Havana Black (12 page)

“To be frank, I hadn't really given it a moment's thought,” Fermín replied, after a longer pause.

The Count felt his nerves tensing. That bastard was trying to wriggle out of it, but he wouldn't let him. Miriam and Fermín were still his only visible paths to the truth, and truth, not that criminal's arrogance, should be his only concern.

“When was the last time you saw Miguel?”

“The day before he was killed. I went to his place and left him my car in case he needed it.”

“And you didn't arrange to see each other the following night?”

“No.”

“He was going to see a relative of his that night?”

“I don't know who it might have been.”

“So I should conclude you don't have the slightest idea why Forcade was murdered?”

The architect smiled. A smile that assumed he was probably holding all the trump cards.

“I'd say it was a case of assault and robbery, wouldn't you?”

“And then they cut his balls off? And left his car intact without taking even a tyre? Nobody's going to believe that, Fermín . . . And of course you didn't bring up your clandestine departure again, the one you were planning when he defected to Spain?”

The Count expected a visible reaction to this awkward question, but Fermín didn't flinch. Ten years in prison must have taught him something about life.

“I don't know what departure you can be referring to.”

“Yours and your sister's. Miriam told me the whole story.”

“I don't know why she told you about something that never happened.”

“And why would you want the out-board motor they found in your house when you were arrested in '79?”

“To install on my boat, of course. I like fishing, like lots of people in this country who have boats and lots of other things and do legal and sometimes even untoward things with them . . . The newspaper is still talking about that and they were all leaders or military; some were even policemen, like yourself . . . Or even more police than you,” he sounded off, as he put two fingers up to one of his shoulders.

“Yes, you're right,” allowed the Count, his muscles stiff with mounting anger. That fellow had just uttered the only verifiable truth in the whole conversation and had touched a very raw nerve: he saw his friend the Major again, forlorn and forgotten, and felt the dam break, so his anger could flood out: fuck the lot of them, he thought, though he spoke in more measured tones: “Well, now we've reached this juncture, you give me no choice but to tell you: make sure you aren't mixed up in Miguel Forcade's death, because if you are I'll do everything in my power to ensure you spend the rest of your life doing press-ups in prison. I'm not a policeman for nothing, as you reminded me. You may go.”

Fermín Bodes stood up and looked at Sergeant Manuel Palacios, who had stayed obediently silent, and then at Lieutenant Mario Conde.

“Thanks for your advice,” he said, and left, gently closing the door behind him.

The Count listened to Fermín's footsteps move towards the lifts, and snorted, as he pressed the tips of his thumbs against his temples.

“What do you make of the fellow, Manolo?”

“That guy knows more than a roach and is in shit up to his elbows, Conde. But he got your goat. I've never heard you say anything like that to anyone . . .”

“Bah, Manolo, I just wanted to see if he got jittery . . .”

“Well, what should we do, put a tail on him?”

The Count paused a moment.

“No, it doesn't make sense . . . You know, nothing makes sense in this business.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“To find out what Miguel Forcade was after . . . Just phone this person,” and he jotted a name and a number on a piece of paper. “Ask if we can see him in an hour's time. I'll go and see if Colonel Molina has finally made it to his office and tell him to sit tight until the case is solved . . .”

 

 

“No, stop, my boy, don't tell me more. Let's see if I know which one it is: a fairly impressionist Matisse, where you can see trees swayed by the wind in a deserted street, and in the background there's a small yellow patch that could be a dog?”

“I didn't see any dog, but I think that's the picture.”

“It's
Autumn Landscape
. Fancy finding it there! And how come I never found out that fellow had it? What do you say his name is?”

“Gerardo Gómez de la Peña, ex-head of Planning and the Economy. Do you remember him now?”

“Vaguely,” replied the old man, Juan Emilio Friguens, who smiled, with that characteristic gesture of his, hiding his mouth and irony behind a hand, cupped like a closed umbrella: his fingers were so long they must have had more bones than were necessary, and they moved as if belonging to an animal skeleton powered by St Vitus. Despite their length, the digits barely hid the wolfish teeth of an old man ever ready to laugh at his own jokes. “The fact is I have to conserve my memory for more important things, you know? Every day my brain cells are less active . . .” and he covered his laughing mouth again.

The Count smiled as well: he felt nothing but admiration for that quiet, sarcastic man. He'd got to know him on an investigation of a theft of various paintings from the National Museum, when the deputy director of Fine Arts recommended he consult him: Friguens was the best informed person in Cuba in the matter of works of art and possible markets for them and his mind held the most reliable catalogue of all the important items that had at some time crossed the island's coasts, in one direction or the other.

“Rumour has it that the Matisse in question is worth a toast. I've got white or vintage rum, which is best on the road to perdition?”

“White and no ice,” the Count replied.

“Vintage, but only a drop,” demurred Manolo.

“I too prefer vintage, but I don't place any restrictions like that young man. After all . . .” said Friguens, who receded into the house repeating: “After all, after all.”

Seeing him walk was also a spectacle: he had kept an erect posture into his eighties, perhaps helped by the scant flesh covering him, and splayed out his feet as he walked, at a rate of knots as vital as the light-coloured
guayaberas
he wore in summer and the dark suits he sported in winter: Friguens was the last representative of the species of the elegant gentleman and had even welcomed them into his home wearing that grey long-sleeved
guayabera
, suited to the autumn.

