“Lieutenant Mario Conde and Sergeant Manuel Palacios,” said the Count by way of introduction. “We’re colleagues of the captain.”
“Milagros, I’m Milagros, the wife of…”
“How is he?” asked Manolo, peering in again.
“He’s better. He’s sedated so he can sleep,” and she glanced at her watch. “I’ll wake him up. He’s got his medicine at three.”
The Count went to stop her, but she was already on her way to the sleeping form and whispering something while she stroked his forehead. Jorrín’s eyes strained to open a fraction, his eyelids flickering as he attempted a smile.
“The Count,” he said, and lifted an arm to shake the lieutenant’s hand. “How are you, sergeant?” he also greeted Manolo.
“Maestro, how could you do this? I think they’ll try you for insubordination and then shut down headquarters,” smiled the Count and forced Captain Jorrín to respond.
“Conde, even good cars end up as scrap.”
“But a new part will get them back on the road.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Tell me how you feel.”
“Strange. Very sleepy. I get nightmares… Do you realize this is the first time in my life I’ve dozed off after lunch?”
“It’s true,” said his wife, and she caressed his forehead again. “But I tell him he’s got to look after himself now. Isn’t that so, lieutenant?”
“Of course it is,” agreed the Count knowing full well the cliché was absurd: he knew that Jorrín had no desire to look after himself, he wanted to get up, go back to headquarters, and get back on the street hunting out bastards, murderers, thieves, rapists, embezzlers – because that, and not sleeping at midday, was what he was about in life, and he did it well. Everything else was a more or less slow death, but death all the same.
“How’s it going, Conde? Out with this lunatic again?”
“No alternative, maestro. I should leave him here and take you with me. Perhaps they’ll operate on him and make a human…”
“I was surprised you hadn’t called in.”
“I only just found out. The Boss told me. I’m busy on a case.”
“What are you up to?”
“Nothing out of this world. A petty theft.”
“He can’t speak for very long,” his wife piped up, now holding one of his hands. You could see the mark left by the plaster and the needle from a saline solution. Jorrín in defeat. Unbelievable, the Count told himself.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be off now. When are they going to kick you out of here, maestro?”
“I don’t know yet. In three or four days. I’ve got a case pending and I want to see…”
“Don’t worry about that now. Someone will take it on. Not as well as you, but someone will. All right then, we’ll come tomorrow. I’ll probably want to ask you a thing or two.”
“Get better, captain,” said Manolo shaking his hand.
“Make sure you do, Conde.”
“You bet, but look after yourself, maestro, not many of us good’uns left,” replied the Count, holding the old timer’s hand in his. Although he recognized a nicotine stain on the fingers that even darkened the nails, it wasn’t the tough hand he was used to and that alarmed him. “Maestro, I realized today we’d never exchanged a word outside headquarters. What a disaster!”
“A police-style disaster, Conde. But you just have to accept them. Although you know there’s no such thing as a happy policeman, that you’re a guy nobody can trust and that sometimes even your own children are scared of you because of what you stand for, although your nerves go to pieces and you’re impotent at the age of fifty…”
“What’s that you’re saying now?” his wife interjected, trying to keep him calm. “Get some rest, go on.”
“A police-style disaster, maestro. See you around,” said the Count letting go of the captain’s hand. Now the hospital reeked of suffering and of death.
“Off to the Zoo,” came the order from the Count as he got into the car, and Manolo didn’t dare ask: do you want to see the monkeys? He knew that the Count was feeling low as he lifted his matador’s cape to let him in. He switched on the engine and drove out on to Twenty-sixth Avenue and soon slowly drove the few blocks to the Zoo. “Park close to a shrub for shade.”
They left behind the ducks, pelicans, bears and monkeys and Manolo stopped the car next to an ancient poplar tree. The southern wind was still blowing and whistling insistently through the foliage in the park.
