“What’s up? You still sore?” Fabricio asked, leaning back on the bar and almost touching Mario Conde’s shoulder.
“Ask yourself the same question. You look as if you’ve got the mange.”
Fabricio reeked of cheap liquors that had fermented each other. He smiled drowsily and the Count, who knew a thing about such things, surmised he was drunk.
“You don’t change, do you, Mario Conde?”
“Nor do you apparently,” retorted the latter, making it clear he didn’t like that conversation, which could sour the pleasure of his beverage.
“I’m well and truly fucked, Mario Conde, I’m done for… I don’t even have a pistol, like you,” and, saying that, he pointed to the Count’s belt, where a weapon’s presence made itself felt.
Clearly he was well and truly fucked: the ex-policeman looked as if he was in the phase prior to delirium tremens. The Count could imagine the rest. Lieutenant Fabricio, one of the detectives at Headquarters, had always been one of those guys who liked to be a policeman because of the social distinction and everyday power the job conferred. He usually wore his uniform and stripes, and had more than once used the pistol that was now a requisitioned subject for nostalgia. In the end he’d discovered his police status brought him other advantages: more money than his monthly wage packet contained, among other things.
“It was of your own making…” the Count finally said, trying to concentrate on his rum.
“I was stitched up. I didn’t do anything. They’re sons of bitches.”
“So why did they kick you out?”
“I don’t know, you know what they’re like. Those guys are like hunting dogs: once they bite, they won’t let go, until they pull your guts out.”
“But did you or didn’t you?”
“That’s neither here nor there. Once you fall into their clutches, watch out.”
“Thanks for the advice,” said the Count, and he tried to down his last swig.
Something in his throat prevented him. The sacred ritual of swigging rum, at the knowing, grimy bar of a dive like The Two Brothers, while listening to a toothless, alcoholic black man, with the face of a boxer defeated in a thousand fights, who had begun to sing in crystalline tones a beautiful bolero written at least a hundred years ago, bore no relation to the bad vibrations and worse memories triggered by Fabricio.
“I heard they did for your buddy Rangel…”
The Count put his glass on the bar, and in the same slow, subdued key he’d used thus far addressed the other fellow, staring him in the eyes: “Hey, I don’t want to hear Rangel’s name in your filthy mouth… He got fucked because he trusted shitty types like you…”
And he tensed his muscles, ready to enter the fray. It was only his basic ethics as a drinker of alcohol that stopped him going on the offensive: the Count would never have begun a fight with a drunk and, if it weren’t filthy petulant Fabricio, with whom he had accounts to settle, he’d even have taken a first blow without reacting. But Fabricio smiled, with that sour distinctive twitch of his.
“So you’re still buddies…”
“Don’t push me any further, Fabricio.”
“No, I won’t mention your mate again… After all, he’s as fucked as I am. Did they take his pistol away too?”
He couldn’t stop himself now: the Count smiled. Fabricio felt mutilated by the absence of a weapon that fulfilled him as a man and his drunkenness was truly pathetic. He realized the guy was as dead and castrated as Miguel Forcade. Relieved by this thought, his throat opened up again and he downed the last swig of warming rum.
“You know, Fabricio, at the end of the day it has been a real pleasure talking to you. I am delighted you’re so fucked and I couldn’t care a fuck and I can’t and won’t forgive you. I’m glad to see how you bastard police end up… So stew in your own juice and don’t raise a fist, because I’ll do you in…” he concluded, letting go of his glass, moving away from the bar, and shouting from the swing door: “Hey, Padre, thanks for the liquor and keep an eye on that fellow, he’s a nark and an evil bastard, and when he was police he liked to blackmail people like you,” then went into the street, feeling he’d swept the soot from a hidden corner of his consciousness.
He watched him come in, clutching a plastic cup and spoon of calamine in his left hand and nervous indecision in his right. It was as if he didn’t know what to do with that second arm, which should be doing something and, in its enforced leisure, felt ill at ease and superfluous, as if it was in fact a third, unexpected extremity. Conversely, his face revealed a degree of satisfaction the Count attributed to the lunch he’d just downed in the canteen of the nearby factory. Adrian Riverón was finally back in his office in the Municipal Offi-Record, the hub for organizing the system of ration cards and lists of consumers that lots of people, perhaps possessed by sharp poetic imaginations, used to call Offi-Queue, packing into a desperate neologism everything engendered there: that office being the mother-begetter of all queues, a national institution forged by a demand that always overwhelmed the strict offers ruled by a ration book that had become eternal, and through which everything was distributed from cigarettes to shoes, from sugar and salt to underpants (one or two pairs a year? wondered the Count. Or none at all?).
When Adrian spotted him, all the contentment in his belly visible on his face began to evaporate, and his right arm searched for something in his shirt pocket that it didn’t find despite a thorough check.
“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”
Mario Conde muttered good afternoon, as he placed a cigarette between his lips and returned the packet to its place. He lit up, displayed deep pleasure, dragging and exhaling smoke, and said: “No, don’t worry, Adrian, nothing’s wrong,” adding, as if regretting his lack of forethought, “Sorry, I didn’t offer you one,” and taking the packet out again.
“No, thanks all the same, I don’t smoke,” said the other, with a hollow cough.
“Well, I’d like to talk to you. Can we do so in your office?”
“Of course.”
As a result of his post as the municipal director of Offi-Record, Adrian Riverón enjoyed the privilege of a small private corner in that place that once must have been a shop, bar or liquor store. It was just one of so many businesses shut down by the Revolutionary Offensive in the Sixties and then transformed into houses, offices or warehouses. Consequently, even with the fluorescent light switched on, the spot exuded a sense of claustrophobia and misery. Adrian offered him a seat opposite his desk and the Count contemplated on the wall the map of the municipality, divided into commercial districts, with little stickers registering the number of the region and quantity of consumers.
“I suppose you’re very busy?”
“We always have work: every day someone dies or is born or is divorced or has their seventh or sixty-fifth birthday and that all means we have to introduce changes on the register and add or subtract names. As you can see, very creative work.”
The Count nodded understandingly, and put out his cigarette in an earthenware ashtray.
“Adrian, I came to see you on two counts. Miriam told me you were her boyfriend thousands of years ago, as she puts it,” and he noticed how, in spite of his skin’s reddish hue, Adrian turned even more blood red. “And, from what I’ve seen, you are still good friends.”
“Yes, we are friends. Have been for thousands of years…” and he coughed.
“Then perhaps you can help me, because I expect you are only too aware that Miriam and her brother, Fermín Bodes, are two difficult characters. I at least am sure they know things that can shed light on Miguel’s death and for some reason they’re keeping quiet. Get my drift?”