Leonardo Padura - Havana Red

“But the strangest of all is yet to come: after killing the transvestite, the big man pulled her knickers down and inspected her anus with his fingers… I know because he wiped himself clean on the gown afterwards. What do you make of that, lads? Well, that’s as far as I can take my little tale. When they do the autopsy and finish the other tests in the laboratory, perhaps we’ll have more to go on. Now I’ll be off, downtown, as there’s been another little murder in Old Havana…”

“Good luck to you, Flower of the Dead,” replied the Count, turning his back on him.

He looked at the dirty river in the waters of which he’d once swum. In other waters, in fact, he thought, like Heraclitus: not as dirty, at least not up by La Chorrera bridge, where he and his friends used to catch biajacas, if not Chinese carp, when someone decided those red, exotic fish could grow and multiply in the island’s rivers and reservoirs.

“All right, Manolo, try your hand at the questions Flower of the Dead left us. Why should anyone let himself be strangled and not fight back? Why didn’t the murderer throw him into the water? And why the hell did he decide to inspect his anus?”

Sergeant Manuel Palacios folded two very rickety arms over an emaciated chest. In every case he was assigned to with the Count it was always the same: he had to be the first to get it wrong.

“I don’t know, Conde,” he said finally.

The Count looked at him, surprised by his wariness.

“But how come you don’t know, you always know.”

“But I don’t today… Hey, Conde, what the hell’s got into you today? You’re evil, man…”

The Count returned his gaze, as he lit up. Manuel Palacios was right. What had got into him?

“No idea, Manolo, but it’s something bad. Can you imagine, I cheered up when they said I was on a homicide case and could leave Headquarters! I’m fucked, my friend, now I get high when people are murdered. And this forensic gets at me bad, and big time.”

Manuel Palacios nodded. He knew the Count too well to take those confessions of sinning seriously, and decided to be charitable for once.

“Well, how about a respectable married man with children, who suddenly picks up a woman, though he’s not a flirt, and she’s tall and beautiful, and he’s so delighted with his catch he brings her to the Woods, they kiss, caress, the woman kneels down to suck him off, as the forensic said, and it’s then the fellow discovers she’s not a woman but quite the contrary. Or how about the big ’un also being quite the contrary, I mean as fruity as the dead guy, and he’s taken revenge on Arayan because of some quarrel from queer street? Or how about if the big ’un’s a pervert who likes going with transvestites so he can kill them afterwards, because he hates transvestites, as he’s a transvestite himself, but frustrated by his size and girth? That’s my best take ever, don’t you reckon?”

The Count coughed, cigarette between his lips.

“You get more intelligent by the day, you really do… This is fishy, Manolo. Nobody lets himself be strangled without scratching back. And you tell me, what can you hide in your rectum? Drugs? A jewel? And how come the other fellow knew he had to search there of all places?… Well, because they obviously knew each other, right? But if the murderer decided against dumping him in the river it was because he was sure no one would connect him with this place or that transvestite. And what about the red dress, which must be from somewhere special? And why’s such an elegant transvestite carrying his identity card? Don’t you think it incongruous? I’ll tell you something for nothing, Manolo. I don’t like this case one little bit. It seems too mysterious, and in this country it’s too hot and there are too many fuck-ups for us to handle mysteries as well. Besides, I’ve never liked pansies, just so you know. I’m prejudiced in that department.. .”

“You don’t say,” acknowledged the Sergeant.

“Piss off, Manolo.”

The worst side of the dead is that they leave their living behind, thought the Count after the woman confirmed: “Yes, he’s my son, what’s happened now?” And as she seemed so strong and self-confident he told her without any soft-soaping: “The fact is he was murdered last night,” and then the woman started to crumple, her body visibly shrinking on that nice leather sofa, and an inconclusive scream escaped from the hands she screwed up over her face…

The identity card Alexis Arayan was carrying indicated that the address was his permanent residence: a big two-storey house on Seventh Avenue in Miramar, with a well-trimmed garden, walls painted a bright white, panes of glass miraculously intact in a city of broken windows, and two cars in the drive. A Mercedes and a Toyota, pointed out Manuel Palacios, who knew all there is to know about cars and makes… It was the image of prosperity, as it should be, for according to his ID Alexis was the son of Faustino, the Faustino Arayan, Cuba’s latest representative at UNICEF, a diplomat always away on long trips, a personage from the higher echelons, and of Matilde Rodriguez, that woman who was perhaps a well-preserved sixtysomething, with hair a delicate shade of brown and well-kept hands, who suddenly seemed much older than sixty and to have lost the petulant confidence with which she’d welcomed the policemen.

When she cried out a black woman silently emerged from somewhere in the mansion. She walked noiselessly, as if her feet didn’t touch the ground. The Count noticed the bloodshot look in her bulging, shiny eyes. She didn’t greet the policemen, but sat down next to Matilde and started whispering words of consolation accompanied by almost maternal gestures. Then she got up, went out the way she’d come, and returned with a glass of water and the tiniest pink pill, which she handed to Matilde. The Count’s training enabled him to pick up a fleeting tremble in the black woman’s hands as they neared the out-of-control hands of Alexis’s mother. Still not acknowledging the Count or Manolo, the black woman said: “Her nerves have been very bad of late,” and she helped Matilde stand up and led her towards the stairs.

The Count looked at Manuel Palacios and lit a cigarette. Manolo shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “Bloody hell,” and they waited. The Count, meanwhile, decided to use a blue and white ashtray inscribed GRANADA. Everything seemed clean and perfect in that house where suddenly tragedy had unexpectedly intruded. The black woman came down ten minutes later and sat down opposite them. Finally she looked at them, her eyes still red and shiny, as if she were running a temperature.

“Her nerves have been very bad of late,” she repeated, as if it were a set phrase or the best her vocabulary could muster.

“And comrade Faustino Arayan?”

“He’s at the Foreign Ministry, he left early,” she said, joining her hands together and pressing them between her legs, as if praying to an image nailed to the floor.

“You work here?” interjected Manolo.

“Yes.”

“Been here long?”

“Over thirty years.”

“Do you know if Alexis went out from here yesterday?”

“No.”

“Didn’t he live here?”

“No.”

“But this was his home, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what: was it or wasn’t it, did he go out or don’t you know?”

“Yes, it was his home, but he didn’t live here and so he didn’t leave here. For months… Poor Alexis.”

“So where did he live then?”

The black woman looked towards the staircase that led to the bedrooms. She hesitated. Should she ask permission? Now she did seem nervous, as she lowered her bloodshot gaze and bit her lips.

“In somebody else’s house… Alberto Marques’s.”