Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura

Author:Leonardo Padura [Padura, Leonardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2011-07-04T21:00:00+00:00

Mario Conde looked round, trying to escape from Yoyi Pigeon’s imploring eyes. His temples were pounding at the degradation he was being professionally and efficiently subjected to: the forensic put each of his fingers on the inky pad in turn and lifted them, like inert fishes, on to the card set out with ten greedy spaces, where he imprinted those personal marks, prints of a man now on file, by the name of Mario Conde, alias “the Count”, born in . . . son of . . . inhabitant of . . . Till that precise moment, the ex-policeman had never really grasped the levels of harassment a human being suffered when experiencing that humiliating treatment, which appeared painless but was in fact similar to what cattle must feel when metal tags are attached to their ears: now, despite his obvious innocence, he’d become one more name on the handy list of people registered in police files and, with each case, his details would be run through the cold memory of a computer, in the malign hope they’d coincide with some incriminating prints.

As he used a dirty cloth to bring the colour back to his fingers, Mario Conde tortured himself thinking about the hundreds of times he’d put other men, guilty and innocent, through that same humiliating process. He suddenly grasped the reasons behind the evil, hate-filled looks he received from men he’d subjected to that ritual, because his own discoloured skin had now suffered that degradation, and he thought how he’d plied a destructive trade for far too many years. Although he’d always known the police are a necessary social evil, charged to protect and to serve – as one motto said, one of the most euphemistic ever coined – more often to repress and so protect the rights of the powerful, was their real mission in life, though it was never stated so brutally. Working hard to get his fingers spotlessly clean, Mario Conde scanned the horizons of his conscience, hoping to find some comforting evidence there that he’d been an honest cop, unable to be violent towards other men, averse to arrogance, romantically sure he was performing tasks that would help the world to become a better place, however minimally. But no such assurance came to his rescue, and he was left to sink in the mire of evidence that he had been a policeman after all – perhaps a too cerebral, if not bland example of the species – and had formed part of that uncompromising fraternity now stripped naked before him and exposing its distinctive features.

With no strength to offer resistance, he let himself be led by Sergeant Atilio Estévañez down the corridors of Central Headquarters, whose walls still echoed with stories of his miraculous solutions to complex cases he was always assigned by a mythical boss. A boss suspended for perpetuity in an underhand manner by the Internal Investigations Committee, and who went by the still unutterable name of Antonio Rangel. Had he really

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