Читать книгу Havana Best Friends - Jose Latour - Страница 8
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ОглавлениеAs is often the case, the crime scene had been contaminated by the time the Guanabo police, at the crack of dawn, answered a phone call made nine minutes earlier. Nobody had touched the corpse, but the truck driver who found it on his way to work, and the relatives and neighbours to whom he excitedly announced his discovery, had got near enough to raise doubts on any footprint, fibre, or hair that could be cast or retrieved. Tyre prints on the grit alongside the kerb had also been trampled.
The Guanabo police are not equipped to deal with a homicide and rarely see one, so they confined their participation to cordoning off the area, questioning people, stationing guards, then radioing the DTI,* the LCC** and the IML,+ all three of which have headquarters in the Cuban capital.
At 7.11 a.m., with dawn becoming early morning and the tide starting to turn, three LCC specialists and Captain Félix Trujillo from the DTI arrived in a Lada station wagon. They listened in silence to the lieutenant waiting for them. No neighbour had heard or seen anything unusual before or after going to bed, curious onlookers had ruined the corpse’s immediate surroundings, nobody there knew the dead man.
IML experts carry out the on-site inspection of the body, take it to the morgue, gather whatever evidence is on it, perform the autopsy, and assist in the identification process of unknown persons, so the LCC people just eyed the corpse from a distance before looking around for impressions, taking photographs, and measuring distances.
The white Mercedes Benz meat wagon reached its destination at 7.49. Three men and a woman in white smocks, olive-green trousers, and lace-up black boots got out, shook hands with the cops, exchanged a few words. Captain Trujillo seemed especially delighted to see Dr Bárbara Valverde, an attractive, thirty-three-year-old, dark-skinned black pathologist. She learned from him the few known facts, then pulled out an aluminium scene case from the back of the van, opened it, passed around latex gloves and plasticized paper booties to her assistants, slipped a pair of gloves on, donned a surgical mask and booties. She closed and lifted the scene case, approached the corpse, swatted away the flies, put the case down, and crouched by it. The body lay prone, face supported on the left cheek, both arms at the sides, legs slightly bent to the right. Down the street, senior citizens gaping behind the police line frowned and murmured in confusion. A woman examining a dead man? She a necrophiliac or what? Young and middle-aged voyeurs pooh-poohed them into silence.
The first thing the pathologist noticed was the lump at the base of the neck. She ran her index and middle fingers over it, feeling the dislocated vertebrae. Then she spotted the laceration on the right temple and her fingers detected comminuted fractures of the temporal bone. There were low-velocity stains of blood on the sidewalk, under the left corner of the mouth, probably coming from split lips and teeth loosened when the head hit the cement.
‘Let’s turn him over,’ Dr Valverde said.
Rigor mortis was almost complete. She held the head in her hands while her assistants turned the body. Bills folded in half fell from a pants pocket. One of the assistants whistled. The pathologist reopened the scene case and reached for a pair of tweezers, which she used to pick up the bills and drop them into a transparent plastic evidence bag.
Dr Valverde frowned when she noticed the curvilinear bite-marks on the neck. She studied them for a while under a magnifying glass.
‘Osvaldo, get on the radio and ask Graciela to call the odontologist and tell him to come to the Institute. There are indentations to cast here.’
The tallest assistant marched to the van. The other was measuring temperature and humidity.
She inspected the lacerated temple under the magnifying glass before swabbing nostrils, mouth, and ears, and depositing each swab into evidence bags which she labelled with a marker. She swabbed the blood on the sidewalk as well, then palpated the top of the head, the rib cage, thighs, legs, and ankles before closing the scene case and rising to her feet.
‘What have we got here, Dr Valverde?’ Captain Trujillo asked. He stood a few feet from her, legs spread apart, right elbow resting on his holster, a lighted cigarette held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The pathologist suspected he had catnapped in his uniform: his light grey, long-sleeved shirt and blue pants showed dozens of creases and wrinkles. She admitted to herself that he was attractive in an unprepossessing, rather virile way. He tried to establish a non-professional rapport every time they worked together, but Félix was too young for her – and married, on top of everything. She lifted the case and, followed by the captain, took it back to the van, then yanked her gloves off.
‘What we’ve got here is a broken neck, a severe blow to the right temple, lacerated lips and chin, loose teeth, bite marks on the neck.’
‘Time estimate?’
‘Preliminary. Between four and eight hours.’
‘You planning on doing the autopsy immediately?’
‘Yeah. I’m on the six-to-two shift.’
‘Then I’ll drop by, or send someone later on, to collect his things and take them to the LCC. If the identity card is missing, will you have a ten-print card ready for me?’
‘Lift him up, comrades,’ Dr Valverde told her assistants. The two men slid a stretcher out from the van. She followed them with her eyes.
‘Doctor?’ said Trujillo, realizing that she hadn’t been listening.
‘Sorry, Félix.’
‘Will you have a ten-print card ready for me if the stiff wasn’t carrying his identity card?’
‘Sure.’ After a pause she added, ‘Dollar bills fell from his pocket.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘The one on top looked like a fifty.’
‘Is that so?’
‘But when I palpated him I didn’t feel a wallet. And his left wrist has a pale band, like a watch strap, but there’s no watch.’
Captain Trujillo had a crush on Dr Valverde because she had a perfect body and her face was out of this world. But she was competent and bright too, and he liked that. ‘So, your reasoning is whoever kills for a watch, a wallet, and a pair of shoes searches all the pockets.’
‘Right.’
The captain took a puff on his cigarette and mulled this over as the stretcher was slid into the van. The driver turned the ignition, the attendants stripped off their gloves.
‘I’m thinking sex, sodomy maybe,’ the pathologist added. ‘That might explain the bites. I’ll check for evidence of intercourse. But if he didn’t have sex in the last twelve hours, you’ll have a tough nut to crack: a killer who bites without sexual motivation and steals valuables but leaves cash behind. Pretty weird, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, I guess so. See you in a while, Doc.’
‘Not before noon, Félix. Not before noon.’
The Institute of Legal Medicine, on Boyeros between Cal-zada del Cerro and 26th Street, is a two-storey prefab building hidden from view by a psychiatric clinic and big laurel trees. Before its experts located, exhumed, and identified the remains of Ché Guevara and his men in Bolivia, it claimed the dubious distinction of being the least known of Havana’s public institutions.
Back at her place of work, Dr Valverde had a buttered bun and a glass of orange juice for breakfast, followed by a cup of espresso. Next she smoked a cigarette in the hallway, standing by one of several ugly aluminium ashtrays. She dropped the butt in it before marching to the locker room to step into a gown, don sleeve protectors, shoe covers, a surgical cap, a face shield, and three pairs of latex gloves.
