Havana Best Friends

‘Lift him up, comrades,’ Dr Valverde told her assistants. The two men slid a stretcher out from the van. She followed them with her eyes.

‘Doctor?’ said Trujillo, realizing that she hadn’t been listening.

‘Sorry, Félix.’

‘Will you have a ten-print card ready for me if the stiff wasn’t carrying his identity card?’

‘Sure.’ After a pause she added, ‘Dollar bills fell from his pocket.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘The one on top looked like a fifty.’

‘Is that so?’

‘But when I palpated him I didn’t feel a wallet. And his left wrist has a pale band, like a watch strap, but there’s no watch.’

Captain Trujillo had a crush on Dr Valverde because she had a perfect body and her face was out of this world. But she was competent and bright too, and he liked that. ‘So, your reasoning is whoever kills for a watch, a wallet, and a pair of shoes searches all the pockets.’

‘Right.’

The captain took a puff on his cigarette and mulled this over as the stretcher was slid into the van. The driver turned the ignition, the attendants stripped off their gloves.

‘I’m thinking sex, sodomy maybe,’ the pathologist added. ‘That might explain the bites. I’ll check for evidence of intercourse. But if he didn’t have sex in the last twelve hours, you’ll have a tough nut to crack: a killer who bites without sexual motivation and steals valuables but leaves cash behind. Pretty weird, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah, I guess so. See you in a while, Doc.’

‘Not before noon, Félix. Not before noon.’

The Institute of Legal Medicine, on Boyeros between Cal-zada del Cerro and 26th Street, is a two-storey prefab building hidden from view by a psychiatric clinic and big laurel trees. Before its experts located, exhumed, and identified the remains of Ché Guevara and his men in Bolivia, it claimed the dubious distinction of being the least known of Havana’s public institutions.

Back at her place of work, Dr Valverde had a buttered bun and a glass of orange juice for breakfast, followed by a cup of espresso. Next she smoked a cigarette in the hallway, standing by one of several ugly aluminium ashtrays. She dropped the butt in it before marching to the locker room to step into a gown, don sleeve protectors, shoe covers, a surgical cap, a face shield, and three pairs of latex gloves.

The autopsy suite had four tables, an efficient air-conditioning and ventilation system, and the standard paraphernalia of Stryker saws, a source lamp with a fibre-optic attachment, multiband ultraviolet lamps, surgical and magnifying lamps, pans, clamps, forceps, scalpels, sinks, hoses, and buckets. On the tiled walls, cabinets and cupboards of all sizes, plus light boxes for X-rays. A steelworker would define it as a stainless steel palace, a chemist as the kingdom of formaldehyde, a pathologist as a place to make a living. This last definition is a troubling one for most people.

The body was on a gurney to the right side of table number three. Dr Valverde’s two assistants sat on the autopsy table, legs dangling, face shields lifted to avoid fogging them up while commenting on last night’s baseball game at the Latin American Stadium. On table number one, another team was doing a twenty-five-year-old woman who had died at home, possibly from a heart attack. Osvaldo handed Dr Valverde a mike which she clipped to her gown. René pressed the record button.

The assistants lifted the body on to the autopsy table as the pathologist steadied the gurney; next they broke the rigor mortis in the arms and legs. Hair and substances under the fingernails were collected first. The cadaver was then undressed and the pockets searched. Four cocaine fixes, a key ring with five keys, a half-full packet of cigarettes, a lighter, a handkerchief, and nine coins, were found and put into evidence bags. After dipping the dead man’s hands in a pan of warm water for a few minutes, Osvaldo dried them, then inked each finger, rolled them on to a ten-print card. All the evidence that had to be transferred to the Central Laboratory of Criminology was ready.

The body was measured and weighed, its temperature taken. René photographed the neck, temple, and bite-marks – with Osvaldo holding a ruler as a scale – as Dr Valverde inspected the injuries again, this time under a fluorescent magnifying lamp. The odontologist, a short, bearded man, arrived. He joked for a couple of minutes before taking the bite impressions.

When he was done, the pathologist carefully checked and swabbed the cadaver’s knees, elbows, the underside of the arms, penis, and testicles. She had it turned over and examined the back, buttocks, and anus, then swabbed the rectum for seminal fluid. Dr Valverde put on tinted glasses, ordered the lights turned off, and used the fibre-optic attachment of the source lamp to look for the fluorescence which semen, blood, saliva and urine display under the high-intensity beam.

