Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Page B

coming round to liking that story, but if he wanted to understand anything he had to know a little more. At least one thing was definite: Alberto Marqués couldn’t be the physical murderer of Alexis Arayán. It would
have taken those arms two hours to strangle the youth, while he held his nose between two fingers. But he was also sure Alberto Marqués was deeply implicated in that death dressed in red.
    When he saw Manuel Palacios leaning on the car’s bumper, in the shade of the first flamboyant trees in Santa Catalina, the Count realized how much he was sweating. He’d barely walked four blocks and the sweat was already drenching his shirt, but, bewildered by the rush of information, his brain hadn’t yet processed the feeling of heat he now found in that moisture. It was almost 4 p.m. and the temperature had leapt several degrees.
    â€œWhat happened?” asked the sergeant, as the Count mopped himself with his handkerchief.
    â€œA very peculiar fellow who’s fucked up my whole day. He’s queerer than a Sunday afternoon,” he said smiling, because the metaphor wasn’t his: it bore the copyright of his old acquaintance Baby Face Miki. “And you know I can’t stand queers . . . Well, this guy’s different . . . The bastard got me thinking . . . And what did you find out?”
    As the car drove up Santa Catalina en route to Headquarters, Manuel Palacios recounted the first surprising result from the autopsy: “According to your friend Flower of the Dead, they didn’t take anything from the guy’s arse, Conde: on the contrary, they inserted . . . Two one-peso coins. What do you reckon? Have you ever heard anything like it?”
    The Count shook his head. But the sergeant didn’t give him time to process his shock at the unexpected revelation: “The man who killed him is white, blood group AB, and between forty and sixty. Possibly righthanded. In other words, we’ve already a million and a half suspects . . .”

    The Count declined to laugh at the joke and Sergeant Manuel Palacios finished his story: the murder had been by strangling, and the murderer had pulled the sash tight while facing the transvestite, and yet there was only the smallest speck of someone else’s skin on Alexis’s nails. The man’s footprints indicated he weighed some one hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds, that his shoe size was number nine, that he walked normally and probably wore blue jeans, for they’d found a multi-coloured thread that had snagged on a shrub. The possible fellatio was ruled out, for there was no trace of semen in the dead man’s mouth. There was not a single fingerprint and the silk sash provided no useful information. Nothing of special interest was found at the location of the crime: the usual rubbish you come across in such places: a bottle, a used condom, a rusty key, cigar butts with and without their labels – Rey del Mundo, Montecristo, Coronas – and a plastic comb missing six teeth, not to mention a wisdom tooth . . .
    â€œThen it’s obvious there was no struggle,” the Count commented as Manolo wound up his inventory. “And as for the coins . . .”
    â€œIt’s a real bastard, isn’t it? But I reckon the strangest thing is that he didn’t throw him in the river. You can imagine if he’d appeared in the sea we wouldn’t have known where he was from, or the fish might have eaten him and, if we’d found him, we wouldn’t have identified him. Should we go to Headquarters?”
    â€œNo, no,” said the Count, who paused to glance selfpityingly towards the house of Tamara, the most constant of his lost loves, a woman whose skin always smelled of strong eau-de-cologne, whom he’d dreamed about for the last two thousand years of his
life. “Better carry on to Vedado, a friend just came to mind and I want to talk to him.”
    Â 
    â€œBut what the hell