The Devil had not shown up, despite creating the best conditions for him. Perhaps he avoided coming around because of the Virgin, so oft invoked. But, a demon after all, his resources were infinite: and Conde confirmed it with an awakening that made him feel like he’d been mashed and submerged in sulfurous liquids. For starters, that’s what he smelled like.
He started to feel some relief under the cold shower, with two aspirin in his stomach. The pot of coffee he drank and the day’s first cigarette offered a little more improvement. It almost returned him to feeling like a human being, the proof that guys like him and Garbage II had to have their own lair, where the freedom of knowing there were not even any rules was the highest good.
When he was able to think, he remembered his plans for the day. He was going to earn his salary again, perhaps the last one for that work. He called Manolo and invited him over.
“Now, with all the messes we have here? That Catalan son of a bitch is still lost and…!”
“Listen to me, Manolo. You won’t regret it.”
Half an hour later, he opened the door to his former subordinate. And he saw the unmarked car, pulled up at the curb, that Manolo was now using.
“What happened to you, Conde?” Manolo Palacios asked in alarm when he saw his host’s face.
“Last night, I fought with some Muslims in Saint Jean d’Acre … And I think I dreamed I was tangled up in the sheets with a Chinese-Cuban woman … But dreams themselves are only dreams…”
“What in the hell are you talking about? Are you going to start with all your nonsense?” Manolo asked him.
“No. Don’t worry … And really, I’m already better, I swear it, I’m already better,” Conde assured him, very proud of his capacities for recovery. He couldn’t move much, or turn his head too quickly, he had to recognize that, but he was capable of speaking and even thinking, at least enough.
Manolo sat down by the kitchen table when Conde turned on the stove to brew another pot. The major was about to speak, but the other man stopped him with a gesture of the hand and the request:
“Coffee first…”
Listening to Manolo’s fingertips drum on the table, Conde waited until the coffee was ready, sweetened it, and served two cups. A new dosage of the infusion would enliven his neurons a bit more. Manolo, who was smoking again, always without buying for himself, had a cigarette with him.
“What happened yesterday with Duque?” the officer asked. “He’s raging at you.”
“What’s predictable happened … He’s too much of a policeman to allow someone who’s not his boss to be in his territory.”
“You said something to him. I know you, Conde.”
“I didn’t say anything to him, Manolo. I wanted to be friendly to him … But your brilliant star is a proud guy. And he thinks he has a corner on the truth. Because of you, Manolo, now I found myself an enemy…”
Major Palacios shook his head, even when he knew Conde’s assessment was right. “He’s very young and—”
“A bit of a dumbass. That’s why René Águila walked all over him as much as he wanted to and even fed him that mystery about an anarcho-Catalan plot.”
Manolo crushed his cigarette. “Let’s see, what in the hell was it that you saw?”
“René Águila told me where that lost Catalan could be.”
Major Palacios knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Or at least, not to make his surprise visible to him.
“Because you went back to his house?” Conde nodded. “I knew it, knew it … What in the hell did you go back for?”
“I had to talk to him and Duque hadn’t let me.”
“Talk about what? What did that guy say to you?”
“That Puigventós is the victim of a cataclysm…”
“Are you going to keep fucking around, buddy? Come on…”
“I am telling you something your Lieutenant Duque wasn’t able to find out yesterday … That Catalan Puigventós came to Cuba with the official purpose of buying the Beneficencia Catalana papers that René Águila got for him … And with the unofficial purpose of taking with him a Black Virgin with whom, in principle, there should not be any further complications. Well, besides the theft … But, above all, he came, he comes, and whenever he can, he will come to get between the sheets with a woman named Karla Choy … Who’s also involved in this business of buying and selling works of art, who could be tangled up in this mess about the Virgin, and who, as if that wasn’t enough, or for starters, is a cataclysm, Manolo. You tell me if she isn’t a cataclysm when you see her!”
To maintain his physical and mental health, Conde preferred not to accompany Manolo and his team on the expedition whose course he had set. At the end of the day, finding the lost Catalan was not his job. And if it turned out that they took a Black Virgin prisoner in that hunt, that would mean that the statue could only return to its owner’s hands after a very long time, if it returned at all. All of which meant that his job, as such, would have ended as a splendid failure. Because with two murders in the way for which She was responsible, it would be best to forget about the Virgin. Conde thought about whether he should ask his friend Yoyi and, on the basis of his opinion as a businessman, go ask for the pay promised to him—or not, he concluded. Or, whether it was better to ask Yoyi to do it for him …
Conde knew that until Manolo called him, as he promised he would, his only choice was to wait. So, at ten in the morning, as they had decided the night before, prior to cracking open the last bottle, he left his house and met up with Rabbit in front of the old high school in La Víbora, prepared to carry out a private expedition in search of a certainty that, perhaps, at this point, would serve only to satisfy Rabbit’s unleashed historical curiosity and the need for truth that obsessed Mario Conde.
To Conde’s relief, Rabbit’s face could compete with his own in postalcohol devastation. It was clear that the years were passing them a bill that was becoming more and more difficult to pay, and now all of them, already sixty years old or nearly, needed more time to recover. Or be inclined to make the decision to drink less. He was relieved again when they entered the hired car that would take them to the center of Havana and a surprising and thunderous rain began to fall over the city, at first multiplying the hot humidity in the atmosphere, but then, soon after, resulting in a reduction of the reigning heat.
