“After that row I never saw her again, fortunately… Five or six months later, she announced she was giving up singing and promptly disappeared from the scene. I was as happy as Larry: one less, another with no stamina for the fight, sleepless nights, and the struggle to get good performing and recording contracts. If she was going to marry that wealthy individual, she could put all that behind her and enjoy her good luck, because she wasn’t like me, an artist devoted night and day to my art. She was a just a bed-hopper who’d struck lucky… Later on, when I barely remembered she’d ever existed, I found out she’d committed suicide. That’s right: she killed herself… By the way, how the fuck did you come across her?”
The news of her suicide, right out of the blue, provoked a primitive response from Yoyi and sent the Count’s mind and body into a whirl. The certainty that Violeta del Río was now just a press cutting and a voice heard dimly on an old crackling 45 killed at a stroke Mario Conde’s high hopes, nourished over the two days he’d been dreaming, that he might find the mysterious, seductive woman alive: she whose image and way of singing had begun to obsess him as if were an infatuated adolescent. A wave of frustration hit him. He suddenly felt lost in the tragic final lines of a bolero: lines written to shatter expectations raised by a sultry love song.
“Where the fuck does that old man live?” enquired Yoyi when a bewildered, disappointed Count pointed him out of calle Zanja and into Rayo, in search of Silvano Quintero’s residence.
Despite a few recent cosmetic touches, Havana’s old Chinatown was still the same sordid, oppressive place. Over decades the Asians who’d come to the island had huddled together there, vainly hoping they’d find a better life, even dreaming they’d get rich, a dream that had been quickly flattened. These ancient, increasingly obsolete Chinese businesses had postponed their inevitable and natural demises, by changing into restaurants – their greasy offerings got pricier by the day – and had brought life and atmosphere to the area. But the district was still gripped by its rapid, apparently unstoppable, degeneration. It emerged from potholes in the streets brimming with stinking water, climbed over metal bins packed with detritus and scaled walls gnawing at them, and occasionally causing them to collapse. Those old buildings from the beginning of the twentieth century, many now turned into tenements where several families crammed in, had long ago shed any charm they might have once had, and unremitting decline now offered up vistas of horrific poverty. Blacks, whites, Chinese and mestizos of all bloods and beliefs lived in a poverty that didn’t discriminate between skin tone or geographical origins, putting everyone on an equal footing in a struggle to survive that made everyone aggressive and cynical, like the hopeless beings they’d become.
The B side: You’ll remember me
The knocks echoed around the house as if summoning him back from the past. Mario Conde opened his eyes but had a slippery grip on the world: he didn’t know where he was or what the time was, and was surprised his head wasn’t aching and that day was only just breaking, which was what the red numbers 6:47 flashing on his luminous watch informed him in the most obvious way possible. More bangs on the door and his brain cleared: Skinny, he thought immediately, something’s happened to Skinny – his immediate response when he received unexpected calls in the night or early morning visits. Before he got up he shouted: “Coming”, and walked towards the door, then almost collapsed when he saw the figure of Manuel Palacios looming large.
“Something happened to Skinny?” he asked, his heart thudding.
“No, don’t worry, it’s not that.”
The relief brought by the knowledge his friend was still of this world immediately gave way to indignation.
“So what the fuck are you doing here at this fucking time of day?”
“I need a few words. Aren’t you going to put the coffee on?” asked Manolo, stepping inside.
“It better be important. Go on then, come in.”
The Count went into the bathroom, urinated the usual fetid, early morning quantities, washed out his mouth and wet his face. He dragged his feet into the kitchen and put the coffee on, an unlit cigarette between his lips. With or without a hangover, dawn was the worst moment of his day, and being forced to talk was the most excruciating of tortures.
“I came to see you because…” began Manolo, but Conde’s hand cut him short.
“After a coffee,” he insisted and pulled up the underpants that were threatening to slip off his lean waist.
