“I’m always waiting for you, Count.”
The lieutenant ignored the irony and went out into the passage. He climbed two flights of stairs, to the top floor. Walked along another corridor and entered the anteroom to Major Rangel’s office. Behind Maruchi’s desk – she always had a flower in a small vase that was no longer there, perhaps she took it with her – there was the lieutenant who’d surprised him the day before. The Count saluted her and asked to see the Major.
“He told me to make sure nobody bothered him,” the lieutenant warned.
“Tell him it’s urgent,” the Count retorted. “Do me a favour…”
She hummed sonorously – how this guy likes to hassle, she must have been thinking – but she pressed the intercom button and told the Major that Lieutenant Conde was there and said it was urgent. “Tell him to come in,” said the Boss’s voice on the intercom.
The Count opened the door and saw him, cigar in his mouth. It was the same kind of smoke as the previous day’s wretched Holguin specimen.
“What’s up, Mario?” asked the Boss, and his voice was slow and opaque.
“I’ve brought you this, that’s why it was urgent.” And he took out of his pocket the long, resplendent Montecristo with which Faustino Arayan had regaled him.
“Where did you get this from, my boy?”
“I promised you one, didn’t I?”
“Fuck, this is a fine piece of work,” he said, and almost without looking threw his Holguin weed out of the window and started to smell the Montecristo. “It’s a little on the dry side, isn’t it?”
“You can sort that…”
“And what else do you want? I know you too well…”
The Count sat down and lit one of his cigarettes.
“They’ve called Manolo in. What’s his problem?”
The Major didn’t reply. He sniffed his new cigar again and carefully put it away in a drawer.
“For after lunch…”
“Are you going to tell me?” persisted the Count.
“They want him because of you,” replied the Boss as he stood up.
“Because of me?”
“Yes, it’s logical enough. You’re officially suspended and that’s why you are of interest to Internal Investigations – ”
“I’ll fuck the – ”
“Hey,” Rangel bellowed, switching his tired voice to a gruff, authoritarian tone that culminated in the fingertip he flourished at the lieutenant. “You don’t need to worry… If you do, say, comment or think anything about this and I find out, I’ll get your balls sliced off, get that? This is red-hot and I don’t want any more problems. They’re going to question Manolo about you, and what will he say? Nothing… That you had a set-to with Fabricio because you can’t stand each other and there’s nothing else to go on… Nothing!”
The Count put out his cigarette and suddenly wanted to be well out of there. It was already complicated enough looking for rapists, thieves, swindlers and murderers of mystical transvestites without becoming the subject of suspicion oneself.
“Talk to Manolo and tell him what’s at stake. But talk to him away from here. OK? If anyone finds out I told you this, I’ll be the one who’ll get it in the balls. OK?”
The Count didn’t reply.
“OK, Conde?” the Major persisted.
“OK, Boss… I’m off…” And he stood up.
“Just a minute. How’s the case going?”
The Count shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly he wasn’t overly interested in his case.
“So so… I’ve got a dead man who occasionally had visions of God, and a suspect who’s too suspicious, but no proof against him.”
“So what next?”
“I’ll carry on searching.”
“What the fuck,” said the Boss as he opened the drawer and took out the Montecristo. He broke off the end with his teeth in the traditional manner and briefly chewed on it. He spat the end in the basket and then, when he went to put the lighter-flame next to the end of his cigar, something stopped him and he shook his head. “It’s too good to light now. This at least deserves a cup of real coffee.” And he put it back in the drawer. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you, Conde. Someone phoned me and asked me for discretion in everything around this case. He told me something I didn’t know: the dead man was old Arayan’s son and you know what that means. They want everything to stay a problem unconnected to the family so links can’t be made between them and that mess of tranvestites and queers their son was mixed up with. So now you know: first I said trasvestites because that’s what came to me, and don’t hassle the family much and try to resolve this quickly, without creating too much of a stir, get it?”
“Yes, Siree, as they say,” the Count riposted and left the office, without saying goodbye to the Major. Now he wanted to abandon everything even more. And he thought: what a load of shit. They don’t even have a decent cup of coffee to go with a decent cigar.
“What do you reckon?”
The Count smiled, looking at the faded, parched pages of what had aspired to be the school literary review, and thought how all that might as well belong to another life, one too distant to be the one he was still living: his story on the back of the title page with the print of the Jesus del Monte church, and the pompous title of La Viborena, which hid so many expectations and longings severed by the brutal chop from the hatchet of intolerance and incomprehension.
“Naive and without depth. I remembered it as being more squalid and more moving,” he said, and reclined back on Carlos’s bed. “Far too many ‘thats’ and far too few commas…”
“And why did you want to read it?”
The Count poured more rum into his glass and moved the bottle towards Skinny’s glass.
“I didn’t know if I wanted to remember what the story said or what they said to me about the story.”
Carlos downed some rum and grimaced far too dramatically for the owner of a throat burnt by the slow fire of a sustained daily habit.
“Who remembers any of that now, Conde…”
“I do,” he rasped and took a long, possibly excessive gulp.
“Hey, hold on, man… What the fuck’s up with you today? You were perfectly fine yesterday, and today…”
The Count looked at his friend: an ever more amorphous mass in his wheelchair. He closed his eyes, like the character in his story and thought, like him: if only it weren’t true. He would have liked Skinny still to be skinny, and not that fat type keeling over, like a sinking boat, taking with it in the wreck Mario Conde’s last chance of happiness. He wanted to play on the street corner again, for all his old friends to be there and nobody to exclude him from a place which so much belonged to him. At the same time he wanted to forget everything, for good.
“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” Carlos insisted, moving his chair to the edge of the bed where his friend had flopped down.
“I’m fucked, Skinny. They don’t even want me as a policeman any more… Today they’re going to talk to Manolo about me. They’ll probably retire me. What do you reckon? Retired at thirty-five…”
“Are you serious?”
“As serious as Desiderio’s arse.”
Skinny laughed. The bastard couldn’t help it.
“You’re done for, man.”
“That’s what they say. Pour me some more rum. I’m running shit-scared.”
“Why, you idiot? Are there real problems?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t stop being scared… More rum.”
“You’ve got to forget all this, man… Conde, you’re well fucked, but you’re a good man. I know you’ve done no wrong, so quit being scared, right?”
“All right,” the other agreed, not overly convinced.
“Did I tell you Andres came to see me this morning?”
“Yesterday you told me he was going to come. What did that lunatic want?”
Carlos poured himself out more rum, downed a murderous gulp and pulled his wheelchair over until he was in front of his friend.
“Dulcita’s coming,” he said.
“Dulcita?” Conde was taken aback. “Dulcita?”
Dulcita had left for the United States more than ten years ago, and the Count remembered how often he and Skinny had spoken about the departure of the girl who’d been Carlos’s girlfriend for two years at school. Intelligent Dulcita, perfect Dulcita, the great laugh, who’d then left, leaving them to wonder why, oh why did it have to be her. And now she was coming back: “How come?”