Taking refuge in the arcades of the Payret cinema, they decided to wait for the rain to stop in order to cover what separated them from the Avenida del Puerto and the historic Emboque de Luz. As they watched the now-deserted Parque Central, Conde decided he should use the downtime in the best possible way. Doing what he should have already done.
“Rabbit, how are things going for you?” He entered the conversation sideways, convinced he could steer it where he needed to.
“Good and bad, like always. You know … Why are you asking?”
“To find out … About your trip. And because I think I wasn’t very nice to you. I’m a shitty narcissist who only thinks about myself and sometimes, I go too far…”
The other man smiled, displaying the teeth to which he owed his nickname. “Calm down. I know you. I knew that when you found out, you were going to get like that … But since I know you, I didn’t wonder when you offered me the money you would earn with the Virgin so that I could travel…”
“That I should have earned. I think that money is fucked … The thing is, my brother, we’re being left more and more alone … Everything is going to hell, everything…”
“You’re going to tell me about being left alone? Remember that my daughter is over there and my wife only talks about how much she misses her, that she’s not going to see her grandchildren grow up, that we don’t have any family anymore…”
Conde shook his head, tossed his cigarette butt on the wet sidewalk, and looked at his friend. “Do you really think that the best thing for you would be to stay over there, as you say? It’s true, your daughter is there, your family—”
“Brother, I don’t know what I’m going to do…” Rabbit interrupted him. “I don’t want to be dependent on my daughter, chasing after her, complicating her life … She did what she wanted and had to do. What a bunch of kids her age are doing every day. What Miki’s kids did. What Rafaelito, Tamara’s son, did … Kids who look at us and quickly come to the conclusion that they don’t want to end up like us, for having done what we thought or what they told us we should do … But I don’t want to die in poverty, either, living I-don’t-know-how on the retirement that awaits us, with the few pesos that are never enough for people to have even one decent meal per day. You know that. What’s fucked-up is that I don’t want to die far away from here, either, suffering nostalgia over not being here … Why should I have to die far away after everything we’ve been through and done and everything that we haven’t been able or allowed to do?”
Conde had an answer: We should die here because it’s what belongs to us. Because we are from here. Except, at this point in the game, who would he be able to convince with that argument about belonging? What was more important: being or belonging?
“Do what you have to do,” Conde said, since it was the only thing he could and should say.
“Conde, we’ve spent our whole lives saying that they didn’t let us travel where we felt like and that we had, that we should have, the right to do so. Do you remember when we were twenty years old and you loved Hemingway so much? You always said you would have liked to go to Paris and live as Hemingway did in Paris.”
“Mental masturbation of mine … It’s very cold in Paris, there are no avocado plants there, and the rum must be very expensive.”
“But you were never able to go to Paris … Or Alaska, either … Because thinking of going anywhere was just that, mental masturbation. The country was closed under lock and key and someone else had the key, those who decided who got to travel and how, those who decided what was good and what was bad for you, what books you should or should not read, how to cut your hair, and what kind of music to listen to. For us, it has always been like that, it still is like that: someone decides for us, to take care of us and save us, right?… And now they’ve opened a little door: they let us travel, man! If you have money or not to do so is your problem, like everywhere. But we can at last do it and … I’m going to try it. If those damned Americans give me the visa, I want to go to Miami, to be with my daughter, see Andrés again, have a bottle there with Dulcita … Confirm whether the Miami airport smells like Cuban coffee and whether the people in Hialeah really live as if they were in Centro Habana, but with running water all day long … And then I’ll see what I do.”
“That sounds good, Rabbit. It sounds like the bells tolling of freedom of choice.”
“Or the bells of La Demajagua … Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, our forefather, giving the slaves their freedom, like they taught us in our fourth-grade history class. Freedom, independence, human dignity…”
“It suddenly sounds amazing.” Conde laughed at the historical context that Rabbit never failed to provide and added, “It’s better not to speak of those bells. But go on, use your freedom, it’s your right … And even your left … Well, the time for being philosophical is over … Let’s get going, the rain stopped.”
Feeling relief over the conversation he had with Rabbit, Conde subjected himself to the regulation pat down (because of their faces) that allowed them to board the little speedboat to Regla, with its prow facing the village and the hermitage of the Cubanized Black Virgin on the other side of the water.
Although they were early, they breathed easily when they learned that Father Gonzalo Rinaldi was waiting for them in the sacristy. Conde was shocked when he saw that the pastor was younger than them: until now, all the priests he had met were older than him, and in his mind, he had created an image that a priest should be a person “of a certain age.” And if he was starting to be older than priests, then the problem of his old age was becoming more patent and alarming. According to his statistics, he was already older than 66 percent of the planet’s inhabitants, including some priests. That’s fucked-up, he told himself.
A steady drizzle continued to bathe the city and, beneath the sacristy’s high mainstay, the atmosphere was cool and pleasant. The priest, dressed in street clothes that made him look almost youthful, offered them a pitcher of lemonade from which they both served themselves as Rabbit repeated the purpose he had mentioned on the telephone to Father Rinaldi: to learn more about medieval Black Virgins. Like the Virgin of Regla, like the one in Montserrat … Like the reborn Our Lady of la Vall, arrived in Cuba, seemingly, several decades before, in the hands of a young Catalan who had escaped the rage of war.