An hour and a half had passed. Without a word, Dr Valverde unclipped the mike. René stopped the recorder and the team moved to a corner. Once they had yanked off their third pair of gloves they had a smoke while discussing the postmortem’s next stage. It was agreed that little of it would bear any relation to the cause of death, but it had to be done anyhow.

Seven minutes later, again wearing the mike, the pathologist ran her scalpel from the clavicles to the sternum, down to the pelvis, then removed the breastplate of ribs.

After thirty minutes of work the major organs had been extracted. All were within normal limits. The dead man’s lungs revealed that he had been a heavy smoker. Half-digested beef, plantains, rice, and red beans were identified in the stomach. Dr Valverde adjusted a surgical lamp to stare at the fractured vertebrae and the injured spinal cord. She sighed, asked for the Stryker saw to start working on the skull, then decided against it. An X-ray of the right temporal bone would be enough. The job was completed three hours and ten minutes after it began, as René tied a tag which said ‘Unknown man 4, 2000’ to the cadaver’s toe prior to wheeling him to a sliding drawer in the cold room.

Dr Valverde showered and changed in the locker room, then hurried to the nearly deserted cafeteria to have lunch. The menu for the day was rice, scrambled eggs, sweet potato, and boiled string beans. She chose one of the empty Formica-topped tables, pulled back a chair, sank on to it feeling tired. Then she spotted Captain Trujillo at the doorway, craning his neck in search of her. She waved at him. He came over.

‘You had lunch?’ she asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Want to?’

Hesitatingly. ‘Can I? I assumed this was for IML people only.’

‘It is, but let’s see.’

She talked to the man in charge, Trujillo shelled out fifty cents, then advanced to the food counter. Dr Valverde was halfway through her lunch when he deposited his plastic tray on the table and shoved back the chair facing her.

‘Hey, thanks for speaking on my behalf. I’m famished,’ he said.

‘Least I could do. This is going begging anyway.’

‘Well, yeah, but something is better than nothing. When I get back to my mess hall there might be nothing left.’

‘Enjoy it then.’

Trujillo gobbled his food and they finished simultaneously. After leaving the two dirty trays and the cutlery by a serving hatch near the food counter, the captain joined the pathologist. She had been waiting for him on a granite bench in the hallway. She extended her packet of Populares, he reached for one, then clicked his lighter for her. Both inhaled deeply.

‘No ID, no sexual intercourse, was killed around midnight,’ she reported.

Trujillo tilted his head. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘What appears to be four fixes of cocaine,’ she replied between gusts of smoke.

Trujillo frowned and they smoked in silence for a minute or two. In the last seventy-two hours he had slept twelve, hadn’t had a change of clothes for the last two days, had been reprimanded by the colonel for skipping the last three Party-cell meetings, and was therefore in no mood to get involved in a complicated murder case. And he knew better than to suggest to Major Pena to pass the buck to someone else. The homicide had been reported during his shift, exactly thirty-seven minutes before he was to go off duty. Just his luck. If only it had been a crime of passion! One of those open-and-shut cases where the killer is found sobbing by the body, hanging by the neck in the vicinity, or hiding at his or her parents’.

‘Well, Doc, I’ll collect the ten-print and his things now, take them to the LCC. Please send the autopsy report as soon as possible.’

‘Sure. I don’t envy you, Captain. This is a tricky one.’

‘As if I didn’t know. Thanks for everything. Changing the subject, I’m stressed out, you’re probably stressed out too, would you…catch a movie or have dinner with me one of these nights?’

The pathologist gave him a disapproving look. ‘Felix, are you coming on to me? What’s the matter with you guys?’

‘Take it easy. I just thought you might want to. Somebody said you’re divorced. Aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am. But you’re not. Give me a break, will you, Félix?’

Trujillo inclined his head and blushed slightly. How had she found out he was married? ‘Okay. I’m sorry. I apologize. Are you mad at me?’

‘No, I’m not. Got to make my watch report. Take care.’

