Havana Noir Page 6

  Of all the witnesses, the one who made the greatest impact was, without a doubt, the victim who had gotten away from the guy near the Prince’s Castle. Right now, I can’t remember her name, only her story, which stunned me. She was a Chinese mulatta, more or less my age, with straight hair and light eyes, pretty actually, but who could never pass for white, not here or in Hong Kong. And that in itself struck me as odd, because he’d often bragged that he’d never “burned oil” in his whole life. In other words, he didn’t like black women or mulattas, nothing at all coming from Africa. He was no jackoff perverted peasant, he said, to have to go fuck animals. Certainly that was somewhat offensive or, as they say now, “politically incorrect,” but it was also good news for so many young Cuban women. I can’t say what other women might think, but as far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t be in the least bit insulted if a killer didn’t find me attractive enough to be his victim. And I’m absolutely sure the guy wasn’t kidding about this. The revulsion that laced his voice every time we touched on Afro-Caribbean topics was so deep, so visceral, that I could practically smell it over the phone line. Later, when I saw the relatives of the other victims, I noted that they must have been white. Hmm. What the devil made him change the menu at the last minute? Ufff, who knows! Of course, in the end none of this mattered one bit, I thought. By contrast, I have indeed “burned oil,” and the difference—what they say is the difference—is in fact nil, just idle talk, myths. But that was nothing. The most astonishing aspect of all this was still to come.

  She—the one who got away—was a nurse who worked at Calixto García General Hospital. The night of the incident she was working the graveyard shift, but at about 2:15 in the morning, her grandmother called to say that her young son was having a hellish asthma attack. She left immediately through the large door on Avenue of the Presidents, which is only used by Calixto staff. As might be expected, there wasn’t a soul out…or so it seemed to her. She didn’t pause to contemplate the scene but ran over to Carlos III Street, to see if she could find a ride to Lawton.

  But she didn’t get very far. She’d barely rounded the monument to José M. Gómez when some lunatic popped out of nowhere, grabbed her from behind, and put a knife to her throat, threatening to cut her if she uttered a single word.

  At that moment, all she could sense was an odor, like a dead rat—so she said—coming from the criminal, his breath reeking of alcohol, rotten, as if that revolting swine had more cavities than teeth in his mouth. And, at least as far as she could see, there wasn’t a single cop anywhere—not even a casual transient!—no one to ask for help. So she didn’t resist.

  Without quite letting go, the ruffian eased his hold on her and removed the knife from her throat. He was bigger, stronger than her. He put an arm around her shoulders and, as if they were on a romantic evening stroll through Vedado, he forced her to cross Avenue of the Presidents.

  “Giddy up, whore,” he whispered in her ear. “Giddy up or I’ll make mince meat out of you—and don’t look at me!”

  The nurse was so terrified, she peed her pants. But as soon as they stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street, the Prince’s Castle side, in a moment of sheer valor or temerity, she swiftly turned toward the criminal. And that’s when, under one of those bluish spots from the mercury bulbs of the street lights, she saw his face. An absolutely horrifying face, she said, that she’d never, ever forget.

  Furious, the guy punched her so hard in the stomach that she tumbled to the ground.

  “You fucked up now, whore!” he hissed, kneeling next to her. “Who the fuck told you you could look at me, huh? Now you really fucked up! Cuz I’m a freak, absolutely fucking freaky…!” And he threatened her again with the knife. “See? Freaky! Hee, hee, hee!”

  He pulled her by the hair, practically lifting her off the ground, and dragged her to the thicket around the Prince’s Castle. He raped her there, in the shadows. Understandably, the victim didn’t offer many details during that part of her testimony, only the most necessary in order to clearly establish the case. I mean, I put myself in her place and the truth is that I can’t imagine having to talk about all of this in front of an audience. By the end, he had her flat on the ground, on her back. Although she felt a very acute pain, as if her insides were being burned by hydrochloric acid, she explained, she didn’t lose consciousness for a single moment. All she thought about was surviving. She lifted a rock from the ground and held it in her right hand without the guy ever noticing. A few minutes passed, though it seemed like years to the nurse. When the maniac finally ejaculated, she took advantage of his momentary weakness to smash him with the rock, as hard as she could, right on the head. Bam! She left him groggy.

  She quickly pushed him off, got up as fast as she could, and, in spite of her own dizziness, the nausea, and that piercing pain she felt in her lower abdomen, she took off running toward the avenue. She ran faster than she thought humanly possible, all the while screaming for help…Groggy and everything, the bastard ran after her. But there’s ample evidence that it’s difficult to get anywhere when your pants are down by your knees. So the lunatic from Macagua 8 was only able to take a step or two, then he let loose a horrific howl, got tangled up…and fell flat on the ground.

