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to organize his dank strands of hair.
    â€œYou don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes . . . In this heat, at this time of day, with that face and in this house, who is going to pay a visit if not the police? Besides, I’ve heard what happened to poor Alexis . . .”
    The Count concurred. It was the second time recently he’d been told he had a policeman’s face and he was on the verge of believing it was true. If there were bus drivers who looked like bus drivers, doctors like doctors and tailors like tailors, it can’t be difficult to have a policeman’s mug after ten years in the job.
    â€œCan I come in?”
    â€œCan I not let you come in? . . . Enter,” he added finally, opening the door into the pitch black.
    It wasn’t hot inside, although all the windows were shut and he couldn’t hear the hum of any refreshing fan. In the cool half-dark, the Count imagined a distant high ceiling and glimpsed several pieces of furniture as dark as the ambience, scattered without rhyme or reason across a spacious room divided in two by a pair of columns that were possibly Doric in their upper reaches. At the back, some five yards away, the
wall receded towards an equally sombre corridor. Without closing the door, Alberto Marqués went over to one of the room’s walls and opened a french window that spread the obscene light of August on the room’s chequered floor, to create an aggressive, decidedly unreal luminosity: as if from a spotlight turned on a stage. Then the Count got it: he’d been dropped into the middle of the set for The Price , a work by Arthur Miller that thirty years earlier Alberto Marqués had staged with a success that still resonated (that was also on his file) and which he himself had seen some ten years ago in a version staged by one of the dramatist’s more orthodox disciples. He’d stepped into the production – too many stages! – like one of the characters and . . . of course, that was it. But could it possibly be?
    â€œSit down, please, Mr Policeman,” said Alberto Marqués, reluctantly pointing to a mahogany armchair darkened by fossilized sweat and grime, and only then did he close the door.
    The Count used those seconds to get a better look: between the floor and the dressing gown he saw two rickety, starved ankles, as translucent as the face, extended by two unshod ostrich feet that ended in funny fat toes, splayed out, their nails like jagged hooks. The fingers of the hands were, on the contrary, slender and spatula’d like a practising pianist’s. And the smell. His sense of smell ravaged by twenty years of vigorous smoking, the Count tried to distinguish the odours of damp, fumes from reheated oil and a whiff he recognized but found difficult to pin down, as he observed the man in his Chinese silk dressing gown settling down in another armchair, parting his legs and carefully positioning his skeletal hands on the wooden arms, as if he wanted to embrace them
entirely, to possess them, as in a final gesture he folded his oh-so-delicate fingers over the front edges of the wood.
    â€œWell, I’m all ears.”
    â€œWhat do you know about what happened to Alexis Arayán?”
    â€œPoor . . . That they killed him in the Havana Woods.”
    â€œAnd how did you find out?”
    â€œI got a call this morning. A friend got wind.”
    â€œWhich friend?”
    â€œOne who lives round there and saw all the bother. He enquired, found out and phoned me.”
    â€œBut who is he?”
    Alberto Marqués sighed ostentatiously, blinked a bit more, but kept his hands on the arms of the chair.
    â€œDionisio Carmona is his name, if you must know. Are you happy now?” And tried to make it evident he found the revelation troubling.
    The Count thought of asking permission, but decided not to. If Alberto Marqués could be ironic, he, Conde, could be rude. How dare that pansy try it on with him, a