and a bottle of vintage rum, along with two small cut-glass tumblers, separated by a sheet of very fine sandpaper.
“Start cleaning the books,” he instructed the Count giving him the sandpaper.
While savouring his coffee and watching with relish as Pigeon poured out the rum, Conde cut the sandpaper in half to make his job easier and pulled the heap of books towards him.
“What about that one?” asked Pigeon, pointing his glass of rum at the volume half hidden under his bag.
“It’s a present for Skinny’s mother. It’s a cookbook I’ve been after for a while.”
The youth swigged his rum and smiled again.
“A cookbook? To cook what? Hey, man, you and your friends are incredible: Skinny, Rabbit, black Candito who’s crazy about Jehova and all that jazz… Fuck, they’re like a bunch of men from Mars, I swear. I look at them and wonder what the fuck they stuffed in their heads to make them like that…”
Conde took a swig and lit up. He took one of the books and started sandpapering gently along the top edge, to remove any traces of damp or specks of dust.
“They made us believe we were all equal and that the world would be a better place. That it was already better…”
“They fooled you, I swear. Everywhere you go some people are less equal than others and the world is going to
