While Yoyi drove his sparkling Chevy Bel Air down the Calzada de Güines, as that part of the Central Highway was called, Conde was deep in reflection. He knew he was forcing open the door to a dangerous precipice, into which he could tumble without anything to break his fall: he was about to play another mind game without the slightest certainty of how it would end. But he didn’t have the option of turning back. Something in his instincts assured him that, behind that foreboding door, there could be a path. And he was going to take the risk and try to follow it—even while wearing the boots of cardboard-like leather that he’d chosen from his limited options. Ultimately, he thought, this is what they paid him for. Was this what they paid him for? Yes, and no, he answered himself. And he avoided offering any clarification for his Solomonic response: he was entering this labyrinth out of curiosity and, especially, because he was an imbecile, the psychological component that best expressed his anachronistic sense of responsibility and what was just.
Excited by the adventure, Yoyi had stopped by to pick him up earlier than the agreed-upon time; although, with foresight, in order to maintain the physical integrity of his beloved car, he had brought along his trusted mechanic, a character that everyone in Havana knew as Paco Chevrolet. The man, who had a bullet-shaped bald head and the face of a prisoner, was considered the best specialist on the island for Yoyi’s make of automobile, and Yoyi treated him like the eminence he appeared to be.
When they crossed in front of the intersection leading to Finca Vigía, Conde took a look at the dive bar where the toilet that had once had an intimate view of Ava Gardner (escaping from the nervous exhaustion of Hemingway besieged by a literary dry spell) must still be. The association happened in his brain immediately.
“I’m feeling weird, you know? For days, I’ve had the urge to write,” he said, as if he were commenting on the weather.
Yoyi took his eyes off the road for a moment. “Like a real urge?”
“I don’t know, an urge … At some times more than others. Last night, something strange happened to me. Like an illumination,” he said, without being able to bear to speak of his experience with the apparition to whom he gave away his shoes.
“So, get to it, man … Before that light goes out. Remember all the blackouts we get here…”
Conde nodded. If it were only that easy. He lit a cigarette and chose to change the subject. “Incidentally, yesterday I met Karla Choy,” he said to Yoyi.
“And what’d you think of that specimen?”
“A cataclysm,” he dropped his assessment. “Does she have a husband?”
Yoyi smiled. “I don’t know if he’s a husband … They say he’s an Italian who’s swimming in cash.”
“An old guy?”
“What do you mean old, man? That woman has options, Conde.”
“So, what do you know about her?”
Yoyi thought for a few seconds. “Very little, almost nothing … I don’t know why but I’ve never done business with her. Although we know each other, of course … But she’s a strange woman. She doesn’t open up; she’s mysterious; she knows she is disarming to men and she uses that to her advantage … Women like that are a hazard … In business, of course.”
“Well, yesterday, she told me her life story,” Conde said, with a measure of pride.
“Be careful with those Chinese fairy tales, man.”
“She seems like an intelligent woman who knows what she wants,” Conde opined.
“And she is, she is … That’s what makes her more dangerous. With that face and that body, young, intelligent, manipulating … Too much,” the Pigeon declared. “That’s why I say it’s best not to do business with her…”
“Well done,” Paco Chevrolet pronounced from the back seat before returning to his usual silence.
“Do you think she could be involved in this mess with Bobby’s Virgin?”
Yoyi thought for a moment. “I don’t know … Now, there’s a dead guy in the story … A dead guy that I don’t think she killed, right?”
“Sometimes things get out of control and…”
“That’s also true … Tell me, where do I need to turn?”
Conde pointed out the turnoff, and when they had left the avenue to run along the devastated streets of Lookout Heights, he began to reveal his strategy to his friend and partner.
“If Ramiro the Cloak is there, I want to speak with him alone.”
“But, man, didn’t you bring me along to take care of you and to see what I think of the guy and try to negotiate with him?”
“Yes,” Conde admitted, “but leave the opening to me. You wait nearby, and when I call for you, you’ll come and help me. I’m going to introduce you as a buyer with lots of money, who is interested in everything…”
“Is this the face of a trafficker?”
“A little bit, yes. Not as much as Paco, but you’ll do,” Conde said, as he gave the mechanic a look and Yoyi smiled, a little proud, even, so the former cop kept going. “Yoyi, can I ask you something personal that…?”
The young man, without taking his eyes off the road, responded, “Shoot … Paco is silent as the grave. Note I trust him so much that I gave him this car with my eyes closed. And see how he keeps it…”
Conde chose his words. “Well … It’s that, I wanted to know … Have you ever sold drugs?”
Yoyi stopped smiling. He turned toward the last navigable stretch of street, on the border of the “settlement,” and focused on his partner.
“Are you seriously asking me?”
“It’s just a question, my man.”
“Then no, I don’t get involved in that, and you know it. I am involved in a thousand other things, but that, no, not in that.”
“Well done,” Paco Chevrolet added.
“Out of fear or ethics?” Conde continued.
“I don’t find anything appealing about drugs … And besides, I don’t get involved with them because I’m smart … Let’s see, Conde, you know that in this country people do five thousand kinds of business and that four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them are illegal, because in Cuba, whatever is not forbidden is illegal … And I do all of those businesses. I make a living from those businesses, but there are two … branches of business that are best to stay away from: politics and drugs … Your former colleagues and their superiors are usually bothered by those subjects, because they imply power. Real power. And when those gentlemen get angry, they are relentless. So, it’s best to go down another path, since everything is lacking here and everything is needed, then someone has to facilitate obtaining things … And here I am, right, man? Besides, I can’t stand those guys who sell drugs: they’re rats…”
Conde held his hand out to his friend. Yoyi the Pigeon was a wise man and his economic and general good fortune were the best evidence of that wisdom.
“Let’s go,” Conde said and left the car.
Yoyi gave the car keys to Paco Chevrolet, who had also gotten out.