Conde opened the door to his terrace and saw Rubbish curled up on his mat. His belly moved slowly in and out: he was breathing. He coughed and spat in the direction of his sink. Coming back in, he picked up the faded jeans he’d abandoned to their fate the previous night, and pulled them on, leaning on a wall where he scratched his back in the process.
He handed Manolo a coffee and sat down with his big cup sipping on a liquid able to power the re-establishing of contact with himself after waking. He lit his cigarette and peered into the vaguely squinting eyes of the uniformed captain of the detective squad.
“I’ve come to see you because we’ve got problems… Big ones.”
“What’s up?” asked the Count routinely, not prompted by any real curiosity. Manolo had sought his advice over the years in a wide range of cases and the Count wondered if he’d not gone too far this time waking him up at that ungodly hour.
“Dionisio Ferrero is dead. Murdered.”
The blast hit Conde smack in the chest.
“What was that?” Conde asked, now completely awake and convinced he’d not heard him right.
“Amalia got up at three to go to the bathroom, and was surprised to see the light on in the reception room. She thought it was her brother and went to see if he was OK. She found him in the library, bleeding from the neck. He was already dead.”
Mario Conde’s brain started to process what he’d just heard at an unlikely rate of knots. The policeman he’d once been surfaced in every cell of his body, like a latent gene that had suddenly been activated.
“Did they take any books?”
“We don’t know yet. That’s why I’ve come to see you. His sister needed an injection and is quite groggy.”
“We gave them loads of money yesterday.”
“Amalia says none is missing, it was under her mattress.”
“Let me have a quick wash and get dressed,” replied the Count, picking up the shoes he’d worn the day before. He took a shirt from his wardrobe and, as it fell over his shoulders, the real reason for Captain Manuel Palacios’s early morning call finally struck him. He padded back to the living room, where Manolo was smoking, deep in thought.
“Manolo… why did you come here?”
The detective stared at his former colleague his eyes more free-floating than ever. He looked at the cigarette he was puffing between his fingers and whispered: “Right now you and Yoyi are the main suspects. I hate to say it, but you do understand why, don’t you, Conde?”
The first spurts of blood, pumped by his heart, had hit the bottom right corner of the mirrored door, and the stains ran into those created by leaking mercury, trailing down and drawing elusive abstract art shapes, that joined and extended the pool still being fed by the last secretions from the body that had fallen to the ground. A blackish puddle had coagulated, forming a narrow-mouthed bay on the chessboard tiles, its shores opening out to the interior of the library. The chalk line marked out Dionisio Ferrero’s final position, and the first thing to catch the Count’s eye was that he’d died with his hands splayed open. Or had someone prised something out of them?
While Manolo argued in one corner of the room with the forensic doctor who’d ordered the body to be moved without his authorization, Mario Conde, under the scrutiny of a sergeant who’d been introduced as Atilio Estévañez, began to think the situation through. Apparently, Dionisio had been stabbed from behind by someone still in the library. If that were the case, it must have been a person Dionisio wasn’t expecting to attack him, otherwise he wouldn’t have turned round so tamely, and left his rearguard unprotected, as any manual of war would point out. He clearly knew his aggressor, a right-handed one at that, judging by the slash on that side of his neck. Whoever the murderer was, he’d been intent on killing his man. If it had been a fight that had got out of hand, he might have stabbed him in the back first, but the killer had gone straight for his neck arteries, trying to murder him at a stroke and simultaneously choke and silence him with the flow of blood. The idea that the murderer was someone familiar to Dionisio was supported by the fact that no door into the house had been forced, which meant, the ex-policeman presumed, that the man had opened the door to his own executioner. The only feasible explanation, among those the Count ran through, was that Dionisio, enticed by figures he’d heard in recent days, had started negotiating with someone behind his sister’s back, possibly the mysterious buyer who’d put in an appearance the previous day, as if out of the blue, or someone similar, who wasn’t even known to Amalia. The probable absence of particular books might clarify the motivation for the crime, although that spelt danger for the murderer: the missing items would be clues that could be easily tracked down.