Read Havana Blue for Free Online Page B

you like,” and she got him a pristine ashtray from the shelf under the glass coffee table. Murano, a purple-blue glass flecked with silver. He lit his cigarette and thought what a sin it would be to sully that ashtray.
    â€œDon’t you smoke?” she asked Manolo, and the sergeant smiled.
    â€œNo, thank you.”
    â€œIt’s incredible, Tamara,” said the Count smiling. “I’ve not been inside this house for fifteen years, and it hasn’t changed a bit. Do you remember when I broke that flower vase? I think it was bone china, wasn’t it?”
    â€œA Sargadelos.” She leaned back on the sofa and tried to tame the lock of hair riding her forehead.
Memories will be the death of you as well, my dear, thought the Count, and he wanted to feel the way he felt when their whole group gathered to study in the library of that house straight out of the films. There were always cold drinks, often sweets, air conditioning and dreams they shared between the bookshelves: Skinny, Rabbit, Cuqui, Dulcita, the Count, would all have a house like that one day, when we are doctors, engineers, historians, economists, writers, all those things they were going to be and didn’t all become. He couldn’t stand any more memories and said: “I’ve read the statement you gave at the station. Tell me more.”
    â€œI don’t know, it was like this,” she started after thinking for a moment and crossing her legs, then her arms; she was still so elastic, he noted. “We got back from the party, I went to bed first and was half asleep when I heard him get in, and I asked him if he was OK. He’d drunk a lot at the party. When I got up, there was no sign of Rafael. I didn’t really start to get worried till the afternoon, because he’d sometimes go out and not say where he was going, but he had no work on that day.”
    â€œWhere do you say the party was held?”
    â€œAt the house of the deputy minister that Rafael’s enterprise is responsible to. In Miramar, near the tourist shop on Fifth and Forty-Second.
    â€œWho were the guests?”
    â€œLet me think for a minute.” She needed time and fiddled with her errant lock once more. “The owners of the house, Alberto and his wife, naturally. That’s Alberto Fernández,” she added as the Count pulled a small notebook from this back trouser pocket. “So you still carry a notebook in your back pocket?”
    â€œSame old defects,” he replied, shaking his head, for he couldn’t imagine anyone remembering an old
habit of his that he’d almost forgotten. What else should I be remembering, he wondered, and Tamara smiled, and he thought yet again what a burden memories are and that perhaps he ought not to be there; if he’d let on to the Boss, perhaps he’d have sent someone else, and then he thought he’d better ask to be taken off the job, that he shouldn’t be there searching for a man he didn’t want to find and conversing with the man’s wife, that woman whose every nostalgic outburst aroused his desire. But replied: “I never liked carrying a satchel.”
    â€œDo you remember the day you had a fight in the playground with Isidrito from Managua?”
    â€œI can still feel the pain. That joker really hit me.” And he smiled at Manolo, who was brilliantly playing his cameo role as a peripheral spectator.
    â€œAnd why did you thump each other, Mario?”
    â€œYou know, we started arguing about baseball, about who was best, Andrés, Biajaca and the people from my barrio or the guys from Managua, until I lost it and told him that anyone born outside my barrio was a son of a bitch. And, naturally, the joker went for me.”
    â€œMario, I reckon if Carlos hadn’t intervened, Isidrito would have killed you.”
    â€œAnd a good policeman would have been lost forever,” he smiled, deciding to put his notepad away. “Look,