At a quarter past two the inked fingerprint card was optically read by the LCC computer. The key features of the general pattern and local details provided a listing of candidates, ranked by a comparison algorithm. Online, the fingerprint examiner asked for seventy-two cards from the national registry and started the long screening process. At 7.50 p.m. he lifted his phone, dialled the DTI switchboard’s number, and asked for Trujillo. He had to wait six minutes while the captain left his bed in the communal dormitory for senior officers, relieved himself, splashed water on his face and, feeling reasonably alert at last, ambled to the phone on the duty officer’s desk.

‘Captain Trujillo, at your service.’

‘This is Captain Lorffe, from Fingerprints, LCC.’

‘Yes?’

‘You have a pen and paper?’

‘Just a minute.’

Trujillo searched his shirt pockets. He found a two-by-three-inch bus ticket and a ballpoint.

‘Okay.’

‘Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés,’ Captain Lorffe dictated slowly. ‘A Cuban citizen. Born 17 August 1965, in Havana. The address on his identity record is 2406 Third A, between 24th and 26th Streets, Miramar, Playa.’

Trujillo copied everything down, then confirmed he’d got it right. ‘Okay. Thanks. Now, Captain, I mean no disrespect, but that ten-print was taken from a cadaver. I’ve got to notify the relatives. Any chance of mistaken identity?’

Trujillo heard Lorffe sigh. ‘The card I’ve got has the prints of Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés. There are more corresponding simple ridge characteristics than I’ve got hairs on my head. Now, if someone at the Identity Card office in Playa fucked up and misfiled this guy’s original impressions; if you left the IML card on your desk and somebody changed it; if someone…’

‘I hope nothing like that happened,’ Trujillo cut in. ‘Thanks a lot, comrade.’

Back in the dormitory, the DTI captain grabbed his briefcase, pocketed the key ring found on the corpse, had supper in the mess hall, then asked for a Lada from the car pool, got a Ural Russian motorcycle with sidecar, and rode to Miramar. First he questioned the man in charge of surveillance in the CDR.* José Kuan lived around the block from Pablo Miranda, on 26th between Third and Third A.

Kuan was the son of Chinese immigrants and appeared to be in his late thirties, so Trujillo estimated he was probably in his early fifties. He had moved to the neighbourhood in 1992, to a third-floor apartment with his wife and two boys, both under ten, and was assistant manager at a state-owned enterprise that marketed handcrafts. Kuan’s children were watching TV in the living room, so he walked Trujillo to the couple’s bedroom. His wife brought the captain a cup of espresso which he accepted gratefully. Then she retired to the kitchen to do the dishes.

Yes, a man named Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés lived around the block, Kuan admitted; he knew the guy: he was short, bald, worked at a joint venture two blocks away. Trujillo wrote down the name and address of the firm in his diary. No, he hadn’t seen him in the last few days. No, he wasn’t married, far as he could tell; lived with his sister. No, she wasn’t married either. Nobody else lived there.

Trujillo asked to see the Register of Addresses. Kuan opened a closet and produced an 81/2 x 13” file, with a page for each household in the area covered by the CDR. The one corresponding to the dead man’s apartment also had the name Elena Miranda Garcés inscribed, and gave the woman’s date of birth as 19 September 1962. The name Gladys Garcés Benítez, born in 1938, had been crossed off in red ink in 1987 just after she moved to Zulueta, Villa Clara. Her surname was identical to the siblings’ second surname. If she was still alive, Trujillo calculated, their mother would be sixty-two now.

‘What can you tell me about this Pablo Miranda?’ Trujillo asked once he’d finished jotting down names and ages.

The man fidgeted with the pages of the Register, his eyes evading the cop’s, pulling down the corners of his mouth. After eleven years in the force, Trujillo had seen this body language time and time again. Men and women who don’t want to rat on neighbours, stumped for a reply. Then why do they accept the position? he used to ask himself when he was a rookie. Now he knew the answer: it was for fear that declining might be considered a disinclination to fulfil revolutionary duties, something with adverse implications.

‘Well, actually I don’t know him very well, you know. He doesn’t mix much with the neighbourhood crowd. I guess he works a lot.’

‘You know the kind of company he keeps? People he goes out with?’

‘No. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.’

‘Does he have a car?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Goes out a lot?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘What about his sister?’

Relief spread across the man’s face. ‘She’s a very nice person.’

‘Different from her brother?’