“I leave it in your hands, Paco. Remember that this is a patchy territory. Make sure that not even a fly lands on it…” And he caressed the automobile’s hood.
Paco smiled for the first time that morning. His missing teeth hurt just to look at. “Damn, Pigeon … Not even the fruit flies will get close to it,” the man assured him. “Go on, waltz away. Not even the butterflies!”
Owner and mechanic bumped fists. Pigeon could calmly be on his way.
They entered the “settlement” through one of the paths that led to the main artery. For the occasion, Yoyi was wearing double-soled boots, jeans, and a wide shirt, underneath which he could hide anything, including his protuberant sternum. And, of course, he had left his thick gold chain with the gold medallion at home, when he usually wore it daily. As Conde observed the reigning poverty with immutable surprise, Yoyi contemplated the scene with a critical and distant eye, as if no part of that surrounding urban and human disaster were capable of surprising him. The twenty-year difference between them had created different perceptions of the same reality. While to Conde the place’s misery proved it was social, political, economic aberration, to his partner, it constituted the mere result of the country’s social, political, and economic situation. It’s exactly what I expected, man, he would have said.
When they reached the point where the path veered toward the hill where Ramiro the Cloak lived, Conde asked his friend to wait for him at that spot until he called.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Conde?” Yoyi insisted. “The other day, no one knew Raydel had been killed and Candito and Rabbit were with you.”
“And today Ramiro knows the police are marinating him and that I’m here with you. This guy knows everything … Let me do it my way. Remember, I’m old but I’m not yet an old fart.”
“Okay. But take this with you in case something comes up…” Yoyi held out a compact cell phone to him.
“I don’t know what to do with that, buddy,” Conde protested.
“Don’t fuck around, man. How can a Cuban in 2014 not know how to operate a cell phone, not have access to the internet, and, once in a while with his salary, not buy himself a trip to London and stay in a good hotel so he can understand up close how decadent British reality works?”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Conde was looking at him as if he’d gone mad. A cell phone was a luxury (ever since the government had finally authorized their possession) of which he and millions like him could not allow themselves the purchase or the use given the Cuban prices and rates; the internet only seemed to work on national television (which Conde never watched, since he didn’t even have a TV in his house and he abused himself enough already with alcohol to then withstand such an attack on his neurons); and, to all of them, London was the foggy place where Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes ran around and where there was a street with a zebra crossing which the Beatles had walked.
“I’m talking about how far we’ve come, and you haven’t even found out, man. I read it in a magazine the other day … You don’t make any progress, Conde, no progress! You’re stuck! Look, take it. If you need it, you lift the lid, press this key, and then these two, and I’ll respond on mine.” And Yoyi showed him his touch-tone device of the latest make and generation.
Grudgingly, Conde put the gadget in his shirt pocket, adjusted his shades, and began his ascent toward the place where he had met the Cloak two days before. When he arrived at the ramshackle gate that led to the property, he turned around, confirmed that his colleague was still in sight, and entered. He stepped across the few feet of flattened, dry earth separating the gate from the little house. Once he was at the door, he called out to Ramiro the Cloak and identified himself. A few seconds later, a voice called out, “Hang on…”
Conde took out a cigarette and lit it. Down the hill, Yoyi had moved so as not to let him out of sight, and, a couple of times, he showed him his raised thumb and, laughing, motioned like the police in the movies before they began a sting operation. A few minutes later, Ramiro opened the rotting wood door and gestured to Conde to come inside, closing it again behind him.
“What’s up with you now? They already found Yúnior, so stop looking for him,” the Cloak said. “That business is fucked. I’ve got the police on top of me … And not just any police … Even State Security is involved in this!”
“State Security?” Conde was puzzled.
“What other Security do you know, pipo?”
“No, this doesn’t have anything to do with State Security…”
“Suit yourself … Why don’t you just disappear already?”
Conde asked himself what Manolo could have done to make the Cloak think things were even more serious than they already were, and he feigned not understanding the invitation to evaporate. As if he had time to spare, he looked around: inside the large room, with its sanded cement floor, Conde saw a refrigerator, two working fans, a muted television set, a bed, and a square table with four chairs. No bathroom or kitchen. He supposed that if the Cloak ate there, it was because someone brought him prepared food, and that he took care of his personal business elsewhere, perhaps in some neighboring house or on the rocky terrain outside, visible from the room’s back window and through which a powerful, almost blinding reflection of sunlight was entering. On the table, he saw several mugs and a thermos that, he assumed, would contain coffee. In a corner there were several empty rum bottles. And on a small shelf, some type of lidded wooden receptacle, colored a bright blue, inside which he supposed there must be some kind of religious artifact, perhaps even the bones of a Chinese or Jewish person. But Ramiro did not display any ritual necklaces or bracelets, although close to his shoulder, Conde discovered on him the discrete lines of two scars: that of the “rayados” in the Palo Monte religion. In the air, like a winnowing presence, floated a peculiar odor, sweetish, like blond-tobacco cigarettes … American cigarettes, he thought.
“Bobby told me that they killed your cousin with gusto, Ramiro,” Conde said and settled into one of the chairs without having asked permission to do so.
“Yes, and because of that old faggot, they came after me and held me for four hours while they questioned me and fucked up my business life. Now I have to lay lower than whale shit … They even forced me to identify the body!”
“Bobby didn’t say anything about you,” Conde lied. “It could have been your partner the Bat.”
“It wasn’t the Bat … That one knows what he can and can’t say,” Ramiro assured him. “But now it’s all the same … Because I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Yúnior … Well, come on, tell me, I’m not in the mood for you today. What the hell is going on with you now? I already told you, there’s no business to do…”
Conde got up and went over to the window to throw his cigarette butt outside. The bare land of the neighboring lot shimmered under the sun.
“What’s going on with me is that Yúnior’s body showed up, but no trace of the Virgin or the jewelry…”
“Because whoever did away with Yúnior took off with it, right?”