“I don’t have much time anymore to spend with you, so I’m going to tell you the main thing,” the priest began when the three were sitting around the small table, a higher one than normal. There, Conde esteemed, was where the Eucharist was performed prior to Communion. He was comforted by the idea of being so close to the divine. “To begin to outline the subject, I’d like to tell you that those three Virgins you’ve mentioned,” he addressed Rabbit, “are different … The Virgin of Regla of Chipiona, in which ours is inspired, has a whole legend about Her origins that places Her in Hippo, in North Africa, in the fourth century. They even say that Saint Augustine himself carved Her and that his disciples brought Her to what today is Spain in the fifth century. But all of that is a myth. The original statue must be from the fourteenth century; in other words, post-Romanesque, although what remains of her was also carved in black wood. Meanwhile, the one from Montserrat is not black: She is of a color known as white lead that has blackened with the years, something different.”
“So la Moreneta isn’t really morena?” Conde smiled. “Given the whole thing the Catalans have about that…”
“Well, she’s not black, perhaps because she is a European carving, although she is medieval, Romanesque, of the same school and time as Our Lady of la Vall. And from what you can see in the photos, the Virgin you’re looking for is Romanesque, black, and it’s very possible that she came from North Africa in the twelfth century with the Crusades and Templars that were in Jerusalem in that era and in other cities of the so-called Frankish states. The best proof of the North African origins of those Virgins is a historical document, not a story or a myth. There is a French Chronicle from 1255, in which it is commented that, the year before, the French King Louis IX, Saint Louis, returned from his incursion in Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade and brought back several statues of Black Virgins that he had obtained in the Holy Land … There’s no reason to question that detail, first of all, because it does not mythologize anything or glorify anyone and, secondly, because it refers to an event very close in time. It is just that, news, that offers a certainty: in North Africa, these Black Virgins existed in sufficient quantities for the French king to make off with a whole load of them.”
“Why from the Holy Land, why Black, why so many Virgins?” Rabbit went on, and the priest raised his hands, asking for clemency.
“That’s what’s complicated about the story … The problem is that there are many answers, too much invention and mysticism, but I’m going to tell you the most important ones. Or, the most well-founded. Just at the time of the Crusades, the cult of the Virgin Mary was at its apogee. Two or three centuries before, there had not existed such a strong devotion for the Mother of Jesus. But in the twelfth century, it did exist and the person who pushed it the most in Europe was Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard, of whom it was said that he was the man who best represented the medieval Renaissance of the twelfth century. Among other things, he was the founder of the monastic order of Cîteaux, as well as promoted the existence of the order of the Templars, already in its definitive form. He also defended the idea of a holy war in which, for the faith, even the act of killing another human being was endorsed if he was an infidel, a heretic, a pagan enemy of the Holy Church…”
“None of this turning the other cheek if you get smacked,” Rabbit noted.
“No, no … Well, more or less … The fact is that Saint Bernard himself had a very peculiar story with the Virgin: he said that when he was young, before an altar where Our Lady was worshipped, from the breast of the statue, fell three drops of milk to his lips … And the miraculous Virgin was Black…”
“That seems too similar to the story of my friend who had the Virgin…” Conde recalled. “He says that he saw Her crying or sweating…”
“The important thing is that at the time, thanks to Saint Bernard and other devotees, even the term Our Lady became popular and so extensive back then that they began to dedicate chapels, churches, even cathedrals to Her … The great Gothic cathedrals. That is why several of them are dedicated to Notre Dame, right? And if some of those mothers of the Lord who presided over cathedrals, parishes, chapels, were Black and came from the Holy Land, it is due, I believe, to there being in North Africa at the time artists who were more qualified, as they say now, than in medieval Europe. Those artists were the heirs of a high culture that goes back to the times of the Egypt of the pharaohs and Greco-Latin greatness, which was preserved more in that part of the world than in medieval Europe. An area where having black or copper-colored skin was much more common…”
The priest took a long sip of lemonade and ramped up.
“On the other hand, as you know, Christianity was the result of several traditions that mixed, crystallizing in a time and space of many cultural convergences. As a religion, it is the offspring of a tradition, of a historic time. Among its antecedents, there appears to be, without a doubt, the Egyptian influence of venerating the mother goddess, who in that culture was Isis, the daughter of the god of the earth, wife and simultaneously sister of Osiris, the judge of the dead, and the mother of Horace, who reigned over the day. Isis was the divinity considered to be the center of the universe. So Isis was represented with dark features … That mother goddess was the generator of life, and life is related to the earth, with its fertility … With its black color. These are the key numbers in the equation through which Black Virgins began to appear in North Africa and medieval Europe and, since they became fashionable, for lack of a better word, they were reproduced in great quantities by European makers, seemingly Venetian maestros in particular, the most knowledgeable, progressive, and enterprising of the time and everything related to art, navigation, business … No one better than them to obtain the black wood brought from the interior of Africa or the Middle East, where ebony abounds along with other kinds of textures and similar colors…”
“So how do the Templars come into this story, Father?” Conde asked.