‘No, no, that’s not what I meant.’ He looked flustered.

‘But she is sweet. Always polite, gentle, and beautiful, too.’

Trujillo nodded and repressed a smile. Was the man attracted to the sister? Well, he had a very pretty mulata all for himself. What more could a man hope for? Then he remembered that human aspirations are unlimited.

‘Well, Comrade Kuan, there’s something I should tell you. Pablo Miranda was found dead this morning in Guanabo.’

The news left the man speechless.

‘I have to notify his sister now and conduct a search of his apartment. As you know, witnesses from the CDR must be present. I need you to come with me, please. The president too, if possible.’

The President of the CDR, Zoila Pérez – a.k.a. ‘Day-and-Night’, after a TV series sponsored by the Ministry of Interior – was a fifty-eight-year-old bookstore saleswoman who had moved to the dead man’s building in 1988; she lived on the second-floor, front apartment. Zoila had earned her sobriquet and the position of CDR president in 1990, when she began trying to persuade neighbours that an American invasion was imminent. She never missed her citizen’s watch and was always willing to stand in for sick (or allegedly sick, or sick and tired) cederistas.

To Zoila, every stranger was a suspect, especially at night, and she would report enemy activity at the drop of a hat. In her wild imagination, couples necking in the Parque de la Quinta were transformed into pairs of camouflaged soldiers from the expeditionary force’s van-guard, so no less than two or three nights a week she picked up her phone and called the nearest police precinct. Desk sergeants familiar with her paranoia thanked her politely, hung up, then chuckled before bellowing to other cops in the squad room: ‘Hey, guys, that was Day-and-Night. Chick giving her boyfriend a handjob in the park is a marine getting ready to open mortar fire on her apartment building.’

But now, having learned what happened to Pablo, she was wringing her hands in desperation when Trujillo pressed the buzzer of Elena Miranda’s apartment. It was the kind of news Zoila hated, made her freak out. A full-scale imaginary invasion she could live with; the real murder of a neighbour was too unnerving. She wanted to walk away but knew she couldn’t.

Nearly a minute later, Elena opened the door in a robe and thongs. Wow, Trujillo thought. She processed the visual information instantly: a pained expression on Zoila’s face, an embarrassed Kuan, a poker-faced police officer. Bad news, she discerned. Skipping all the formalities, she asked, ‘What happened?’

‘Elena, this is Captain Trujillo, from the Department of Technical Investigations of the police,’ Zoila said.

‘What’s the problem, Captain?’

‘Can we come in, Comrade Elena?’ Trujillo, trying to sound casual, flashed his ID.

‘Sure, excuse me, come right in. Have a seat.’

Elena eased herself on to the edge of a club chair, Trujillo sat across from her, Kuan and Zoila on the Chesterfield.

‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Comrade Elena,’ Trujillo began. ‘Your brother, Pablo, was found dead this morning.’

Elena felt a shiver down her spine, a numbness, a sense of loss. Shock, for the third time in my life. Locking eyes with the police officer, she nodded reflectively, pursed her lips, interlaced her fingers on her lap, swallowed hard. ‘An accident?’ she wanted to know.

‘We’re not sure yet. He died from a broken neck and a head injury. He may have taken a fall, or he may have been murdered.’

‘You’re sure it’s my brother?’ She sounded unnerved.

‘We’re positive, comrade.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘Actually, if you are his only relative in Havana, you must identify him. His body is at the IML. Tomorrow morning…’

‘Where?’

‘The morgue. You can go there tomorrow morning. At eight. It’s on Boyeros and the Luminous Fountain. Are you his only relative?’

‘In Havana, yes. There’s our mother…and father.’

‘Can you notify them?’

‘Well, I can call my mother, but my father is in prison.’

To conceal his surprise, Trujillo unclasped his briefcase, opened his diary, drew out his ballpoint. Next he cast a baleful eye at the informers, but they were staring at Elena as if it were news to them too. Both had moved to the neighbourhood years after Elena’s father was sentenced and nobody had bothered to tell them the story.

‘Tell me his name and where he’s serving time. Maybe I can get him a special pass to attend the wake and the funeral.’

‘His name is Manuel Miranda and he is at Tinguaro.’

