“Of course he didn’t: Ofelia Belen Pacheco and the Marquess are sworn enemies, ever since Ofelia bedded one of the Marquess’s boyfriends. Although that was in the days when buses were made of wood
… Well, they have fantastic parties and all the transvestite buddies of Havana go there. Sometimes thirty or more.”
In the spacious living room, under the influence of music of a seemingly Barbra Streisand flavour, several couples of diverse make-up had started dancing and the Count stared at Estrella, dancing boleros and cutting an incongruous figure with her dance partner, a titchy black barely five feet tall, whom the Count supposed had bigger dimensions that were momentarily hidden. Viki was still standing by the balcony, and the Count was alarmed when he realized that if he hadn’t been warned he’d have thought her a woman who was desirable, if not beautiful.
The atmosphere exuded a ghetto freedom, limited but capacious, as the dancers’ hands caressed their partners and muffled voices echoed the song. A distasteful chill ran through the policeman when he spotted a couple kissing shamelessly: two men – according to legal, biological codes – some thirty years old, moustachioed with jet black hair, soldering lips to facilitate a flow of tongues and saliva that injected the Count with a squeamish repugnance he tried to quell by gulping down another glass of rum. He knew then that he’d gone too far on that journey to hell and needed different air if he wasn’t going to suffocate or die of shock. A policeman who boasted he’d seen every possible barbarity, he now felt pain-stricken by a vibration born from a tight knot of male hormones, unable to resist that most disturbing negation of nature. He looked at Polly and tried to smile, as he turned his green goblet round, as if to demonstrate that the evaporation was damaging the atmosphere.
“Should I put you on the alcoholics’ list?”
“Put me down as an aspiring or discerning drinker… Hey, the Marquess says Alexis hadn’t been here for days.”
“That’s right, I hadn’t seen him for some time.”
“And when you saw him, did he tell you he was in love with somebody?”
Polly looked up, as if seeking her reply in the visible part of her lank fringe.
“I don’t think so. I think he was still with a painter whose name I’ve forgotten, one who did things with collages.”
“Salvador K.”
“Hey, you’re really in the know! You sure you’re not police?”
“Really I’m not, love… And what did Alexis tell you?”
“Nothing much, that he was really fed up and that if he split with the Salvador guy he wasn’t going to hitch up with anyone else. And he went off because he was going to mass at the cathedral.”
The Count thought how Alexis Arayan must have been carrying his Bible, where perhaps the passage on the Transfiguration was already missing.
“Why did you suddenly shut up?” enquired Polly, pressing one of his legs. “Do you want another drink?”
“That’s not a bad idea. I’d like to have a drop with you.”
And she smiled, as mischievous as ever.
“Why not have a drink at my place? I live just round the corner.”
“Are you a transvestite?”
“Come and find out.”
“The walk will warm you up,” said the Count, and compared Polly to a St Bernard on a rescue mission in the middle of a snowstorm. Averting his gaze from the kissing moustaches, he looked round for the Marquess. He wasn’t in the room, nor was his amphibian friend. Polly’s roll-call, he thought, as he stood up, still had a way to go.
The Count let himself be undressed without claiming the promised drink and was pleased to see his best friend on duty, despite the evening’s bustle and the worries about sexual fraudulency still torturing him; a whiff of sparrowish behind had woken him up. He took off Polly’s baby-doll and wasn’t surprised by her small tits, with their ripe nipples, just bursting to be touched and bitten, then he warily checked inside her panties and found no false castrations, but a moist, inverted mine down which half a hand vanished. Awakened abruptly by the discovery of that vein, his travelling companion perked up, stretched, yawned and braced its swollen tissue, before descending, like a bullet winging home, into Polly’s mouth, deep like the other cavities he’d already explored.
Polly was a sophisticated lady: unhurried and unfussed, she fellatioed delicately, licking his penis’s every cranny, swallowing, then bringing it back into the fresh air only to languish enviously as her sparrow’s teeth tightened round his testicles. It was the Count who had to call for a truce, dismayed by the imminent spurt and desirous to deepen his knowledge of her second jousting cleft, and he pushed Polly on her bed, ready to crucify her, just as the girl’s hand intervened in her fate.
“Oh, mum, I’ve always wanted to lay a policeman. Go on, there are some condoms under the pillow,” she said, sucking on the Count’s nipples as he hooded his anxious friend, annoyed by the lateness of the party.
