In his years in the force, Mario Conde suffered immensely when an investigation led him to that Havana backwater where nobody had ever known, seen or heard anything, where people poured their hatred into scornful looks they directed at the representatives of a distant establishment that always repressed them. Violence, the means to vent chronic frustration, was the everyday currency used to repay debts or insults and lawlessness had long ruled that ravaged territory, where to be frail was the worst illness imaginable.
Since the day he’d entered the book trade, the Count hadn’t been back to that rough corner of the city: he knew in advance he’d have been wasting his time – and would perhaps have lost his wallet, shoes and other bodily possessions – if he’d dared to meander down its streets, searching suspiciously for something as exotic as a book for sale. Consequently, although he’d assumed the darkest days of the Crisis must have decimated that Bermuda triangle, he hadn’t imagined how hard the degeneration from the years of the worst shortages – bad times the country had now supposedly overcome – had hit.
Conde abandoned his taxi at the miserable, downtrodden crossroads of Cuatro Caminos – that once mythical location, where a restaurant stood on each corner, competing in quality and prices with its equidistant colleagues – and walked down a couple of alleyways in search of calle Esperanza. He immediately began to understand Yoyi Pigeon’s claim that Chinatown was only the first circle in the urban hell, because a first glance made it clear he was penetrating the heart of a world of darkness, a shadowy bottomless pit that was barely held in check by any wall. Breathing that atmosphere of hidden danger, he progressed through a labyrinth of impassable streets, like a city ravaged by war, strewn with potholes and debris, tottering buildings, cracked beyond repair, propped up by wooden supports rotted by sun and rain, containers overflowing with putrefying mountains of rubbish, where two men, still in their youth, sniffed after any recyclable bounty. Packs of mangy dogs wandered about, with nothing in their stomachs to shit on the street, alongside raucous sellers of avocados, brooms, clothes pegs, piles of torches, second-hand lavatories and wood for cooking; next to hard-faced women, sharp as knives, all geared up in lycra Bermudas that got tighter and tighter, ideal garments for emphasizing the quality of the nipples and sex on proud display. The feeling that he was crossing the borders a land of chaos warned him he was witnessing a world on the brink of an Apocalypse that it would be difficult to escape.
No sooner was he past those borders than Conde realized he’d set himself an almost impossible mission. None of the ploys he’d considered – introducing himself as a journalist, a distant relation of someone, a public health officer looking for an AIDS victim, or a desperate hunter after rented rooms – was going to help once he’d asked his initial questions and revealed his real concerns. So, his only chance of finding the faint trail of Elsa Contreras, Lotus Flower the dancer, resident in the area as Silvano Quintero had recalled – was the hope that his old informant Juan Serrano Ballester, alias Juan the African, was around in the barrio and not in prison – his normal location.
When he was in front of the tenement in the dead-end callejón Alambique where Juan the African had been born and lived the few years of freedom he’d enjoyed in his lamentable existence, Conde was pleased to see nobody in the entrance. He immediately wondered why that man had bothered to spend his life stealing, defrauding and looting if it’d never got him beyond that elemental state: it was a three-storey building from the beginning of the twentieth century and its sombre, balcony-less façade strongly resembled that of a prison. Where there’d once been a front door supposedly separating the street from the passage and stairs leading to the higher flats, only a gaping hole now remained, and the Count imagined how, in the direst days of the Crisis, the wooden frame and door must been sacrificed to a wood-burning stove. Steam from pig shit and urine rose from the floor, while equally fetid water dripped down the stairs, no doubt leaking from dilapidated sewage pipes. Juan lived on the third floor of that phalanstery, in a half room he managed to retain after ceding the remainder of an already oppressive flat to the country girl from Guantanamo who’d borne him twins. As the room was at the back of the building, you had to negotiate a narrow door-lined passage, one part of which had collapsed in some remote prehistoric era and been replaced by two planks that gave access to the back rooms. The Count filled his lungs to avoid taking a breath on his journey across the planks, arms spread like an intrepid tightrope walker. When he was finally opposite the door the African had added to the passage, Conde wondered whether his stubborn quest for the truth about the fate of a lost songstress made any sense at all, and again logic said it didn’t, though something inexplicable compelled him to knock on the door.
When Juan recognized him he almost fainted. He was only two months out from his last stay behind bars, after a three-year sentence for repeated fraud. Seeing that policeman from a dark corner of his past in his house could only signal impending disaster.
“Don’t be scared, for fuck’s sake, I’m not in the police any more,” the Count quickly explained, while the other man shook a jet-black head profiled like a Dahomey sculpture. “I swear, man, I’ve been out more than ten years…”
“You swear on your mother?” the African said threateningly, sure nobody would take his mother’s name in vain unless it was a very last resort.
“I swear on my mother,” the Count replied, reminded of Yoyi and his oaths. “I need your help: I can pay cash,” he added, tapping his pocket.
“Did they kick you out of the police?”
“No, I left because I wanted out.”
The African half shut his eyes to process that information.
“I get it: now you work for foreigners and run one of those so-called corporations, right? You getting lots of the green’uns?”
“I don’t run a thing. Can I come in?”
“Swear again you’re not a policeman. Come on, swear on your children, who you’ll find dead when you get home if you’re lying…”
“I swear.”
In his peculiar situation, the Count had decided it was better to tell the African the truth, or at least part of the truth related to his search for the lost past of Violeta del Río, however incredible it might seem to a rational ear. While he told the story, he tried to imagine how his ex-informant could help him, but he’d only just started to say why he was so interested, when the man dashed his hopes of a quick fix by stating he knew the names of every stray dog in the barrio, but had never heard of Elsa Contreras, let alone any Lotus Flower.
“You’re fucked. I can’t help you,” Juan concluded, a happy smile in his bloodshot eyes, no doubt pleased to think that, now he could be no help, the Count would beat a quick retreat back the way he’d come.
“I need to be sure that woman doesn’t live around here. I’ve got to talk to someone who really knows this barrio. Or don’t you want to earn yourself a few pesos? Look, can’t you introduce me as your ex’s cousin who’s going to spend a few days with you… I don’t know, because I’ve just got out of the clink, OK?”
The African laughed, almost roared.