The autopsy suite had four tables, an efficient air-conditioning and ventilation system, and the standard paraphernalia of Stryker saws, a source lamp with a fibre-optic attachment, multiband ultraviolet lamps, surgical and magnifying lamps, pans, clamps, forceps, scalpels, sinks, hoses, and buckets. On the tiled walls, cabinets and cupboards of all sizes, plus light boxes for X-rays. A steelworker would define it as a stainless steel palace, a chemist as the kingdom of formaldehyde, a pathologist as a place to make a living. This last definition is a troubling one for most people.
The body was on a gurney to the right side of table number three. Dr Valverde’s two assistants sat on the autopsy table, legs dangling, face shields lifted to avoid fogging them up while commenting on last night’s baseball game at the Latin American Stadium. On table number one, another team was doing a twenty-five-year-old woman who had died at home, possibly from a heart attack. Osvaldo handed Dr Valverde a mike which she clipped to her gown. René pressed the record button.
The assistants lifted the body on to the autopsy table as the pathologist steadied the gurney; next they broke the rigor mortis in the arms and legs. Hair and substances under the fingernails were collected first. The cadaver was then undressed and the pockets searched. Four cocaine fixes, a key ring with five keys, a half-full packet of cigarettes, a lighter, a handkerchief, and nine coins, were found and put into evidence bags. After dipping the dead man’s hands in a pan of warm water for a few minutes, Osvaldo dried them, then inked each finger, rolled them on to a ten-print card. All the evidence that had to be transferred to the Central Laboratory of Criminology was ready.
The body was measured and weighed, its temperature taken. René photographed the neck, temple, and bite-marks – with Osvaldo holding a ruler as a scale – as Dr Valverde inspected the injuries again, this time under a fluorescent magnifying lamp. The odontologist, a short, bearded man, arrived. He joked for a couple of minutes before taking the bite impressions.
When he was done, the pathologist carefully checked and swabbed the cadaver’s knees, elbows, the underside of the arms, penis, and testicles. She had it turned over and examined the back, buttocks, and anus, then swabbed the rectum for seminal fluid. Dr Valverde put on tinted glasses, ordered the lights turned off, and used the fibre-optic attachment of the source lamp to look for the fluorescence which semen, blood, saliva and urine display under the high-intensity beam.
An hour and a half had passed. Without a word, Dr Valverde unclipped the mike. René stopped the recorder and the team moved to a corner. Once they had yanked off their third pair of gloves they had a smoke while discussing the postmortem’s next stage. It was agreed that little of it would bear any relation to the cause of death, but it had to be done anyhow.
Seven minutes later, again wearing the mike, the pathologist ran her scalpel from the clavicles to the sternum, down to the pelvis, then removed the breastplate of ribs.
After thirty minutes of work the major organs had been extracted. All were within normal limits. The dead man’s lungs revealed that he had been a heavy smoker. Half-digested beef, plantains, rice, and red beans were identified in the stomach. Dr Valverde adjusted a surgical lamp to stare at the fractured vertebrae and the injured spinal cord. She sighed, asked for the Stryker saw to start working on the skull, then decided against it. An X-ray of the right temporal bone would be enough. The job was completed three hours and ten minutes after it began, as René tied a tag which said ‘Unknown man 4, 2000’ to the cadaver’s toe prior to wheeling him to a sliding drawer in the cold room.
Dr Valverde showered and changed in the locker room, then hurried to the nearly deserted cafeteria to have lunch. The menu for the day was rice, scrambled eggs, sweet potato, and boiled string beans. She chose one of the empty Formica-topped tables, pulled back a chair, sank on to it feeling tired. Then she spotted Captain Trujillo at the doorway, craning his neck in search of her. She waved at him. He came over.
‘You had lunch?’ she asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘Want to?’
Hesitatingly. ‘Can I? I assumed this was for IML people only.’
‘It is, but let’s see.’
She talked to the man in charge, Trujillo shelled out fifty cents, then advanced to the food counter. Dr Valverde was halfway through her lunch when he deposited his plastic tray on the table and shoved back the chair facing her.
‘Hey, thanks for speaking on my behalf. I’m famished,’ he said.
‘Least I could do. This is going begging anyway.’
‘Well, yeah, but something is better than nothing. When I get back to my mess hall there might be nothing left.’
‘Enjoy it then.’
Trujillo gobbled his food and they finished simultaneously. After leaving the two dirty trays and the cutlery by a serving hatch near the food counter, the captain joined the pathologist. She had been waiting for him on a granite bench in the hallway. She extended her packet of Populares, he reached for one, then clicked his lighter for her. Both inhaled deeply.
‘No ID, no sexual intercourse, was killed around midnight,’ she reported.
Trujillo tilted his head. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘What appears to be four fixes of cocaine,’ she replied between gusts of smoke.
Trujillo frowned and they smoked in silence for a minute or two. In the last seventy-two hours he had slept twelve, hadn’t had a change of clothes for the last two days, had been reprimanded by the colonel for skipping the last three Party-cell meetings, and was therefore in no mood to get involved in a complicated murder case. And he knew better than to suggest to Major Pena to pass the buck to someone else. The homicide had been reported during his shift, exactly thirty-seven minutes before he was to go off duty. Just his luck. If only it had been a crime of passion! One of those open-and-shut cases where the killer is found sobbing by the body, hanging by the neck in the vicinity, or hiding at his or her parents’.
‘Well, Doc, I’ll collect the ten-print and his things now, take them to the LCC. Please send the autopsy report as soon as possible.’
‘Sure. I don’t envy you, Captain. This is a tricky one.’
‘As if I didn’t know. Thanks for everything. Changing the subject, I’m stressed out, you’re probably stressed out too, would you…catch a movie or have dinner with me one of these nights?’
The pathologist gave him a disapproving look. ‘Felix, are you coming on to me? What’s the matter with you guys?’
‘Take it easy. I just thought you might want to. Somebody said you’re divorced. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am. But you’re not. Give me a break, will you, Félix?’
Trujillo inclined his head and blushed slightly. How had she found out he was married? ‘Okay. I’m sorry. I apologize. Are you mad at me?’
‘No, I’m not. Got to make my watch report. Take care.’
At a quarter past two the inked fingerprint card was optically read by the LCC computer. The key features of the general pattern and local details provided a listing of candidates, ranked by a comparison algorithm. Online, the fingerprint examiner asked for seventy-two cards from the national registry and started the long screening process. At 7.50 p.m. he lifted his phone, dialled the DTI switchboard’s number, and asked for Trujillo. He had to wait six minutes while the captain left his bed in the communal dormitory for senior officers, relieved himself, splashed water on his face and, feeling reasonably alert at last, ambled to the phone on the duty officer’s desk.
