“Negro … can I have a drink already?”
Doctor Francisco Galarraga looked at his patient and pointed an admonishing finger at him that looked more like a Bantu sword. In simple opposition, on his dark face, his eyes looked like two searchlights that scanned, as if it were a foreign body, the speaker’s physiognomy.
It had been Doctor Galarraga, a surgeon, who had received the man, wounded by a bullet three days prior, in the emergency room. Transported on a gurney pushed by a lame nurse who crashed into walls and seats, the wounded man had been taken to the vestibule of the operation room, and when he saw the jet-black face lean over him from which those luminous eyes observed him, he thought that he had earned his assent to the heavens because of his life’s good acts and that the Black angel of an old friend was awaiting him alongside Saint Peter.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” he asked the doctor at that moment, his very dark skin suddenly turned ashen. “Negro, did I die already?” inquired the patient, who was really worried.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” the doctor responded and began to study the wound as he said, “Yes, the world truly is small … Conde in person … How in the hell…”
“Hold on, Negro, it hurts, it hurts…” the man on the gurney protested when the surgeon touched the edges of the wound on the upper-left part of his thorax.
“Keep still, buddy,” the doctor scolded him. “Don’t be such a jackass.”
“Yes, I am … I’m gonna pass out, man. They shot me, dammit! Am I dying?”
Doctor Galarraga smiled. His teeth, of horselike proportions, were also shining and white.
“Only the good die young … The bullet went through you and it seems there are no affected organs or bones … It might have nicked your clavicle … Either way, I’m going to have to do an X-ray. So I’m going to clean you up, and if there’s no bigger problem, I’ll do a small operation and sew you up … Shall I use a bit of anesthesia?”
“Yes, of course. Better if it’s general, Negro.”
“Go wash your own ass, Conde.”
The doctor and patient had met many years before. It was practically inevitable that they had met in high school at La Víbora and, besides, on the school’s baseball team, for which Pancho Galarraga, alias “El Negro,” played second base. Conde and his other classmates had given him the nickname of “El Negro” because, among the many Black students with whom they shared classrooms, Galarraga managed to stand out due to the resounding darkness of his skin. His former classmates still of sound mind continued to remember how, thanks to El Negro’s enormous home run, the school’s team had reached the finals of a provincial championship … That it later lost.
“Negro, let Tamara and Carlos know … Tell them it’s serious, go on.”
“Let me finish up with the wound first … I’ll call them, but … You’re going to make things complicated for me, Conde!”
The doctor had been right, since by midnight, when he’d already been sewn up and bandaged, with his left arm immobilized, the wounded man’s provisional bed looked like a beehive. Tamara and Aymara had been the first to arrive. Soon after, the recently landed Dulcita showed up, pushing Carlos’s wheelchair. Yoyi, Rabbit, and Candito arrived a little later, and the parade was closed out by Major Palacios and Lieutenant Duque, whose face looked like a poorly made tiger: some orange stripes crossed his cheeks and forehead in several directions.
When he saw Manolo, Conde asked him:
“What the hell happened?”
“I’m not really sure, buddy … We have to reconstruct the events and—”
“What about Elizardo?”
“I had to shoot him,” Manolo said.
“What do you mean…?”
“I killed him, Conde,” Major Palacios whispered and looked off toward the window that overlooked the hospital garden.
It was at that moment that Doctor Galarraga decided to cut off the summit.
“Well, now everyone knows that Conde is not going to die from this one … I’m going to take him for observation. I have to leave him here for two or three days. There’s always the danger of internal hemorrhage or an infection and I want to keep him close. Someone can stay the night with him…”
“I’ll stay,” Tamara leaped, imposing her unquestioned priority.
“Me, too,” Carlos said, firmly.
“Only one can stay,” the doctor warned.
“Negro, Tamara’s staying and so am I…” Carlos said. “Or do you want me to get up from here and smack you a couple of times? Or tell this whole hospital that you are nothing but a thief who used to steal cans of meat with me from the warehouse when they sent us to school in the countryside?”
“So it was with El Negro that you used to steal the cans of Russian meat!” Candito was surprised.
The doctor threw up his hands, giving up, but was insistent on taking the wounded man for observation.
The following night, Conde’s hospital room again turned into a solidarity meeting. All that was missing was the Creedence Clearwater Revival music and some bottles of rum for the “activity,” as someone called the meeting, to reach its best form. At eight o’clock, when established visiting hours were over, Doctor Galarraga and the head nurse tried to impose order and sanity, but Conde’s friends, gathered around the bed, refused to leave the room. Major Palacios had announced his visit and none of them wanted to leave there without learning the details of the story that nearly cost Conde his life and had ended in the death of one Elizardo Soler. El Negro Galarraga, convinced that the rebellion in course was uncontrollable, negotiated with the mutineers that they remain in the hospital for one more hour or he would call the police. “I’ll really call them, dammit,” he insisted.
