Manolo came over and the Count looked him in the eye. The captain gestured to Sergeant Estévañez to move away.
“It’s the fucking last straw, these forensics have more power than us these days… They’re the scientists… Wait, before we go in,” he pointed to the library. “I wanted to say a couple of things so you understand…”
“A couple of things?” asked Conde, wanting to grab Manolo by the neck of his uniform.
“Conde, I know it’s beyond you… but try… for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Do you think if I really thought you were a suspect, you’d be here with me now? Don’t take the piss… But remember the high-ups don’t know you and you’ve been a renegade as far as they’re concerned ever since you left the force…”
“Look, I don’t give a shit what the high-ups think, or the lowdowns for that matter… Anyway, go on, say what you-”
“The murderer took his knife with him, judging by the kind of gash inflicted the forensic says it’s a normal kitchen knife, sharppointed but pretty blunt.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He was killed between twelve and two this morning. That’ll be more precise after the autopsy. The murderer is right-handed-”
“Yes, I’d worked that out.”
“He was attacked from behind, and the angle of entry indicates that the murderer is about four inches shorter than Dionisio.”
Conde put the squeeze on his brain and recalled that the mysterious buyer described by Dionisio was a tall black man.
“About my height then,” the Count acknowledged.
“Another important detaiclass="underline" they cleaned the door handle. So far we’ve only found fresh fingerprints of five people…”
“Dionisio, Amalia, Yoyi, the buyer who came yesterday and myself…”
“Maybe. The footprint in the blood was Amalia’s doing, when she went to see if he was dead. They’re going to check Dionisio’s fingernails now, but I don’t think there was any fight. And we’ll take your prints, Yoyi’s and those two, and see if the fifth person’s on file.”
“What else?”
“That’s all… The high-ups want me to resolve this as soon as possible. Dionisio was in the military, part of the clandestine struggle against Batista and his friends are going to create a fuss any minute now.”
“Something they didn’t do when he was starving to death,” Conde recalled. “Dionisio worked in a corporation for two or three years and was booted out when he started to notice things he didn’t like. That was at the worst bloody moment of the Crisis… And nobody expressed any interest in him after that.”
“I’ll find out what happened in the corporation,” agreed Manolo. “OK, now let’s look at the books. See if any have gone astray…”
Manolo gave Conde a pair of nylon gloves and they went into the library, taking care not to step on the dried blood or the silhouette that had been marked out. Conde paused in the centre of the room to get an initial overall view: on the left, the section of shelves they’d yet to inspect; on the right, next to the door, the books Conde and Yoyi considered to be unsaleable, piled higgledy-piggledy on the bottom of the shelves; the books held back for a second phase in their deal, on the shelves either side of the window, also looking as if they’d been piled up in a rush; perching precariously on the shelves opposite, the three expanding piles where they’d put particularly valuable items the Count refused to let loose on the market. Almost unthinkingly he went over to the most coveted volumes, rubbed a finger twice over their spines and concluded that, if his memory wasn’t playing tricks, they were all present and correct, even the most valuable Cuban editions, each of which he remembered perfectly.
He went back to the centre of the room, closed his eyes, and tried to chase any preconceived notions from his mind. He looked around again and, apart from a few strange spaces between the books on the bottom shelves of the area they hadn’t yet inspected, he didn’t think he noticed any changes, although he regretted not scrutinizing the room more carefully the previous afternoon. At that precise moment Conde had a feeling that Dionisio or Amalia, in one of their conversations, had mentioned something crucial about the library, an important revelation now floating in his memory that he couldn’t pin down. What the hell was it? he wondered, before deciding to leave the self-interrogation until later.
Conde racked his memory as he moved towards the area they’d yet to explore, trying to recall whether at some moment Yoyi or Dionisio had taken a volume from that bookcase. Using the torch Manolo had given him he could see changes in dust levels indicating that six books had recently been removed and he noted that the remaining volumes concentrated in that section were old tomes to do with legislation, customs tariffs, trade regulations in the colonial era, and a long row of magazines specializing in business topics, all published between the thirties and fifties.
“I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think a single book is missing,” he told Manolo as he pointed out the jewels in the library, “and there are books worth several thousand dollars-”
“Did you say several thousands? For an old book? How many thousands?”
“This one,” he indicated the black spine of the Book of Sugar Mills, “could fetch ten or twelve thou in Cuba…”
“Twelve thousand dollars?” Manolo reacted in a state of shock.
“At least. And double that outside Cuba.”
“Shit,” exclaimed the Captain, shaken from head to toe by that statistic. “More or less what I’ll earn in my lifetime on my wages… They’d kill anyone for a book like that.”
“We hadn’t touched that part of the library, but six books have gone missing from there. The most valuable are still here… I don’t get it. It must be a sextet of very special books…”
“What about them?…”
“We’ll ask Yoyi and Amalia, I certainly didn’t take any from there. Perhaps Dionisio… They might be somewhere else in the library or perhaps were stolen.”
“But could they be worth even more than the others?” Manolo ventured. “If there are books that could fetch twelve thousand dollars…”
“Could be, though I doubt it. The books on that side are legal and commercial, and I don’t think any would be worth that much. I reckon that’s the case because if anyone was in it to steal books and knew the trade, they’d have removed some of those we’d put aside. If you can carry six, you can carry ten… So if six were taken, it wasn’t because they’ll fetch a lot of money, but because they were valuable to someone in particular, and that could only be because of the story they told and not because they were antiques or very rare… Unless they weren’t books but manuscripts that were important for other reasons,” he concluded, thinking that cold logic threw out of court the idea that any items in the legal and commercial section should have been in a safe: although what about the extremely slim, much coveted General Tariff for the Price of Medicines believed to be the first text printed on the island?