She wasn’t young but very small, with a body like a little girl, and they’d found her on the beach at Barceloneta. Her corpse had been left out in the open. Like a message for somebody. Raped and strangled. It was impossible to identify her, but her features suggested she was from the former Soviet Union, where they’re as much Slav as Mongolian: blond hair, high cheekbones, gray eyes that seemed vaguely Asian.
I didn’t think about Delgado again until early one morning when inertia took me to Clavié.
There were a couple of people at the piano, straining themselves singing “... estranyer indenai!” and Paty, who I hadn’t expected to find there, was tearfully killing her fourth gin and tonic.
“You men are all sons of bitches,” she said, warmly gesturing for me to sit with her.
She was in a stormy mood. That afternoon she’d interviewed the father and brothers of a girl who’d recently disappeared. Muslim Algerians with strict traditions, they struggled without news of the girl and became angrier and angrier with every passing hour.
“You must have seen the photos, the fliers. They’re on the lampposts,” she said.
“Maybe she ran off with somebody.”
“Or at this very moment, she’s being raped by twenty shitass machos,” she replied, pronouncing each syllable so as to pound it into my head. “Do you know what will happen if they find out who did it?”
“They’re going to cut him into little pieces?”
“Sweetheart...” she said, her eyes blurry from liquor, tears, and disdain, “he’s gonna hate his mother for ever having given birth to him.”
I was ordering a rum and Coke, which helps recharge the batteries at that hour, when I felt a hug and heard Cavalcanti’s voice.
“You’re exactly who I want to see,” he said. “I’ll buy you whatever you want; let’s talk business.”
“C’mon, man, I’m with my girlfriend. Why don’t we leave it for another day?”
The tango singer wrinkled his nose and, with a smile from golden times, bowed toward Paty.
“My dear lady, darling of Cupid and all gods with good taste, may I steal your intended for just a few minutes?”
Paty grinned from ear to ear because, curiously enough, she and Cavalcanti always got along quite well.
“Oh, noble gentleman,” she answered, “if you take him and lose him in some battle, this lady will be forever grateful.”
Since I had no choice, I followed him to a corner and drank his whiskey while acting like I wasn’t really listening.
“What a woman, pibe, what a woman! You know what I’m saying? You don’t deserve her.”
“Cavalcanti, don’t mess with me. What do you want now?”
“Remember Delgado?”
“The Vietnam War hero who was tortured in the Gulf War?”
For a moment, the nocturnal tango clown disappeared and I felt I was caught in the gaze of a man who perhaps had a couple of corpses to his credit.
“Pibe, you’re never going to learn. You mustn’t believe everything you hear at night. The ones trying to figure things out are cops, or worse. Don’t be fooled by appearances. I come off like a fool because wise guys always lose. But don’t tell me you’re the fool and you haven’t heard yet.”
“If you’re going to make me listen to your philosophy lessons, then at least buy me another whiskey.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and with a wave of the hand he conjured a couple of double shots. “I don’t know if you’ve bumped into El Delgado lately...”
“Why would I?”
“Why would — No, you wouldn’t. But, since your girlfriend told me you’d been to an African ‘holding cell,’ I thought you might have run into him. Delgado is like God, he can show up anywhere, whether among junkies or barefoot Carmelites.”
“I’ve noticed. A black guy told me he sleeps up by the three chimneys and a Moor told me he’s gone to heaven... Why are you interested in Delgado?”
“If you come with me, I’ll tell you.” He took off, with his canine gait, toward the bathroom.
He carved three lines on the sink and after he sucked up two, he was more explicit.
“The Russians have it in for him, and I have to get along with the Russians. You follow me?”
I shrugged as I leaned on the sink.
“It seems he worked as a heavy in some whorehouse. Sometimes the customers... you know, they get out of line and have to be set straight.”
“I figured he worked with his hands somewhere.”
“Something like that. The problem is, he fell in love with the Russians’ little star. Some girl who had been an Olympic champion on the parallel bars. You know, one of those girls who spins in the air as if she doesn’t give a shit about the laws of gravity.”
“So?”
“Nothing. Except the girl was older, though she was so small she looked like a schoolgirl. So what can I tell you, some guys will pay a fortune to get into bed with a schoolgirl.”
“Right, and that animal surrendered to her slender charm—”
“It’s worse than that. The Russians are fuming, they say the idiot stole her from them.”
I don’t know if it was the coke or instinct, but I had a sudden illumination. “Cavalcanti, you’re talking in circles. It’s clear from your description that it’s the little Russian girl who was found on the beach, raped and strangled.”
He stared at me hard. “And what if it is? The Russians are looking for Delgado, and I’m going to hand him over.”
“The big guy killed her?”
“The big guy is obsessed with skinny women with Asian eyes.”
“That doesn’t mean much.”
“Since when are you judge and jury?”
“What am I getting out of this?”
“Now you’re talking,” he said, and mentioned a sum that, for my drooping pockets, was simply exorbitant.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Cavalcanti: I’ll look for him, but I don’t want anything to do with the Russians.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“I’ll look for him, but once I find him, what do you want me to do?”
He must have known how our conversation was going to go because he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a card with a phone number.
“I’ll be there anytime you need me. You tell me where he is and then forget about it. We never had this conversation.”
“And they’re gonna pay just for that?”
“I swear on my blessed little mother. Moreover, and so you won’t think I’m messing with you, I’ll put up the money myself. I have business with the Russians and I don’t want to fuck up the relationship. You have to be generous with investments in order to make the little coins multiply.”
“Cavalcanti...” I said sincerely, “you’ve never seemed as suspicious to me as you do now.”
“Young man,” he said sympathetically, “anybody who lives to be old is suspicious. I thought you already knew that.”
We had to interrupt the conversation because Paty came in all of a sudden and, before heading back out to the streets, handed me a napkin with a phone number scribbled on it and a flier surely taken down from a wall somewhere.
“The Algerians with the missing girl have offered a reward. I wouldn’t turn anybody in but you guys are cut from a different cloth. They’re looking for a big guy with a stupid face who sounds like a friend of yours. If you know where he is... I don’t want to know.”
The girl on the flier also had almond-shaped eyes.
I took the napkin, only to see Cavalcanti wink my way and shake his head with his index finger pointed at his own chest. “You call me first,” he said.
That’s when I remembered the skinny vendor with beer, hashish, and coke at the three chimneys. And that’s why, the next morning, I went back to the plaza where half of Europe’s skaters could be found; the skinny guy didn’t take long to make his appearance.