  That turned out to be his Waterloo. The nurse went straight back to Calixto and avoided doing what any inexperienced girl would have done. She did not take off all her clothes and throw them into an incinerator, nor did she swallow a paracetamol or piroxicam or any other powerful analgesic, nor did she set herself under a long shower—thereby destroying all material evidence of a crime which could in the future serve to indict the delinquent, praying to all the saints that she not be pregnant, that she not have contracted AIDS or any venereal disease. Those are the kinds of things that free all sorts of bastards. But not this time. To the asshole’s dismay, this nurse had some street sense. Without any drama, she went directly to the emergency room and explained everything to the doctor.

  After that, everything flowed according to the law. First, there was a call to the police. Then there was a medical exam to confirm that in fact there had been a rape and to collect, among other evidence, semen, for future DNA comparison. By dawn, they had created the police sketch and had faxed it to the newsrooms at Granma and the other papers. This last tactic of going to the press is not a typical part of the process in cases such as this. The official media here—in other words, the media—usually just focus on letting us know that we live in the best and most democratic of all possible countries, that the imperialist enemy jealously tries to make us look like cowards because we were almost champions in the World Baseball Classic, that there will be sunshine and heat this afternoon with some scattered rains and lightning storms, while we will continue to do heroic battle against the mosquitoes which perpetuate the dengue epidemic, and that it’s those treacherous Jews who are the real bad guys in the Middle East. It’s always the same, exactly the same. And there’s no crime report, of course. Whoever said there was any crime in Cuba the Beautiful? Had to be an imperialist, no question about it. Oh, I don’t think there’s ever been more boring media!

  This, however, was an exceptional case. The rumors on the street about the malevolent psychopath and his perverse activities had far exceeded the limit of what could be an acceptable urban legend. Horribly mutilated corpses kept showing up at the morgue at a dizzying rate, while the police just ran in circles, disoriented, without a single lead, without any ideas of any kind, without anything to go on in order to even begin a manhunt. The assassin had them cornered and was making them look like fools. It had gotten rather shameless, insolent, and disrespectful. It was simply intolerable in our Socialist nation! So much that, finally, for once, they crawled for help to the media.

  And the gambit paid off. A retired old man who knew by sight a certain ne’er-do-well nicknamed the Beast, and who, to top it off, had just seen him acting rather suspiciously, hiding behind a flamboyan tree in John Lennon Park no less (how shame
less could he get?), rushed to offer the location of the suspect’s usual hangout. And so various squad cars, with sirens going full blast, ran full speed to arrest him. It turned out that this Beast guy, so lacking in inhibitions, was not lacking a police record. He was trapped. He had already been arrested in the past for disorderly conduct when he threw glasses and bottles against the wall in some dead-end bar; for stealing a chicken (live, tied by the feet), a sack of taro, and a bunch of plantains at the farmer’s market at 19th and A streets; for pickpocketing among the citizenry; for groping the female citizens’ asses on the “camello” bus headed toward San Agustín; for being a peeping tom in the ladies’ room in the Department of Arts and Letters at the University of Havana; and for snatching a purse from a New Zealand tourist.

  As if all this weren’t enough, it turned out the jerk was an immigrant from the provinces, what we call a “Palestinian,” without legal residency in Havana. More than once he’d been hauled back to his birthplace at Macagua 8, out there somewhere in the wilderness around the Sierra Maestra, in the hope that the authorities that way would deal with him. But the crafty bastard always found his way back to the capital, and once here, committed new crimes. In court, he liked to rationalize his acts with a single argument that never sounded anything but frivolous, which was that he was absolutely crazy. Of course, that never did him any good, and certainly not in this case. A few hours after his last arrest, the nurse didn’t so much as pause when she fingered him in the line-up at the Zapata and E streets station. A little later, she identified him again with the same aplomb, this time before the judges at the Provincial Court.

  Honestly, I don’t think that woman was lying, much less that she’d lost contact with reality because of nerves, which is what I thought at first, before I saw her and heard her. No way. Nothing like that. On the one hand, she seemed like a very solid woman, essentially reasonable, adult, capable of dealing with difficult circumstances without losing her head. On the other, what possible motives could she have to incriminate a poor innocent man who would have never otherwise said a word to her? Bribery? Boredom? A bet? A desire for notoriety? Pure and simple malevolence? Who knows…The fact is that I’ve gone over her story more times than I care to count, looking at it from different angles, and I have to admit that, to this day, I haven’t found any contradictions or holes. Basically, the nurse’s simple and direct testimony strikes me as real from A to Z. Plus, she has all that material evidence to back her up. The DNA positively identified citizen Policarpo. So then, there’s no doubt that the guy threatened her with a knife, insulted her, kidnapped her, hit her, raped her, and, if she hadn’t had her wits about her, would have probably killed her too. Everything seemed to fit beautifully, right? Hmm. Well, no. There’s a problem. And what a problem! Something which—to my surprise—no one talked about during the trial.