‘Captain Trujillo, at your service.’
‘This is Captain Lorffe, from Fingerprints, LCC.’
‘Yes?’
‘You have a pen and paper?’
‘Just a minute.’
Trujillo searched his shirt pockets. He found a two-by-three-inch bus ticket and a ballpoint.
‘Okay.’
‘Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés,’ Captain Lorffe dictated slowly. ‘A Cuban citizen. Born 17 August 1965, in Havana. The address on his identity record is 2406 Third A, between 24th and 26th Streets, Miramar, Playa.’
Trujillo copied everything down, then confirmed he’d got it right. ‘Okay. Thanks. Now, Captain, I mean no disrespect, but that ten-print was taken from a cadaver. I’ve got to notify the relatives. Any chance of mistaken identity?’
Trujillo heard Lorffe sigh. ‘The card I’ve got has the prints of Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés. There are more corresponding simple ridge characteristics than I’ve got hairs on my head. Now, if someone at the Identity Card office in Playa fucked up and misfiled this guy’s original impressions; if you left the IML card on your desk and somebody changed it; if someone…’
‘I hope nothing like that happened,’ Trujillo cut in. ‘Thanks a lot, comrade.’
Back in the dormitory, the DTI captain grabbed his briefcase, pocketed the key ring found on the corpse, had supper in the mess hall, then asked for a Lada from the car pool, got a Ural Russian motorcycle with sidecar, and rode to Miramar. First he questioned the man in charge of surveillance in the CDR.* José Kuan lived around the block from Pablo Miranda, on 26th between Third and Third A.
Kuan was the son of Chinese immigrants and appeared to be in his late thirties, so Trujillo estimated he was probably in his early fifties. He had moved to the neighbourhood in 1992, to a third-floor apartment with his wife and two boys, both under ten, and was assistant manager at a state-owned enterprise that marketed handcrafts. Kuan’s children were watching TV in the living room, so he walked Trujillo to the couple’s bedroom. His wife brought the captain a cup of espresso which he accepted gratefully. Then she retired to the kitchen to do the dishes.
Yes, a man named Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés lived around the block, Kuan admitted; he knew the guy: he was short, bald, worked at a joint venture two blocks away. Trujillo wrote down the name and address of the firm in his diary. No, he hadn’t seen him in the last few days. No, he wasn’t married, far as he could tell; lived with his sister. No, she wasn’t married either. Nobody else lived there.
Trujillo asked to see the Register of Addresses. Kuan opened a closet and produced an 81/2 x 13” file, with a page for each household in the area covered by the CDR. The one corresponding to the dead man’s apartment also had the name Elena Miranda Garcés inscribed, and gave the woman’s date of birth as 19 September 1962. The name Gladys Garcés Benítez, born in 1938, had been crossed off in red ink in 1987 just after she moved to Zulueta, Villa Clara. Her surname was identical to the siblings’ second surname. If she was still alive, Trujillo calculated, their mother would be sixty-two now.
‘What can you tell me about this Pablo Miranda?’ Trujillo asked once he’d finished jotting down names and ages.
The man fidgeted with the pages of the Register, his eyes evading the cop’s, pulling down the corners of his mouth. After eleven years in the force, Trujillo had seen this body language time and time again. Men and women who don’t want to rat on neighbours, stumped for a reply. Then why do they accept the position? he used to ask himself when he was a rookie. Now he knew the answer: it was for fear that declining might be considered a disinclination to fulfil revolutionary duties, something with adverse implications.
‘Well, actually I don’t know him very well, you know. He doesn’t mix much with the neighbourhood crowd. I guess he works a lot.’
‘You know the kind of company he keeps? People he goes out with?’
‘No. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.’
‘Does he have a car?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Goes out a lot?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘What about his sister?’
Relief spread across the man’s face. ‘She’s a very nice person.’
‘Different from her brother?’
‘No, no, that’s not what I meant.’ He looked flustered.
‘But she is sweet. Always polite, gentle, and beautiful, too.’
Trujillo nodded and repressed a smile. Was the man attracted to the sister? Well, he had a very pretty mulata all for himself. What more could a man hope for? Then he remembered that human aspirations are unlimited.
‘Well, Comrade Kuan, there’s something I should tell you. Pablo Miranda was found dead this morning in Guanabo.’
The news left the man speechless.
‘I have to notify his sister now and conduct a search of his apartment. As you know, witnesses from the CDR must be present. I need you to come with me, please. The president too, if possible.’
The President of the CDR, Zoila Pérez – a.k.a. ‘Day-and-Night’, after a TV series sponsored by the Ministry of Interior – was a fifty-eight-year-old bookstore saleswoman who had moved to the dead man’s building in 1988; she lived on the second-floor, front apartment. Zoila had earned her sobriquet and the position of CDR president in 1990, when she began trying to persuade neighbours that an American invasion was imminent. She never missed her citizen’s watch and was always willing to stand in for sick (or allegedly sick, or sick and tired) cederistas.
To Zoila, every stranger was a suspect, especially at night, and she would report enemy activity at the drop of a hat. In her wild imagination, couples necking in the Parque de la Quinta were transformed into pairs of camouflaged soldiers from the expeditionary force’s van-guard, so no less than two or three nights a week she picked up her phone and called the nearest police precinct. Desk sergeants familiar with her paranoia thanked her politely, hung up, then chuckled before bellowing to other cops in the squad room: ‘Hey, guys, that was Day-and-Night. Chick giving her boyfriend a handjob in the park is a marine getting ready to open mortar fire on her apartment building.’
But now, having learned what happened to Pablo, she was wringing her hands in desperation when Trujillo pressed the buzzer of Elena Miranda’s apartment. It was the kind of news Zoila hated, made her freak out. A full-scale imaginary invasion she could live with; the real murder of a neighbour was too unnerving. She wanted to walk away but knew she couldn’t.
Nearly a minute later, Elena opened the door in a robe and thongs. Wow, Trujillo thought. She processed the visual information instantly: a pained expression on Zoila’s face, an embarrassed Kuan, a poker-faced police officer. Bad news, she discerned. Skipping all the formalities, she asked, ‘What happened?’
‘Elena, this is Captain Trujillo, from the Department of Technical Investigations of the police,’ Zoila said.
‘What’s the problem, Captain?’
‘Can we come in, Comrade Elena?’ Trujillo, trying to sound casual, flashed his ID.
‘Sure, excuse me, come right in. Have a seat.’
Elena eased herself on to the edge of a club chair, Trujillo sat across from her, Kuan and Zoila on the Chesterfield.
‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Comrade Elena,’ Trujillo began. ‘Your brother, Pablo, was found dead this morning.’
