Grab a Snake by the Tail by Leonardo Padura

Author:Leonardo Padura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2019-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

7

Major Rangel scrutinized Mario Conde, while puffing on the longest of Havana cigars as he sat behind his desk, enveloped in a cloud of bluish smoke. The lieutenant felt like his boss had inserted him between two glass slides and was studying him through a microscope lens as if he were a mutating virus.

“You look as if you’ve come straight from a dumpster,” was the first, would-be scientific conclusion reached by the chief of Criminal Investigations Headquarters. “At least you smell as if you’ve been inside one.”

“That’s a chino smell, boss.”

“A chino smell?” Rangel removed the cigar from his mouth and delicately tapped the ash into a Murano crystal ashtray, a recent gift from his elder daughter, who was married to an Austrian ecologist who roamed the world saving whales and Bengal tigers – though on a budget that enabled them to stop off in Venice and buy expensive glassware. As one does.

“I slept in a chino’s bed … But I’d better not tell you about that, man.”

“I should think not. But do tell me how it’s going, because I’ve got things I need to pass on to you. I didn’t call you here because I couldn’t live without seeing you … What the hell were you doing in bed with a chino?”

“Halt right there, boss … Clarification needed.”

Conde acted extremely respectfully towards his superior. Nonetheless, he felt at ease working with him and liked to tease him with his ironic repartee. Conversely, Major Rangel, who was so cutting with the rest of his subordinates, admitted – only to himself – that he had a weak spot for that irreverent detective who could be overfamiliar and even dared call him “man” and drop by his house so the major’s wife would invite him in for a cup of coffee. At the end of the day, Rangel thought, someone has to put up with him; despite his obsessions and wayward thinking, that lieutenant was his trouble-shooter. And every now and then he had to get his own back.

While he was explaining to Rangel that sleeping in a chino’s bed wasn’t the same as sleeping with a chino, and telling him everything that had happened since Patricia had turned up on his doorstep, Conde sensed his ideas were finally coming together and moving him towards a discovery that would help him solve his Chinese case. At the same time, he was also a hundred per cent sure there were other invisible but even thornier issues around the murder. Sure, a dark shadow from the past hung over the chino’s death, and the removal of that darkness, whatever its nature, might have painful consequences. But he didn’t tell Rangel about these worries that were still too vague, or that he still harboured a suspicion, however flimsy, that pointed to Francisco Chiú.

“So you’re not sure that the dead chino is at all connected to the cocaine being shifted in the Barrio?” asked Rangel, dropping his cigar on the ashtray.

“Not at this point. Why do

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