“That’s a possibility … Well, I’m not sure.”
“Your problem … Look, Yúnior didn’t say anything to me about that operation or about any jewelry. What I do know is that he was thinking of getting the hell out of here. But he said that every day, especially since he’d had to race out of Santiago. He was kind of an idiot, you know? Anyway, he had goals and was thinking that in Miami, he would live like a prince because he had a big dick and a pretty face … They completely disfigured him!”
Conde took his time.
“Sit down, Ramiro, I have to tell you something that greatly concerns you…”
The young man looked at this gate-crasher who was ordering him around in his own house. His initial inclination was to act affronted, but something stopped him and Conde knew at that moment that he had hit the target: Ramiro was scared. The mulato drew back a chair, to give himself some space, and sat down, with his forearms on his knees and his body leaning toward the other man.
“I already told you that I was once a cop and no longer am,” Conde began. “But I know something about the way stories like the one your cousin Yúnior got involved in go … If the person who killed him was the same one who was going to get him out of the country, and if that guy took what Yúnior had, the story ends there and the deal is fucked … Now, if they killed Yúnior because of what he stole and didn’t get the things they were looking for, things that include something that must be worth a lot, at least to a few people, then the story isn’t over…” Ramiro, who had initially listened with indifference, became slowly absorbed by his visitor’s reasoning. He looked away to find a cigarette, which he placed between his lips without lighting. It was black tobacco, like the ones Conde was smoking. He’s thinking, Conde concluded, and continued his speech. “And the person or persons who killed your relative are very fucked-up people, truly fucked-up. They tortured him, they beat him with everything and with gusto … Well, you saw him … They disfigured him … Why? I think they did it because Yúnior didn’t have what they wanted, and they tried to get out of him where he had hidden everything … Don’t you think?” Ramiro didn’t react, Conde sighed. “So now we don’t know if Yúnior said anything or not.” Conde paused and launched his best missile: “Nor do we know if he told them where you and he hid those things…”
Ramiro dropped his cigarette without lighting it and protested at last, exasperated.
“Oye, oye, what in the hell are you saying? Why does everyone think that I know…?”
Conde made the cautionary gesture of pointing between the other man’s eyebrows with his extended finger. The motion was effective, since the Cloak immediately stopped.
“Ramiro, to do what you do and still be on the streets, you can’t be an idiot. You know a lot … But the cop or cops who protect you so that you can do your business here in the neighborhood are not going to get involved in this mess. There’s a dead body involved … And now even State Security … So, keep listening to me and think, because it behooves you: I would guess that Yúnior didn’t talk and that those guys lost control of things and killed him before they meant to. They are bad guys, but they’re not professionals … Although you know well that there is something in this whole robbery that is worth so much that it could warrant the risk of killing someone if necessary. And you also know something else or you should learn it right now … If it’s worth it, the person who kills one guy, can kill two…”
Ramiro picked up his cigarette and finally lit it. Conde felt the desire to imitate him but stopped himself.
“What could be worth so much, Ramiro? Whatever it is, I’m interested in it, I could buy it … Outside here, I have a guy with big bucks, and he’s desperate to do a deal.”
The mulato smoked and looked out the window, then back at Conde, and lowered his voice.
“You’re nuts, viejo! Do a deal while the fire is raging? I don’t know if there were diamond bracelets or not … What I do know is that the Virgin is worth a boatload of dough…”
“A wooden Virgin of Regla?” Conde was playing his cards and embracing the other man’s style: he also lowered his voice. “Not even my neighborhood priest would believe that…”
“It’s worth millions…”
“What are you talking about, Ramiro?” The former cop finally felt like he was on promising ground.
“A friend of Yúnior’s, one who spends his time screwing rich old men and women who he finds on the internet. He says that the Virgin comes from Spain and is worth millions…”
“Everyone knows she comes from Spain … But that she’s worth millions…”
Ramiro got agitated and recovered his tone. “That’s what Yúnior said, viejo! That the Virgin was on the internet!”
Conde thought a moment, looking for the best way to move forward. “Who is this friend of Yúnior’s?”
“I don’t know him. He’s a gigolo, he screws old American ladies … and men, too, if they pay him … They call him Platero, because he’s hung like a donkey.”
“So, where does he live?”
“I don’t know that, either. I think around el Cerro. But I’m not sure … It doesn’t matter.”
“So Yúnior offered the Virgin up for sale after finding out that she was worth a lot of money?”
“I already told the police that … He told me that he was going to see someone who could find him a buyer for the things that were worth the most money. But he didn’t tell me who. And then he got lost … I didn’t see him again … I thought he had screwed me over … He loved screwing people over … And it turns out he wasn’t showing up because they had eaten him alive…”
Ramiro threw his cigarette butt out the back window. Conde followed the perfect parabola of what remained of the cigarette with his gaze, keeping his focus on the visible scene of rocky terrain, populated by the wild bushes of marabú. So Yúnior had spoken with someone who could buy the Virgin, someone who had to be worth a lot of money. Someone from the guild? Conde noted that detail and decided to go in for the kill, although he felt that in that whole imbroglio of deceptions and deals, there was still an essential detail missing. But he didn’t have time to think, he just had to put on the pressure.
“Ramiro, I know that I look like a world-class idiot … But you must have noticed that I’m not such an idiot, right? You’re telling me some truths, as well as some lies. And sooner or later, I’m going to prove it and figure out what’s what … So, don’t lay it on so thick, buddy … This is a matter of earning money … I know you know where the Virgin is…”
“What the hell?!?” Ramiro protested. “Stop fucking around and disappear already. I already said more than I should have. Come on, come on, get going!”
Conde stopped to look at the young man before moving.