“So, in that entire cultural process, it has been proven that the knights of the Order of the Temple, the Templars, played an important role. It is no coincidence that the boom of those Virgins coincided with the order’s two-hundred-year history and with the devotion to Our Lady that they practiced and propagated thanks to spreading out through a good part of Europe with their posts, where they usually had at least a chapel … These were especially numerous in the South of France, in the north of Spain. In these regions, not coincidentally, you can find, for centuries and even today, the majority of the Black Virgins in conservation, who must be just a small part of the ones that existed and disappeared, due to natural or human effects, like fires, which were so frequent in those centuries … In sum, as you can imagine, being the parish priest of the church in which a Black Virgin is venerated, I’ve had to study the subject in depth, in which there are still many historical mysteries awaiting a well-founded response. And mystical mysteries which will always be mysteries…”
Conde and Rabbit were nodding and processing. The light of the priest’s words was clearing away the final shadows.
“Historical and mystical mysteries such as what, Father?” Rabbit asked.
“Like the sphere that some Black Virgins or the baby Jesus hold in Their hands. The sphere is perfection, that is true. But it is also the earth, the world, the kingdom of God … The mother is the earth. Or the earth is the planet … But, in the twelfth century, some madmen dared to think that the world was a sphere … Mysteries such as how many of the chapels dedicated to these Virgins are in places that for the European Celts, who adored the Mother Earth in a special way, had a telluric power. Mysteries like Their relation to the Camino de Santiago, the route of the stars, the Milky Way. Milk and the mother, the earth and fertility, the route toward the West … In sum.”
“So what about what they say regarding the powers of those Virgins?” Conde then interrupted.
Father Gonzalo Rinaldi smiled. “Are you both believers?”
Conde and Rabbit looked at each other before starting to move their heads. No, they were not.
“So it’s difficult for you to understand me … To believe, faith is necessary. And, until now, I’ve been speaking to you with reason, telling you a story … A historical one. But with faith or without it, I think the thing about the power these Virgins have is very clear. Because it’s real … To those who have placed their devotion in them. There is a lot of talk of miracles, like the one regarding Saint Bernard that I told you about and hundreds, perhaps thousands more. The one that is most often repeated is that of making women fertile who had believed themselves to be sterile, or of reviving dead children … I, as a priest, testify that miracles exist, although not all the ones that present as such are as miraculous. As the rational being that I also am, I consider that many extraordinary or inexplicable events, which we call miracles, occur because our thoughts and subconscious have the power, and even this you both must admit, right? And since you admitted, then you must also accept that that power is real for those who invoke it sincerely. That is the key to everything…”
“The power of faith and of the mind,” Conde summed up.
“Yes, a power of which science still does not know the true proportions and capabilities … What it does know is that the need to believe turns out to be something that supersedes us. It is the response before a mystery. And everything tends to be projected through a figure that constitutes a symbol, the representation of an idea … Like a flag, for example. Are there not people who immolate themselves with a flag or for a flag? I know it’s not the same, but the act reveals to us the power of symbols. The need for symbols, I would say. And those statues that represent Our Lady, the Mother of God, the generic mother … Adam was born of clay, from the earth…”
The two friends nodded. Some details offered by the priest were new and revealing for them. Not the essential: that, they already knew. Only now, they had the conviction of how tangible the Black Virgin’s power could be for Bobby and how valuable Her possession could be. Because of Her mystical powers and because of real history. The price of that statue could be incalculable, and, because of it, there were now two more victims in what was probably a long and populated list of men sacrificed on the altar of the powerful statue, perhaps brought by some anonymous Templar or a sanctified king from Jerusalem’s mythical hills, the Holy Land for which three religions had fought and killed, and continued to fight and kill, when curiously, they believed in the same God.
Suddenly, it seemed that something as unusual as autumn had arrived on the island. The rain had stopped, but the sky continued to be low and dark, and the atmosphere was charged with an affectionate, although ephemeral thickness. According to Father Gonzalo Rinaldi, it was the presence of a trough, which had positioned itself over Cuba’s extreme western part, from where it would keep moving until it undid the charm of the season.
Like on every occasion that he heard that meteorological explanation, Conde asked himself how long those things called “troughs” had existed. When he was a boy, everything was simpler: there existed, in descending order, hurricanes, bad weather, summer rainstorms, and winter drizzles. Because he confused a several-days-long memorable stretch of bad weather with some temporary winter drizzles, the grandfather of a friend was called by the name of that meteorological event for the rest of his life. But now everything was resolved as a trough …
When the speedboat returning them to Havana docked at Emboque de Luz, they found that Manolo was waiting for them in the jail-like shed. At the mere sight of his expression, the former policeman had an idea of what happened.
“The Catalan didn’t show up?” was his first question.
“Let’s go, we’ll talk out there,” Manolo proposed. “It stinks in here…”
“Can I stay with you?” Rabbit asked, who was always more discreet.
“Yes, let’s go…” the policeman accepted and pointed at Conde. “After all, this moron’s going to tell you everything anyway.”
Conde and Rabbit looked at each other and followed the officer. They left the shed and walked toward the recently restored walk on the Alameda de Paula, the city’s oldest. Since the sun had yet to appear, they sat down on one of the low walls that served as benches, facing the bay’s dark waters.
“Okay, shoot,” demanded Conde, who needed to know.
Manolo sighed. “Well, we went to the cataclysm’s house … And she really is. What a woman!”
