Leonardo Padura - Havana Blue

“And why did he spend his time sealing these deals if he had experts in the different areas?” asked Mario Conde at the cue for applause for the speech from an unexpectedly silver-tongued Maciques.

“Because he felt fulfilled doing it and knew he was the best. Each commercial area within the enterprise has its own expertise, whether according to line or geographical area, do you see? However, if the deal were very important or threatened to get stymied in some way, Rafael would advise the experts, draw on the business contacts he’d established over the years and enter the ring.”

So he was a torero as well? the Count wanted to ask because he guessed Maciques might be a hard nut to crack as his obsolete if irrefutable verbiage spewed out. He looked down at his notebook, where he’d written BIG MONEY BUSINESS, and allowed himself a moment for thought: was Rafael Morín everything he was cracked up to be? Although from a considerable distance, he’d seen the social and professional rise of a man now declared missing. He leaped like a clever, well trained acrobat, one who jumps fearlessly into the void because they’ve put in place a safety net that assures them, up you go, just do it and you’ll triumph, I’m here to protect you. Marriage into a wealthy family was half the battle: Tamara, her father, and her father’s friends, must have smoothed the path for him, but for justice’s sake he must accept the rest was down to him, no doubt about that. When Rafael Morín spoke from a microphone at high school twenty years earlier, his mind was already dead set on the idea of making it, of climbing all the way to the top, and was getting in training. At the time people’s ambitions were usually abstract and vague, but Rafael’s were already well formed, and that’s why he got on the fast track and set out to secure every certificate, every recognition, every award and to be a perfect paragon, self-sacrificing and worthy, cultivating en route friendships that would at some stage be useful, yet he was never out of breath or without a smile. And he showed himself to be extremely able, always ready to make the slightest sacrifice to skip over several steps on the ladder to heaven, conveying good vibrations, trust, forging an image of himself as ever prepared and possessed with the necessary flexibility that made him look useful, malleable and reliable: a man who took on and completed every task he was charged with and quickly bounced back for the next. The Count was familiar with these stories of lives that blow with the wind and imagined the infallible cocky smile he’d put on when speaking to deputy minister Fernández-Lorea about how well things would turn out, Comrade Minister, according to the latest estimates received. Rafael Morín would never have argued with a superior, would only have had exchanges of opinion; he’d never have refused to carry out a ridiculous order, would only have offered constructive criticism and always through the right channels; he’d never have taken a jump without testing the safety net that would welcome him lovingly and maternally, if he had an unexpected fall. So where had he gone wrong?

“So where did he get the money to give the presents he gave?” asked the Count when he finally managed to read the only thing he’d jotted down. And was surprised how quickly René Maciques responded.

“I imagine he saved it from his daily allowances.”

“And would that be enough for the hi-fi system he had at home, to buy his mother Chanel N° 5, for the big and small gifts he gave his subordinates and even to say his name was René Maciques and rent a room at the Riviera and take a twenty-three-year-old sparkler to dine at L’Aiglon? Are you sure, Maciques? Did you know he used your name with the women he picked up or did he never tell you, even in confidence as it were?”

René Maciques got up and walked towards the air conditioning unit built into the wall. Fiddled with the controls, straightened the curtain that had got caught up in one corner of his office. Perhaps he felt cold. That same night, while pondering the latest twist in the fate of Rafael Morín, Lieutenant Mario Conde recalled this scene as if he’d lived it ten or fifteen years earlier, or as if he’d never wanted to experience it, because Maciques returned to his chair, glanced at the policemen and no longer looked like a television presenter but the timid librarian the Count had imagined when he said:

“I just refuse to believe that, comrades.”

“That’s your problem, Maciques. I’ve no reason to lie to you. Now tell us about those presents.”

“I told you: they must have come from what he saved out of his daily expense allowance.”

“And could that run to so much?”

“I’ve no idea, comrades, you’d have to ask Rafael Morín.”

“Hey, Maciques,” said the Count as he stood up, “would we also have to ask Rafael Morín why you came here at lunchtime on the thirty-first?”

But René Maciques smiled. He was back on camera, stroking his eyebrows, when he said:

“What a coincidence! I came to do just that,” and pointed at the air conditioning unit. “I remembered I’d left it switched on and came to turn it off.”

Now the Count smiled and put his notebook back in his pocket. He was praying Patricia would find something that would allow him to pulverize René Maciques.

The only time Mario Conde shot at a man, he’d learned how easy it was to kill: you aim at the chest and stop thinking as you pull the trigger; the act of firing almost spares you the moment the bullet hits the man and knocks him to the ground like a hail of stones where writhing, wracked in pain, he does or doesn’t die.

The Count was on leave that day, and for months he’d tried, as with everything else in his life, to find the thread to the tangled events that had put him, pistol in hand, in front of a man and forced him to shoot. It was two years after they moved him from the General Information Department to Investigations, and he’d met Haydée while investigating a violent robbery that had taken place in the office where she worked. He chatted to her a couple of times and realized the future of his marriage with Martiza was a thing of the past. Haydeé became the obsession of his life, and the Count thought he’d go mad. The passionate onslaught of their love, expressed daily in rooming houses, borrowed flats and other happy hunting grounds, was violently animal and offered him innumerable unexplored pleasures. The Count fell outrageously in love and performed the most extravagantly satisfying sexual deviations he’d ever experienced. They made love time and again, never endingly. When the Count was exhausted and blissful, Haydée knew how to extract that little bit more: he only had to hear her releasing a powerful yellow jet of pee or feel the magnetic tip of her tongue licking its way up his thighs and curling round his member to want to start all over again. Like no other woman, Haydée made him feel a male object of desire, and in each encounter they played love-games like inventive explorers or pent-up celibates.

If the Count hadn’t fallen for that frivolous innocent abroad who was transformed whenever sex was nigh, he’d never have been standing, fretful yet happy, on the corner of calle Infanta, half a block away from the office where Haydée worked until five thirty pm. If that afternoon Haydée, in her rush to their next dose of delirium, hadn’t made a mistake adding six and eight and getting twenty-four, as she noted in an impossible tally, she would have left at five thirty-one, and not five forty-two, when the din in the street and blast from the gun got her up from her desk all worried and anxious.

The Count lit his third despairing cigarette and didn’t hear the cries. He was thinking about what would happen that afternoon in the flat of a friend of a friend who was on a two-month course in Moscow, which had become the momentary shelter for their still clandestine passion. He imagined a naked sweating Haydée working on the most sacred places of his trembling anatomy and only then saw a man streaming blood and running towards him, his green shirt darkening over his belly, apparently about to fall to the ground and beg forgiveness for all his sins, but he knew forgiveness wasn’t in the mind of the other man who, with a limp in his left leg and a shattered mouth, was clutching a knife and running at him. For a long time the Count had thought that if he’d been in uniform, it might have stopped the man in a hurry who nobody else had challenged, but when he dropped his cigarette and shouted “Stop right there, you bastard, stop. I’m a policeman” the man straightened up, lifted his knife above his head and directed his hatred at the intruder in his path who was shouting at him. The strangest thing was that the Count always reran the scene in the third person, as if it were outside the perspective of his own eyes, and he saw the guy who was shouting take two steps backwards, put his hand to his waist and strike silently, and shot the man who was still wielding a knife over his head less than a yard away. He saw him fall backwards, twist round in a way that seemed rehearsed, drop the knife from his grasp and start writhing in pain.