“Fine,” he said and stood up. “But let me say something else, the most important thing … The ones who killed Yúnior must also know that the Virgin is what’s worth a lot … And they’re hell-bent on finding that statue, and they know that you and Yúnior were like two peas in a pod. They could think as I did … That over there, next door”—Conde pointed at the fallow land—“you could have hidden Her … And all they have to do is go look for Her because you—”
Conde noticed a fleeting change in the lighting in the room and the spark of stupor on Ramiro’s face. A whiff of American cigarettes and, immediately, a violent commotion. Then all the lights went out.
On the third or fourth slap, Conde cried out and opened his eyes, recognized Yoyi, and closed his lids again. His head ached with a beating, explosive intensity and the smell of vomit assaulted his senses. More out of instinct than any ability to think, he put his hand at the base of his skull. Delicately, with fear, he touched the burning, sticky bump he now had there.
“Wake up, man, come on, come on … What in the hell happened here? What in the hell happened?” Yoyi was pleading, his voice agitated, and Conde made a gesture, asking for a minute. His friend granted him just a few seconds and again asked, “Can you get up and walk!? Tell me, Conde, dammit!”
With a gesture, he again asked for calm, until he spoke at last, “I don’t know, I’m dizzy and it hurts a lot, so much! They broke my head open! I’m bloody, look at this! What happened?”
“That’s what I’m asking you! How the hell am I supposed to know what happened, viejo? You’re the one who was here … Look at what they did to this guy, look at what they did to him!”
He forced his eyes to open, to react, to try to understand. “To Ramiro?”
“I don’t know, to this guy they fucked up … Look at this, I think you can see his guts, man, you can see his guts. What a fuck of a lot of blood…” Yoyi said, as alarmed and freaked-out as Conde had ever seen him.
He sat up, leaning on an elbow, and looked around. The images came to him in double, and to his right, beyond the tables, near the windows where the sun streamed in, he managed to see Ramiro and his double, lying on the floor, with his faces—the same face—with a grimace and his eyes clearer and vaguer, no longer with their satanic brilliance, and his abdomens bathed in blood, a lot of dark blood.
Conde let himself fall to the ground again and lowered his eyelids once more.
“Call Manolo, Yoyi,” he told his friend, and, as if he were returning from a trip, he touched his shirt pocket. “The cell phone! They took the cell phone you gave me, Yoyi! Don’t touch anything. Come on, dammit, call Manolo.”
“Are you sure?” Yoyi asked. “This one is done for, and if we leave … I want to get out of here, man, there’s a dead guy, they ripped his guts out,” he insisted, getting more and more agitated. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this, man.”
“Get a hold of yourself, buddy … Call Manolo, dammit, call him already. Tell him they killed the Cloak and that they almost fucked me up … And then give me some water … Better still, rum. And if you find it, have a drink yourself, too, and see if you calm down…”
From his position, Conde could see his young friend turn and vomit any of the remaining liquid he still had inside of him.
He knew all the protocols, so he didn’t let Yoyi remove two of the chairs from the Cloak’s shack to sit on while they waited outside the crime scene for the police. They got as comfortable as they could beneath a mango tree, up against its dried-out trunk, since he and his partner both needed to rest: Conde, because of the wound that had stopped bleeding but was still beating; and the young man due to nerves that caused him to repeat several times that it was the first time he’d encountered a dead man … And what a dead man.
Beneath the tree’s tired shade, they kept their silence until the first patrol car arrived, manned by area police. Those in uniform tried to seem professional, but it was obvious that they were just neighborhood agents, if anything, good for breaking up fights and the pursuit of minor criminals. And they seemed very annoyed to have been called to a place that they normally tried not to enter. Behind them came people from the “settlement,” who viewed the arrival of the police force, with whom they tended to have a tense and problematic relationship, with a mixture of curiosity, animosity, and fear. What happened? was the question running through the entire neighborhood. Twenty minutes later, two 4x4s and the forensics van brought specialized units led by Lieutenant Miguel Duque and the already-aged medical examiner Flor de Muerto, a veteran specialist from Conde’s days with the police.
After observing the scene, and before the technicians got down to work, Lieutenant Duque approached Conde and Yoyi to listen to their version of what had happened, while the medical examiner cleaned the wound on the back of Conde’s head.
“That’s quite a blow,” Flor de Muerto proclaimed.
“Will it require stitches?” He was asking because medical procedures terrified him. He was the guy who turned his face when they took blood from him for lab work.
“I can stitch you up a little … To be safe, but it won’t be pretty … But you have thick skin, Conde … Let’s see, how many fingers am I showing you?” The medical examiner made a V with his fingers in front of the wounded man’s eyes.
“Eight?” Conde asked.
“You’re all set,” the doctor proclaimed. “I cleaned up the wound for you. Sit and take a pain reliever and don’t have sexual relations for forty days…”
“And how do we break the news to your wife?”
“I’ll do what I can. She’s understanding…”
“Thanks, friend, you’re always so … Damn, Flor de Muerto, do you remember that time that Major Rangel caught you—”
“Can we talk?” Duque interrupted, exasperated and resolved to put an end to the former colleagues’ camaraderie and nostalgia.
Miguel Duque was a light-skinned mulato with amphibian eyes and a bearing that was excessively military. He had a serious, commanding voice, and, despite having been born in the province of Guantánamo, he pronounced all of his letters and syllables with the precision of a newsman … Born in Guantánamo. Conde well knew that kind of policeman who was capable of fully enjoying the state of being a policeman twenty-four hours a day. Some could even be good policemen, and the fame of his efficiency preceded Duque who came from the eastern extreme of the island. A Palestinian, like the deceased Yúnior and Ramiro.