Elena felt a shiver down her spine, a numbness, a sense of loss. Shock, for the third time in my life. Locking eyes with the police officer, she nodded reflectively, pursed her lips, interlaced her fingers on her lap, swallowed hard. ‘An accident?’ she wanted to know.
‘We’re not sure yet. He died from a broken neck and a head injury. He may have taken a fall, or he may have been murdered.’
‘You’re sure it’s my brother?’ She sounded unnerved.
‘We’re positive, comrade.’
‘Can I see him?’
‘Actually, if you are his only relative in Havana, you must identify him. His body is at the IML. Tomorrow morning…’
‘Where?’
‘The morgue. You can go there tomorrow morning. At eight. It’s on Boyeros and the Luminous Fountain. Are you his only relative?’
‘In Havana, yes. There’s our mother…and father.’
‘Can you notify them?’
‘Well, I can call my mother, but my father is in prison.’
To conceal his surprise, Trujillo unclasped his briefcase, opened his diary, drew out his ballpoint. Next he cast a baleful eye at the informers, but they were staring at Elena as if it were news to them too. Both had moved to the neighbourhood years after Elena’s father was sentenced and nobody had bothered to tell them the story.
‘Tell me his name and where he’s serving time. Maybe I can get him a special pass to attend the wake and the funeral.’
‘His name is Manuel Miranda and he is at Tinguaro.’
Trujillo took his time writing the three words. Tingu-aro was a small, special prison fifteen kilometres to the south of Havana for those who had occupied high-ranking positions in the Cuban party, government, or armed forces before having to serve time for some non-political crime. Men deserving special consideration because they had won battles, done heroic deeds, followed orders to the letter, been willing to die for the Revolution. Yes, the name Manuel Miranda definitely rang a tiny bell at the back of his mind.
‘I’ll see what I can do, comrade. Now, I’m conducting an investigation and as part of it I need to examine your brother’s personal belongings. His papers, clothing, anything that can shed light on what happened to him. Comrades Kuan and Zoila are here as witnesses. We would appreciate it if you could take us to his bedroom and any other room where he kept his things…’
Elena was shaking her head emphatically, two tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘I don’t have the key to his bedroom. We…well, Captain, he put a lock on the door to his room. I don’t have the key to it.’
Trujillo produced Pablo’s key ring. ‘Do you recognize this?’
Elena nodded. The last shadow of a doubt evaporated in her mind.
‘It was found in a pocket.’
‘Come with me, please.’
When Elena switched on the light, the visitors saw that Pablo’s bedroom was a mess. It hadn’t been cleaned in a long while and disorder reigned. Ten or fifteen cockroaches scurried in search of hiding places. Under a table supporting a colour TV and a VCR were a roll of tissue paper, old newspapers, and a broken CD player; a pile of soiled sheets and towels and underwear lay on top of the unmade bed; slippers under a writing table; three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, several empty and crushed packets of Populares on the floor; shoes and socks all over. It reeked of human sweat and grease, and dirt.
As Trujillo professionally searched the bedroom and the embarrassed witnesses stared, Elena, leaning in the doorway, occasionally fighting back tears and biting her lip, wondered why she and her brother had become enemies, when the split had begun, what part of the blame was hers. Memories kept coming, the way waves wash over a beach, only to ebb away and be absorbed by the sand.
Elena couldn’t recall the rejection she must have felt right from the very beginning. She was three when what had been a big balloon of striated flesh all of a sudden deflated and transformed itself into a screaming, crying, red-faced newborn demanding her mother’s full attention. Had the little thing sensed that she probably hated him? Was it possible for a suckling infant to somehow intuit repulsion?
Her sources were family stories. Funny anecdotes told by Gladys of which she had no memory whatsoever. Like the morning when she found Elena sucking from the bottle she was supposed to be using to feed her brother. It was how their mother learned why the boy was always hungry so soon after having been fed by his improperly supervised sister. Or the day she covered his face with her excrement. Or the evening she fed him a quarter pound of raisins, which Pablo happily chomped away on, and nearly dehydrated from acute diarrhoea. As teenagers, when these and other stories were recounted, Elena and Pablo swapped cursory smiles, made jokes, but in her brother’s eyes there was a strange gleam, as if he were thinking: See, see how it was you who started it all?
According to her mother, Elena was amazed to discover Pablo’s penis. Why? What did he need it for? Once he learned to stand and walk, she had wanted to pee standing up, too. Family stories, however, excluded one which Elena remembered vividly. The day when, at age seven, she was found fondling her brother, aged four. Her mother spanked her like never before, so she figured she had done something terrible and for many years the memory hid at the back of her mind as some unspeakable atrocity she had to atone for. After the Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Havana expounded on sexual games among children, Elena experienced a huge spiritual relief. The feeling of guilt disappeared and her sexuality improved noticeably.
Perhaps as part of her atonement and to stave off their growing antagonism, but if so unconsciously, she tried hard to become her brother’s favourite playmate. The Parque de la Quinta was their playground. She learned to throw a baseball and skate and ride a bike as he learned to swing a bat, ride a scooter, then a tricycle. They were the object of undisguised envy by many other children in the neighbourhood, those who didn’t have fathers with the special connections required to obtain for their offspring what was unavailable for 99.9 per cent of Cuban children in the 1970s.
In practical terms, however, their childhood was fatherless. Manuel Miranda had been a major in the revolutionary army – the highest rank – since 1958, aged twenty-one. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant two months after joining the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, he was made captain four months later, then appointed major two weeks before Batista fled and the regular Army collapsed. By the time the rebels reached Havana he was a living legend: a hundred stories portrayed him as a fearless, highly adventurous young man who laughed uproariously in the face of death.
Major Miranda had a few wild months in 1959 Havana. Only five feet four, his self-assurance, shoulder-length hair, and personal history made him the third most sought-after man in the Cuban capital (after Fidel Castro and Camilo Cienfüegos). Gladys Garcés, at the time one of the chorus girls of the world-renowned Tropicana, was two inches taller and two years older than the major, had a statuesque figure, and danced the way palm fronds sway in the afternoon breeze – with an almost magic sensu-ousness. They met, made love, and the country boy lost his heart for the first time. He didn’t want to wake up from the dream and persuaded the young woman to quit the cabaret and marry him in June. After four years of nightclub life and several dozen men, Gladys was too well versed in the vagaries of passion to fall madly in love with anyone, but she felt in her bones that marrying a swashbuckling hero considerably reduced the uncertainty of a future in which millionaires, business executives, and their bejewelled mistresses were threatened species.
Right then the struggle against American imperialism began. Miranda spent weeks, sometimes months, in a bunker somewhere waiting for the American invasion; in the Bay of Pigs, crushing Brigade 2506; in Algeria, fighting the Moroccans; hunting counter-revolutionaries in the mountains of Las Villas; training guerrillas to foster subversion in Latin America. Sometimes of an evening, taking time out from his action-packed life, Major Miranda would insert his key into the lock of the confiscated Miramar apartment he had been assigned by the Housing Institute in 1960, and his kids would spend a couple of days playing with Daddy.
