“Clear as water, Conde.”
The lieutenant left the foyer in the administration wing without saying goodbye to a defeated, almost pathetic headmaster. He walked down one of the long side corridors and turned to the right and walked to the end. Halfway down one passage he looked out over the parapet and found it had hardly changed: he put one leg over the wall, dropped on to an eave and, as he’d done day after day for a year, scrambled down the wall bars to get into the PE yard. As ever, freedom and the street were but one step away. And the Count ran as if the very fate of the bold Guaytabó was at stake in his mortal struggle against Anatolio, the cunning Turk, or Supanqui, the fearsome Indian. Then he heard someone whistle.
The author of that summons had followed in his footsteps, jumped over the wall, shinned down the bars and now ran over to him.
“I saw you through the window and asked to be allowed to go to the lavatory,” announced José Luis and his rickety, chain-smoker’s chest shook from the effort and his coughing.
“Let’s go into the street,” suggested the Count and they walked towards the laurels growing at the back of Pre-Uni. “How are you?” he asked offering him a cigarette.
“Fine, fine,” he said, but he was nervous and looked back twice at the building he’d just left.
“You’d rather we left here?”
The youth thought for a second and said: “Yes, let’s sit down round the corner.”
“Skinny and me,” thought the Count and he chose the wall of the liquor shop where Skinny and he used to sit after their PE lessons.
“Well, what happened?”
José Luis threw his cigarette at the street and rubbed his hands as if he were cold.
“Nothing really, lieutenant, I’ve been thinking about the mess you told me about the other day and the fact that someone’s dead and I started to think…”
“And?”
“Nothing, lieutenant, I’ve…” he repeated himself and looked back at Pre-Uni. “Things happen you probably don’t know about. There are many people here up to their necks in it, and the trick is to keep your head down and not get into trouble. That’s why everybody will tell you Lissette the teacher was real nice.”
“I don’t get you, José Luis.”
The boy forced a smile.
“Don’t make it difficult for me, lieutenant, it’s not easy saying this: she used to pass everyone… She’d do revisions two or three days before the exam and would include the same exercises that would be in the exams. You get me? Well, she’d change a percentage here, an element or formula there, but it was basically the same and the whole class went crazy and got top marks.”
“Do lots of people know about this? Didn’t anyone ever tell the headmaster, for example?”
“I don’t know, lieutenant. I think a young girl may have mentioned it in a Young Communist meeting, but as I don’t belong… I don’t know if they talked about it anywhere else.”
“And what else did she do?”
“Well, things other teachers didn’t do. She’d go to parties with people from her class, or from the barrio, and dance with us and lay the odd one, well, you know…”
“Well, she wasn’t much older than you people.”
“Yes, that’s true. But sometimes she’d go one clinch too far. And she was a teacher, wasn’t she?”
The Count looked at the fragment of Pre-Uni you could see through the foliage. Going to bed with a teacher had always been the number one dream of the pupils who’d passed through its portals over fifty years; even he’d dreamed about his literature teacher and told himself she was Cortázar’s Maga. He looked at José Luis: it would be too much to ask, he thought, but he asked anyway: “Which pupil was going to bed with her?”
José Luis turned his head, as if caught in a sudden draught. Rubbed his hands together again and swung his foot to and fro.
“I don’t know, lieutenant.”
The Count placed his hand on his thigh and stopped his leg from swinging.
“Yes, you do, José Luis, and you’re going to tell me.”
“I really don’t, lieutenant,” the skinny youth protested and tried to sound sure of himself again, “I wasn’t one of her little gang.”
“Look,” said the Count taking his battered notebook out of his back pocket. “Let’s do one thing. Trust me: nobody will ever know we talked about this. Ever. Write down the names of her little gang. Do me this favour, José Luis, because if one of them had anything to do with Lissette’s death and you don’t help me, you’ll never forgive yourself later on. Help me,” the Count repeated, as he handed the youth his notebook and pen. José Luis shook his head, as if to say, “Why the fuck did I ever leave that classroom?”
If they were the last act of the Creation, after six days in which God experimented in every imaginable way and created out of nothing heaven and earth, plants and animals, rivers and woods, and even man himself, that wretch Adam, women must be the most perfect, most considered invention in the universe, starting with Eve herself, who had showed herself to be much wiser and able than Adam. That’s why they have all the questions and all the answers, and I’m just one truth and one doubt: I’m in love, but, but with a woman I can’t get to know. Really, Karina, who are you?
The Count peered over the balcony and gazed at the restless contours of Santos Suárez, focussing on the spot on the horizon where he’d located Karina’s house. The need to penetrate that woman via the hitherto inviolable keyhole of her hidden history now became an obsession calling on the best impulses of his intellect. He returned his notebook to his pocket because he again felt the oppressive presence of that torrid wind on the fourth floor that wouldn’t agree to leave the last flowers of spring or Mario Conde’s perennial melancholy in peace.
Under the aggressive midday sun the roof terraces were like red deserts, off-limits to human life. One floor lower, opposite, the Count sought out the window that made him a peeping tom to a matrimonial drama and found it open, as on that first day, but the scene had changed: behind a sewing machine, taking advantage of the bright light streaming in, the woman was hard at work and listening to the chatter of the man who was rocking in his chair. They now performed a rather classic, recherché domestic drama that included the action of drinking coffee from the same cup. End of soap, thought Conde as he shut his balcony window and switched off the lights in the flat. For a moment he tried again to imagine what happened six days ago and realized it must have been something horrific: as if a ruthless Lent storm had let rip there before tyrannizing the city. Standing up in the halfdark, opposite the chalk profile on the tiles, the Count saw the back of a man striking a woman, gripping her neck and squeezing it tight. He only needed to touch the white shirt on the shoulder to see a face – one of three possible faces, all three strangers to him – and end that business he now thought most pathetic.
He went down to wait for Manolo, but stopped off on the third floor. He knocked on the door of the flat underneath Lissette’s and after his second knock confronted a face he felt was remotely familiar: an old man he calculated was in his eighties, with his scant wisps of grey hair and elephant ears about to take flight, was peering at him through the half-open door.
“Good day,” said Conde, taking his police credentials out of his pocket. “It’s to do with the girl in the top flat,” he explained to the corrugated cardboard ear the old man presented, which nodded affirmatively when its owner seemed about to open the door.
“Take a seat,” the old man suggested and the Count entered a space similar but different to the one he’d just left. The old man’s living-room was full of solid, antique mahogany and wickerwork furniture that matched the glass cabinet and centre table. But everything appeared to be recently turned and polished by a master carpenter.