Conde told him what little he knew: he had come to speak with Ramiro about the death of his cousin Yúnior Colás and of the possible fate of the objects they had stolen from the house of Roberto Roque Rosell. Conde was doing it because Roque was his friend. While he was speaking with Ramiro, he had received a blow to the head (he pointed at the site of the wound without touching it) and did not see the attacker. Perhaps that was why he was still alive. He had awoken when his friend Jorge Casamayor Riquelmes, who had remained about three hundred feet from the house, went to see what was happening, since Conde had not come out or answered the cell phone that, incidentally, had been stolen from him when he was unconscious. It was the first time he had a cell phone all to himself and, before using it, it had been stolen from him. That was why he had never wanted a cell phone, look what happens when … Duque muttered his protests and Conde finished his story: the rest of what had happened was what could be seen in the large room of the now-deceased Ramiro Gómez, alias the Cloak.
Duque was listening and taking notes, without interrupting the story. He knew that, despite his premeditated inquiries, the former lieutenant would make the kind of summary a policeman could put together, so, for now, Conde would only tell him what he was interested in telling him. The officer turned toward the doctor and the two technicians who were waiting by the front door and ordered them to proceed.
Duque looked at Conde with more intensity. Conde also knew those looks. “So, do I have to believe what you told me?”
Conde shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think you have any choice, Lieutenant. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations, that Chinese guy who doesn’t even know where he’s standing, knows that I didn’t kill that man.”
“Korean.”
“I get them all confused…”
Duque nodded. He took a deep breath. “In any event, we’re going to fingerprint both of you. And you should give me your passports,” the officer added.
“If you find mine, please take care of it for me. I was thinking of making a trip to Alaska…”
The policeman furrowed his brow. Was he putting him on? “Remember that I am an officer and”—Duque pointed a finger at Conde and then said something that the others didn’t manage to hear—“What did Ramiro tell you about the stolen objects?”
“He didn’t know anything about them. You and your guys already know that Ramiro didn’t know that his cousin had been killed until you called him yesterday. I don’t think this kid had anything to do with Raydel’s death. At least not directly.”
“So, did you suspect that Ramiro knew something about those objects?”
“I assumed so, that was all. I was pressuring him a little…”
“Did it seem like Ramiro was nervous, that he was afraid, that he was waiting for someone?”
Conde thought before answering. It was a good string of questions. So, he decided that police intervention was necessary and, besides, could be useful to him. A person, or more than one person, capable of killing two guys and of doing so in the way that they had were true dangers to society. And if the police work could even serve to prevent their making off with the stolen objects and disappearing from the country on a speedboat, then it would be better for everyone, even for him and Bobby.
“I thought he was a little nervous because you had interrogated him yesterday … Now I think that before I arrived, it’s possible that Ramiro had a visitor … When I entered here, I got a whiff of blond tobacco and he smoked black tobacco … He also took a while to let me in, perhaps … On the table, there were two cups of coffee, and I think that when we left, they weren’t there … What I now think is that Ramiro was hiding what Yúnior stole, at least a part of it. And, I have a hunch that that was or is in the terrain that starts on the other side of the fence.”
“A hunch?” Lieutenant Duque wanted to clarify.
“Do you have something against hunches?”
“I don’t like them,” the officer admitted and added, “I’m a Marxist.”
Now it was Conde who imbued his gaze at Duque with more intensity. A real Marxist, alive and healthy?
“Well look at that,” Conde said. “I’m a dialectic. Of the Heracleitus school, of course … That’s why I believe in telepathy.”
Duque tried to regain his authority, on the verge of being beaten down following the untimely announcement of his philosophical militancy. “Forget that … Why are you so sure that what happened in there had something to do with the theft from Roberto Roque? As far as we know, Yúnior Colás had other outstanding debts, and Ramiro surely had some out there, too.”
“You’re right, Lieutenant … But my hunch tells me that the theft was just the tip of the iceberg … So, Marxists don’t like hunches; what about subjective conditions?” Conde asked, willing to poke the wound just as the police were shooing away the curious in order to allow in an unmarked car, from which Major Manuel Palacios emerged. Conde thought he saw smoke emerging from his former subordinate’s ears and decided to put a lid on his sarcasm.
Duque put away his notepad and went out to meet his superior. He greeted him with a precise military movement. For three or four minutes, the two officers spoke. From where he was, Conde watched them and reminded Yoyi of his part in the script: all he knew was that Conde was taking a long time, so he came to get him. Yoyi listened, without saying a word.
The lieutenant went toward Ramiro’s house, gestured at the forensic examiner to follow him, and they both entered the large room, prepared to join the examination of the sites and the body. For his part, Manolo walked very slowly as he approached Conde and Yoyi. He did not shake their hands.
“What a shitty place. What the hell is this? My car almost fell apart trying to get up here … How do you feel?” the policeman asked his former colleague.
“This one isn’t going to kill me … It only hurts when I take a dump … Or when I see your face…”
Manolo walked around him to look at the wound, returned to his position facing Conde and looked at him seriously. “Well, it must hurt a lot because you really turned this to shit … What in the hell did I tell you very clearly about this case? When are you going to fucking understand that you are not a policeman anymore, or anything close to it? Huh, huh? Are you ever going to…”
Conde was shuffling his feet during Manolo’s barrage of questions and insults. Next to him, Yoyi was looking at his nails, to see if some speck of dirt had soiled them.
Conde sighed at last. “Manolo, don’t be foulmouthed…”
Major Palacios pointed a finger at his former colleague and his eyes crossed. He was on the verge of exploding when the other man made a gesture to stop him.
“Okay, okay … You’re right, right as anything. I’m an idiot who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong and can screw up police work and—”
“So why did you do it then, viejo?”
“Because I can’t help it, Manolo. You know, buddy, that I can’t help it,” Conde confessed to him. “It’s that I had a hunch … And now I have two…”
“Are you going to go on with that story about your hunches? Look, I’m—”
“Are you also a Marxist?”
“What in the hell—”
“Can I speak?” Yoyi interrupted. He looked more together. His face had recovered its color and his wise gaze.
“What happened, Yoyi?” Manolo asked. “Do you also have a hunch?”
The young man paused, shook his head no, and finally spoke.