“Damn, I’m the only one who hasn’t seen her,” Rabbit protested. “Is she really Chinese? Incidentally, in the eleventh century, when they brought the Chinese from Canton and they came here to the port, they took them—”
“Stop telling stories, Rabbit,” Conde told him. “Go on, Manolo, talk…”
“Well anyway … She says she hasn’t seen Puigventós and, of course, that he has not been to her house. She knew the Catalan was in Cuba, she confessed that she also knows him, but since she doesn’t have any pending business with him, it didn’t interest her.”
Conde considered the information and concluded:
“She’s lying. Karla saw him. I’m sure of it…”
“So where does she have him, under her skirt?” Manolo asked.
“It wouldn’t be a bad place to hide, actually,” Conde opined. “But if he’s not there, he’s close…”
“I spoke to her for a while, put the screws to her as best I could, but I couldn’t do anything else … So we went to see the other character who could know something, Elizardo Soler. He was leaving his house. And he also swears up and down that he has not seen Puigventós and that he doesn’t know where he could be. But he did reiterate the Catalan’s fondness for our female compatriots…”
“This was also pulling one over on us. He knows something…”
“Why are you so sure? One of your premonitions? Don’t fuck around, Conde, not with this…”
Rabbit was on the verge of intervening, but Conde’s look stopped him.
“It’s more than a premonition, Manolo. It’s something I know … But that I don’t know. Something I saw, but that I lost … I’m convinced … Seriously. And what I am sure of is that all of those clever cats are lying or hiding something. All of them, including my friend Bobby…”
Conde took out his cigarettes and offered one to Manolo, who accepted.
“Are you going to go on and on about what you see and don’t see? Because of you, I’m smoking again,” Major Palacios protested as he lit his cigarette. “And because of that Catalan and the Black Virgin and … Conde, Puigventós has been missing for three days already. It’s too much time. I had to send Duque to the hotel to ask the Spanish manager, Puigventós’s friend, not to make a formal report. Because we are already looking for him and when there’s a report, it has to be communicated to the Spanish consulate, to the Foreign Ministry, to those gentlemen in the Special Police Corps for Foreigners … And then things will be a big fucking mess. I don’t even want to imagine it.”
Conde heard an alarm coming from a dark corner in his memory.
“Does State Security have something to do with this?”
“No, of course not,” Manolo assured him. “Why are you so insistent on State Security?”
“It’s just that I remembered right now that Ramiro told me someone from State Security had gone to see him.”
“No, I don’t think so. I would know,” Major Palacios reaffirmed.
Carefully, from his place, Rabbit raised his hand as if asking permission to speak. And without anyone’s authorization, he said, “I only wanted to tell you that the Chinese who came from Canton were taken to some rooms that were over there, in Regla … And to ask a question: What comes now?”
Conde and Manolo looked at Rabbit, and then looked at each other.
“We keep looking for Jordi Puigventós,” Manolo responded. “I just don’t know where he is.”
“Puigventós is wherever the Virgin is. Or nearby. And the Virgin is with whoever killed Raydel and Ramiro. That’s the unifying thread,” Conde opined.
Manolo took another drag from his cigarette and tossed the butt in the air. “I’ve already got Immigration breathing down my neck. I also asked them to stay calm. They gave me until today. I’m desperate…”
Conde knew the pressure his former subordinate must be under. “Manolo, take me home, I need to think. And to go to the bathroom, too…”
Major Palacios stood up and looked around. “It’s looking nice here, right,” and he pointed at the old boulevard and its restored surroundings. At one point, the area had been one of the centers of the city that depended on the bay and its port activities. As the years passed, its degradation had been complete, out of control, and it was encouraging to enjoy its renaissance.
“All of nineteenth-century Havana came through here,” Conde called to mind. “Martí, Casal, Villaverde … Here Heredia, Varela, Domingo del Monte, Saco came to sit and talk…”
“And?” Manolo admonished him.
“And … Well, that between them all, they invented Cuba. At this point, I don’t know if it was a good or bad invention. What do you think, Rabbit?”
“That’s enough already, buddy,” the policeman protested. “I don’t have all day and…” Manolo scratched his head. “So, sitting right here, those characters invented Cuba? Stop fucking around, Conde … Well, forget about that. Let’s go,” Manolo cut off the nationalist and foundational reflections. “Besides, look, it’s going to rain again.”
From the sea, the violent clouds of the presumed trough advanced toward the city, crossing over Regla and Casablanca.
“So let it rain. Let the city, the country, the world be flooded. Let the thunder, lightning, and sparks come. Let the hail and snow fall. Let there be wind, gales, whirlwinds, and even troughs,” Conde said, giving free rein to his apocalyptic propensity before the two other men’s condescending stares: they knew him too well to be alarmed by his inclinations. “Damn! Let the hurricane come! Let there be a cataclysm! That’s what we need, a cataclysm! Or at least a miracle,” he concluded and hurried up to reach Rabbit and Major Manuel Palacios, who were no longer listening to him because they were running to the car, frightened by the first large drops of the new rainfall brought by the supposed trough.