Neither she nor Pablo were old enough to discern the reasons behind their parents’ divorce. It hadn’t been a normal home, but the break-up was still a shock because Gladys, who never talked much about her husband and didn’t seem to be particularly distraught by his prolonged absences, all of a sudden spent hours cursing the son of a bitch, a term that, like countless other expletives, she had learned in the dressing rooms of the Tropicana. She also blamed some nameless whore for her misfortune.
After Pablo completed second grade – or was it third? – school became an important dividing factor. The boy resented his sister’s tutoring, which Gladys forced Elena to give him at home. He also detested her dedication to school issues, and her being elected Head of the Detachment of Pioneers, the children’s communist organization. It was worse in junior high. Having inherited her mother’s genes, at twelve Elena was the most beautiful and popular girl from among 165 female students. Pablo at nine was an exact copy of his father: Short, lean, and bold to the point of having been nicknamed ‘El Loco’ – The Wacko.
In the following three or four years, the two personalities became the centre of contrasting groups. Pablo was the undisputed leader of five or six angry, frustrated, and rebellious teenagers, kids from one-parent homes most of them, who played hooky, roamed the streets, and flunked exams. Elena was his exact opposite. She became president of her school’s chapter of the Federation of High School Students at fifteen, valedictorian of her class at seventeen. They were living in a peculiar symbiosis: different species under the same roof, avoiding each other, always on a collision course.
Tragedy struck one evening in 1980, just after General Miranda returned unannounced from Angola only to find his second wife, an extremely beautiful brunette thirteen years younger than him, in his own bed with a next-door neighbour. The general drew his nine-millimetre Maka-rov and emptied its first clip into the two pleading lovers. Their legs and arms kept jerking spasmodically, so Miranda changed clips and made sure neither lived to tell the tale. Then he drove his Lada to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and turned himself in.
In the ensuing three or four months the lives of Elena and Pablo became kaleidoscopes of incomprehension, apprehension, and irritability that little by little evolved into indifference and insensitivity, then to some measure of euphoria and consolation when they learned the general had been sentenced to thirty years in prison, not the death penalty, which was what a much-hated prosecutor recommended.
Like most Cubans, Gladys was firmly convinced that lambasting the living is not as unacceptable as speaking ill of the dead. So, relieved that Elena and Pablo had been spared from further traumas, she would venomously repeat to them, eighteen and fifteen years old respectively, how men become assholes when they think with their little head instead of their bigger one. ‘You’ll regret this,’ she claimed to have warned her husband the day he packed his belongings and moved out, ‘when you catch the slut cheating on you and remember that you renounced the decent home and wife you once had.’
Since the mid-1960s, the Cuban media has been instructed to ignore all sorts of scandals involving top communist officials; the notion that all of them were paradigms of human perfection couldn’t be jeopardized. But the story was too juicy to put a lid on. Generals and colonels stationed in faraway lands considered it prudent to relate the tragic drama to their usually younger and beautiful wives and/or mistresses, who in turn told it to their friends and relatives. From the island’s easternmost town to its westernmost village, hundreds of thousands learned what had happened by tuning in to Radio Bemba – Lip Radio – among them a neighbour of Gladys and her kids who considered it his duty to inform a few discreet friends on the block. The news spread like wildfire.
Then a very curious phenomenon occurred. The teenagers who as children had learned the meaning of the word envy with Elena and Pablo – observing them ride in their father’s cars; staring at the olive-drab, tarpaulin-covered trucks which delivered heavy cartons in late December; ogling the toys, clothes, and shoes they wore; savouring the huge, exquisite birthday cakes and slurping as many bottles of soda as they wanted to on Pablo and Elena’s birthdays – those same teenagers split into two groups. A minority provided unwavering support and encouragement. The greater number turned their back on the Miranda family after gleefully expressing a complacency which reduced itself to a simple statement: At last those who had been born with a silver spoon in their mouths would learn what building socialism was really all about.
That same year Elena gained admittance to the University of Havana to do a BA in Education. She felt like Alice stepping into Wonderland. Nobody seemed to care whose daughter she was or where she came from. There followed the transition from high-school senior who gave the cold shoulder to juniors, to junior who got the same treatment; there was the professor in his early forties, the first mature man she felt attracted to; there were the huge buildings, the enormous library and stadium, the serious political rallies. At last she was able to shed the school uniform, ride a bus daily, have lunch wherever she felt like and her allowance permitted. She also had to study a lot harder.
The Wacko, however, remained in the same school and was demoted from rightful heir to a generalship to son of a murderer. His response was extremely violent: in the course of two months he had fist fights with two teachers and nine schoolmates, something that could not be overlooked. But before expelling the boy, the principal wrote a letter to the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Thirty-five-year-old Major Domingo Rosas, from Army Counter-Intelligence and a psychologist by profession, was ordered to ‘look after’ the son and daughter of former general Manuel Miranda.
Major Rosas visited Gladys first. He explained that in consideration for the outstanding merits of her erstwhile husband, the ‘Direction of the Revolution’ – an expression generally meaning Number One in person, yet vague enough to shift the blame to Numbers Two, Three or Four should something go wrong – had instructed that a liaison officer for Elena, Pablo, and their father must be appointed. He would take them to visit ex-General Miranda in prison when and if they felt like it; he would also try to win their trust and provide counselling. Gladys should feel free to call him when any problem seriously affecting her son and daughter couldn’t be solved through regular channels.
Next, Major Rosas went to the high school and interviewed its principal and Pablo’s teachers. The information he gleaned convinced Rosas he’d be tackling a real deviant. He explained things to his commanding officer and was relieved of all his other assignments for a month, at the end of which he made a report and a prognosis. It was an excellent report and it had an optimistic prognosis; it omitted one very significant fact, though. In thirty days Major Rosas had fallen madly in love with Elena Miranda.
‘Comrade Elena, could you come over?’ Captain Trujillo asked from the door to Pablo’s closet, sounding intrigued.
Elena approached him. The DTI officer had taken a VHS-format video cassette from a huge carton containing many more. It was cryptically labelled thirty-five.
‘There must be forty or fifty videos in this box,’ Trujillo said. ‘Was your brother a big video fan?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Captain.’
‘Didn’t he show these to you?’