“Manolo … The guys who killed that one”—he pointed toward the deceased Ramiro’s room as if it were a considerable distance away—“and who clocked this one on the head took a cell phone that I lent this one … I already told that one, the mulato officer who went into the house and … Can’t you track the phone? I mean … like on the American TV shows?”
Manolo looked at Yoyi, then at Conde, and turned around to yell:
“Lieutenant Duque!”
It was painful and comforting. Devastating and educational. That disaster also—or above all—was life. That was why whenever he had time to spare, he carried out this kind of pilgrimage with which he paid homage to friendship and the past, as he simultaneously completed a personal and nontransferable mission. And he never ceased to carry it out when he had problems. He no longer obtained practical solutions to his conflicts, of any kind, or even advice or scolding. Nor did he expect miracles. On the contrary, he felt a tangible relief running through his body and spirit when he engaged in this sort of confessional sacrament with which he mitigated his debt of gratitude and love for the man who observed him in silence, with barely any visible expression. Even thus, he knew, Mario Conde knew, that the man was listening to him, processing the information he was receiving, and it felt electrifying to have the slim but constant possibility of being the confidant of somebody who loved him, who needed him, and who, perhaps, understood him.
It had been five years already since the former police commissioner Antonio Rangel had suffered a violent stroke that robbed him of nearly all his speech and mobility. Until shortly before the treacherous attack by his own body, Old Rangel, long retired, had seemed ten years younger than the eighty he had actually accumulated. He even still played some sports—his body remained as erect and muscular as it was in the days when he wore his officer’s uniform, always ironed, without a speck of dirt. Immediately following the stroke, when Rangel’s life was hanging by a thread for several days, Mario Conde insisted to the former major’s wife and recently arrived daughters (they resided in Europe) that he be in charge of the sick man’s overnight care, and he took over a plastic chair that he placed alongside his friend’s bed. He spent each night telling him stories, in the hopes of helping him return to life or at least make the passage to death less sorrowful. The anecdote he repeated the most times, because he knew how much Rangel liked it, was the one about the day he stole a Montecristo No. 5 from him, to try to prove the culpability of a suspect. And the words the major spat at him for this unforgivable provocation: a Montecristo No. 5 cigar, played with as if it were a mere paper garland!
Later, when the man’s life was no longer in danger but his body was left devastated, Old Rangel was sent home and, whenever possible, his former subordinate and friend visited him and tried to make him a participant in some life pleasure. Conde, who always smoked cigarettes, took a cigar along with him on each of his pilgrimages and lit it so that Rangel could inhale that smoke he had enjoyed so much when he was a whole man and not the human wreck he was now that, after years of so much exercise and playing sports, his body refused to release his soul and allow him to rest in peace. Because a man like Antonio Rangel didn’t deserve that miserable fate.
Now, as with each possible opportunity, Conde pushed the wheelchair in which the old man vegetated and took him out to the porch of his house. From there, one could see the garden that Rangel had taken care of from his premature retirement until his sudden physical decline, the pleasant street of the Bahía neighborhood with a smattering of passersby, and a sky (that on that September afternoon was cloud-free) of an immaculate blue. It was a nearly idyllic world, diametrically opposed (so completely diametrically opposed) to the “settlement” where that very morning Mario Conde and Death had been.
After Rangel swallowed the painkillers that his wife, María Luisa, offered him and drank her recently brewed coffee, Conde lit the cigar he’d bought on the way and bathed his former boss in smoke.
“This cheap cigar is a piece of shit, but it tastes good,” he proclaimed. “It’s not one of those Montecristos or Cohibas or Rey del Mundos that you liked, but it’s not bad, I swear it’s not,” he commented and took another puff on the thick cigar, then exhaled more perfumed smoke. “Would you like some?”
From his wheelchair, Rangel was watching his former and most unruly disciple, and greedily breathed in the cigar’s smoke, moving his eyelids, accepting, enjoying … What a disaster, Conde thought. What a shitty life, he knew Antonio Rangel must be thinking. And, almost certainly, appreciating his former subordinate’s incombustible loyalty, while simultaneously lamenting that his friend could not help him with what he really needed most: ending everything.
“The problem is that my hunch feels real, viejo,” he said after telling Rangel about the mess in which he was involved and showing him the protuberance on the back of his head and describing the murder scene of Ramiro the Cloak and even his stop at police headquarters to have his fingerprints taken and for the inspections of his and Yoyi’s fingernails. “The investigators say that someone was walking around that vacant field. The man left footprints, but they don’t know if he found anything … But if he knew where what he was looking for was, then he nearly certainly took it and flew the coop, so Manolo says it doesn’t make much sense to keep looking, and I’m of the same opinion … And that somebody who took it is almost probably the murderer, of course, because if he isn’t, then who the hell is it going to be? This seems to leave aside the possibility of a settling of accounts and focuses everything on the robbery … Now the hope is that the shitty cell phone they stole from me helps them track down the guy … Although I don’t think he would be stupid enough to start using it. Do you know how you find a cell phone if no calls are made? Because I don’t have the foggiest idea, and I imagine that you don’t, either. My friend Yoyi says that in the American movies it’s so easy … And if they find this character, I don’t think that the son of a bitch Manolo will call me to tell me. That lazy bastard is raging at me. Those madmen asked for my passport. My passport! Look, Manolo acted just like you used to when I did some outrageous thing, remember?”
