“See you around, Ivan Mikhailovich.”
“I’ll ask you again, in two or three days, when this whole fuss about the presidential visit is over.”
“Don’t waste your time.”
García stopped at the tobacconist, picked up the public telephone, and dialed a number:
“Gomitos? García here.”
“I’ve got the information you asked for, Cap’n. You sure the colonel’s not going to be pissed off?”
“Sure.”
“The telephone number you gave me is in a house on Dolores Street, under the name of Hong Kong Pacific Enterprises.”
“What address on Dolores?”
“Number 189. No apartment number. There’s something else.”
“What?”
“It was installed just two weeks ago.”
“Thanks, Gomitos. See you later.”
“If the colonel asks. .?”
“He’s got no reason to ask you anything, but if he does, tell him you gave me the information.”
He hung up the phone and hopped on a bus. Useless to wait for a taxi. I should’ve brought the car, but then, where would I park it. Fucking colonel doesn’t want me to use special plates. And all that dough on Dolores Streets, so close to where I’m going now. And now the Russian wants me to work with him. How many agents does he have on this thing? Some we know about, and the others are playing very earnestly at being tourists. And del Valle’s shit about how I’m no expert, so now the real experts want to hire me. Marta must’ve already returned from her shopping spree. I feel like telling them all to go to hell and getting into bed. Why should I give a shit if they kill the gringos’ president? And what do I care about world peace? Tomorrow at this time we’ll know if they whacked the president or not. But the gringos will have rolled out all their security. They’re the experts. Like they were in Dallas. And me, maybe tonight I’ll show up on Dolores Street. If I had all that dough, what the hell would I care what happens? And that fucking professor with all his memories. Seems we’re all having a go at our memories and our confessions. So he wasn’t loyal to his laws. Fucking laws! Laws are for dumbasses, not for us and not for the lawyers. It’s like they just stole the Revolution right out of our hands. But I never had it in my hands. Those who are born in the gutter. . General Miraflores scaled the heights, but now these lawyer-types have left even him in the dust.
The house on Camelia Street turned out to be a run-down tenement. He knocked on the door of the room they directed him to and a thin woman with large dark eyes dressed in black opened it.
“Ester Ramírez?”
“What do you want?”
“Police.”
“Come in.”
They entered the small room with wood floors painted what they call Congo yellow. You could tell the woman had done the impossible to make it look like a living room, with two small rickety tables covered with embroidered tablecloths and porcelain figurines, these probably taken from some old inn out in the boondocks. There were even curtains, but all that effort to disguise the poverty made it stand out more.
“Have a seat,” the woman said.
García took off his hat and sat down on one of the chairs. The woman sat in the other. This broad has been crying her eyes out. Maybe she really felt for the dead man. And now it’s like she’s all empty inside, like she doesn’t have anything left at all.
“What can I do for you?”
“I want to talk to you about Luciano Manrique.”
“Why? I already told the police everything I know and he. . he’s dead. What for?”
“Did you tell the police about the Toad and the gringo?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“It might have been them who killed Luciano. They were his buddies. . the Toad was in the police with him, back home.”
“Yes.”
“You knew him.
“Yes. He was a bad man.”
“And a friend of Luciano’s?”
“I told him not to be friends with him anymore. He was a bad man, a professional hit man. Luciano never killed anybody, never. .”
“But he was in jail.”
“Yes. And I worked in a whorehouse and that’s why we could never live in peace. That’s why we had no right to anything. I don’t even have the right to be alone in my own house, thinking about him, about that man who was so good to me, the man I loved. It must sound funny to you, doesn’t it? A woman from a whorehouse who loves a man? Pretty funny, eh?”
“No.”
“My love for Luciano, it was the only thing I had. The only thing, you understand? And now that’s gone. And I can’t even be alone in my house and think about him.”
“What business did he have with the gringo?”
“I don’t know anything about his business, and I don’t want to. Luciano was good, but he was weak and he was ambitious. He said he wanted to give me lots of things and, sometimes, when he had money, he gave me things. I didn’t ask for anything, only that he be here and be good, but he wanted to give me things, he wanted to be important. I begged him for so long to take a job. We didn’t need much. General Miraflores would have given him a steady job, but he didn’t want one. He was looking for something else. . And now he’s dead.”
“He talked about making a lot of money?”
“He was always talking about that, but I’d stopped listening. ‘Go pick out your car,’ he’d tell me. ‘This deal can’t go wrong.’ ‘We’re going to live in our own house.’ That’s how he’d talk to me, because he loved me, because he was good to me, but I knew it would never happen. I stopped even trying to get him to forget about all those things. I just kept loving him, that’s all.”
García remained quiet. Fucking broad! She’s going to keep talking about her dearly departed, as if any of that mattered. They say that Filiberto García rapes the widows of the men he kills. But now he’s a faggot.
“I should’ve insisted, I should’ve threatened to leave him, but he took me out of the whorehouse, so he never listened to me, he didn’t think what I said mattered. And that’s true, he took me out of the whorehouse — he was good to me.”
“Lately, did he have more money than usual?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes. A week ago he gave me some to pay the three months rent we owed and the bill at the grocery store. And he bought me a pair of stockings. That’s how he was. But now they’ve gone and killed him. And the police don’t want to tell me anything. They just wanted me to identify the body. The night before last I waited up for him all night and only yesterday afternoon did they come to tell me. That’s how you are, you policemen. And then I talked to General Miraflores, who’s helped us so many times. I just wanted them to give me his body so I could hold a wake and bury him. But he didn’t want to do anything, he didn’t even want to talk to me. That’s what his assistant said, that the general didn’t want to talk to me and that he had nothing to do with Luciano. Fair weather friends.”
“Who hired him for the job he was doing?”
“I don’t know what he was doing. He said it was something big, very big. That’s what he said. I didn’t want him to get involved in those big things, but he never paid any attention to what I said. We’ve never had anything to do with those big things, they aren’t for us. We deal in small things, things for people who did time or who worked in a whorehouse. And now he’s dead, sir, dead, and the person who killed him, what did he know about how good he was to me? What did he know about the things he said to me? What did he know about how he took me out of the whorehouse because I was so unhappy there, because I was never happy there? But that’s something they don’t understand, men who kill. They don’t realize, when they do that, that there’s no going back.”