“What problems?” she asked, as if she’d heard someone blaspheme, and finally press-ganging her lips into a smile, she lifted a hand up to her chest and splayed out her fingers before launching into a convincing list. “She had it alclass="underline" a house, a career, was well integrated, was the perennially good student, had clothes, youth…”
She didn’t have enough fingers on one hand to enumerate so many blessings and possessions and two tears ran down Caridad’s wan face. As she concluded, her voice lost its sparkle and self-assurance. She doesn’t know how to cry, Conde told himself, and he felt sorry for that woman who had lost her daughter such a long time ago. The lieutenant looked at Manolo signalling him to halt the conversation there. He stubbed his cigarette out in the large, coloured glass ashtray and leaned back.
“Caridad, you must understand. We need to know what happened and we have to have this conversation.”
“Yes, I know,” she replied, flattening the wrinkles around her eyes with the back of her hand.
“What happened to Lissette wasn’t at all straightforward. They didn’t do it to steal, because as you know nothing seems to be missing from her flat, and it wasn’t simple rape, because they beat her up as well. And most alarming of alclass="underline" there was music and dancing that night at her place and they smoked marijuana in her flat.”
Caridad opened her eyes and then slowly dropped her eyelids. Something deeply instinctual led her to lift a hand up to her chest, as if trying to shield her breasts that shook beneath her jersey. She looked downcast and ten years older.
“Did Lissette take drugs?” the Count followed on determined to force through his advantage.
“No, she didn’t, how can you think such a thing?” the woman retorted, recovering some of her battered confidence. “That’s impossible. She may have had several boyfriends or been a great partygoer or got drunk occasionally but she never took drugs. What have people been saying about her? Don’t you know she’s been a comrade from the age of sixteen, and that she was always a model student? She was even a delegate to the Moscow Festival and a revolutionary from primary… You must know all that?”
“Yes we do, Caridad, but we also know the night she was killed there was marijuana smoked in her place and lots of alcohol consumed. Perhaps they took drugs and popped pills… That’s why we’re so keen to know who might have been at her party.”
“For God’s sake,” she then swore, anticipating the final fallout: a hoarse sobbing rose up from her chest, her face cracked and even her strawberry blonde resistant hair seemed like an ill-fitting wig. The poet was right, thought the Count, a man too addicted to poetic truths: that blonde was suddenly as lonely as an astronaut in the darkness of outer space.
“Do you like this area, Manolo?”
The sergeant thought for a second.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I think anybody would like living here, but I don’t know…”
“What don’t you know?”
“Nothing really, Conde, but can you imagine a downat-heel like me, who doesn’t have a car, a pedigree dog or big money in a barrio like this? Just take a look, everybody’s got a car and a beautiful house; I think that’s why it’s called Casino Deportivo: everybody here is in competition. I know the conversations off by heart: Dear neighbour and vice-minister, how often have you been abroad this year? This year? Six… And what about you, dear managing director? Oh, a mere eight times, but I didn’t bring much back: four tyres for the car, a leather leash for my toy poodle, oh, and my microwave, that’s just splendid for roasting meat… And who is more important, your husband who’s a party leader or mine who works with foreigners?…”
I don’t like this area much either,” confessed the Count as he spat out of the car window.
Red Candito was born in a tenement on Milagros, in Santos Suárez, and still lived there thirty-eight years later. Things had improved in the tenement in recent times; the death of the next-door neighbour had freed up a room they’d gained without major legal complications – “because of my ballsy father” Candito had commented – to the only room in the family’s original dwelling, and thanks to the high ceilings of that old fin-de-siècle building, devalued and turned into a rooming-house in the fifties, his father had built a wooden mezzanine reached by a ladder so it now began to seem like home: two bedrooms in the part closest to heaven, and the final fulfilment of the ancestral dream of owning their own bathroom, a kitchen and a dining room on the ground floor. Red Candito’s parents were now dead, his elder brother was into the sixth year of his eight-year sentence for violent robbery and Red’s wife had divorced him and taken their two children with her. Candito now enjoyed his extensive home with a placid, twenty-something mulatto who helped him in his work: the production of home-made women’s shoes which were permanently in demand.
The Count and Red Candito had met when the Count started at La Víbora Pre-Uni and Candito was making his third attempt to pass an eleventh grade he’d never pass. Out of the blue, one day when they’d both had the door shut in their face because they’d arrived ten minutes late, the Count handed a cigarette to that coppery raisin-coloured youth and thus sparked off a friendship that had lasted sixteen years and which Conde had always made best use of: from the night when Candito’s protection prevented people stealing his food during a school camp to the sporadic rendezvous of recent times when the Count needed advice or information.
When he saw him come in, Red Candito looked surprised. It was months since he’d had a visit and, although the Count was his friend, a visit from the policeman was never just a friendly occurrence for Candito – at least until the Count showed this one was any different.
“Well, fuck me, if it isn’t the Count,” he said after looking down the passageway and checking nobody was around, “what’s brought you to this neck of the woods?”
The lieutenant shook his hand and smiled.
“Hey, pal, how come you always look so young?”
Candito stepped back and pointed out to him one of the wrought-iron armchairs.
“Alcohol preserves me on the inside and my head, that handy gift from God, on the outside: it’s as hard as nails,” and he shouted inside. “Put the coffee on, our pal the Count’s here.”
Candito raised his hands as if asking an umpire for more time, and went over to a small wooden cabinet and extracted his personal medicine for internal conservation: he showed the Count an almost full bottle of vintage rum that stirred up the thirst provoked by Caridad Delgado’s impregnable bar. He put two glasses on the table and poured out the rum. Cuqui pulled to one side the curtain separating the living-room from the kitchen and smiled in at them.
“How’s things, Conde?”
“Here I am, waiting on my coffee. Although it’s not so urgent now,” he replied, as he took the glass Candito was offering him. The girl smiled and silently popped her head back behind the curtain.
“Hey, that girl’s a handful for you, isn’t she?”
“That’s why I get up to my tricks to bring in a few pesos,” nodded Candito tapping his pocket.
“Until the day you get caught.”
“Hey, guy, this is all legal. But if I get stuck in a corner I can send for you, can’t I?”
The Count smiled and thought that, of course, he could. Ever since he’d started working as a professional detective, Red Candito had helped him to solve various problems and both knew the Count’s helping hand in times of need was the other side of the coin. Apart from the one old debt and their years as friends, the Count muttered, as he downed a big gulp of luscious rum.
“This place is real quiet, isn’t it?”
“They gave a house to the people in the front room and it’s quieter than a morgue. Just listen to that silence, pal.”