For ten years, Antonio Rangel had held the responsibility of being Conde’s supervisor in the Criminal Investigation Unit. Before that, he had been the one who’d discovered the potential as an investigator of a young, unorthodox, and irreverent policeman who was allergic to weapons and violence, who read too much, aspired to write, and said he was fueled by his gut feelings, prejudgments, and premonitions: a compendium of what a policeman could not be. And, in essence, Rangel had not been mistaken. Throughout those years, always tense when it came to work, both men had learned that there existed between them deeper affinities, and they became friends. But the friendship born and nurtured did not represent any authoritative weakness on the part of the major, who had been on the verge of putting Conde on leave several times, and even, on one occasion, had cut back his responsibilities and returned him to the records pit from which he had previously extracted him once he’d noticed his powers of deduction. Ten years after their initial encounter, when Rangel was found guilty of ignoring certain acts of corruption by his subordinates, the least drastic solution was to make him take an early retirement and send him home. In the face of what he considered an injustice, Conde’s response in solidarity had been to leave the police as well, something he had been planning to do for some time already.
Following that disaster, Rangel had chewed on his frustration, without allowing himself the additional humiliation of lowering himself to protest the arbitrariness to which he’d been subjected. He punished himself so diligently that in the end, he managed the rebellion of a vein within his skull. It had been a difficult time, in which the former major always looked more like a bird who’d fallen from the nest, since his demotion coincided with the unleashing of the Crisis, throughout which, as on more than one occasion the old man’s wife had confessed to Conde, they had survived (in truth, they still did) thanks to the financial help provided by their two daughters, who lived outside Cuba: because the official police pension would not have been enough to get through even half the month. Less still when the man’s physical decline occurred and he needed special attention to keep him alive.
At one point, sometime after his onerous exit from the police, Rangel had confided his frustrations to Conde:
“Sometimes I think I really should have let myself be bought. Now I might have something to get by on and I wouldn’t be dependent on what my daughters send me … Living on charity, even when it’s from your own family, is humiliating. At least, for me, it’s humiliating. And I don’t want to ask anyone any favors to get me a job as an assistant manager or head of supplies for the hotel for foreigners or any of that crap soldiers and old policemen do to try to make some extra cash and feel like they can keep ordering others around … They fucked up my life; I am an untouchable. The only son of a bitch who comes to this house is you, Mario Conde … What a disaster … And you know what? I haven’t hung myself from one of those trees in the yard because I know that I would also kill María Luisa and make my daughters suffer … That’s why I’m still alive, but enraged each day, from morning to night … That rage and humiliation are going to be the death of me, Conde…”
Those words, said by a man who had always seemed to be made of stainless steel, returned to Conde’s mind on each visit he made from Rangel’s initial decline until his nearly vegetative state. And he knew that the greatest desire of the best head of police he’d ever known was to be able to die as soon as possible. But nature punished him by keeping him in his shitty life.
“What worries me, viejo, is that because of the Virgin or whatever it is that is worth so much or that someone believes is worth so much, they’ve already killed two people. Because that’s how things are these days: they’ll kill anyone over anything … Or nothing. To give you an idea of what it’s like out there, listen to the story … Manolo told me a few days ago that three guys had killed a kid just to look tough. You heard right. They challenged each other to see who would knife him, and the poor kid who was just walking by, not bothering anyone, they knifed him so repeatedly that they killed him: they perforated his liver and his lungs … twenty-two times. Just to play, to show off, because every one of those characters had a knife on him and they were drunk and bored. That’s what we’ve come to, viejo. So be happy you are no longer a policeman, as I am happy, because now, it’s a jungle out there. And it’s getting worse and worse … You cannot imagine the state of things. This same neighborhood of Easterners where they gave me this knock to the head, you’ve never seen anything like it, how those people live, amid shit and violence, subsisting on whatever they come up with. Yes, viejo, that’s what we’ve come to … And it’s happening right in Havana and all over the country; don’t think this is geographic determinism. No, no … Dammit, my cigar went out!”
He lit the cigar again, which he had forgotten as he was relating his sorrows of a former policeman. When he saw that it was properly lit, he looked out toward the street.
“I wish you could say something to me, viejo. At least to tell me if I’m wrong. Like you used to do…”
Conde registered movement with his peripheral vision. What had it been? He looked at Rangel, because the fluttering seemed to have come from him, and then he saw that the old man was lightly lifting his pointer finger. Conde looked at his hand, then at the sick man’s eyes.
“Did you move your finger because you wanted to move it?”
Conde waited. Rangel moved his finger.
“Well…” He hesitated, thinking. “Look, viejo, if the answer is that you moved your finger because you wanted to move it, lift it twice, okay?”
He waited again, concentrating on Rangel’s pointer finger which finally rose once. And, a second later, he repeated the motion.
“Well, damn, this is great,” Conde rejoiced and thought he saw a flash of intelligence cross his former boss’s face. “How long have you been able to do that?”
Conde waited for a response that didn’t come.
“Well, that doesn’t matter … Now tell me something, do you think I’m a hopeless imbecile?”
Rangel lifted his finger, and moved again.
“So that’s what you think of me … Well, you always thought it … But, tell me, do you also think that among what they stole from Bobby’s house, there’s really something worth a lot?”
Conde remained expectant. One, two movements of the finger.
“And what’s worth a lot is the jewelry, right?”
More waiting: Rangel’s hand remained at rest.
“So then, viejo, it’s really the Virgin?”
Conde leaned a little closer toward the old man. And he saw him move his finger twice.
“The Virgin! Because She has something inside, diamonds, I don’t know what?”
The old man’s hand remained static, as if dead.
“Because of the Virgin Herself?”
Twice, the finger confirmed, perhaps with more precise strength.
“Because She has powers, or someone believes that She does?”
Rangel lifted his finger three times.
Conde was about to scratch his head, but stopped himself. Two times was yes. Three times?
“Yes and no?” he hazarded a guess.
Two motions of the finger.
“Aha … So then … Because She is an antique?”
Rangel confirmed again.
“And because She is an antique and the internet says She’s worth a lot of money, as the Cloak told me?”
Another confirmation.
“So, they’re killing people for an antique Virgin who is worth a lot of money. And because She has powers?”
Rangel controlled his fingers.
“Because someone believes in those powers, like Bobby?”