He penetrated her as if it wasn’t a first visit, noticing how much was required to fill a slit worthy of a white whale’s rather than a sparrow’s, a surprise Moby Dick, but he was happy at the manoeuvrability permitted by Polly’s hundred pounds, portable Polly, easily upped and downed the length and breadth of polyethelene which blocked off a good part of that objective, if invisible reality. The Count was surprised by his own energy, which he could only attribute to his systematic lack of such binary practices. He inned and outed like a jack-in-the-box, hooked on a nipple, then offered up an ear for a girlish tongue to explore. Saliva ran like the rivers of life, turned them into slippery, naughty sea snakes. He went back in, conscious the curtain was about to fall, when postmodern Polly snuck away from him, half-turned on the bed and presented her sparrow’s bun to his eyes, increased in size by its nearness and pert position.
“Give it me in the arse,” she asked, unsmiling.
The Count took one look at his selfless comrade, inelegant but ready for combat, and gripped her buttocks tight to open up the exit door more widely.
“God, how horrible!” she said when he drilled her little hole. Then the Count felt he was the right measure for polyphonic Polly’s proportions, and stuck to his task as he heard the girl’s anxious lament, which, between push and pull, changed to a smile, a laugh, a guffaw, a cry begging split my arse, split it down the middle, though now there was nothing left to heft and he could only keep up the rubbing which the man tried to do tirelessly. Ay, Polly the prostrate
…
But everything has an end. The Count was surprised by his own powerful, triumphant macho whoop, as Polly’s guffaws faded to a laugh, to a smile before ending on a whimper: “God, how horrible,” only to add, with a judgement the Count assumed he fully deserved: “Ay, darling, what a lovely fucker you are, you are!”
There was a face there. He could almost see it, if he stretched out his hand he could almost touch it, but his eyes and hands slipped and slid, entwined by viscous veils and nets that suddenly loosened their knots, let him escape, close in on the face, almost touch it, only to wrap round him again, distance him, refuse him a revelation that evaporated in a luminous heat cloud, swept along by a dirty river, as it finally faded forcing him to wake up, stressed, at the first loud rings of his telephone, his breathing agitated, his body soaked by the sad, sad sweat of doubt. I know him, of course I do, he told himself as he reviewed his passage from dream to a more objective reality, as he tried to find out what was happening. It was a clear, brutal telephone ring, as the sun penetrated the windows to his room, to impose yet another day of aggressive heat.
“You motherfucker,” he said, crawling to the receiver, eyes stunned by the brightness. He picked up the phone and asked, “What’s the time?”
“Ten past nine, Conde, ten past nine,” repeated the voice at the other end of the line, perhaps of the world.
“Shit, Manolo, I didn’t hear my alarm clock, or didn’t set it. Who knows…”
“When did you hit the sack?”
“Around four.”
“Alcohol level?”
“Only two glasses.”
“Just as well, because there’s bother: Salvador K. hasn’t showed since yesterday afternoon.”
The Count finally felt he was awake. “And how come?”
“El Greco and Crespo tailed him. They say he went out yesterday at around five, as if he was going to his studio, and went down the passageway of a house that’s on Nineteen and A. They waited for him for more than an hour and then discovered the passageway led to a garage facing Twenty-First Street. He vanished. He’s not in the house or his studio.”
“Did they talk to his wife?”
“Yes, but only to ask after him, and she just said he was at the studio.”
The Count lit a cigarette, trying to cast off the last chains of sleep, and then he remembered.
“Hey, Manolo, I had the strangest of dreams: I could and couldn’t see the murderer… You know, those funny dreams: when I thought I was going to see him, I didn’t, because he also wore this kind of disguise… Fuck me if I’m not obsessed with transvestites, the transfiguration, wandering souls and all that shit.”
“It wasn’t Salvador?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t, but now I’m convinced I know him, I’m not sure why, but I’m convinced I do. Hey, go and speak to Salvador’s wife, put the squeeze on her, though not too tightly, and pick me up at… well, when you’re finished.”
The Count hung up and looked around: there were only traces of more or less distant disasters. Clothes on the ground, a crushed cigarette butt, Rufino the fish swimming in waters murkier by the minute. I must clean the pigsty, he told himself, but forgot this priority as he observed his own nakedness, which sent him back to the previous night’s erotic adventure. God, how horrible, she says she’s almost always heterosexual, what the fuck have I got into? he wondered, smiling as he congratulated himself on having enough coffee for two more breakfasts.