“Give it me in the arse,” she asked, unsmiling.
The Count took one look at his selfless comrade, inelegant but ready for combat, and gripped her buttocks tight to open up the exit door more widely.
“God, how horrible!” she said when he drilled her little hole. Then the Count felt he was the right measure for polyphonic Polly’s proportions, and stuck to his task as he heard the girl’s anxious lament, which, between push and pull, changed to a smile, a laugh, a guffaw, a cry begging split my arse, split it down the middle, though now there was nothing left to heft and he could only keep up the rubbing which the man tried to do tirelessly. Ay, Polly the prostrate
…
But everything has an end. The Count was surprised by his own powerful, triumphant macho whoop, as Polly’s guffaws faded to a laugh, to a smile before ending on a whimper: “God, how horrible,” only to add, with a judgement the Count assumed he fully deserved: “Ay, darling, what a lovely fucker you are, you are!”
There was a face there. He could almost see it, if he stretched out his hand he could almost touch it, but his eyes and hands slipped and slid, entwined by viscous veils and nets that suddenly loosened their knots, let him escape, close in on the face, almost touch it, only to wrap round him again, distance him, refuse him a revelation that evaporated in a luminous heat cloud, swept along by a dirty river, as it finally faded forcing him to wake up, stressed, at the first loud rings of his telephone, his breathing agitated, his body soaked by the sad, sad sweat of doubt. I know him, of course I do, he told himself as he reviewed his passage from dream to a more objective reality, as he tried to find out what was happening. It was a clear, brutal telephone ring, as the sun penetrated the windows to his room, to impose yet another day of aggressive heat.
“You motherfucker,” he said, crawling to the receiver, eyes stunned by the brightness. He picked up the phone and asked, “What’s the time?”
“Ten past nine, Conde, ten past nine,” repeated the voice at the other end of the line, perhaps of the world.
“Shit, Manolo, I didn’t hear my alarm clock, or didn’t set it. Who knows…”
“When did you hit the sack?”
“Around four.”
“Alcohol level?”
“Only two glasses.”
“Just as well, because there’s bother: Salvador K. hasn’t showed since yesterday afternoon.”
The Count finally felt he was awake. “And how come?”
“El Greco and Crespo tailed him. They say he went out yesterday at around five, as if he was going to his studio, and went down the passageway of a house that’s on Nineteen and A. They waited for him for more than an hour and then discovered the passageway led to a garage facing Twenty-First Street. He vanished. He’s not in the house or his studio.”
“Did they talk to his wife?”
“Yes, but only to ask after him, and she just said he was at the studio.”
The Count lit a cigarette, trying to cast off the last chains of sleep, and then he remembered.
“Hey, Manolo, I had the strangest of dreams: I could and couldn’t see the murderer… You know, those funny dreams: when I thought I was going to see him, I didn’t, because he also wore this kind of disguise… Fuck me if I’m not obsessed with transvestites, the transfiguration, wandering souls and all that shit.”
“It wasn’t Salvador?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t, but now I’m convinced I know him, I’m not sure why, but I’m convinced I do. Hey, go and speak to Salvador’s wife, put the squeeze on her, though not too tightly, and pick me up at… well, when you’re finished.”
The Count hung up and looked around: there were only traces of more or less distant disasters. Clothes on the ground, a crushed cigarette butt, Rufino the fish swimming in waters murkier by the minute. I must clean the pigsty, he told himself, but forgot this priority as he observed his own nakedness, which sent him back to the previous night’s erotic adventure. God, how horrible, she says she’s almost always heterosexual, what the fuck have I got into? he wondered, smiling as he congratulated himself on having enough coffee for two more breakfasts.
While he was waiting the Count grabbed the newspaper seller who was walking along the pavement with his precious treasure of news under his arm, and, as he wasn’t a usual customer, he had to pay double – after the inevitable pleas – to get a copy. Still shirtless, in the doorway to his house, he greeted passing acquaintances as he digested headlines and skimmed items to get a round-up that still left him with a few doubts. According to the paper’s international pages, the world was in a pretty bad state, though the socialist countries – despite difficulties and continuous external pressures – were intent on not abandoning the uphill, triumphant path of history. The national pages, for their part, made it plain that the island wasn’t in bad shape at all, except for the odd episode, like the railway accident which had left several dead (and which naturally wasn’t planned). They were planting worms, the sacrosanct CAME, the Council for Mutual Economic Aid, promised it was going to solve the problems of Cuba’s telephone system, it would even rain and there’d be an eclipse of the moon in a week’s time. That was the bit of news he most liked: the eclipse would be on Skinny’s birthday. And when was Dulcita arriving? Moreover, the paper said that this afternoon the famous Eligio Riego would give a poetry reading, and he decided that, as he’d like to talk to him, he’d call Major Rangel so that he’d put him in touch with his friend the poet…
The Count breathed in till he filled his lungs, just as a lorry belched out its unrefined fumes. But he felt reading the newspaper had fortified him so he could face another day of hard labour.
“And where the hell can this guy be?”
The car wove round the potholes left by the last nuclear bomb that stretch of La Calzada must have suffered. After picking him up, Sergeant Manuel Palacios told him about his interview with Salvador K.’s wife: she insisted her husband had gone to the studio and, if he wasn’t there, she couldn’t imagine where he might be, and she’d asked the policeman rather anxiously: “Should I tell the police?”
“Manolo, you really think she doesn’t know?”
“I don’t know, Conde, you’re the psychologist here. I don’t know if she wanted to put us on the wrong track.”
“Did you ask her for a photo of him?”
“Of course. Shall we circulate it?”
The Count shut his eyes and let his head fall backwards. “Let’s wait a day. He’ll probably turn up and we won’t need to create a stir.”
“If only, but don’t pin your hopes on it. If that guy did the little pansy in, he might make a break for it, Conde. Get a boat out of here, or whatever…”
“We’ll wait a bit longer,” the lieutenant decided, as the car stopped at a traffic light. A bus halted next to them and, from his seat, the Count saw the bus driver. He was a man in his fifties and the policeman saw his was a bus-driver’s face: he was looking at the street while, bored out of his mind, he hit the steering wheel with the wedding ring he wore on his left hand. He had that slight though visible hump professional drivers get after a few years in the saddle, and something about his face warned: this man could do nothing else with life: he was a bus driver, the Count concluded, and then he saw a girl waving at the driver asking please to open the bus door. From his Olympian height the bus driver seemed to ponder long and hard, before agreeing to her request, one second short of the woman kneeling down in the middle of the street, begging for her ride. Then she smiled, thanked him and put her coin in the collection box, just as Sergeant Manolo Palacios put his foot down and left the bus behind.
“Hey, Manolo, go down Luyano, I want to see Fatman Contreras.”
“Fatman?” asked Sergeant Palacios as if he hadn’t understood, though the Count knew that wasn’t the sense of his question. Suddenly the vision of the bus driver with a bus-driver’s face had helped him grasp the inevitability of certain destinies which were prescribed for ever, and he immediately felt the need to speak to Captain Jesus Contreras as if under orders. About what? Anything. He just had to see him.