The former major moved his finger twice more. Conde knew it, Rangel was still the best boss the Criminal Investigation Unit had ever or would ever have. And at that moment, he discovered that his deathly quality cigar had gone out again. Since he had money on him, how in the hell had it not occurred to him to buy a Montecristo so he could gift its aroma to old Antonio Rangel?
“Is this cigar a national disgrace?”
Two movements of the finger. Said and confirmed: a disgrace.
Since the headache had diminished but not disappeared, Conde decided to take refuge in a safe place. But, before going to Tamara’s house, he stopped by his own and devoted some time to making dinner for Garbage II: a sort of risotto loaded with fairly bad chicken picadillo to which he added some strips of Cuban pork shoulder to improve the taste. And a pinch of salt, just like Garbage II, who loathed flavorless food, liked it. Watching his dog eat, Conde thought about the possibility of taking him with him during his stays at Tamara’s house; it caused him pain and shame to leave him alone, now that that whirlwind Garbage II had become old and dependent. Old age and neglect surround me, he thought. What if I take him to Carlos’s house?
When Tamara saw him arrive with his new look, she put a hand over her mouth. With the gesture, Conde motioned at her to remain calm and went to the guest bathroom mirror and looked at himself for the first time since he’d received the knock to the head. What little hair he had left looked like a matted glop, and his face like a field after a battle. The shirt, two sizes larger than his own, made him look like a scarecrow.
“María Luisa, Rangel’s wife, lent me the shirt … Mine was covered in blood,” he said as if he had just returned from the dead. “I have to take a shower, come with me and I’ll explain.”
Tamara followed him to the master bathroom and watched him undress and enter the shower. Only when he’d allowed the water to run over his head and body and drain darkly did Conde begin to narrate his peripatetic day. She asked him some questions and went out to get him the other set of clean clothes that he strategically kept at her house. When she went out, she took the dirty clothing with her, holding it by the tips of her fingers, as if it were infectious material.
Naked, Conde sat on top of the toilet and Tamara delicately dried his head. Then, she examined his wound.
“It’s not big … But any scalp wound causes a lot of bleeding.”
“They almost killed me, Tamara … They hit me so hard. And I was bleeding and bleeding,” Conde exaggerated. “Dry my back, please, everything hurts.”
The woman agreed and with similar care went on drying the man’s skin until, standing in front of him again, she saw Conde’s physical response.
“Really?”
“You are my Viagra…”
“Well forget about doing the tango … There’s nothing for you today. You have to rest.”
“The warrior’s rest,” Conde admitted, watching himself quickly and inexorably go flaccid as Tamara approached him with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in her hands. While she treated him, he yelled as if being tortured.
They ate in the kitchen and Tamara offered him a long drink from the bottle of whiskey a patient had given her, that she had been saving for special occasions. When he felt more relaxed, he searched for the cordless phone and dialed Manolo Palacios’s number.
“It’s me, Manolo.”
“I know that already … Aren’t you dead?”
“I’m more alive than ever … Tell me, what happened with the cell phone?”
“Nothing, they removed the card and threw it out. They might have thrown out the device, too. They took it from you so you wouldn’t able to call anyone.”
“And did they end up finding the Bat?”
“Yes … And he couldn’t have been the one who killed Ramiro … He was at the League Against Blindness from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon … He started shaking when he found out about Ramiro.”
“So, what do you have, then?”
“Several footprints in the vacant field, but nothing that looks like anything was buried. We took the search dogs to cover the sites where Ramiro could have been and it looks like that son of a bitch went there to piss and shit. Too many tracks … The dogs were worthless. We also have traces that someone entered through Ramiro’s window, but this could have been anyone, even Ramiro himself when he went to the field…”
“So, almost nothing,” Conde concluded.
“Besides the two dead people…”
Conde nodded. “So did the coffee cups show up?”
“No. And the thermos didn’t have any prints. It was wiped clean.”
“So why did you tell Ramiro that you were with State Security?”
“What are you talking about, Conde?”
“About Ramiro telling me that someone from State Security was after him because of Yúnior…”
“Ramiro was talking shit.”
On his end, Conde nodded and closed his eyes. “You know what, Manolo? I was at Major Rangel’s house.”
There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone.
“How’s the viejo doing?”
“The same.”
A guilty silence.
“I need to go and see him. I’m a fake … But this job. I’m still stuck in this shitty office…”
“I spoke with him … Yes, I spoke with him … Not with words, but I spoke with him … And the viejo also thinks that the key to everything is the Virgin. Everyone thinks so…”
Manolo engaged in a much more prolonged silence on the other end of the line. He knew that Rangel’s police instincts had extraordinary abilities.
“And what do you think?”
“I think you can set aside any possibility that all of this has something to do with Yúnior’s old debts or even Ramiro’s … That’s why, early tomorrow—”
This time, Manolo immediately reacted. “Don’t even dare, Conde! Here at headquarters, I have your friend Bobby and the Bat, the guy who bought the stolen things from Yúnior and a certain Manduco the Albino, who was also a buddy of Yúnior and Ramiro’s … And we’re putting the screws to them to the max because one of them has to know something. Do you want me to bring you over here, too, huh? Tell me. This is a police case, Conde, there are two deaths, and, even if they were completely scum, I’m getting a lot of pressure from the higher-ups … There’s even talk of a serial killer! So don’t even get involved. Because I swear to you that I’ll also reserve a room for you at this hotel. I swear on my mother that I’ll do it, Conde, on my mother.”
“Fine, fine. I’ll stay still … But anything you find out, you’ll tell me, right? For old times’ sake, Manolo. So I can tell old Rangel later…”
Manolo sighed. Conde closed his eyes and raised his shoulders to protect himself from the explosion.
“Mario Conde, you are the most twisted, blackmailing son of a bitch on this island and all of its damned keys!” And he hung up.
Conde opened his eyes and smiled. He showed Tamara the empty glass and grimaced in pain. He needed more medication.