Trujillo took his time writing the three words. Tingu-aro was a small, special prison fifteen kilometres to the south of Havana for those who had occupied high-ranking positions in the Cuban party, government, or armed forces before having to serve time for some non-political crime. Men deserving special consideration because they had won battles, done heroic deeds, followed orders to the letter, been willing to die for the Revolution. Yes, the name Manuel Miranda definitely rang a tiny bell at the back of his mind.

‘I’ll see what I can do, comrade. Now, I’m conducting an investigation and as part of it I need to examine your brother’s personal belongings. His papers, clothing, anything that can shed light on what happened to him. Comrades Kuan and Zoila are here as witnesses. We would appreciate it if you could take us to his bedroom and any other room where he kept his things…’

Elena was shaking her head emphatically, two tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘I don’t have the key to his bedroom. We…well, Captain, he put a lock on the door to his room. I don’t have the key to it.’

Trujillo produced Pablo’s key ring. ‘Do you recognize this?’

Elena nodded. The last shadow of a doubt evaporated in her mind.

‘It was found in a pocket.’

‘Come with me, please.’

When Elena switched on the light, the visitors saw that Pablo’s bedroom was a mess. It hadn’t been cleaned in a long while and disorder reigned. Ten or fifteen cockroaches scurried in search of hiding places. Under a table supporting a colour TV and a VCR were a roll of tissue paper, old newspapers, and a broken CD player; a pile of soiled sheets and towels and underwear lay on top of the unmade bed; slippers under a writing table; three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, several empty and crushed packets of Populares on the floor; shoes and socks all over. It reeked of human sweat and grease, and dirt.

As Trujillo professionally searched the bedroom and the embarrassed witnesses stared, Elena, leaning in the doorway, occasionally fighting back tears and biting her lip, wondered why she and her brother had become enemies, when the split had begun, what part of the blame was hers. Memories kept coming, the way waves wash over a beach, only to ebb away and be absorbed by the sand.

Elena couldn’t recall the rejection she must have felt right from the very beginning. She was three when what had been a big balloon of striated flesh all of a sudden deflated and transformed itself into a screaming, crying, red-faced newborn demanding her mother’s full attention. Had the little thing sensed that she probably hated him? Was it possible for a suckling infant to somehow intuit repulsion?

Her sources were family stories. Funny anecdotes told by Gladys of which she had no memory whatsoever. Like the morning when she found Elena sucking from the bottle she was supposed to be using to feed her brother. It was how their mother learned why the boy was always hungry so soon after having been fed by his improperly supervised sister. Or the day she covered his face with her excrement. Or the evening she fed him a quarter pound of raisins, which Pablo happily chomped away on, and nearly dehydrated from acute diarrhoea. As teenagers, when these and other stories were recounted, Elena and Pablo swapped cursory smiles, made jokes, but in her brother’s eyes there was a strange gleam, as if he were thinking: See, see how it was you who started it all?

According to her mother, Elena was amazed to discover Pablo’s penis. Why? What did he need it for? Once he learned to stand and walk, she had wanted to pee standing up, too. Family stories, however, excluded one which Elena remembered vividly. The day when, at age seven, she was found fondling her brother, aged four. Her mother spanked her like never before, so she figured she had done something terrible and for many years the memory hid at the back of her mind as some unspeakable atrocity she had to atone for. After the Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Havana expounded on sexual games among children, Elena experienced a huge spiritual relief. The feeling of guilt disappeared and her sexuality improved noticeably.

Perhaps as part of her atonement and to stave off their growing antagonism, but if so unconsciously, she tried hard to become her brother’s favourite playmate. The Parque de la Quinta was their playground. She learned to throw a baseball and skate and ride a bike as he learned to swing a bat, ride a scooter, then a tricycle. They were the object of undisguised envy by many other children in the neighbourhood, those who didn’t have fathers with the special connections required to obtain for their offspring what was unavailable for 99.9 per cent of Cuban children in the 1970s.

In practical terms, however, their childhood was fatherless. Manuel Miranda had been a major in the revolutionary army – the highest rank – since 1958, aged twenty-one. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant two months after joining the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, he was made captain four months later, then appointed major two weeks before Batista fled and the regular Army collapsed. By the time the rebels reached Havana he was a living legend: a hundred stories portrayed him as a fearless, highly adventurous young man who laughed uproariously in the face of death.