That’s spoilt my bloody morning, he muttered. He no longer had the patience to wait for the lift, so he attacked the stairs to the seventh floor. He felt the analgesics burden his stomach once again and thought how all that would end badly. Fuck, he told himself, he’ll get what’s coming to him, and went into the anteroom to Major Rangel’s office.
Maruchi looked at him, nodding in his direction as she carried on with her typing.
“What’s up, treasure?” he greeted her in turn, walking over to her desk.
“He sent for you really early. But apparently you’d already left,” said the girl, as she nodded towards the office door. “I’m not sure but I think there’s big trouble brewing.”
The Count sighed and lit a cigarette. He shook whenever the major spoke of big trouble sent from on high: Conde, you get a move on. But this time he wouldn’t agree to replace anyone, even if it cost him his job. He pushed back his pistol that was always trying to flee the waistband of his jeans, more so now he was getting thinner for no apparent reason, and put a hand on the paper the Boss’s secretary was copying.
“What do you reckon, Maruchi?”
The young woman looked at him and smiled.
“Are you about to declare your love after testing the terrain?”
Now it was the Count’s turn to smile at his gauche behaviour: “No, it’s just that even I can’t stand myself right now,” and he rapped his knuckles on the glass panel.
“Go on, in you come.”
Major Rangel was smoking his cigar and just by its smell the Count knew that it wasn’t a good day for the Boss: it reeked of a cheap, dry smoke, a sixty-cent effort, and that could definitively sour the mood of the head of headquarters. Despite the bad weed that could put a frown on his chief’s face, the Count admired his martial air: he wore with distinction a uniform that showed off the bronzed tan of a squash player and daily swimmer. The bastard keeps himself fit.
“They said…” he started to explain, but the major pointed him to a chair and gestured to him to keep quiet.
“Take a seat, the party’s over. Get hold of Manolo because you’re on a case. You’re not down for anything special for a week, are you?”
The Count looked for a moment at the window in the chief’s office. All he could see was a blue horizon and none of the swirling leaves and paper unleashed by the wind, and he understood there was no way out. The major was trying to revive the embers of his cigar and the distress caused by the unrequited smoker’s stress was evident in every twitch of his face. The Boss wasn’t at all happy that morning.
It’s as if the end of the world were nigh, or we’ve been cursed, or people have gone mad on this island. You know, Conde: either I’m getting old or things are changing and no one bothered to inform me. I think I’m going to give up the habit, you can’t smoke this stuff, just look, call this shit a cigar? Go on, take a look: the surface is more wrinkled than my grandma’s arse, it’s like smoking a bunch of banana leaves, it really is. I’m going to make an appointment to see a psychologist today, I’ll lie him down on the couch and tell him to help me give up smoking. And yet I really need a good cigar today: I don’t mean a Rey del Mundo or a Gran Corona or a Davidoff… I’d settle for a Montecristo… Maruchi, bring us a cup of coffee, be so good… See if I can get rid of the taste of this muck. Right, if this is coffee, get God to come and vouch for it… Anyway, to the point. I need you to get stuck into this case and be on your best behaviour, Conde. I don’t want you moaning and groaning, or going on the bottle; I want it solved now. Work with Manolo and whoever you want, you’ve got carte blanche but get on with it. Listen hard, this is between the two of us: something big is in the offing and I don’t want us to be caught napping or in a daydream. It must be something big and ugly because I don’t know the people pushing it. It’s coming from very high up and heads will fly: Get this into yours right?… And don’t ask me because I’m not in the know, you understand? Look, here’s the paperwork to do with the case. But don’t start reading now, my friend. I can sum up: a twenty-four-year-old high school teacher, single and a member of the Communist Youth; killed, strangled with a towel, first beaten every which way, a broken rib and a finger with a double fracture and raped by at least two men. They didn’t take anything of value, apparently: neither clothes nor electrical goods… and traces of a joint were found in the water in the lavatory pan. Like the sound of it? It’s dynamite, and I, Antonio Rangel Valdés, want to know what happened to that young woman, because I’ve not been a policeman for thirty years for the pure pleasure of it. There must be a lot of dirt swept under the carpet for them to kill her like that, torture, marijuana and a gang bang… But what kind of a cigar do you call this? It’s as if the end of the world were nigh, I swear by my mother, it is. And remember what I said: behave yourself, people aren’t in the mood for any of your pranks…
The Count thought he had a good nose for aromas. It was his only attribute he considered to be in reasonable working order and his sense of smell told him the Boss was right: that whole business reeked of shit. So much was obvious from the moment he opened the door to the flat and inspected a crime scene that only lacked the victim and her assailants. The silhouette of the young murdered teacher in her final position had been marked out in chalk: one arm had come to rest very close to her body and the other seemed to be trying to reach her head, while her legs were folded up tight against her torso in a vain effort to protect a stomach that had already been battered. It was a gruesome sight, between a sofa and the central table that had been yanked to one side.
He went into the flat and shut the door behind him, then inspected the rest of the room: an inevitably Japanese colour television and twin-deck cassette recorder with a tape, which had come to a finish on the A side, stood on a multi-use piece of furniture filling the entire wall opposite the balcony; he pressed STOP, took out the tape and read: Private dancer, Tina Turner. Above the television, on the longest shelf, was a line of books he found more interesting: several chemistry textbooks, Lenin’s Complete Works in three faded red volumes, a history of Greece and a few novels that the Count would never dare read again: Doña Barbara, Old Goriot, Mare Nostrum, Las inquietudes de Shanti Andía, Cecilia Valdés and, at the far end, the only book he felt like stealing: Poesía, Pablo Neruda, that so matched his mood at that moment. He opened the book and read a few lines at random…
Take my bread, if you wish
take the air, but
don’t take your smile…
… then put it back, because he’d got the same edition at home. She doesn’t seem a very keen reader, he concluded, shaking the dust off his hands.
He walked to the balcony and opened the shutters: the light flooded in, the wind blew and a copper mobile, that the Count hadn’t noticed before, started rattling. By the side of the outline chalked on the floor he spotted another silhouette, a smaller patch that had almost disappeared, staining the bright shiny tiles. Why did they kill you? he wondered as he imagined the girl raped, beaten, tortured and strangled, lying in her own blood.
He went into the only bedroom in the flat and found the bed made up. A poster of an almost beautiful Barbra Streisand from the time of The Way We Were had been carefully framed and hung on one wall. On the other side was a huge mirror the usefulness of which the Count decided to test; he flopped on the bed and saw himself full-length. Wonderful, wasn’t it? Then he opened the wardrobe and his initial reaction to the scent gathered strength: it wasn’t a normal or ordinary selection of clothes: blouses, smocks, trousers, pullovers, shoes, knickers and overcoats, the Count noted, with their made-in-some-far-off-place labels.