Elena sighed, crossed her arms over her chest, took a deep breath. ‘Listen, Captain, I think I ought to level with you from the start,’ she said gloomily. ‘As Pablo’s sister, with both of us living under the same roof, it’s perfectly natural for you to think I’m the ideal person to give you background information on my brother, what he did in his spare time, who he hung out with, if he was doing okay at his job, the sort of thing from which you can find out what happened to him. Unfortunately, my brother and I didn’t get along. He lived his life; I lived mine. We didn’t have mutual friends. We didn’t share our hopes and aspirations and problems. I cooked for myself, he cooked for himself. As you can see, he kept his room locked. My TV set is the old black-and-white in the living room, I don’t own a VCR. Pablo never showed me those videos. For many years we agreed on one issue only: swapping this apartment for two smaller units, so each of us could live alone. But we never found the right swap; either he didn’t like the apartment he’d move to or I disliked mine. So, I’m probably the least informed person about my brother.’
Trujillo lifted his eyes to the witnesses. Kuan remained impassive, but Zoila gave him a slight nod. The captain reinserted the cassette into its box, returned it to the carton, then produced another one. Its label read thirty-four.
‘Sorry to hear that, Comrade Elena. It slows down the investigation. Let’s see what’s here. Probably a movie.’
Elena shrugged her shoulders and returned to the doorway. Trujillo found the remote control under a shirt on top of the writing table. He inserted the cassette and pressed the play button.
Blue. White clouds on a clear sky, the camera gliding slowly down to the horizon, the sea, then panning gradually to a sandy beach. Two young women holding hands approach the camera, laughing and jumping over tame little waves which break and die under their feet. Both wear straw hats, dark glasses, and minimal two-piece bathing suits. Fade out. Same girls under a shower, naked, playfully splashing water on each other. The game loses momentum, with a lecherous stare the brunette gently caresses the blonde, they embrace and kiss hungrily…
Trujillo stopped the VCR and ejected the cassette. ‘I will take all these tapes with me to the Department,’ he said.
The captain resumed the search. Elena tore off another layer of forgetfulness from her mind. At what age had sex become the driving force in her brother’s life? She didn’t know. It had been early on, though. She recalled the disgusted looks of her high-school girlfriends when a drooling Pablo ogled them. One afternoon she caught him masturbating in the hall as an unsuspecting schoolmate, sitting on the living room’s Chesterfield in faded denim short shorts, legs tucked under her, concentrated on a list of questions for an upcoming exam. How old was he? Thirteen? Perhaps only twelve.
Elena shook her head in denial and clicked her tongue. This made Zoila steal a glance at her that went unnoticed.
Had her brother been bisexual? Judging by appearances alone, among the people who visited him at home there were as many gay men and lesbians as heterosexuals. But she suspected that Pablo, despite his promiscuity, had never been in love. Probably he belonged to those who, following a few days, weeks or months at the most, long for the delicious early stage of all relationships and must chase after someone new to fantasize about.
It seemed as though he was one of the increasing number of individuals capable of comprehending the meaning of infatuation, lust, sex, perhaps even romance, but not love. Men and women who try to conceal, under a veneer of sophistication or cynicism, their inability to involve themselves spiritually beyond a certain point, who believe that the absence of commitment is the greatest expression of individual freedom. Unmarried, generally childless people who profess to love their blood relations and friends, those socially stereotypical human bonds which hardly ever demand forgiveness and understanding and self-sacrifice on a daily basis.
Elena wondered whether she belonged to a disappearing breed that people like Pablo, if given the chance, feast on. She thought she had fallen in love, with varying intensity, on three occasions out of a total of eighteen men. She had never been casual, never gone to bed with a guy just for the hell of it, for what he could provide materially, or because she felt lonely or sad. Not once had she pushed aside feelings, a minimum of physical attraction, and yet…life had not rewarded her senti-mentalism, naïveté, foolishness, or whatever it was with the lasting, mature, intense, fulfilling relationship she had always dreamed of. Were people like Pablo the precursors to a new stage in what humans call love? Heirs to the characters so masterfully described over two centuries earlier by Pierre de Laclos in Les Liaisons Dangereuses? The kind of people the human race demands to counteract disappointment, infidelity, jealousy, the high divorce rates, the one-parent homes, and the population explosion?
As though prodded by death, Elena continued the second serious philosophical exploration of her life. Certainly the institution of marriage, probably the oldest social stereotype, seemed to be in intensive care. She had never married, but it appeared to her that forced cohabitation and self-repression based on moral obligations did not provide the foundation for extending love beyond the initial passion experienced by almost everybody. Contrary to what the famous song argued, love and marriage don’t go together like horse and carriage. Eventually people should? could? would? establish long-lasting love affairs built on affinities and feelings, not on a signed document.
Kuan gasped; Zoila covered her mouth with her hand; Elena returned to reality. Trujillo had found a thick manila envelope under the mattress and had extracted from it a wad of hundred– and fifty-dollar bills an inch thick.
‘Comrade Kuan, Comrade Zoila, would you please count this money?’ Trujillo requested.
The witnesses stared as if they had been asked to fly to the moon.
‘You have a problem with that, comrades?’
Kuan shook his head; Zoila said ‘No.’ They approached the captain, took the cash, and started counting it by the writing desk.
The search brought no further surprises. Trujillo sat on a chair, produced from his briefcase two sheets of semi-bond paper with the DTI’s letterhead, a sheet of carbon paper, and recorded in longhand the seizure of forty-three video cassettes and twenty-nine hundred US dollars in cash found in the bedroom of Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés. The serial numbers of fifty-four bills followed. All four present signed, Elena was given the copy, and the captain and the neighbours left. Around a minute later, as she sat on the Chesterfield holding her head in her hands, elbows on her knees, the buzzer startled her. It was Trujillo, asking whether it would be possible for Elena to be at the IML at eight the following morning to identify the body. She limited her reply to a nod and closed the door.
Half an hour later, still angst-ridden, lying in bed on her right side with the night lamp on, Elena suddenly realized she was doing something she hadn’t done in the last thirty-one years – sucking her thumb. She pulled it out in disgust. What was the matter with her? Regressing to childhood? Totally freaked out? Next she turned the lamp off and tried to relax.
Her unruly memory began replaying her greatest personal calamity, the one which had made her reflect philosophically for the first time about life, love, and God. Her angelic son, the most beautiful child in the whole world, in his white small coffin, eyelids closed, flowing golden locks framing his head. No! Death wouldn’t govern her thoughts any more tonight. No more wading through the saddest moments of her past, either. To divert her mind from all the problems assailing her, Elena turned the light back on. She would make espresso and read until daybreak, then call her mother.
Captain Felix Trujillo drove the Ural back to his outfit, on Marino Street between Tulipán and Conill, got receipts from the storeroom clerk for the video cassettes and the money, returned the motorcycle, then walked back home. He lived ten blocks away from DTI headquarters, in a one-storey wooden house with a red-tile roof at 453 Falgueras Street, municipality of Cerro.
