Leonardo Padura - Havana Blue

He couldn’t see her eyes, hidden as they were behind her impertinent lock, but he knew she’d stopped crying. He watched her gulp down her whisky and followed suit. She got up, said, for God’s sake, went back into the kitchen, and the palm of his hand felt the warmth he’d stolen from Tamara. He now knew he could go to bed with that woman who’d been driving him crazy for the last seventeen years, and he put his tumbler down on the glass table, forgot the cigarette burning in the Murano and abandoned his pistol on the sofa cushion. He felt ready for it and walked into the kitchen behind her. Began to caress her hips – hips of a would-be rumba dancer – her belly he was already familiar with, and reached for the most discussed breasts in La Víbora High School, and she let him caress her until she couldn’t stand it anymore and turned round and offered him her lips, her tongue, her teeth and saliva smelling of single malt scotch, and he pulled at her jersey zip – she no longer wore bras – and lowered his head to nibble her dark nipples until she gave a start from the pain, then pulled down his trousers, fumbled taking her knickers off and kneeled like a repentant sinner to breathe in Tamara’s femininity, to kiss and consume her, ravaged by an ancient, never satisfied hunger.

And with a strength he’d forgotten he possessed, he lifted her up, took her over to the table, sat her down and felt her as he’d never felt another woman. They made love again on the living-room sofa. And a third time in her bedroom before finally calling it a day.

He lifted the lid of the coffee pot and saw the dark black coffee bubbling up from its red-hot entrails. The light was beginning to break over the trees and filter through to the kitchen windows, and he added four spoonfuls of sugar to his jug of breakfast beverage. It looked as if it would be a sunny morning, and he anticipated it wouldn’t be so cold. He stirred the first coffee in the jug till the sugar melted, then returned it to the coffee pot, where a thick yellow foam formed. Then he poured himself his half-cup so he could start to think. She was asleep upstairs, ten minutes to seven o’clock and to when she gets up, he calculated as he lit his first cigarette. It was a necessary ritual without which he couldn’t start life each day, and he thought about Rufino and about what would happen if he fell in love with Tamara. He couldn’t imagine it happening, he told himself, and even shook his head to confirm that this was so, I still don’t believe it, he muttered and he saw his and Tamara’s clothes on the chair where he’d placed them before making coffee. His vanity as a man satisfied by a memorable sexual performance hardly left room for thought. He knew he had defeated Rafael Morín and regretted he’d not yet shared the second part to the story with Skinny, the successful feats of conquest and colonization. He knew he shouldn’t, but, as soon as possible, I’ve got to tell him.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said, and he almost jumped out of his chair as he realized at that precise moment that if he didn’t flee, he would fall in love.

He liked to hear a woman’s voice at the start of the day and found Tamara was more beautiful then, with her dressing gown mostly unbuttoned, her lips unadorned and one side of her face marked by the fold in the pillow, her hair relentlessly impertinent, irrepressibly covering her forehead, and her eyes reddened by lack of sleep. He could see she was very happy with her state as a woman who’s well-served and better serviced, so well that she would sing while cleaning a grimy pan, and she came over, kissed him on the mouth and then, only then, asked for her coffee: it was all quite conclusive: he fled or was lost.

“It’s a pity one has to work in this world, isn’t it?” she said, hiding her smile behind her cup.

“What would happen if your husband came in through that door?” asked the Count, expecting to hear another confession.

“I’d offer him a cup of the coffee, and he’d have no choice but to say it’s really good, you know?”

He travelled in a crowded bus and never stopped smiling; he walked six blocks and kept smiling; he walked into headquarters, and everyone saw him smiling and still laughing when he climbed the stairs and went into his office, where Sergeant Manuel Palacios was waiting for him, feet on his desk and face stuck behind a newspaper.

“What’s got into you?” Manolo asked, also laughing, reckoning good news was on its way.

“Nothing really, today’s the sixth of January, and I’m waiting for my present… What’s new, then?”

“Oh, I thought you’d something to tell me. Nothing you could call new… What are we going to do with Maciques?”

“Start all over again. Till he’s exhausted. He’s the only one who’s allowed to get exhausted. Did you see Patricia?”

“No, but she left a message with the duty officer saying she was going straight to the enterprise. She left at eight last night, and I think she was back welcoming the dawn there.”

“Have you seen the reports?”

“No, not yet. I just got here and started to read all the stuff about AIDS in the newspaper. Fucking hell, comrade, soon you won’t even be able to get laid in this world.”

The Count smiled, was still smiling as he said:

“Uh-huh, take good note, then. I’m going to have a look at the reports so we can start on Maciques.”

“Thanks, Boss. May you always wake up smiling,” retorted the sergeant, weaving his way back to the desk.

He preferred to go down the stairs and, while he did so, he thought how he was in a mood to write. He’d write a very squalid tale about an amorous triangle, in which the characters would live, in different roles, situations they’d lived previously. It would be a nostalgic love story, with no violence or hatred, about ordinary people and ordinary experiences, as in the lives of the people he knew, because you must write about what you know, he told himself, remembering how Hemingway wrote about things he knew and Miki wrote about things he knew he ought to write about.

When he was in the hallway he walked round the corner towards the Information Department, which Captain Jorrín was just leaving, and he seemed tired and groggy, as if getting over an illness.

“Hello, Maestro. What’s the matter?” He shook his hand.

“We’ve caught one of the culprits, Conde.”

“That’s good.”

“Not so good. We questioned him last night, and he says he did it by himself. I wish you could see him, a stubborn hulking bastard who reacts as if he couldn’t care less about anything. And you know how old he is? Sixteen, Conde, sixteen. I’ve been a policeman for thirty, and I’m still surprised by such things. The fact is I’m past caring… You know, he admits he did it, that he pulverized the kid to steal his bike, and tells it as if he were talking about a baseball game and just as nonchalantly when he says it was all his own work.”

“But he’s no kid, Captain. How did you catch him?”

Jorrín smiled, shook his head and wiped a hand over his face, as if trying to iron out the wrinkles lining his face.

“From a statement given by a witness and because he was riding the bike belonging to the kid they killed, without a care in the world. Did you know people exist who do this kind of thing just to assert their egos?”

“So I’ve read.”

“But forget your books. If you want to check it out come and take a look at this boy. He’s a case… I don’t know, Conde, but I really think I’ve got to say goodbye to all this. It gets more and more painful…”

Jorrín barely managed a farewell and walked towards the lifts. The Count watched him leave and thought the old sea-wolf might be right. Thirty years are a lot of years in this profession, he muttered, and pushed open the door to the Information Department. He smiled, greeted all the young women and sat down in front of Sergeant Dalia Acosta’s desk: she was the departmental duty officer, and he always wondered how one woman’s head could gather so much hair.