Leonardo Padura - Havana Red

“Faustino, do you or your wife have any idea about what might have happened the other night?”

The owner of the house looked at his hands as if he’d find a truth there, and looked the Count in the eye.

“What can I say, Lieutenant? It was all the result of a wrong choice… Alexis chose his path and look where it led. What I can say, it’s like a punishment… The very thought of it fills me with shame. Disguised as a woman… Can I tell you something?” The Count nodded, like an eager pupil. “Neither his mother nor I deserved to suffer this. All I hope is that time passes so we see if we can wake up from this nightmare. Of course you do understand me…”

“Of course,” the Count affirmed and looked at his own hands, searching, perhaps, for another possible truth.

“It’s really shaming,” Faustino repeated, and the Count looked him in the eye for the first time in the whole conversation: he found two damp eyes, where he thought he spotted real grief, and tears which perhaps his sense of manliness prevented him from shedding. Although it was difficult, given he was such a powerful, self-confident man, the policeman was surprised to find he could feel pity for him.

“Faustino, you may know nothing about this. Because of your relationship with Alexis, I mean… But perhaps your wife, I don’t know… Please ask her if she heard Alexis mention at all the day of the Transfiguration. I’m following this line of thought, though I can’t tell you why. It’s an idea I can’t get out of my head…”

Mario Conde began to feel a degree of relief when the car took to the tunnel under the river and ran along the Malecon, towards the city centre. The sea had a pacifying effect, and absorbed him in a state of allconsuming fascination. And that morning the sea was an invitation to quiet and calm: tranquil and blue, like the breeze blowing in through the windows.

“What do you reckon, Manolo?” he finally asked the sergeant, and lit a cigarette.

Sergeant Manuel Palacios drove down the right lane and reduced speed slightly.

“It’s difficult for him. It must be the talk of at least the diplomatic service, right? But I can tell you one thing. I reckon he’s pleased from one point of view. It’s like when someone dies of cancer: if there’s no cure, the sooner it’s over, the better.”

“Maybe,” the Count agreed, not knowing exactly what it was that might be.

“Where do we go now?” Manuel Palacios asked, preparing to accelerate.

“I’m not sure… Salvador K. looks to be top of the list, right? But it’s also true we have nothing definite against him… I’m pissed off,” he said, throwing his cigarette into the street.

“Conde, Conde,” Manolo shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe it. “Here you are and you still get like that. Don’t gripe like that; if we need to invent something to implicate the painter, we will, won’t we?”

“Don’t suggest such a thing. At least not today.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m very worried. Did you manage to find out what happened to Maruchi?”

The sergeant reduced speed slightly.

“No, I haven’t got anything on that… But this morning I didn’t tell you something else that happened yesterday. I’ve got an appointment at three this afternoon with the Internal Investigation people.”

“And what do they want from you?”

Manuel Palacios shook his head, and the Count noticed he was wiping the sweat from his hands on to his trousers.

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

The Count looked into the street, more and more potholes, dustbins overflowing with rubbish, houses eroded by salt water and neglect.

“If you don’t have problems, nothing to worry about, but watch what you say, OK? You’re no idiot, Manolo, so think out your replies carefully… But don’t get too worked up, I expect it’s something quite trivial.”

“All right, Conde. It’s really hot, isn’t it?”

The fishermen congregated on the Malecon at that early hour with little hope that fate would place a fine specimen on their hooks and bring justifiable cheer to the family table. When the Count saw those silhouettes over the calm sea, he was filled with envy. He knew life was healthier there, with a piece of string in the water and one’s mind thinking only about a possible catch and the dinner of one’s dreams, and not about a series of stories of deaths, thefts, frauds, rapes, lesser or greater forms of assault – that could also help save him from boredom – or, the last straw, about the enquiries of the Internal Investigations team bent on throwing light on business the Count hadn’t even imagined and that had already cost two of his colleagues their positions at work. Will they find something on me? he wondered, and tried to recall any heinous act in his career. Who knows

… And what about Maruchi, what the hell had happened to her?

“What shit, right.” And he added, “Turn down there, I want to revisit the Havana Woods.”

Without patrol cars, ambulances pretending to be in a rush, the obscene line of bystanders, the photographers, forensics and police summoned by death, that forest of fantasies, in the middle of the city, by the dirty river, radiated a harmony which the Count’s every pore tried to inhale, in an urgent, greedy act of appropriation. He felt that violence and that place now seemed so alien that even his own presence in the area was an incongruous irritant, and, as usual, he meditated on death’s insalubrious ability to change everything. The grass so green, the indefatigable sound of the river, the generous shade from the trees, had been but a few hours earlier the scenario framing a macabre murder, the pre- and post-histories of which the policeman was now trying to grasp, with his unprofessionally manic tendency to feel he too was an accomplice. That was why he now stood there, in that anonymous space – nobody would ever erect a pretentious funeral monument to the first Cuban transvestite killed in sexual combat – where Alexis Arayan’s life had ended and Mario Conde’s eschatological labours had begun. Death was thus transformed into a social event, ceased to be a drastic biological fact which no exact, medical, natural or supernatural science could revoke: its only importance now lay in the crime and possible punishment for the transgressor of a law, already established by the Bible and Talmud, and the Count knew his mission in the world would conclude with the Pyrrhic victory of a conviction that was predictable and necessary, but could not restore what was gone for ever.

“What you thinking about?” Manuel Palacios pulled up a blade of grass and put it in his mouth.

“About woods and wild animals,” the lieutenant replied as he headed towards the river. “That transvestite didn’t get dressed to go on parade or hunt, Manolo. He was seeking something more difficult to find. Peace of mind, perhaps. Or revenge, how do I know… What was he seeking here, looking the complete transvestite, if he wasn’t one, and right on the evening of the day of the Transfiguration? It gets stranger by the minute…”

“I don’t see why you have to over-complicate things all the time. Why do you always want to imagine what nobody else can?… Something strange is happening to you, Conde. I’ll tell you one thing: I sometimes think you’re not interested in being a policeman any more.”

“Manolo, you are a genius.”

The policemen followed the path down to the bed of a river, a slow, decidedly sickly serpent. The Count got close to the edge and lamented the advanced stage of agony he contemplated there: patches of oil, acidic foam, dead animals, countless bits of detritus flowing in the slow waters of the Almendares, the city’s only real river. And then he had a premonition: “Of course, hell, didn’t Alexis own a Bible?”