Now an almost dessicated old man, he'd been art critic for the
Diario de la Marina
for thirty years, a role that had given him real power in Cuban art circles: Friguens functioned at that time as a kind of guru and an unfavourable opinion from him, trumpeted from the pages of that age-old, Catholic, conservative newspaper, could be the ruination of a joint exhibition, even of Picasso and El Greco. However, his prestige
went beyond the platform from which he launched his eulogies or anathemas: it was well known that Friguens behaved like a true incorruptible: spurning the usual practice of his colleagues, he never accepted cash handouts or goods in kind from any of the painters, gallery-owners or dealers he came into contact with and the walls of his house were evidence of his true asceticism: the only drawings visible were those idyllically commercial copies of
The Last Supper
and
The Sacred Heart of Jesus
that could be found in the living rooms of any Catholic Cuban of the old school.

When the newspaper was definitively shut down soon after the victory of the Revolution, almost all of Friguens's colleagues took the road of political exile. He, on the contrary, decided to stay on, wedded to the island's cultural offerings: life in Cuba (at least while rum is manufactured and there are still such good painters, he once told the Count) was the only possible cornerstone to his existence, even when he'd been delivered an emasculating “loss of by-line” and buried alive on a radio programme where his name disappeared in a farrago of words flung into the ethereal ether. His Christian resignation must have helped him in that calvary, thought the Count, for, after enjoying years as a real influence in the land, to see oneself suddenly thrust into the mediocre world of news bulletins could have been one punishment too many for someone used to seeing his signature printed daily in a large-circulation newspaper of real substance. But Juan Emilio had accepted the challenge, also without being corrupted: he wasn't a hostage to bitterness or hatred and retained his pride in being the encyclopedia freely consulted on anything anybody wanted to know about artistic and commercial movements in the Cuban fine arts between 1930 and 1960.

“Here's your rum,” he announced, returning to the living room, and giving each of them a glass. His and the Count's were at the upper limit.

“Maestro, do your doctors know you're still taking this medicine?”

Friguens smiled, hiding his mouth as usual, and said: “My dear boy, I haven't been to the doctor for twenty years. The last time I went was when my bunions started playing up . . .”

“Here's to my health and his, you're already far too healthy,” said the Count, raising his glass, and the three sipped their rums.

Juan Emilio took a second sip before speaking.

“My dear boy, I'm so glad you came to see me. Because that Matisse has been intriguing me for more than thirty years. Well, not just me . . . You realize that right now it's easily worth four or five million dollars? Yes, because it's a rare work, one of the last from Matisse's post-impressionist period, before he became one of the fauves when he had that exhibition in the Paris Autumn Salon in 1905 with Derain, Rouault and Vlaminck. I don't know if you realize it was there that the fauvist movement was invented? That's when they started to make paintings in which the drawing and composition were the most important ingredients and pure colours were rediscovered, and quite aggressively at times. Though the fact is Matisse always paid tribute to working with that light he had learned from his master Cézanne . . . You know, according to the information I have, that painting must have been created in 1903, at a time when the poor fellow was always up to his eyeballs, grabbing help from wherever, one hand behind him and the other God knows where, and he sold very, very cheaply. Just imagine, he was working as a decorator's assistant and was one of the painters of
the friezes in the Grand Palais. And Marianito Sánchez Menocal, a nephew of General García Menocal who was strutting his dandy stuff in Paris, took full advantage of that bad patch, and, bought the picture for a rock-bottom price. Marianito then brought it to Cuba when his uncle was President and the 1914 war was starting in Europe, and the family kept it here till the 1929 crash, when they also sank in it up to their eyeballs and decided to sell it to the Acostas de Arriba, owners of sugar refineries in Matanzas who didn't know too much about art, but had too much money by half and a son who was half, well, half pansy, a gay, as they say nowadays,” and he emphasized the nowadays, as an evil thought went through his head. “In short, the little queer decided he wanted to buy the picture, because Matisse was now famous and he imagined the work must be rather important. When the Acostas de Arriba left the country, lots of people said the painting had already been lost, because they didn't take it with them, but nobody knew where it had gone. I remember it being said the family no longer had it because one of Batista's ministers had bought it around 1954, but the truth was nobody knew where the Matisse had ended up. You follow me? What we do know is that when the little queer who bought it from the Sánchez Menocals arrived in Miami, he can't have had the picture, because a few months later one of his lovers shot and killed him with two bullets to the chest and nobody mentioned finding a Matisse in that shakeout . . . The fact is a haze descended over the painting and whoever bought it didn't want people to see it or talk about it again. They must have had good reason. So, what's the verdict, my Count of Transylvania?”

The policeman took a long draught and two drags on his cigarette. “Devious.”

“A synonym for trickery, as well as for cunning,” the old man riposted, performing his entire smiling routine.

“Now one would need to know how it reached that house where it was expropriated as property reclaimed by the State that never reached the hands of State.”

“Oh, my dear boy, if I start telling you those tales . . .”

“So I'll have to find out who owned the house and see if we can conclude the story of that painting . . . Because there were other impressionist paintings in the place and even, I was told, a Goya and other things as well.”

“Did they tell you what the Goya was like?” jumped in the old man, goaded by professional curiosity and deep pride.

“No, they didn't.”

“Because there were three Goyas in Cuba, and if that one was in Miramar it must have been the one the García Abreus owned . . . So were they the ones who bought the Matisse?”

The Count attacked his glass of rum once more.

“And, Juan Emilio, are you sure the Matisse had a yellow patch like a dog in the middle of the street?”

“Yes, in the background. You almost can't see it, but it is there, as God is in Heaven. Most definitely.”

“Did or didn't you see it?”

“I didn't see God, and don't need to. Or the dog.”

“So how do you know the damned dog was there?”

“Because I was told about the painting and committed it to memory,” he responded, smiling, dental occlusion included. “Remember it was my livelihood . . .”

“And how come I never saw the damned dog, if I see every stray dog going? Tell me something else, Juan Emilio, are there more of these famous paintings, worth millions, that went missing around that time?”