Lando started to gesture as if in protest, but said nothing. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t credit his ears. The Count leaned forward off the wall and crushed his cigarette on the floor. He took a step towards the table and looked at Lando.
“Orlando, you’re in a dicey situation, you know?”
“But I know nothing about any dead woman.”
“Didn’t you know Lissette Núñez Delgado?”
“Lissette? No, I know a Lissette who left sometime ago. She landed an Italian and found herself a better life. She lives in Milan now.”
“But a joint made from the marijuana you’ve been peddling was found in the house of the Lissette I’m referring to.”
“Look, general, I’m sorry but I don’t know that woman and haven’t been peddling anything, I swear… Do you want me to swear an oath?”
“No, that won’t be necessary, Orlando, it’s easy to prove. An identity parade with the two dealers we’ve pulled in can do the trick. They’ll identify you because they’re dying to get a few years knocked off their sentence. Tell me something, did you sell marijuana to anyone involved in La Víbora Pre-Uni?”
“At Pre-Uni? No, I’ve never been involved with that place…”
“Then tell me about Caridad Delgado.”
“Never heard of her.”
Conde found another cigarette in his pocket and lit up slowly. Lando the Russian wasn’t going to admit to his connection with drugs, especially if he’d had any kind of relationship with Lissette. But he went on, chasing his only tangible lead: “Orlando, this isn’t the first time you’ve had problems with us and we really don’t like seeing the same faces returning, you get me? We don’t like you giving us so much to do. But at the end of the day we do our homework. You’ll be here until we know the hour your great-great-grandfather was born and the rest, because you’ll tell us. Now tell us what you know about Lissette Núñez, and the marijuana that ended up at her place or should we meet again at twelve after the late-night film?”
Lando the Russian scratched his chin again, shaking his head. His eyes had darkened another degree and his look was despairingly opaque.
“I swear to you, general, I know nothing about any of that,” he said and shook his head again. At that moment the Count would have given anything to know what lay under the apocryphal Russian’s crop of fair hair that danced to the endless shaking of his head.
“Come on, Manolo. See you later, Orlando, and thanks for the promotion to general.”
La vie en rose, sang Bola de Nieve, taking a chance with his French and openly challenging Edith Piaf. Terrific, the Count muttered and tried to think for a moment: interrogation cubicles provoke a feeling of enclosure that nurtures confessions. They are the anteroom to trial and prison, and finding yourself defenceless there can be a burden that’s hard to bear. To leave those four cold, oppressive walls is like a resurrection. But the presence of a policeman in an everyday environment can trigger the unexpected: fear and suspicion spring up with the need to conceal that undesirable apparition from others, and sometimes such fears cause the hare to make the necessary leap. Tra-la-la, he hummed. No stopping this policeman: and he decided he’d go and see the head teacher on home territory. He’d go back to Pre-Uni. A very vague idea had come to him while talking to Lando, and he’d suggested to Manolo they should go and converse with the head.
It was a benign Monday morning outside headquarters. The wind had declared a truce and a resolutely summery sun varnished the city streets. Manolo had tuned into a programme dedicated to Bola de Nieve on the radio and the Count decided to concentrate on the voice and piano of the man who was the song he sang: he was singing ‘La Flor de la Canela’, ‘with jasmine in her hair and roses on her face…’ and the lieutenant remembered the unexpected end to his last meeting with Karina. He saw himself disarmed, without arguments to prevent her departure, when she was dressed and saying goodbye on his doorstep and, looking more like a whinging kid than a pursuer of myths, he felt like stamping the ground. Why was she leaving him? The wholehearted surrender of that woman transformed by the sharp scent of sex didn’t fit with the unbridgeable distance she’d then imposed. From the start he’d thought he should have talked more, got to know and understand her, but what with his desperate monologues and the sexual conflagrations that absorbed them, there’d hardly been time to breathe, recharge batteries and drink a coffee.
The car drove very close to the hospital where Jorrín lay and turned into Santa Catalina, an avenue planted with flamboyant trees and memories, parties, cinemas and emotional discoveries of every kind, a vie en rose that seemed increasingly remote in his memory, locked in a time that was lost for ever, like paradise itself. Bola de Nieve was now singing Duerme, negrito and the Count wondered: how can he sing like that? It was a melodious whisper exploring subdued, daring notes, rarely visited because of the narrowness of that final frontier between song and mere murmur. The flamboyant trees on Santa Catalina had resisted the battering from the winds, their red flowery crests a challenge to any artist. Outside the walls of headquarters life sometimes seemed normal, almost en rose.
Manolo parked to one side of Pre-Uni and switched off the radio. He yawned and his over-prominent bones shook, as he asked: “Well, where are we at?”
“The head hasn’t told us everything he knows.”
“Who ever does, Conde?”
“It’s a very peculiar case, Manolo: everybody’s lying, I don’t know if it’s to protect someone or protect themselves or because it’s a habit they can’t give up. I’m up to here with all this lying. But what I’m after now is what this man can tell us.”
“Do you think it was him?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything, but I do think he doesn’t…”
“What then?”
The Count looked at the school’s sturdy structure. He was now wondering whether he hadn’t decided to see the head simply because he wanted to return, as if eternally guilty, to the scene of his favourite crimes.
“There’s a third man in this story, Manolo. I lay my neck on it. The first one is Pupy, who’s got a lot of fingers in the pie but I don’t think he’d have dared, he’s got too much street sense to ruin it with a woman whose antics he was too familiar with. Besides, he knew how to get what he wanted from her. He’d never have strayed so far. The second is the head teacher, who has even got good reason: he was in love and probably jealous. But if his alibi stands, it would have been impossible for him to go to Lissette’s at eleven, and batter and kill her. And the third man? If there is a third, he was the one who killed her and he must have been at the party, and although Lando’s fingerprints didn’t show up in the flat, I’ve not yet ruled him out. This is how I see things right now: the party ended, the third man stayed behind and for some reason killed Lissette, because of something she did to him or refused to give him. Because he didn’t stay to rob or rape her – neither of those things happened – and it’s even possible the last one to bed her didn’t murder her. What did Lissette have to interest him? Drugs? Information?”
“Information,” replied Manolo. His eyes glinted with joy.
“Huh-huh. Information about what? About drugs?”
“No, I don’t think so. She was always a live wire but I don’t think she was part of Lando’s set up and was always careful not to burn her fingers.”
“But, just think, Caridad Delgado only lives three blocks away from Lando.”
“You think they knew each other?”
“I really don’t know. But what information could she have had?”
“She knew something.”
“Or rather something worth money, right?”