“Jorrín’s dying,” the Count commented and lit a cigarette on the fag end he’d been smoking. He looked at his fingers and wondered why they weren’t nicotinestained.
“And you’ll kill yourself if you go on smoking like that.”
“Piss off, Manolo.”
“On your head, pal.”
The Count looked to his right at a group of kids watching the skinny, aging lions that preferred not to walk, worn out by the hot breeze. The air stank of old piss and new shit.
“I’m at a loss, Manolo, because I don’t think Pupy or the head were involved in what happened on Tuesday night.”
“Look, Conde, let me tell you…”
“Go on, tell me, that’s why we’ve come here.”
“Well, the head has a good alibi and it seems to stand up. It’s his word and his wife’s, if his wife is in agreement. And if Pupy didn’t really sleep with Lissette the night she was killed, what are we left with? The party: rum, music and marijuana. That’s where it’s at, right?”
“Looks like it, but how are we going to unravel this particular skein? And what if Pupy lied to us? I don’t think he needed to set up an alibi with so many people, but then there aren’t many people with blood group O and the last person with her was that, group O.”
“Do you want me to tighten the screws on him?”
The Count threw his cigarette out the window and shut his eyes. The image of a woman dancing in the shadows came to his mind. He shook his head, as if trying to frighten that happy, inappropriate shade away. He didn’t want to mix up potential bliss with the sordid nature of work.
“Leave him with Contreras for a bit and then we’ll squeeze him some more until the juice comes out… And let’s check out the head’s story down to the last second. He’s going to find out what it is to be really scared…”
“Hey, Conde, what do you think about the Mexican tourist who was Lissette’s boyfriend? Mauricio, right?”
“Yes, so Pupy said… And the marijuana is from Central America or Mexico. Can that Mexican have given it to her?”
“Conde, Conde,” Manolo then got alarmed, and even rapped the steering-wheel. “And what if the Mexican came back?”
The lieutenant nodded. Manolo had his uses.
“Yes, that could be. We must speak to Immigration. Today. But meanwhile I’m going to have another go at unravelling the skein. Marijuana: I don’t why, but I’m sure that’s where we’ve got to go. All right, get this piece of junk moving. This zoo smells of ammonia. Anyway, I’ve always thought of zoos as being like a kick up the backside. Let’s go and call the Head of Immigration – take the coastal road.
The sea, like the enigma of death or the excesses of destiny, always provoked an obsessive fascination in the mind of Mario Conde. That dark, unfathomable expanse of blue attracted him in a way that was at once morbid and pleasant, like a dangerous woman you prefer not to flee. Others before him had felt the same secretions from that irresistible seduction and that’s why they’d responded to her siren call. Nothing in his intimate memory was at all related to the sea: he was born in a poverty-stricken, arid barrio buried deep in the city’s hinterland. But perhaps his awareness as an islander, inherited from the distant insular origins of his great-grandfather Teodoro Altarriba, alias the Count, a Canary Island swindler who crossed an ocean searching for another island far from creditors and police, was prompted by the simple vista of water and waves, of the line of the horizon where his eyes now lingered, as if he wanted to see beyond that illusory border, apparently the final frontier for all hopes. The Count, sitting by the coast, thought again of the rare perfection of the world that divided its space up to make life richer and more complex yet, at the same time, separate men and even their thoughts. At one time in his life such ideas and fascination for the sea related to a desire to travel and explore and fly over other worlds from which the ocean separated him – Alaska and its explorers and sledges, Australia, Sandokan’s Borneo – but he’d long since assumed his destiny as a man who’d downed anchor with no wind in his favour. He then settled for a dream – knowing it was only a dream – that he would at some point live facing the sea, in a house of wood and tile always exposed to the smell of the brine. In that propitious house he’d write a book – a simple, moving story about love and friendship – and devote his afternoons, after his siesta in the long porch open to breezes and dust clouds, to casting lines into the water and reflecting, as now, as the waves splashed his ankles, on the mysteries of the sea.