Havana Gold by Leonardo Padura Page A

restrain that boomeranged round his memory. And I won’t have any truck with him, he told himself, as he arrived home and tried yet again to cast out that troublesome image and think of a future full of hopes and possible loves.
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    A quarter to six and still no call. Rufino , his fighting fish, quickly circled the interminably spherical goldfish bowl and came to a halt very near the bottom. Fish and policeman looked at each other. What the hell you looking at, Rufino? Get swimming, fish – and as if to obey him, the fish resumed its eternal rondo. The Count had decided to divide the time into quarters of an hour and had already counted off five equal slices of time. At first he tried to read, looked on every shelf of his bookcase and gradually discarded every possibility that at other times he’d thought more or less tempting. It was true he could no longer resist Arturo Arango’s novels, the guy wrote lots and lots, always about crazy types who wanted to go back to live in Manzanillo and reclaim innocence
through a lost girlfriend; forget about López Sacha’s short stories, far too wordy and recherché and longer than a life sentence; he’d sworn never to read Senel Paz again, so many yellow flowers, yellow shirts, if only he’d write something a bit more devilish one day . . . he might suggest to him, for example, that he write a tale about a party member and a queer; and Miguel Mejides, forget him, to think he’d once liked his books, the yokel writes so badly and so pretentiously à la Hemingway. So much for contemporary literature, he muttered, and decided to try again with a novel that he’d thought the best from what he’d recently read: Horse Fever . But he couldn’t concentrate enough to enjoy the prose and barely got past the second page. Then he tried to put some order into his room: his house was like a storehouse of the forgotten and deferred and he swore he’d spend Sunday morning washing shirts, socks, underpants and even sheets. Washing sheets, what a horrible thought! And the quarters of an hour fell by the wayside, heavy, like clockwork. Telephone, for fuck’s sake, I’ll give you anything: just ring. But it didn’t. He took it off the hook for the fifth time to check it was working, and returned the phone to its cradle when he had recourse to the most desperate of measures: he would bring to bear all his mental powers, which were there to serve some purpose. He placed the telephone on a chair and another opposite the telephone. Naked, he sat in the empty chair and after
critically eyeing his moribund testicles hanging in the air – and spotting two grey hairs – he concentrated, started looking at the gadget and thought hard: You’re going to ring now, you’re going to ring right now, and I’m going to hear a woman’s voice, a woman’s voice, because you’re going to ring now, and it’s going to be a woman, the woman I want to hear because you’re going to ring, now, and he jumped up, “Fuck”, his heart beating like mad, when the phone really did ring loudly and the Count heard – also for real, salvation at last – the voice of the woman he wanted to hear.
    â€œSherlock Holmes, please. Professor Moriarty’s daughter here.”
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    The Count’s ego was having a ball. He’d always been vain and arrogant and when he could show off his gifts, he did so mercilessly. He stood in the entrance to his house and greeted every passing acquaintance and prayed Karina would pick him up when he had the biggest audience. He’d watch her drive up, all casual, and walk slowly over . . . Hey, look at that lucky Count. Hell, a chick with a car and so on. He knew the points that item was worth in the ratchet of values upheld by people in the barrio and he wanted to exploit it to the max. A pity the surly wind had scattered the group on the street corner, who’d scurried into