The rain benefited the city all afternoon. The deficient or inexistent practical prevision of the apocalyptic Conde prevented him, as almost always, from preparing himself for the circumstance. So, when hunger arose, he had to content himself with making an omelet with the only two eggs he’d stored in his refrigerator and cutting the avocado that, taking advantage of their being locked away due to the rain, he stole from his neighbors, the happy owners of a generous tree. He shared the omelet with Garbage II and, with the help of coffee and cigarettes, resolved to think. To better do so, Conde sometimes used sheets of paper on which he placed names, details, general ideas he tried to relate to one another. He had learned that practice from the deceased Captain Jorrín himself.
For the time being, he knew, and noted it with initials and arrows, that among Karla Choy, Jordi Puigventós, Elizardo Soler, René Águila, and his friend Bobby, there were several links, but they now all went through the existence of the Black Virgin (he signaled Her with the initials BV and placed them within a circle at the center of the page) and Her unknown whereabouts. The Virgin should also link all of them, or at least several of them, to Yúnior-Raydel and Ramiro the Cloak, the deaths in the equation. The Virgin, in and of Herself, opened two powerful lines that could even cross: the mystical one—Her powers—and the earthly one—money—a pragmatic and cash-based version of power. Which of those lines had been activated in the relation among the characters and between the characters and the BV? Conde began to draw new circles around the words he had written and more lines that moved out from them, like escape chutes with no known destination. He felt incapable of making the key connection and asked himself how much his abilities may have declined in the years since he left his job as an investigator. And how much they decayed with the progressive hardening (or softening) of his aging neurons. He thought that at some point he should call Tamara, although he decided to wait an hour longer, to be sure that she would return home. The image of the woman, the house, peace, placid love, enveloped him with the feeling of calm that turned into drowsiness.
Listening to the monotonous beat of the rain and enjoying the cooled-off atmosphere, he went to bed with one of his old volumes of poetry by José María Heredia. Having evoked him as he walked on the Alameda de Paula, almost two hundred years before, had revived in Conde the cyclical necessity of going over his verses charged with telluric force, exalted passions, communication with nature. Had Heredia been as apocalyptic as him? In reality, better than him: the nth lecture of his verses was enough to confirm it.
Lord of the winds! I feel thee nigh,
I know thy breath in the burning sky!
And I wait, with a thrill in every vein,
For the coming of the hurricane!
When he awoke, it had gotten dark and stopped raining. He could not specify whether he had dreamed again. Only the image was there. Like the dinosaur. And now he could see it.
An hour later, when he opened the door, he was face-to-face with Manolo’s exhausted visage. Behind him, he saw the less friendly face of Lieutenant Miguel Duque, whom Conde nodded at briefly, convinced that he’d have time enough to tear him up at his leisure. In the back, in the twilight and under the persistent rain now falling, was the vulgar Chinese Geely in which the police had traveled from headquarters.
Before greeting him, Manolo reprimanded him. “Make sure this is not another case of your clowning around! What’s this about a dinosaur?”
“The shortest story in the world. And the best,” Conde responded. “Do you want me to tell it to you?”
“‘When he awoke, the dinosaur was there,’” Miguel Duque quoted. “Augusto Monterroso.”
Manolo turned around to look at his subordinate, and Conde, despite himself, smiled. Had he been wrong about that Duque and it turned out that he was actually an educated policeman? With faith, miracles do happen, as Carlos had told him and as Father Rinaldi had confirmed.
“I’m surrounded!” Manolo concluded.
Conde invited them into the dining room. He confirmed that Duque was carrying the laptop in his hands and asked them if they wanted coffee. “I just made it,” he added. But both declined the offer.
“I can’t fit another coffee in this body,” Manolo commented. The other man did not explain his no. It was obvious that he did not want anything from Conde: not even coffee.
Each one sat down and Conde was the first to speak. “This afternoon, I told you I had seen something and that I didn’t know what it was…”
“Yes, so did you see it already? In your dreams?”
“No, in a movie … Rather, in two, and I think we all saw it,” said Conde, who was enjoying his melodramatic manipulation of the information. “The first movie we saw in the theater or on TV and the main character is an actor called Richard Gere … who does what he does in that movie and every movie he acts in because women think he’s a good-looking guy, although he is a worse actor than I am a baseball player.”
“What are you talking about, buddy?”
“About a guy who likes women, Richard Gere … And about movies. Like one that’s there, on the computer. Lieutenant Duque, can I humbly ask something of you?”
“Conde, Conde…” Manolo scolded him.
“What do you want?”
Conde, with the same seriousness, continued:
“First of all, I’d like to congratulate you for your literary knowledge, but I’d like to remind you that the story you cited is much longer: ‘When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.’ And then, I’d like to ask if you would be so kind as to turn on that digital device and look for the first film we saw yesterday of Puigventós in the hotel lobby…”
The lieutenant let out a loud sigh. He knew Conde was poking at him, only in a way that was disarming. He immediately opened the laptop and turned it on. Manolo was now looking at Conde and the lieutenant, expectantly. He knew that something important could be revealed by the Jurassic image that Conde had had, and that was why he was still there. Like the dinosaur, right?
Duque looked for the recording and pressed play. He moved the device on the table and Conde brought it closer to himself, touching it only with the tips of his fingers, as if it were contagious. For a few minutes, they were all silent. At a given moment, Conde nodded, moving his head slowly.
“Lieutenant, do me a favor, play that part of the tape again … And both of you, watch it.”
