Havana Red Read Free Page B

they almost killed him.”
    Red smiled and wiped his forehead: “The real bitch is that’s how it’s got to be, my friend. Here it’s the law of the jungle: respect is respect. Now neither that guy or any of the people here or anybody who hears the story of what happened will dare try it on.”
    â€œAnd what will they do with him now?” Curiosity gnawed at Skinny, who was sipping his drink nervously.
    â€œThey’ll put him out to rest till he cools off. And after he pays for what he’s drunk, we’ll send him home because he needs to get some early shut-eye today, don’t you reckon?”
    Skinny shook his head, as if he’d understood nothing, and looked at the Count who was still silent, apparently absorbed in the bolero Daniel Santos was singing.
    â€œDid you see that, you rascal?”
    â€œYou bet I did, you animal.”
    â€œAnd do you get it?”
    â€œNo. I swear by my mother every day I understand less . . . Hey, come on, Red, let’s have another beer.”

The worst thing was this sense of the void. As the alarm clock rang, it drilled into the Count’s brain a quarter to seven, a quarter to seven, and his eyelids struggled against lethargy and the recent burden of beer, a quarter to seven, the void started to reclaim its space like an oil slick suddenly released and spreading over the sea of consciousness; but it was a colourless slick, because it was void and nothingness, the end which recommenced, day after day, with an unstinted capacity for self-renewal against which he lacked any defences or valid argument: a quarter to seven was all that was tangible in the depths of that void.
    Recently he’d started to imagine death might be somewhat similar: waking to an absence of atmosphere, onerous yet painless, stripped of expectation and surprises because it was only this: a bottomless, empty void, a dark, padded cloud cushioning him definitively. He also tried to recall the time there hadn’t been a sense of void or premonitions of death, when dawn rose like a curtain on a new performance, no matter whether imagined or improvised, at least it seemed right and appealed: a spontaneous desire to live another day. But it was like feeling sick and trying to think what it was like to be well, and he couldn’t, since the ubiquitous quease prevented him from reviving other pleasant sensations.
    When he went out into the street, on such mornings that came hot with the dawn, a solitary taste of coffee
lingering on his lips and no woman waving him farewell, no magnet drawing him into the future, the Count wondered what could be the latest incentive impelling him punctually to set his watch and alarm, given that time was the most objective manifestation of his void. And as he could find none – a sense of duty? responsibility? need to earn a living? movement by inertia? – he wondered yet again what the hell he was doing there, heading for a bus queue more crowded and violent by the day, smoking a cigarette that rotted his guts, seeing people who were less and less familiar, suffering a heat that got hotter by the minute, and he told himself it was his fast lane to hell. Then he touched his belt and realized, once again, that he’d left his pistol at home. He asked who was the last in the queue and lit his third cigarette of the day. If I’m going to die anyway . . .
    Â 
    â€œMajor Rangel wants to see you.”
    And, with that declaration from the duty officer, the Count resurrected at least one lost expectation: yes, perhaps he might now down a good cup of coffee, purge the sweet, stewed taste of the brown liquid sloshing with unidentifiable particles he’d drunk in the shabby café where he’d stopped before reaching Headquarters. He took one look at the queue by the lift and made for the stairs. He couldn’t imagine why the Boss wanted to see him, but his nasal memory was already enjoying the aroma of freshly brewed