  It turns out that during this, his last act, the guy changed what we could call his modus operandi. What I’m saying is, he completely renovated his tactics, his style, his methods, his entire strategy for nocturnal hunting. And I’m not talking about variations on a theme, but rather a radical metamorphosis. It’s as if the guy, from one minute to the next, had decided to transform himself into a person wholly different from the one he’d always been. For starters, the guy did not hang out at night on the streets of Vedado on foot, but in a car. Probably not in a Ferrari Testarossa, since that was obviously over the top. His flying saucer, as he referred to it in our phone conversations, was probably more sober, more discrete, say, a black Mercedes, a classic model, elegant but not too showy, or something like that. And also, he did not throw himself on his victims in the middle of the street, nor did he capture them by grabbing them from behind or threatening them with a knife at their throats. No sir. It’s true that he had a knife, the lethal blade, but he only unsheathed it when he was going to dip it in blood. In his own way, he had excellent manners. Without ever leaving his car, he would invite girls to climb in, one at a time, with the promise that he would take them wherever they wanted. They almost always accepted, of course, and even said thanks. There are serious transportation problems in Havana. An offer like that, so generous and seemingly without ulterior motive, is not so easily dismissed. The poor girls didn’t stop getting in the fateful flying saucer even after the rumor on the street about a serial killer who was out there decimating the young female population had reached its point of climax, which, if you think about it, shouldn’t be all that strange. C’mon, who was going to suspect a young white man, well-off, well-dressed, and charming—what we’d call a gentleman? And, if by chance, some girl actually refused to climb into the nefarious flying saucer, he never insisted too much, he didn’t chase her no matter how good she looked. He just took his music somewhere else, to find a less suspicious prey, or he would call me from his cell phone to tell me about his tribulations.

  “Hey, whore, who the fuck were you talking to at this hour? It’s past 3 in the morning! I’m like a fool here, calling and calling, and all the time it’s busy, busy, busy…What were you thinking? What the fuck were you thinking, eh? I’ve been calling for an eternity!”

  “Oh yeah? Well, take it easy, Mr. Fool. Slow down, you sound like a cranky old woman in line for potatoes. I was on the Internet.”

  “Internet? Shit! What the fuck were you doing? Looking at porn?”

  “Yes, of course, looking at porn. Oh, Ted Bundy, it’s so easy to see that money just falls from the sky for you! But that’s not the case with me, you know? Not with me. I have to earn my money, because I’m working class. I was working. How do you like that little word? Work-ing.”

  “Oh, don’t flatter yourself. What working class? You mean whoring class? Ha! Ha! What you have to do—now, listen to my advice—is get yourself a damn cell phone and pull yourself out of this underdevelopment.”

  “A cell phone? Me with a cell phone? No way. Too expensive.”

  “My God, what a tightwad! If I don’t say so myself…you’ve got to be a Jew!”

  “Hey, hey! What is that, man? Don’t start in on stereotypes at this hour of the night. Fine, I may well be a Jew. That’s okay. I accept that. Hey, in the end, nobody’s perfect…But you, my dear, are much worse than me. You’re a Nazi.”

  “Nazi? This here…? Ha! Ha! That’s a good one, little whore! I like that one. I really like that one. I looooove it! Ha! Ha!”

  “You looooove it, eh? Hmm. I knew you would. You’re a piece of work.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m a helluva guy. Always have been and always will be!”

  “Kiss, kiss—kisses for you! But hey, big guy, now that you’ve called, tell me, lay it on the line, tell me everything. What are you waiting for? Tell your momma a delicious, dark, spine-tingling story…I’m all ears. C’mon, how’d you do tonight?”

  “Fucked up! Ufff! I haven’t gotten a thing. Can you believe that, slut? Nothing. There was a meatball standing at the corner of 23rd and Paseo, next to the traffic light. I think she was looking for a ride…but I’m not sure. She didn’t want to get in the goddamn flying saucer—she just refused! You know what that imbecile told me? To mind my own business! Did you hear me, you ugly thing? Yes, just like that. That’s what she said. To mind my own business. As if I—me!—as if I could give three shits about anything in her retarded life…What a bitch! That’s what she is. That’s it exactly: an ungrateful bitch. You understand?”

  “No, my love. I can’t understand how anyone would dare treat you in such a vulgar way. You’re right, as always. That girl on 23rd and Paseo is nothing but an ungrateful bitch. You do her a favor just by noticing her, which she surely doesn’t deserve, and look at how she repays you…Daddy, there’s no respect, no one has any moral values anymore. Our whole culture is in crisis. Do you know why? Because of globalization and neoliberalism.”

  “Oh, well said. A better world is possible! Ha! Ha! But you know, you sarcastic bitch, these things would never happen if you were with me, at least now and then…Not because I can’t do it
alone, of course—don’t ever think that, okay, bitch?—I don’t need you one twit! But the girls, if they saw a couple instead of just a guy…well, you know, they’d feel safer. Don’t you think? Oh yes! They’d all fall in the trap! Each and every one of them! Ha! Ha! C’mon, Momma, c’mon, don’t be so hard on me…C’mon, what’s the big deal with helping me out, huh? Look, just tell me whenever you want me to come by in the flying saucer and I’ll—”