Duque pulled the device back, did some maneuvering, and returned it to the side of the table occupied by Conde. Manolo and Duque stood behind their host.
On the screen of the computer, the hotel lobby came to life again. Puigventós was sitting on the sofa and drinking from his little bottle of water. People passed beside him, in one direction and another.
“What is it, Conde?” Manolo demanded, and with his hand, Conde requested patience. The images were moving just as the three of them had seen several times, until the shots showed, front and profile, the woman in white with a hat and glasses who was crossing near Jordi Puigventós.
“Stop there, Duque,” Conde told the lieutenant, who pressed the key and froze the image. Conde concentrated on the still image. “No, you can never see the face well, but…”
“The woman dressed in white? What’s wrong with her?”
“She appears to be a young woman,” Conde proposed without really responding.
“She is young. You can tell by the way she walks,” Manolo stated.
“Manolo, although you can’t see her face, I think I know who she is and why she was in the hotel, and besides, on top of that, I think I even know why Jordi Puigventós isn’t showing up … That woman is Karla Choy and it’s no coincidence that she is there and dressed that way. I think this is the damned unifying thread…”
This time, Conde decided to accompany them. He didn’t want to miss the presumed climactic scene of the show for anything.
When the Geely in which they were traveling stopped in front of Karla Choy’s house-gallery, two patrol cars came out of nowhere and parked next to the Chinese car. One of the policemen, whom the others called Calixto, dressed in a uniform and with sergeant’s bars, approached Manolo and held out a piece of paper to him. Manolo moved under the light of a nearby lamppost to read the document and confirmed that he was within the law: they could search Karla Choy’s house, he said, and Calixto confirmed that he had placed two men at the back of the mansion, to prevent a possible surreptitious exit.
When the woman who could pride herself on being amid Havana’s most desirable opened the door, a look of exhaustion came over her face.
“Again!” she protested.
“Yes, Karla, again, but different,” Manolo said and handed over the search warrant. The young woman read it and returned it to the major.
“What do you want to see? Sketches for paintings?”
“First we want you to see something on this computer.” He pointed at the device Miguel Duque was carrying. “Where do we sit down?”
The woman made a gesture for them to follow her and walked toward the glassed-in dining room in the back. Conde placed himself at the head of those following her to be the first to enjoy the harmonious movement of the cataclysmic young woman’s body and no longer had any doubt: Karla Choy was the woman in white. Thank you, Wilkie Collins.
“Rey, you tricked me,” the young woman then said.
“Not at all … I was passing by and got in on this story. I’m really not a cop…”
Karla and Duque occupied the seats Manolo pointed at, while he placed himself behind them. Conde, on his end, took advantage to disappear behind the four policemen who had begun to search the house, accompanied by two neighbors who’d been called in to serve as witnesses to the police work. The goal was to find any clue capable of revealing Jordi Puigventós’s presence there.
A few minutes later, when he returned to the dining room, Conde saw that the images from the hotel lobby were running on the screen. At just the right moment, Conde alerted Duque.
“Stop.”
The four of them watched the two frames occupied in the middle by Jordi Puigventós and the woman in white.
“What do you have to say, Karla?” Manolo asked.
“About what, Major?”
“About that woman who’s there.” Manolo pointed at the screen.
Karla studied the image. She looked at Manolo and shook her head.
“I don’t know who she is, you can’t see her face…”
“But right now, we can reconstruct that woman, Karla. With a wide-brimmed hat and everything,” Conde said, and when the others turned around, they saw the former policeman, with the movements of a magician, was extracting from a large bag with the Emporio Armani symbol emblazoned on it, a long dress, a wide-brimmed hat, and a foulard, all white. Exactly like those worn by the woman frozen on the computer screen, the woman whom the dumbstruck Jordi Puigventós could not stop looking at.
Havana, so torrid, humid, tropical, and prone to troughs and the like, had come to have a difficult relationship with rain. Eight or ten hours of ordinary summer downpours with the aspiration to be autumnal turned the city into a deplorable version of Venice: a puddle with houses. The streets, with their sewers full of earth and shit, had become lakes and rivers depending on their inclination. The sidewalks, full of potholes, bumps, and cracks accumulated by years of abandonment, turned into traps capable of devouring any living being who risked crossing them. The electric and telephone lines crackled on their posts until they exploded, fell, leaving citizens in the dark and cut off from communication for time that was immeasurable. The roofs of the houses, worn away by the relentless beating of the sun on them for years, whimpered under the sky’s downpours, soaking them up and transferring the precipitation indoors. In the “settlements” that had popped up on the periphery, the scene had to be terrible: mudslides, overflowing ditches, busted ceilings and walls, conquered or broken by the humidity and the weight of water. Shadows and desperation.
Pushed by his triumph and pride, Conde did not accept Lieutenant Duque’s invitation to take him back home or wherever he wanted to go. Like the policeman he once was, he knew that his role in the recent staging had ended with his key scene of showing the proof of an undeniable relationship. Now, it was the real policemen’s turn and, despite what some people thought, in reality, Conde no longer was one and protocol could not be broken for him. Thanks and goodbye. The others would continue the work.
When the uniformed policemen had left with Karla Choy toward headquarters, Manolo approached his former colleague, who was getting ready to leave. The rain had stopped at that moment, but, beneath the tree that covered them, above their bodies, the flooded leaves cried down onto their bodies.
