Havana Noir by Achy Obejas Page A

hurtful, sadistic, and devastating. I really wanted to fuck with this guy, to offend him, humiliate him, and chew him up and out. I confess that there are times when I have very violent impulses toward others, but I contain myself. I am, after all, a civilized person. But when life’s crazy turns bring me in contact with someone who doesn’t repress those impulses in himself…well, then the walls crumble, there’s no point to being civilized, and we willingly go deeper into that wild and tenuous territory where everything is up for grabs. And when I say everything, I mean exactly that: everything . So I was really sharpening my claws, ready to dig them where they would most hurt my nocturnal interlocutor as soon as I got my chance. Ah, but woman proposes and God disposes! That bastard son of a bitch never called again. And because I had no way of getting ahold of him, I was left on my own. What a drag.
    A week after the police sketch was published, news of the dangerous criminal’s arrest came with much fanfare, followed by effusive praise for the wisdom, heroism, and selfiess work of the National Revolutionary Police, the party, the government, the community organizations, and, more generally, the people of the capital, who had remained firm in their resolve, without allowing themselves to be distracted by the enemy, blah blah blah…
    As incredible as it may sound, I didn’t tie any of these things together. For me, it was clear—clear as day—that the scarecrow in the photo didn’t exist. For me, if they’d caught anybody, it could only be the real him, the psychopath with the lethal blade, the bastard who so reveled in his telephonic chitchats with me, and who had, unexpectedly, stopped calling. And, as I said, that’s when I panicked. I freaked out. It’s not that I had done anything terrible, nor that I felt responsible for the guy’s deeds. No way! Looking coldly at the facts, what could I be accused of? Of accepting calls from a serial killer at nearly midnight all summer long? Of having heard on numerous occasions the detailed plans for a crime from its perpetrator? Of never having run to turn him in? Well, I suppose that is also a crime, a very serious one. Of course, I could swear and swear again until the end of days that I never believed a word uttered on the phone by that guy, that I always believed those florid and malicious narratives pouring into my little ear were never more than nocturnal jokes, just jokes. Jokes in supremely bad taste, of course. Cruel, stupid, macabre jokes, but no more than that. Regardless of whether the police inspector believed me or not, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove the contrary. But I was terrified just the same. Just thinking about it, my hairs stand on end.
    The last thing I wanted in this life was to raise the police’s suspicions, to be investigated, to have them sticking their noses in my personal business. I didn’t want them to know I don’t work for the state, that I don’t belong to my block’s Committee for Defense of the Revolution or to any other community organization, that I barely deal with the people in my neighborhood, that the people in my building think I’m weird, that I frequently cheat on my taxes, that my parents live in Israel, that I have an illegal Internet connection, that my brother is gay and lives in New York, that I sometimes do drugs to go to sleep, that my ex-husband is a former political prisoner and now lives in Miami, that I have a nine-millimeter Beretta (which is extremely illegal in this country) stashed in the top drawer of my night table…Basically, I had an abundance of reasons to be scared of the National Revolutionary Police noticing my existence. My anguish was such that, for the first few days after the guy’s arrest, I was utterly paralyzed. I didn’t even try to get rid of the gun. In the end, that turned out to be a good thing, since no one ever came to arrest me, or to attempt to search my