Leonardo Padura - Havana Fever

As he’d never found out for certain why he’d become a policeman – he was too young, needed work, was still being channelled through life by a gauche innocence – for a long time he’d put his decision to become a police investigator down to the simple fact that his youthful spirit couldn’t stand the sight of the bastards doing things and not paying for them. Perhaps that was why he enjoyed so much exposing their supposedly whiter-than-white characters, knocking them off their pedestals and making them pay for their crimes and presumption, for the way they abused the power they’d abrogated to themselves, and thanks to which they screwed up the fates of others. In the course of such demolition jobs, Conde had felt immune and almost invigorated by the many looks of hatred he’d received from those once powerful individuals he’d defeated.

Luckily for the Count, this kind of reflection, conveniently hidden in his conscience, only dared surface in quite specific circumstances, such as that morning’s, when, his hand gripping an early morning shot of rum, he felt an elemental need to seek out the truth stirring in him, and his brain tried to galvanize into action rusty old mechanisms that might still work.

“Hey, what the hell’s getting at you now?”

The voice, from behind his back, came as no surprise. He’d summoned it himself, like a phantom floating in the mists from his own yesterdays, and felt how those familiar tones aroused deeprooted joy. So he didn’t turn round, but pushed his glass over the varnished wood of the bar, until it was opposite the next stool, then asked: “Now, tell me the truth, my friend, can one be a pansy for a while, and then opt out?”

“You must be joking. Once a pansy, always a pansy. Once you’ve swallowed the pill, there’s no salvation… And the guy who was a policeman will always be one even though he burnt his bridges.”

“Just as I’d thought,” he answered, finally turning round to contemplate the eternally skeletal features, the irremediably squinting eyes and incredibly childish face of one Captain Manuel Palacios, his former detective colleague. “So even if I burnt all my bridges?…”

Manolo waited for the Count to get off his stool before giving him a hug. Then he raised his half-filled glass and gulped the whole lot down.

“Aghh… To your health.”

“How’s life treating you then, Manolo?”

When the Count left the police force, the youthful Manuel Palacios was barely a novice sergeant who’d worked as a plainclothes detective only at the Count’s insistence. Now a fully fledged captain, Manolo wouldn’t allow himself to be separated from that uniform he so liked to show off, a uniform to which he’d certainly dedicate every possible year of his life.

“Lots of work, it’s fucking madness. You can’t imagine what things are like. Before it was child’s play, now it’s the hard men and no holds barred. Armed robbery’s routine, drugs are booming, assault is a plague, corruption grows like wildfire, never dies however much you douse it… Not to mention pimping and pornography.”

“I love pornography…”

“Child porn, Conde!”

“Hey, there are some fourteen-year old girls I’ve seen…”

“Fuck off, you never change.”

“So, do you?”

Manolo smiled and put one of his hands on top of the hand Conde had placed on the bar.

“I’m trying to avoid it… How about a ciggy?”

“Another shot of rum?” asked the Count pushing the packet and lighter his way.

“No, what I just sank will do me for the moment…”

“Christ!” the Count called to the barman. “I’ll have another… What’s up then, Manolo? Is it true the end of the world is nigh? Why are people more buggered by the day?”

Manolo sighed and exhaled smoke.

“I keep asking myself that question. I don’t know, too many people who don’t want hard toil any more and take the easy way out. There are a lot, too many, who’ve grown up watching half the world steal, counterfeit and embezzle, and now it seems so normal they do it as if they weren’t doing anything wrong. But the violence is the worst of all: they’ve no respect for anything and when they want something they’ll do whatever it takes…”

The Count sipped his refill.

“I’ve got a partner in the book business. His theory is that people no longer believe in anything and that’s why things are like this. Do you remember when we turned Havana upside down because three lads in Pre-Uni in La Víbora smoked the odd joint?”

“Happy days, Conde, I can tell you. Now they’re on crack, coke, parkisonil with rum and amphetamines, when they can get them. If not, any anti-depressant with alcohol and even the stuff for anaesthetizing animals, will do… They used to inhale petrol, paint, varnish, industrial rubber… You know what the latest is? They set light to CDs and sniff them. And go to heaven but shed a load of neurones on the way… And don’t think it’s just a handful… If you drop by the Psychiatric Clinic, you’ll see how many are tied to the stake like Hatuey the Indian. You know, whenever there’s a public dance or dog fight, or they’re bored, they get off on whatever they can find and start wanting to kill each other: really kill each other… And get money from all ends and sides, almost always by thieving, pimping or selling drugs to other people. Or by deciding to burgle, steal stuff, and kill two or three people while they’re about it. In Cold Blood ? Wasn’t that the title of a book you gave me once? Well, I saw a case like that last week. Five murdered in one house, tortured, mutilated… and all for two thousand pesos and a television set.”

“The newspapers never report these things… Doesn’t anyone ask why it’s all happening?” enquired the Count, alarmed by the panorama sketched by his former colleague and congratulating himself for being so far removed from that gloomy, ever expanding reality.

“I don’t know, but someone, somewhere, should be. I’m a policeman, Conde, an ordinary cop: I pick up the shit, I don’t dish out the grub…”

“So, we’re done for, Manolo. I’d like to know when the test tube broke, as Yoyi says, and it all started to mess up.”

“Yeah, it would, but enough philosophizing. I’m in a hell of a rush. Tell me what you’re after.”

“My request is less horrific but probably more difficult… I need to track down a person who was lost sight of forty-three years ago.”

“Lost, disappeared, what’s the story?”

“She vanished and nobody remembers her. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive, although she’d be sixty or so now, I really don’t know…”

“Tell me her name and I’ll look in the files.”

“That’s the first bloody problem: she was a singer and I only have her name as an artiste. No one was ever really called Violeta del Rio.”

“Violeta del Río?”

“You heard of her?”

“No, no, and no again…”

Manolo stretched his arm out, grabbed the Count’s glass and took a sip.

“Do you or don’t you want another shot?”

Manolo shook his head and added: “Let me have a look anyway, she may come up under her alias… Why are you after her?”

“I don’t know,” the Count admitted. “At least I don’t think I’ll really know until I’ve found her. That’s why it’s so important.”

Rogelito might well be the last of the dinosaurs, a kind of fossil who’d survived the natural extinction of his contemporaries and made it to the twenty-first century from a geological era only recorded in the old books shifted by the Count. His mythical beginnings belong to the year 1921, just after the end of an increasingly historic First World War, when as a mere seventeen-year old he joined the great Tata Alfonso’s danzón orchestra and started to weave his very own legend as a brilliant timbalero , playing in all the remarkable orchestras and jazz bands that drifted through the crowded Cuban musical scene for over sixty years, the ones who pursued him for what he’d always been: the best.