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car, Pablo reached the sidewalk and stood by his side.
    “Listen, John, I don’t want to worry you,” Pablo began, sounding concerned. “But last year, many people here in Guanabo have …”
    Pablo didn’t know what happened to him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a swift, unexpected movement and started turning his head, but an instant after John’s fist smashed into his temple all his systems collapsed and he keeled over.
    The tall, overweight man looked around as if he had all the time in the world. The dog kept barking. Lifting the limp body by the armpits, John manoeuvred Pablo into a sitting position and, crouching behind him, grasped the bald man’s chin with his right hand and the back of his head with his left, then in one swift motion he yanked up and around with all his might. Pablo’s cervical vertebrae snapped.
    Kneeling by the body, John savagely bit twice into the left side of his victim’s neck. He spat in disgust several times before producing a plain envelope containing four fifty-dollar bills folded in half. With the edge of his fingernails he removed the money and tucked it into a pocket of the dead man’s pants. Finally, he freed Pablo of his cheap watch, his wallet, and his shoes.
    Panting, with beads of sweat on his forehead, he stood up, dusted his knees, and scrutinized both ends of the block. The dog kept barking, insistently now, goaded by the scent of death. John unlocked the driver’s door, slid behind the wheel, dropped Pablo’s personal possessions on the passenger seat, and turned the ignition. The car crept away for two blocks, its lights off, before he took a left and returned to the town’s main street. He felt therepugnance of one who has just squashed a big bug under the sole of his shoe.
    After he’d dumped the Cuban’s belongings into a sewer in Old Havana, John thought about going back to Angelito’s and screwing the sexy whore. But after close to a minute grabbing the wheel with both hands and pursing his lips, he shook his head, sighed resignedly, and drove to the Hotel Nacional.

    2    
    A s is often the case, the crime scene had been contaminated by the time the Guanabo police, at the crack of dawn, arrived in response to 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 they might find. Tire prints in the grit alongside the curb 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 who met 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.
    The IML experts would carry out the on-site inspection of the body, take it to the morgue, gather whatever evidence was on it, perform the autopsy, and help in trying to identify who it was, so the LCC people just eyed the corpse from a distance before taking photographs and measuring distances.
    The IML’s white Mercedes-Benz meat wagon arrived at 7:49 a.m. 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