No living soul could say for certain when the house was built, but late nineteenth century would be a good guess, just before most of the remaining dwellings on the block were erected. Over the years the twenty-foot structure had tilted to the right – by reason of the gradual sinking of the subsoil, the building inspector diagnosed – and now it leaned against a quite similar wooden house, as if tired after a century of sheltering people. This oddity, considered amusing by some passers-by, worried its residents and neighbours. Whenever a hurricane threatened Havana or torrential rains fell, Trujillo and his family were evacuated to the fire station on Calzada del Cerro.
When gas mains arrived in the neighbourhood in the 1920s, a meter and the incoming pipe were fixed to its front without any consideration for aesthetics, a sure sign that even then its owner was not a man of means. A two-foot-high grate embedded in bricks and cement separated the yard-wide portal from the sidewalk. What appeared to be three huge front doors were in fact one front door and two openings into the main room, glorified windows almost. The place where Trujillo, his parents, wife, son, and daughter lived, in addition to the main room, had a dining room, three small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. Refurbishing it inside and out would most likely have cost twenty times its original cost, an investment way beyond what a police captain could afford. In fact, Trujillo couldn’t even afford the coats of paint and the new roof and floor tiles that were urgently needed.
Trujillo slipped his key into the lock and went in at ten to twelve. Everybody was in bed, the kitchen light left on for him. There were rice, black beans, and a hard-boiled egg in a covered frying pan; a pot full of water for his bath – the perfect mother. He lit the range and as the water warmed the captain smoked a cigarette. In the bathroom he poured the hot water into an almost full bucket of water, then tiptoed into his bedroom where he found clean underwear and a fast asleep wife. Following his bath he felt hungry. He seldom had dinner twice, but ignoring what the following day had in store for him, he warmed and ate the food, made some espresso, then smoked a second cigarette.
As he was doing the dishes and placing them on the wire drainer, Trujillo resumed the line of reasoning he had started on his way home. If the whole batch of videos were porno, Pablo Miranda must have been one of three things: best client, salesman, or native producer. The money found in his bedroom might also be related to the videos, and his being able to meet and/or associate with foreigners at his workplace pointed in the same direction. A considerable percentage of Italian and Spanish tourists were single men who notoriously came to Cuba looking for cheap sex.
All this and the cocaine inclined the captain to believe that Pablo had engaged in something reprehensible, illegal, and sex-related. His murder had all the trappings of a typical settlement of accounts, very professionally carried out. The murderer might just have been following orders from someone who decreed Pablo Miranda’s execution. After finding the videos, it seemed crystal-clear to Trujillo that the contradictory indications – the bite-marks, the stolen wallet and watch, the two hundred dollars left in a pocket – were an attempt to send the police on a wild-goose chase after a sex maniac or a dumb thief. Had the short bald guy hatched a scheme to blackmail somebody? Had he demanded a bigger share of the profits? And what was his role in the scam? Cameraman? Editor? Talent scout?
Police knew that the production of Cuban porno films had become a new business venture in the last few years. Customs confiscated copies at the airport, officers raiding whorehouses and flophouses found some more, but so far no producer had been caught. At national police headquarters a special unit had been put together under a full colonel. Trujillo had listened to the complaints of his boss, Major Pena, one of the officers working on it in the Cuban capital. From among the ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’, three hookers and two male prostitutes had been identified, busted, and questioned. Each of them had repeated the same story.
A man they had never seen before or again talked them into it. He told them to wait for a blue van with tinted windows at an intersection. Once inside the vehicle they were blindfolded and driven around for half an hour before reaching the garage of a house. The cameraman, light tech, and sound tech had worn masks and spoken to each other in whispers. Once the shooting was over, they had been returned blindfolded to the pick-up point. No, they had no idea where the house was. No, they didn’t see the van’s plates. And the pay? A hundred dollars.
Describe the contact man, Pena had asked. The first hustler said he had brown eyes, the second swore they were green, the third didn’t notice. According to the two men he was clean shaven; one of the women said he had a moustache. Three of them described him as being in his forties, the other two said he was in his fifties. Not even on the man’s height and weight could the models reach agreement. Knowing that they were being spun a line, Major Pena and his subordinates wheedled and threatened, all to no avail. Finally the offenders were indicted, tried and sentenced; the women to one year in prison, the men to three. And the investigation stalled. Pena and his special unit could do nothing but wait for a fresh lead. They would be overjoyed at Trujillo’s break-through.
Returning to the bathroom, he washed his hands, then went to bed. He set the alarm clock on his bedside table for six a.m. With hands clasped in his lap, his mind moved to Elena Miranda.
It seemed as though the murdered man and his sister did not like each other at all. One more case of relatives who regard each other with suspicion bordering on out-right hostility. She seemed decent enough, clean-cut, self-effacing, sensible, still a very attractive woman. In her twenties she must have been stunning, Trujillo speculated. Pablo’s antithesis? It seemed so.
The lock on her brother’s bedroom proved what she had said: ‘He lived his life; I lived mine.’ His room was a mess; the rest of the house was neat. Well, the walls needed a lick of paint and the furniture new upholstery, but what Cuban home didn’t? Separate cooking, wanting to swap the nice apartment for two, it all indicated conflicting personalities. He had seen it many times among divorced couples and in-laws forced to keep living under the same roof because of the housing shortage; less frequently among parents and their offspring. Under this kind of forced cohabitation tempers get rather frayed, providing a recurring reason for police intervention;
situations included anything from aggravated battery to homicide.
Had Pablo Miranda been an underachiever? A kid spoiled by a powerful father who felt relegated after his well-connected daddy lost all his privileges? The tiny bell pealed again. Manuel Miranda. Trujillo tried to recall who the man had been. Certainly one of the few who years earlier held all the cards and wrote all the rules, considering where he was serving time. A former polit-buro member or general or minister, for sure. A sacred cow, even in jail. Early the following morning he would have to find out whose duty it was to call the General Directorate of Prisons, report the murder of an inmate’s son, and ask to notify the father. They would probably let him come to the wake, a few hours before burial time, with two escorts, no handcuffs, maybe wearing civilian clothes.
Suddenly, Trujillo sat up in bed. His wife stirred by his side. A politically motivated crime? Someone who had been screwed by the father and killed the son for revenge? Slowly, Trujillo lay back. Too far-fetched. No precedent as far as he knew. No, it couldn’t be. He yawned. It was the kind of case that wins kudos, back-slapping, and an instantaneous promotion for the officer who solves it. And to a lesser extent, the ill will of his equals. He decided that he would take a stab at it. But there was a lot of spadework to do.
As Captain Trujillo drifted off to sleep, Pablo’s killer was boarding a plane bound for Cancún, México.
