“You really think it’s not relevant?”
“Get a move on, catch the green light,” he countered, pointing to the traffic light onto Boyeros and the El Cerro highway.
The Count lit another cigarette, coughed a couple of times and put Rafael Morín’s photo back in his file. The memory of Tamara telling them of her forthcoming marriage to Rafael had resurrected itself violently and unexpectedly. He could now see the three white stripes on her tunic, her stockings rolled down round her ankles and hair cut in a symmetrical oval. After they’d left high school they’d seen each other barely four or five times, and each time the mere sight of her and her female sensual allure made his skin tingle. They were progressing along the Santa Catalina highway, but the Count wasn’t looking at the houses where some of his old school friends lived or the welltrimmed gardens or tranquillity in that eternally tranquil barrio where he’d partied so often with Skinny and Rabbit. He was thinking of another party, Tamara and Aymaras’ fifteenth birthday party, almost at the start of the second year at high school, on the second of November, his memory recalled to the day, and the big impression made on him by the house where the girls lived. The garden was like a well kept English park: there was room for tables under the trees, on the lawn and next to the fountain where an old statue of an angel, rescued from some collapsing colonial establishment, pissed on lilies in full bloom. There was even a space where the Gnomes could play, the best, most famous, most expensive of the combos in La Víbora, and more than a hundred couples danced; there were bouquets for every girl and trays of meat croquettes, meat pies and fried cheese balls that were unimaginable in those years of perpetual queues. The twins’ parents, ambassadors in London at the time and previously in Brussels and Prague and later Madrid, knew how to throw a party. And Skinny, Rabbit, Andrés and himself were sure they’d never been to a better one. A bottle of rum to each table! “It’s like a party in another country,” pronounced Rabbit, and they all agreed. Then he thought how even the great, great Gatsby would have enjoyed that gala do. In conquistador mode, Rafael Morín spent the whole night dancing with Tamara, and the Count could still remember the twins’ white lace dresses flying though the air to the inevitable “Blue Danube”: a white dress that for him was black and backstitched entirely in grey.
“Park there,” he ordered the sergeant when they crossed Mayía Rodríguez, and he threw his cigarette end on the road. There on the opposite pavement, right on the corner, stood the two-storey house where the twins had lived, a spectacular house splendid with large swathes of dark glass and red brick and a wall around a professionally manicured garden at the right height not to hide the line of concrete sculptures that denoted the shaping hand of a Wifredo Lam.
“This is it,” exclaimed Manolo. “Whenever I drove by here I’d stare at that house and think how I’d like to have lived in a house like that. I even started to think there’d never be problems with the police in such a place and that I’d never get to see the inside.”
“Well, it’s no house for policemen.”
“It was given to him, I suppose.”
“No, not this time. It belonged to his wife’s parents.”
“What can life be like in this kind of house, Conde?”
“Different… Hey, Manolo, wait a minute. There’s an idea I want to work on: the party on the thirty-first. Rafael Morín disappeared after going to that party. Something may have happened there that impacts on all this business, because I’m not into coincidences. I want to ask you a favour.”
Manolo smiled and struck the steering wheel with both hands.
“The Count asking me for a favour? Of a personal or work nature? Go ahead, I’ll be pleased to do anything for you.”
“Hey, shut that trap and let me interview Tamara. I’ve known her for some time, and I think I can handle her better like that. That’s the favour: not much to ask, is it? You can tell me later of any thoughts that may come to you. OK?”
“OK, Conde, it’s not a problem,” the sergeant replied, preparing to make a sacrifice in order to be present at what he guessed would be a settling of accounts with the past. As he locked the car Manolo saw the Count cross the road and disappear between the box-hedges and the head of a terrified concrete horse that seemed more Picasso than Lam. At any rate, that house continued to be far beyond the reach of any policeman.
Her eyes were two classic almonds, polished and slightly moist. Just the minimum to suggest they really were two eyes that might even shed tears. A lock of her artificially curled hair twisted down over her forehead, almost engulfing her thick, very high eyebrows. Her mouth attempted to smile, in fact did so, and her dazzlingly white teeth, like a healthy animal’s, deserved the reward of a broad smile. She didn’t look thirtythree, he thought as he stood in front of his former schoolmate. Nobody would believe she’d given birth, could still perform ballet pirouettes, although she was now clearly more in control of her profound beauty: rounded, exuberant and provocative, and at the peak of her bodily charms. She could still get into her school tunic and tight-clinging blouse, he thought as he tightened the pistol in his belt and introduced Sergeant Manuel Palacios, whose eyes were bulging out of their sockets. The Count wanted to leave as soon as he sat down on the sofa next to Tamara and she pointed Manolo to an armchair.
She was wearing a gaudy yellow loose-fitting dress, and he noted she was not at all unnerved: even wrapped in that garish colour she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, and now he didn’t want to leave but to stretch an arm out when she stood up.
“Well, life is full of surprises, isn’t it?” she remarked. “Wait a minute while I get you some coffee.”
She walked towards the passage, and he observed the movement of her buttocks under the fine yellow material. He followed the faint outline of her knickers on her thighs and exchanged glances with an almost panting Manolo. He recalled how that memorable bum had led to lots of tears when her ballet teacher inevitably advised her to revisit her artistic ambitions: those earth-shaking hips, fleshy buttocks and rounded thighs weren’t a sylph’s or a swan’s, but rather an egglaying goose’s, and she’d suggested an immediate transfer to a sweaty, liquor-laden rumba beat.
“A sad fate, right?” he commented, and Manolo shrugged his shoulders and prepared to investigate that inexplicable sadness when she came back and forced him to look at her.
“Mima’s just made it, it’s still hot,” she assured them, offering a cup first to Manolo and then to himself. “Incredible, the Count in person. By now you must be a major or captain? Right, Mario?”
“Lieutenant, and sometimes I wonder how,” he replied, tasting the coffee but not daring to add: It’s good coffee, bloody hell, especially for friends; it really was the best coffee he’d tasted in years.
“Who would have thought you’d ever join the police?”
“Nobody, I reckon.”
“This guy was a right character,” she told Manolo and looked back at him. “You were never named as an exemplary pupil because you wouldn’t join in the right activities and always bunked off the last classes to go and listen to episodes of Guaytabó. I still remember that.”
“But I got good marks.”
She couldn’t repress a smile. The flow of memories between them jumped over the bad moments, erased by time, and only touched down on happy days, memorable events or incidents that had improved with hindsight. She even looked more beautifuclass="underline" that can’t be true.
“You don’t write these days, Mario?”
“No, not anymore. But one day,” he responded uneasily. “And what’s become of your sister?”
“Aymara’s in Milan. She went for five years with her husband, who’s a representative for Cuban Export. Her new husband, you know?”