The doctor did not have to send for them, since the policemen Manuel Palacios and Miguel Duque arrived about twenty minutes later, and they asked the surgeon to forgive them for being late. Major Palacios then took the preferential chair they had reserved for him alongside the convalescent’s bed.
“How do you feel?”
“Fine, Manolo, thanks … But come on and talk already, buddy! What was the deal with Elizardo?”
“Conde, Conde, calm down,” El Negro Galarraga, who was also seated, reprimanded him. Already in so deep, the doctor was not going to miss the best part of the show. The head nurse, of course, remained to listen to the story.
“My thought is that Elizardo went crazy,” Manolo began to narrate. “When he saw that you had discovered him with the Virgin in his hands, he fired the first shot at you, and I think what saved you was that you passed out…”
“Anyone would pass out after a shot!” Conde advised. “There are people who even die and everything…”
“The problem is that I couldn’t see anything, because you had taken the flashlight, and besides, there were those thick bushes that didn’t let me see what was happening on the other side, where the tree with the hiding place was. But, Elizardo shot at you a second time. Based on the trajectory of the shot that nicked the bushes, we think the bullet went over your head because you were already falling to the ground…”
“That son of a bitch shot at me again?”
“And he was always shooting to kill. He was desperate, out of control. But that shot was the one that cost him his life. I had already taken out my gun with the first shot, and when I saw the second explosion, I fired two times in that direction and heard him yell … Since I didn’t know what happened, I approached him by making a circle, guided by the light coming from the flashlight lying on the ground, next to you. When I got to where both of you were, I saw that I had hit Elizardo twice. Once in the chest, another time in the neck … He was dying. And when I saw you immobile, with your chest full of blood, I thought that he had fucked you up…”
“So, what did you think? Poor Conde?”
“No, I thought, look at what happened to Conde for being an idiot, because right away, you started moaning and I knew you were alive, although I had no idea whether you were in serious condition … Two minutes later, Duque and his people arrived and we ran out of there with you … Duque took you out of there over his shoulder … Look at his face…”
Conde and the other listeners looked over at the lieutenant. Like the night before, his face looked like that of the last Mohican or the Lion King: the orange lines of disinfectant crossed in all directions.
“Duque picked you up and carried you out. The marabú needles nearly ripped him to pieces … They had to bathe his wounds in thimerosal and give him a tetanus shot.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Conde said.
“There’s no reason to thank me,” Duque responded coarsely, almost as a reflex.
“Today, Sergeant Calixto was able to find some of Elizardo’s medical records … He has a psychiatric file that could serve as the basis for a doctoral thesis.”
“I knew it,” Conde muttered. “The guy was an explosive mix of mad and son of a bitch.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted to kill him,” Manolo muttered. “I shot as a reflex … I thought he had killed you…”
“I would have done the same, Manolo,” Conde tried to console him. “And the son of a bitch really did try to kill me…”
“In any event, there will be an investigation. The prosecutors love to sit us in a chair and dig into the dirt … I’m sure they’re going to call on you to make a declaration and—”
“What about the Virgin?” Carlos then interrupted, with his usual gesture of waving his hands to make way. “What the hell happened to the Virgin?”
“We have Her at headquarters. And we know what we know,” Manolo said, Socratically. “Raydel stole Her and gave Her to Ramiro for safekeeping or hid Her himself. Perhaps, they had thought of leaving Cuba together … But we can’t ask either one if Elizardo was behind the theft. I would say he was…”
“So would I,” Conde remarked. “Raydel lived like a prince at Bobby’s side and stole the Virgin because someone proposed buying Her from him, thinking that the kid was easy to trick. And that had to have been Elizardo … Although it doesn’t make much sense to me that a guy who lived like Elizardo did, who had everything he had, would get involved in organizing this theft. No matter how mad he was…”
“Experts say that the Virgin is medieval and authentic and that She’s worth … between two and three million euros,” Lieutenant Miguel Duque advised them.
