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Ever since the Count had become one of Pigeon’s suppliers three
or four years ago, his earnings from buying and selling secondhand
books had rocketed most pleasingly. Out of his many business
ventures – the purchase of jewels and antiques, works of art, two
cars now ready for hire and the ownership of twenty-five per cent
of the shares in a small, entirely illegal building firm – Yoyi’s only
official connection with the authorities was his licence to set up a
stall for the sale of books in the plaza de Armas, which was in fact
supervised by a maternal uncle he visited a couple of times a week
in order to supply new goods and control the commercial wellbeing
of the business that served him as a front. The Count had
finally concluded that the young man’s innate ability to trade, sell
at a good price and cajole potential customers – who, according to
his principles, you always tried to rip off – must be the result of a
genetic legacy from his general-store-owning Spanish grandfather
to whom he also owed the name of Reutilio, for the boy had grown
up in a country where scarcity and shortages had banished the art
of making a good sale several decades ago. People sold and bought
from necessity; while some sold what they could, others bought
what their bottomless pockets allowed, with no stock exchange
complications and, in particular, without the stress that choice
entailed: take it or leave it, it’s this or nothing, hurry up or it will
be gone, buy what’s there although right now you don’t need it
. . . But not Yoyi Pigeon. He was a consummate artist, able to place
luxury items at unbelievable prices, and the Count bet that even
if he realized his dream of leaving the island – to go anywhere,
Madagascar included – he’d end up a successful entrepreneur.
When they met, Conde felt he was reluctantly rejecting the youth
because of his appearance, his love of the jewels he displayed on
his hands and neck and his relentless cultivation of his own body.
Nevertheless, the relationship between the two, born of purely
commercial motives, had successfully surmounted the iron barrier
of the Count’s prejudices and started to turn into friendship,
perhaps because their complementary qualities balanced out any
apparent shortcomings. The young man’s pitilessly mercantile
vision and the Count’s outdated romanticism, the former’s rash
impetuosity and the latter’s scrupulous calm, Pigeon’s occasionally
unthinking outspokenness and the Count’s guile forged by years in
the police gave them a strange equilibrium.
Their friendship had been definitively cemented one afternoon
three years ago when the Count called in at his partner’s house on
the pretext that he had to tell him he’d be bringing a load of books
the day after, although what he really wanted was a cup of the
excellent coffee the lad’s mother used to make. But that afternoon,
Conde’s presence had saved him – at the very least – from a scam
that was proceeding undetected by Pigeon’s beady eyes.
Conde had arrived at Yoyi’s just as the latter, dazzled by a joblot
of jewels offered at an unbelievably reasonable price by two
characters who’d come recommended by a jeweller, was about to
fetch from his bedroom the 2,200 dollars they’d agreed as an overall
amount. When he arrived, Conde had greeted Yoyi and the jewelsellers
and discreetly made for the lobby, driven by a hunch that
not everything was as it should be. He’d squeezed his memory hard
and prised out an image of one of the would-be sellers, implicated
years ago in a case of violent robbery. He immediately concluded
the deal was fraudulent: either the jewels came from a robbery that
had yet to be rumbled or, more dangerously, were simply a ploy to
strip Yoyi of his money. Conde had no time to intervene and abort
that operation, so he made his way along the passage down the
side of the house to the backyard where he picked up a piece of
iron piping which he flourished like a baseball bat. He retraced his
steps and by the time he’d reached the living room, the scene had
reached climax point: one of the sellers was threatening Yoyi with
a huge knife, and demanding the money, while the other collected
up the jewels. Almost without thinking Conde brought the pipe
down on the rib cage of the armed man, who dropped his knife
and fell to his knees in front of Yoyi, who kicked him in the jaw and
sent him flying on his back. Seeing all this happening, the other
thief grabbed the jewels as best he could and ran between Yoyi and
Conde to get to the street before the ex-policeman struck again
with his makeshift weapon. Feeling his body shaking after he’d
acted so violently, Conde handed the iron pipe to Yoyi, kicked the
knife away, and flopped down on the sofa, beseeching the young
man: “Don’t hit him again. Let him be. Don’t complicate life . . .”
But this afternoon, as on other lucky ones, Yoyi smiled contentedly
when he saw his partner approaching with a bag of books. After
asking his mother to prepare the indispensable cups of coffee,
Yoyi followed the Count onto the terrace, where several pots of
ferns and malangas fought for space, favoured as they were by the
protective shade of the fruit trees growing in the next-door yard.
The Count emptied his bag on the table and told Pigeon that this
little consignment was only a very light hors d’oeuvre compared to
the banquet of books he’d just discovered. The young lad listened to
him as impatiently as ever, caressing the jutting keel of his sternum.
“I swear, my partner’s a silly bastard,” he finally commented.
Excerpted from Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura Copyright © 2009 by Leonardo Padura. Excerpted by permission of Bitter Lemon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher
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