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