“What do you think of all this, Conde?” Manolo asked him as he gestured for a cigarette.
“That’s what I always ask you…”
“When I was lost,” the other man recalled.
“But now, we’re not. There’s a connection between Karla and the Catalan, she herself already admitted. Pull on that thread and…”
“The costume you found proves that she was at the hotel … But a woman with the intelligence and long-term vision that Karla has, why wouldn’t she have made that proof disappear if she knew we were coming after her? No, she couldn’t be such an idiot, Conde … What if what she told us is true? That she only had an amorous relationship with Puigventós? What if it’s true that she hasn’t seen him for two days and that she doesn’t know where the hell he is? What if she didn’t tell us anything this morning because she didn’t want to get caught up in a problem that’s not hers?”
“Too many conditionals, Manolo … She knows something. If, as you say, another conditional, she is not involved in the theft of the Virgin, perhaps she knows with whom her Catalan boyfriend was going to do business. Elizardo and René Águila could be the ones with the biggest bucks … Well, you know how to crack that nut … Even the toughest guys go soft at headquarters. And that girl is not going to be the exception.”
“But, if she’s not involved in anything serious … Why doesn’t she tell us what she knows and get out of this?”
Conde thought. “Because she’s frightened?”
Manolo looked at him questioningly. “Frightened of what? Or by what?”
“Couldn’t it be of whom?”
“Yes … Of someone who is capable of killing two kids to keep the Virgin?”
“It’s not a bad option. I would also be afraid of a guy like that … Or she could be afraid because of Puigventós, who is lost…”
“What in the hell could have happened to that Catalan?” Manolo asked himself aloud and tossed the cigarette butt toward the street.
Conde took two more drags of his cigarette and imitated Manolo. Then he raised his gaze to the foliage from which the drops kept falling on his head and shoulders. He felt fuzzy and swampy, like Havana.
“If you don’t find Puigventós today, you’re going to have quite a situation with the Spanish consulate and with the Foreign Ministry.”
“Why in the hell are you reminding me of this, Conde? I know it and…”
“I’m thinking, Manolo, wait … Just talking out loud.”
“And what are you thinking?”
Conde thought a little more and finally responded, “Nothing … I’m not thinking anything. And do you know why? Because, there’s something irrational in this whole mess.”
“You already told me that … So what? I’m leaving. Let’s see what we can get out of Karla … with how tired I am. This shitty job…”
“Manolo,” he called out when the other man was walking away. “Can you imagine the party the dykes are gonna have when a bonbon like Karla Choy shows up in the women’s prison?”
“I can imagine, I can imagine … You’re always thinking of shit, man.”
“Tell her … An idea like that will soften her up more than a pressure cooker…”
Still muttering his protests, Major Manuel Palacios walked away toward where Lieutenant Duque was waiting for him, alongside the Chinese Geely. Conde saw them leave and immediately knew that euphoria and pride were usually bad advisors. It was raining again and he had no idea how to get out of that residential neighborhood to arrive at Tamara’s house. He remembered that at some point, buses used to pass by there that could get him closer. Extinguished bus lines, like so many other things. Like the dinosaurs.
An hour later, dripping water, in the vicinity of where he’d chosen to spend the night, Conde was still pondering the poor relationship between the city and the rain, between Cubans and urban transportation, between troughs and downpours, trying even to discern whether the invention of Heredia, Varela, Saco, and del Monte, Martí’s dream, had worked or not in the best way. Luckily for him, he was not obliged to return to his house, since, before he went out with Manolo and Duque, his neighbors with the avocados had stopped by his yard with a bag of leftovers of rice and chicken for Garbage II. It smelled so good and he was so hungry that Conde was envious of his dog, for whom he placed an exaggerated ration of food in his bowl so that he would become strong and hold out until the next arrival of reinforcements.
When he opened the door to Tamara’s house, where he presumed a healthy, frugal meal would be awaiting him, he was hit by a strong aroma and had the pleasant sensation of having returned to a sweet home. And, immediately, he suffered the rebellion of his awakened gastric juices. Because Tamara’s house smelled like sofrito of olive oil, garlic, and onion, like cumin and bay leaf, like delicious things, like food … Carne estofada? Havana-style picadillo with olives and capers? Dutch-style fillet? Was he before a miracle of nature, history, and the most stubborn memory?
Silently, as he liked to do, he prepared himself to respond to the gastronomic surprise that Tamara was preparing by acting dramatically. He began in the very foyer by removing his flooded shoes, dripping shirt, and pants, and since he was at it, he removed his underwear. Surprise for surprise, he said to himself, and walked toward the kitchen wearing just his damp socks. In the room, he saw the woman, her back to him, stirring the fragrant food with a large wooden spoon as it cooked in a gigantic pan. Then he spoke:
“What time is dinner?”
The woman turned around, alarmed by the voice, and Conde immediately felt his scrotum wrinkling and his penis shrinking up into itself like a pinched accordion.
“Aymara!” he exclaimed when he discovered that the cook was not Tamara, but her twin sister.
“Oh Conde, but you…!” the woman began, surprised at the recently arrived man’s nudity, but her expression quickly changed to a smile as she yelled, “Tamara, your husband has gone crazy!”