Adrian Riverón had recovered his usual colour and, filling his lungs with air, leaned back on his swivel-chair.
“I’m not sure what exactly I can tell you, but you’re right in one thing: Miriam and Fermin are two very complicated people. Miriam’s marriage to Miguel would make a good subject for a bad novel… She was practically forced to marry him and I was removed from circulation. Miriam’s father is one of those people who make you want to throw up. He must have twelve or thirteen children, with seven or eight wives and whenever he divorces he leaves his house to his previous wife, because he knows they’ll give him another house for the next in line. He is one of those men they like to call a historic leader, and he really is that because he’s been leading whatever for thirty years, always badly, but never gets the chop.”
“I’m acquainted with such men of history.”
“Well, this fellow, who’d never done a thing for Miriam, turned up one day in that house with Miguel Forcade and apparently Miguel fancied the girclass="underline" she was seventeen and if everybody’s mad about her now, imagine her then.”
“Yes, I am,” and the Count really was imagining her.
“And old Panchín Bodes, as his friends call him, decided there and then it would be a good marriage and practically forced his daughter to marry Miguel.”
“Family agreements.”
“More like disagreements,” Adrian corrected him, coughing. “But they married Miriam off to the old man and got a good position for Fermín, who had miraculously managed to finish his degree in architecture. You know what happened after that.”
“More or less. How did you get to know them?”
“Through Fermín. He’s two years older than me, but we were in the same scholarship year and we rowed in the same team. One day I went home with him and I met Miriam there.”
“So you were a rower?”
“And still am, though I don’t compete anymore. I love being in the water.”
“So I see from the colour of your skin.”
“That’s right.”
“There’s another important aspect to Miguel’s death… he was castrated. What do you make of something like that?”
Adrian Riverón coughed again, a more prolonged salvo this time. The blood red hue of his skin deepened again and a smile came to his lips.
“What do I know about such things, Lieutenant? I reckon they have to do with abakúa blacks and santería priests? Religious business, I expect.”
“No, I don’t think so, that’s not their way, because abakúas and santeros don’t do that kind of thing… And what was Miguel Forcade after in Cuba? Did Miriam tell you?”
The municipal director of Offi-Record smiled even more expansively.
“Lieutenant, rather than investigating Miriam, who’s been a plaything of others, and Fermín, who’s a wretched son of his father, I think you should get to know Miguel Forcade a bit better. Because if he did come back for something, not even his mother would be in on the secret. You can’t imagine what kind of person Miguel Forcade was.”
“I do have some kind of an idea…”
“A rather distant one. As the youth of today say: that guy was a tricky shit. Miguel Forcade was never straight with anyone… He always deceived half of humanity and I can tell you there’s a lot of rubbish you still have to dig up about his past.”
“From what I see, you didn’t like him very much, true?”
Adrian Riverón’s cheeks turned bright red again, while his right hand, definitively at a loss, landed on the earthenware ashtray, which it placed in the middle of the table.
“No, I didn’t like him at all, but that’s not saying much, lots of people had accounts to settle with him. Lieutenant…”
“Mario Conde.”
“Of course, Mario Conde. Miguel Forcade was one of the biggest bastards on the planet and, though I don’t like to say it, the way he was killed he got his just desserts.”
Sergeant Manuel Palacios was collecting up the last grains of rice from his tray when Mario Conde entered the canteen at Headquarters. As ever, the lieutenant was astonished by his subordinate’s appetite and skill at salvaging scattered morsels of food: he squashed them with the back of his fork and lifted them to his mouth, and chewed them conscientiously.
“I told them to keep food for you,” Manolo announced when he saw him walking in.
“What’s on the menu?”
“Rice, peas and sweet potato.”
“How low we’ve sunk, comrade! You eat that sort of thing, so eat mine if you want…”
“Really, Conde?”
“Really, I make a present to you of today’s grub. And how come you got here so quickly?”
Manolo smiled, pleased by the fruits of his labour and by the thought of another trayful. “Because I found what I was looking for.”
“You’re kidding!” exclaimed the Count, even more astonished than by the four rums he’d got for the price of three.”
“No, siree. I found the deeds for the García Abreu household on Twenty-Second Street, number fifty-eight, between Fifth and Seventh.”
“And everything else?”
“That was much easier once I’d got the address in my mitt. The García Abreus left Cuba in March 1961 and the inventory of Expropriated Property is signed by Miguel Forcade in May of the same year, but there was something that surprised me: they didn’t list any paintings. So I spoke to a girl who works in the Archive, a skinny mulatta, with pert little breasts, and asked her if the document was legal and she said it was. So I explained how important paintings weren’t listed and she told me that came in an appendix, because important paintings were a Patrimony issue. So she helped me look for the appendix and we couldn’t find it anywhere… What do you make of the story so far?”
“That I’ll kill you, if you don’t get to the end quickly… And no more ‘sos’, if you don’t mind.”
“OK, so, with the inventory number she called Patrimony, to see if they had the copy of the other appendix in the archives… You know what they told her?”
“That they didn’t have it either, that it never existed, that they never saw one, that there was no appendix.”
“Elementary, my dear Conde.”
“And if there is no appendix it’s because they never filled one in and just as they sold the Matisse painting to Gómez de la Peña, they sold the rest to other people… It’s called a straight favour on the side.”
“You really think so, Conde?”
“I think that and something else, Manolo: that Miguel Forcade knew more about painting than Gómez de la Peña imagined and if that’s true, the dead man screwed the one living twenty-eight years ago.”
“But how, if he sold him a painting worth almost four million for five hundred pesos?”
“Because he sold him a painting not worth ten for well over five hundred… I bet you anything that no appendix ever existed because all the paintings found in that house were fakes and that’s why Patrimony didn’t want them. Somehow or other the García Abreus got their paintings out of Cuba and left only copies in the house that could deceive any impromptu inspector. But Miguel didn’t swallow that pill; he took advantage of the situation and sold those copies as originals. The most likely scenario is that he quoted a price to the State for a painting he registered as fake, sold like any other object, and pocketed the difference for a painting that was handed over as very valuable, which even came with the certificate of authenticity the García Abreus certainly left behind, but with the proviso it wasn’t shown for some time. Miguel Forcade wasn’t crazy about selling that Matisse on the free market, let alone the Goya and Murillo that everybody knew were in the house. Unless he had a good reason… Do you remember how the young García Abreu was an imitator of famous painters? Well if things are as I think they are, what Gómez de la Peña has in his house is by García Abreu junior and if Gómez de la Peña found out, I don’t doubt he’d cut off all Miguel Forcade had dangling. Go on, eat the other trayful, we’re leaving in half an hour…”