‘If they’re all dirty movies, you’ve hit a fucking mine,’ was Major Pena’s exclamation when he learned, at 7.15 the next morning, that Captain Trujillo had deposited forty-three suspected pornographic videos in the storeroom. Trujillo explained his findings and what he had inferred before outlining his theories. The major was fifty-six, grey-haired, overweight, and most of the time had the frigid, uninterested gaze shared by those who pride themselves on their realism and who no longer believe in the theory of inherent human kindness. But he was respected and secretly admired by superiors and subordinates alike.
‘Tell me the receipt number.’ Major Pena beckoned Trujillo over with his right hand and left his uncomfortable wooden chair. ‘I want to start seeing them right now.’
‘You dirty old man,’ Captain Trujillo said as he dipped two fingers into the back pocket of his pants and drew out his wallet. He produced a pink slip and read out the number, 977.
‘Got it. See you later.’
‘Hold your horses,’ Trujillo cautioned as he returned the wallet to its pocket. ‘The victim’s name is Pablo Miranda, and his father, Manuel Miranda, is serving a prison sent—’
‘The father’s Manuel Miranda?’ the major cut in, eyes rounded in surprise, bushy eyebrows lifted.
Trujillo had never before seen Pena flabbergasted. In fact, the major bragged that nothing surprised him any more. Pena did a second extraordinary thing. He plopped on to his chair and stared vacantly at a wall. To top it all he said, ‘Oh my God.’
The captain arched an eyebrow and kept his smile in check. Before communist Europe went up in smoke, for Party members – state security and senior police officers in particular – religious terminology just didn’t exist. Then, all of a sudden pro-government believers were invited to join a political organization which denied the existence of God; cynics had a field day. Trujillo and Pena, in common with many Cubans, were not religious. But now they used expressions like ‘Praised be the Lord’ to mock the leadership’s sudden turnabout.
‘So you know the guy. C’mon, out with it. C’mon, Chief, c’mon. I have to be at the IML at eight.’
Pena snapped out of his reverie and lit a cigarette. ‘The stories I’ve heard about this guy…it’s like one of those incredible Hollywood movies. Only it’s no movie. The guy’s fucking crazy. I mean, no man in his right mind would do the things this guy is presumed to have done.’
‘Done where?’
‘Everywhere. You name a place where Cubans went into battle from – let me see…’58 to…what, ‘81? –he was there. A brigadier general calling names to the enemy from front-line trenches, letting them have it with all he’d got. Short guy, not an ounce over 130 pounds. Can you believe it? At the last count he had been wounded six or seven times, I don’t know exactly. The man is a born fighter.’
‘So, why is he at Tinguaro?’
Pena told the story in a sad tone. As it unfolded, the captain felt a certain amount of sympathy for the ex-general. In the last two years Trujillo had seen his suspicions that his own wife was cheating on him grow. There had been too many blanks in her explanations about why she was late, an ever increasing sexual indifference, frequent disagreements. Would he do what Miranda had done? No way. No woman was worth a day in prison. It was a problem he had postponed for too long; he would have to tackle it soon.
‘Well, you think you could call Prisons and explain things to them?’
‘Right away.’
‘I’m going to meet Miranda’s daughter at the IML in a little while. Once she IDs her brother we should let Prisons know where the wake is taking place so Miranda can attend.’
‘No problem. Even counter-revolutionaries are permitted to attend the wake of a close relative.’
‘Counters too? That a fact?’
‘You bet.’
‘That’s decent. See you in a while.’
‘Wait. You said the victim had shit on him?’
‘Four fixes.’
‘No chance the guy OD’d before he was killed?’
‘Barbara didn’t mention that.’
‘Oh, it’s Bárbara now,’ quipped the beaming major.
‘Quit busting my balls, Chief.’
‘Okay. Take it easy.’ Pena held up his hands, successfully fighting off a laugh. ‘Everybody knows you have a weakness for the Chocolate Queen.’
‘I’m getting outta here.’
‘When the LCC sends its report, let me know if it’s good or bad.’
‘Good or bad what?’
‘The shit, man, the shit. Go see her, go, go.’
The captain strolled leisurely along Boyeros, his diary under his left arm. The twelve-lane avenue was congested with heavy traffic in both directions, a fact which never ceased to amaze him. In a country where most people made less than twenty-five dollars a month and the cheapest gas cost three dollars a gallon, thousands of ancient, privately owned American gas-guzzlers congest the streets, the majority financed by unmentionable sources. He lifted his gaze to the sky. The cloudy, strangely cool morning made him feel certain it had rained heavily to the south of the city the night before.
Trujillo covered the nine blocks to the IML in twelve minutes. He sat on a granite bench in the foyer, then lit his second cigarette of the day. The captain felt clean and fresh in the uniform laundered and impeccably ironed by his mother. He had shaved carefully too. Just in case he bumped into Barbara (who had been curious enough to check up on him and find out he was married), and to lessen the impression of untidiness that Elena Miranda must have formed of him the night before, assuming she had registered such details when confronted with the news of her brother’s murder.
Elena arrived at 8.19 looking sad, exhausted, and frustrated by a ride in a jam-packed bus. Her face was sucked-in, with dark crescents under her eyes. The aftershock, Trujillo realized, then registered approvingly her beige blouse, black mid-calf skirt, black pumps, black purse. At wakes and burials he had seen weeping young women wearing Lycra shorts and boob-tubes. And he recalled a recent TV documentary on the remarkable mausoleums of the Colón Cemetery which had been presented by a curvaceous hostess wearing a see-through white dress and minuscule black underwear. Maybe the producer was trying to resurrect the dead, the captain’s father had wryly commented from his rocking chair.
‘Good morning,’ said Trujillo, getting to his feet, extending his hand, and dropping the ‘comrade’. He thought once again how inappropriate formal greetings can be on certain occasions.
‘Good morning.’
‘This way, please.’
At the desk they learned that Dr Valverde was off duty. An assistant led them to the cold room and Elena identified Pablo, then retched repeatedly and vomited nothing. Trujillo steered her back to the main entrance, his arm protectively around her shoulders, then made her sit on a bench. He lit up, inhaled, and blew out smoke.
‘We are notifying the General Directorate of Prisons, they will inform your father.’
Elena assented as she dabbed at her lips with a tiny handkerchief.
‘If he wants to attend the wake, they’ll probably give him a pass. A guard might accompany him.’
‘A guard?’
‘I believe it’s standard procedure.’
‘I see.’
‘The body will be sent to the funeral home on 70th and 29B before noon. They’ll make all the funeral arrangements. Did you call your mother?’
Elena sobbed, then repressed her desire to cry. ‘Yes, I did. Early this morning. She’s coming as soon as she can.’