“Daaaaamn!” the Pigeon let loose. “That’s real money to Elizardo, and to anyone…”
“Well, three million … would drive even the sanest person crazy,” Conde surmised. “And Eli wanted to be rich like his grandfather Sarrá … He stole the family sculptures from the cemetery…”
“The logical thing would be for Raydel to steal the Virgin and for Elizardo to pay him some money and then get him out of Cuba. That must’ve been the agreement. When Raydel already had the Virgin, Elizardo put together the show of the purchase and the clandestine exit via the coast … But he thought he could recover the Virgin with very little or no money and fuck over Raydel in the meantime. All of this got tangled up when the kid showed up without the Virgin and almost certainly asked for more money because he had known what She could be worth for a while … And that was when Elizardo went crazy, as Conde says…”
“The crazy son of a bitch,” the wounded man added. “He tortured Ray to get out of him where he was keeping the Virgin, the kid told him Ramiro the Cloak had Her, and then he killed him. He waited a few days, to see what was happening, or because he became afraid … And when he finally went to take Her or buy Her from Ramiro, I arrived…”
Manolo nodded. “I imagine that when he knocked you out with the blow to the head, he got the detail out of Ramiro about where the Virgin was and killed him. It’s a miracle he didn’t kill you that day as well.”
“What a fucking guy!” Carlos exclaimed. “So why do you think he didn’t knock off Conde, too?”
“Because Super Pigeon arrived!” Yoyi said, carrying out the gesture of opening his shirt and showing off his prominent sternum.
“I imagine that’s it,” Manolo admitted. “He didn’t have time … Or he got scared. Or he thought that Conde was still a policeman, and killing a policeman always complicates things much more…”
“What doesn’t click for me is that he preferred to leave the Virgin where She was hiding,” Candito commented. “You could have found Her…”
“I’m sure he thought that was the best hiding place,” Manolo proposed. “And that if someone, us or Conde, found Her, he would not even have touched Her. He would lose the Virgin, but be saved from anything else … Two dead guys changed everything … No, it wasn’t a bad idea to leave Her there. Worst case, he merely lost what he had never had…”
“Yes, that could be,” Conde commented. “That possibility sounds good … Which means he wasn’t crazy at all. He left it in that tree, but things got difficult and he decided to pick Her up and leave with Her … What stirred up the wasp’s nest was the arrival of the Catalan Puigventós … Did Elizardo really mean to kill him as well?”
“If it was Elizardo who called him to the Catalan Hermitage in Matanzas … It was to kill him as well. And I can’t think of any other person besides Elizardo who could have called the Catalan to go to Matanzas, and have him go running so happily there. Maybe that story about a certain Roger Flor calling him was something he made up.”
“So, what about the rest of them, Manolo? Bobby, Karla, René Águila, Puigventós?”
“They’re a bunch of liars and thieves, but we let them go already. If any of them was in cahoots with Elizardo Soler in any part of this story, I don’t think we’ll be able to find out. Luckily for them, Elizardo took all of this shit to his grave … And none of them is going to accuse themselves of having any role in the story.”
“So what happens with the Virgin now?” Conde continued.
“She’s the only one who remains in prison.”
“You’re not going to return Her to Bobby?”
“That’s not up to the police anymore, Conde. And you know that…” Manolo made the gesture of pointing up, in search of the highest stratosphere. “Now the folks in the Foreign Ministry are in touch with the ones from Spanish Patrimony. Since it seems that the Virgin disappeared in Spain during the Civil War, they had assumed She’d been destroyed and they’re looking for documentation … I can’t imagine what comes next. If he’s very lucky, after this whole story is investigated, your friend Bobby could end up recovering Her, but I don’t think so…”
“Are you listening, Yoyi?” Conde said to his business partner.
“Well, the party’s over…” Doctor Galarraga interrupted after looking at his watch. “Conde has to rest. Tomorrow morning, I’ll evaluate him and see if I can release him … Who is staying with him today?”
“I am.” Yoyi the Pigeon leaped forward, without giving the rest of them a chance. “Conde and I have to talk. And that way, I’ll take him early tomorrow if you release him … We’ve got to save gas, right?”
The farewell process lasted half an hour, in the best Cuban style. When they were finally alone, Conde merely looked at Yoyi.
“I already told you I would take care of Bobby … You found the Virgin. Mission accomplished.”
“You think?” Conde asked, who didn’t believe it. No, not when they were dealing with Bobby.
When he performed the clinical exam the following morning, Doctor Galarraga decided that the wounded man could leave, under the condition of continuing to take antibiotics and under strict orders to rest for the next seven days, when he would evaluate him again. Tamara, who had come to listen to the diagnostic, and Yoyi, awaiting the medical judgment to take Conde in his Chevy Bel Air, nodded at the surgeon’s request. Then they heard the question about alcohol that Conde was posing to his former classmate. With his finger raised, his eyes shining in his very black face, Doctor Galarraga proclaimed:
“Not one, Conde, not even one drink … You’re taking antibiotics … You cannot drink until … Until,” the doctor was thinking. “Until your birthday. On October ninth, I will lift the prohibition. Is that clear?”