“But not a word about the Buddha. The theft couldn’t have been a put-up job like Chavarría’s, because after Cuban independence the Rivas had become the legal owners of the treasure and had no need to hide it, indeed, it was their misfortune that they did quite the opposite.
“Yes, the Revolution triumphed and from January 1959 the Cuban bourgeoisie began to emigrate to the United States, Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, taking with them anything they could. Some dallied a little longer and their lingering cost them dear: they could leave Cuba, but the government confiscated everything it considered part of the nation’s cultural patrimony and passed it into the hands of the State. Consequently, many people must have left real fortunes behind them: they didn’t always surrender them, though, but sought out every possible means to hide them so they could later take them out via an alternative route or recover them, if as they anticipated, the Revolution didn’t hold out for very long… But what you are imagining, Lieutenant, didn’t happen: Miguel didn’t steal in that way… be patient, the best is yet to come… or the worst, you will have to tell me.
“One of those Cuban bourgeois families was the Mena y Carbó family, who by chance lived only three blocks from the former residence of Alcides Guevara and Zenaida Riva… They fled Cuba in October 1960, leaving Señor Patricio Mena’s spinster aunt in the house. But that aunt, who was only fifty and lived comfortably on the income assigned her as a result of the Urban Reform requisitions, died suddenly in January 1962 leaving no heirs on the island, and consequently the house was also inventoried by the government and the objects of value it contained were expropriated as goods of the State, and my son Miguel was in charge… In reality, there weren’t many objects in the house of any importance: the mahogany furniture, a few Chinese porcelain vases of little merit, and that beautiful desk that caught your attention, which does have a special worth, though little appreciated by non-connoisseurs: it is the work of a pupil of Boulle, the famous French cabinet-maker who created a whole school for building cupboards and desks, which were particularly noteworthy because they had hidden compartments that could be barely detected if you compared the exterior and interior dimensions of the piece of furniture.
“It was just another bureau as it was for everybody else and Miguel knew I needed one for my papers and decided to buy it and give it to me as a present; we brought it here and found a suitable spot in that corner… As you already know I am a scientist, and I told you that I believe in God and the Virgin, didn’t I? Well, it was that combination that led me to look for references to the style of my strange bureau and hence I came across Boulle and his practice of constructing quasi-invisible secret compartments. And I thought if this piece of furniture belonged to that school, it might also have such a compartment and I decided to find it. Do you know what? I had to search for three days, groping, measuring, tapping the bottom, and when I was almost sure no such hiding-place existed, I decided to push back a flange at the back of the drawer on the left, and when I tapped it I heard a slight whirr in the wood: almost unawares I had found the spring to lift up the two boards forming the drawer bottom, where someone had built a small cavity in which I found two pieces of paper: a handwritten love poem, with no title or author’s name, and most certainly deficient in literary terms, and something that was clearly a map, with references to a house, a fountain, a grille and an avocado bush, and the distance in feet from each of those places to a spot marked with a cross, by the side of which a word had been written that at the time I found both enigmatic and devoid of meaning. Can you guess what it was? Of course, it’s easy now: the word written there was ‘Buddha’.
“That same night I called Miguel to this room and showed him the map. He laughed and told me it must be pirate treasure, but that he would go and investigate what was there. I didn’t see him for three days. We were very busy at the time, myself in the university and Miguel running the Department of Expropriated Property, and when I asked him he said the famous treasure was the corpse of a dog that was probably called Buddha. And we concluded that the spinster aunt who had died of a heart attack had buried her dog and kept the location alongside that poem she had written or received from an old suitor. And I forgot the whole business.
“I forgot so completely that that April day in 1978, when Miguel asked me to come up here and asked me if I remembered the map, I had to dig deep to unearth the story of a dog called Buddha and the love poem. Then Miguel told me the truth: the cross marked the place where a solid gold statue of a Buddha was buried, which he imagined to be particularly valuable not just for the gold, but in and of itself, and that a name was engraved on the marble base: Riva de la Nuez. And after telling me not to tell anyone about it, he confessed that thanks to the map in the bureau he had taken the statue from the Mena y Carbó household and since then it had been buried in the garden of this house. And he handed me a map as rudimentary as the one I’d found in the bureau sixteen years earlier. He asked me to put it back in the escritoire and said that only if something very serious happened to him that made it necessary to use the treasure should I dig it up and sell it. He also told me he intended to stay in Spain on his return from Moscow and it was then that he said if anyone ever asked me about the Buddha in the Boulle bureau, it was a sign I should give them the map and let them dig it up, for that person would take it from wherever it was hidden. And that if I died and Caruca died, my nephew Agustín, Miguel’s cousin, should inherit it, so that the bureau with the map stayed in the family.
“The row we had that night is irrelevant, as is my discomfort at the crime my son had committed and the one he was planning to commit. He had confided in me and I couldn’t betray him, and that was enough to keep me silent. What I did do was to research for years the gold Buddha that had belonged to Riva de la Nuez and put together this whole story from when it embarked on the Manila Galleon to the day the Mena y Carbós stole it or commissioned its theft in 1951 and buried it under their patio before leaving Cuba…
“In all those years I waited for someone to come at night and talk to me about the Buddha in the Boulle escritoire, but I never thought it would be Miguel who would mention it, a week ago. He explained how he had come to prepare the Buddha’s removal to the United States and that Fermín, his wife’s brother, would be responsible for taking it out on a launch, though Fermín still didn’t know what he was taking out or where it was. And he told me that truly elusive Buddha was going to be his salvation…
“Are you content, Lieutenant…? I think I’ve told you what you wanted to know: that was what Miguel came to Cuba for: to remove a fifteen-hundred-year-old Buddha that must be worth several million dollars in any art market… Please, Lieutenant, open that drawer, yes, the one on the left, and touch the protuberance at the bottom. It’s not giving? Push a little harder. Ah, finally the spring to the Buddha in the Boulle escritoire whirred into action. You know, I think I will now finally see with my own eyes that sculpture that has turned so many people crazy over so many centuries… including my son Miguel.”
Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde couldn’t recall many cases in which the prospect of a visible solution produced the emotional charge that shook him when old Alfonso Forcade pointed to the escritoire whose beauty had triggered in him a promising sense of wonder, and that, perhaps impelled by Forcade’s incisive mind, the policeman had imagined to be related to the history of the lost Buddha. Consequently, he was looking for more straightforward explanations for that excitement: perhaps his imminent liberation; perhaps the certainty his intuition was proving yet again to be his best ally: everything was food for thought. Nevertheless, the policeman was convinced that if he could get the information to lead him to a magnificent gold Buddha, shaped fifteen centuries ago by an artist whose name would now remain unknown for ever, and whose artistry had withstood every risk posed by greed and history, he had reason enough to feel that excitement now making his hands tremble as he unsuccessfully felt the bottom of the drawer and imagined Rabbit’s historical enthusiasms when he told him of that imbroglio of deceit and thieving, the weft of which was threaded by the most basic human motives, driven by ambition. That was why he took a deep breath, tried to calm his nerves, and then persisted with the silent drawer-bottom, until he finally released the spring concealed by a disciple of Boulle.