Havana Black by Leonardo Padura Read Free Book Online Page A

he said, knocking on the door after he’d put the flower in his pocket.
    The face of the old lady who opened the door was as exhausted from lack of sleep as the Count’s: the wrinkles around her eyes were a deep brown and her gaze was veiled by a grey mist from prolonged insomnia or several hours of sobbing. There were remains of white magnesia at the corners of her mouth, fit to turn Mario Conde’s stomach. The policemen introduced themselves, apologized for coming without prior warning and explained why they were there: to speak to the family of Miguel Forcade.
    â€œI am his mother,” responded the old lady, whose voice seemed younger than her face. Much to the Count’s relief, the woman’s tongue executed a precise cleaning exercise and the white cream disappeared. “Come in and sit down, I’ll get his wife. My husband is the one who can’t come down, he’s feeling very poorly today. He is very sick, you know. And this has made him feel much worse, poor man,” she concluded, as her voice faded away, but without losing that youthful spark that so surprised the Count.
    â€œAnd which of you is the gardener?”
    The old lady smiled, as if some of her lost energy was flowing back. “He is . . . Alfonso is a botanist and that garden is his. Pretty, isn’t it?”
    â€œA poet I know would say it is the place to be really happy,” said the Count, recalling his friend Eligio Riego.

    â€œAlfonso would be delighted to hear you . . .” conceded the old lady, her eyes moistening.
    â€œWho is it, Caruca?”
    A voice emerged from the passage that must lead to the bedrooms and was soon joined by the figure of its owner.
    â€œOh, forgive me,” said the newcomer, in whose wake came a ruddy, frowning man, coughing slightly, with the dry, uncontrollable persistence of a smoker.
    â€œThis is Miriam, my daughter-in-law,” noted the old lady. “And this is an old friend of hers . . .”
    â€œAdrian Riverón, at your service,” said the man, his cough erupting again.
    Even before he said hello and introduced himself, the Count’s first reaction was to start counting on his fingers, but he restrained himself from a sense of arithmetic politeness: according to the report he’d read, Miguel Forcade was forty-two years when he left Cuba, so he must have been fifty-three when he died, right? But now he was looking at a blonde woman, perhaps with an excess of blonde, which he suspected might be the result of vigorous bleaching, with sturdy thighs barely hidden by shorts and prominent breasts under a thin top, poked by nipples set on perforating the material. But the Count also had to look at her decidedly youthful face, where (grey, green, or were they blue?) eyes glinted from between her curly black eyelashes: thirty at a pinch, estimated the policeman, now able to think straight again, swallowing, counting on mental fingers and calculating that in his forties before he left Cuba Forcade had married a woman not yet in her twenties. Basically, he shouldn’t give up hope, he started to speculate, before he called himself to order.
    â€œI was telling your mother-in-law how we have come
to ask a few questions about Miguel . . . I know it’s a bad moment for you, but we are very keen to solve this case as soon we can.”
    â€œYou are really very keen?” said Miriam, distilling irony, as she sat down in one of the armchairs.
    Her friend, coughing again, swung round like a bewildered seagull trying to find his bearings and found respite against the high back of the chair Miriam had chosen, as if he felt a need to guard the young woman’s back. The Count’s gaze, inhibited by protectionist Adrian, drifted from those handsome legs, and it was only then the policeman realized he hadn’t carried out his customary detailed study of the scene and discovered, unusually, that the room merited the same scientific attentions