“So what do you reckon?”
“I expect Dionisio was so excited by the cash flow from the books that he took six he thought were very valuable and put them somewhere else or sold them behind our back and his sister’s… But that’s pure supposition. If he did do something like that, the money can’t be far away.”
“Despite what you say, perhaps those six books were valuable and the murderer settled for them, knowing you hadn’t looked at the books concerned?”
“All very plausible… Can I tell you something?” Conde observed the library silently. “When I entered this room four days ago, I had a hunch there was or is something very special here. Then when I started looking at the books, I thought it might just be that some were priceless items. I even thought there might be a manuscript or some missing piece to an unsolved puzzle… When I found the photo of the bolerista, I decided it must be that and her forgotten story… Now I’m sure it wasn’t those books or manuscript or the photo. But something that’s probably not here.”
“And what the hell might that be?”
“If I had a sixth sense… What’s more, Dionisio or his sister said something important about this library, but I can’t for the goddamn life of me remember what…”
“I’ll ask these genius scientists to tell me when those books disappeared yesterday. They can probably say if they went before or after you were working here.”
“Right you are.”
Manolo stretched his hand out and took the gloves the Count had just slipped off. The men looked each other in the eye until Manolo averted his gaze.
“It’s not right so many valuable books are kicking around here, Conde… You realize you’ve got to come with me to Headquarters? For fingerprinting and-”
“Don’t worry, Manolo. I’ll only make one request: that you’re not the one to interrogate me… Right now, as calm as I am, I’d like to take you by the neck and throttle you. You know what I’m like when I go crazy.”
Mario Conde looked round, trying to escape from Yoyi Pigeon’s imploring eyes. His temples were pounding at the degradation he was being professionally and efficiently subjected to: the forensic put each of his fingers on the inky pad in turn and lifted them, like inert fishes, on to the card set out with ten greedy spaces, where he imprinted those personal marks, prints of a man now on file, by the name of Mario Conde, alias “the Count”, born in… son of… inhabitant of… Till that precise moment, the ex-policeman had never really grasped the levels of harassment a human being suffered when experiencing that humiliating treatment, which appeared painless but was in fact similar to what cattle must feel when metal tags are attached to their ears: now, despite his obvious innocence, he’d become one more name on the handy list of people registered in police files and, with each case, his details would be run through the cold memory of a computer, in the malign hope they’d coincide with some incriminating prints.
As he used a dirty cloth to bring the colour back to his fingers, Mario Conde tortured himself thinking about the hundreds of times he’d put other men, guilty and innocent, through that same humiliating process. He suddenly grasped the reasons behind the evil, hate-filled looks he received from men he’d subjected to that ritual, because his own discoloured skin had now suffered that degradation, and he thought how he’d plied a destructive trade for far too many years. Although he’d always known the police are a necessary social evil, charged to protect and to serve – as one motto said, one of the most euphemistic ever coined – more often to repress and so protect the rights of the powerful, was their real mission in life, though it was never stated so brutally. Working hard to get his fingers spotlessly clean, Mario Conde scanned the horizons of his conscience, hoping to find some comforting evidence there that he’d been an honest cop, unable to be violent towards other men, averse to arrogance, romantically sure he was performing tasks that would help the world to become a better place, however minimally. But no such assurance came to his rescue, and he was left to sink in the mire of evidence that he had been a policeman after all – perhaps a too cerebral, if not bland example of the species – and had formed part of that uncompromising fraternity now stripped naked before him and exposing its distinctive features.
With no strength to offer resistance, he let himself be led by Sergeant Atilio Estévañez down the corridors of Central Headquarters, whose walls still echoed with stories of his miraculous solutions to complex cases he was always assigned by a mythical boss. A boss suspended for perpetuity in an underhand manner by the Internal Investigations Committee, and who went by the still unutterable name of Antonio Rangel. Had he really always been even-handed? He tried to persuade himself he had, to salvage some of his devastated self-esteem, because the Count knew they were heading to one of the rooms used for interrogations and that he was going to need massive amounts of that in there.
When he entered the oppressive cubicle, Sergeant Estévañez pointed him to a chair, behind a small formica table. Conde looked at his place, opposite where he sat when he was the interrogator, and at the mirror across the room. He imagined Manolo must have put off his conversation with Yoyi in order to sit, perhaps next to a big boss, behind that glass panel that separated the interrogation room from the room for officers and witnesses, drawing an iron line between the powerful and those stripped of all power.
“I’m sorry,” said Sergeant Estévañez, as if that were really possible, “but we have… just a few questions, more routine than anything else… Captain Palacios told me to say you’re making a statement rather than being questioned… You say that last night you were by yourself at home? Did anyone see you or ring you?…”
At that last word the sergeant was shocked to see Conde stand up, as if jet-propelled, knock his chair over, and walk towards the mirror, which he banged twice with the palm of his hand.
“Manolo, come in here.”
Conde returned to his place but, before he got there, the door opened and his former colleague came in.
“Couldn’t they talk to me elsewhere? Does it have to be in this interrogation room, like some fucking murderer?” his voice was angry and staccato. “Is he taking a statement? Don’t try to mess me around…”
“Listen, Conde, it’s different now from when we…”
“Different, my ass, my friend, my ass,” a wave of indignation restored his lost energy, sent feelings of harassment packing, and he flopped down.
“Go out for a moment, Atilio,” Manolo instructed Estévanez, then added, glancing at the mirror. “Leave me alone and switch the equipment off, right?”
Manolo waited a few seconds and rested one buttock on the edge of the table, as he used to in the old days.
“Calm down, for fuck’s sake…”
“No, I won’t. I’ve spent too much time in a state of calm. Now I’m going to defend myself.”
Manolo sighed, clicked his tongue and shook his head.
“Will you let me say how much I regret this?”
‘No,” the Count answered, not looking at him. “You must be kidding.”