Cubop City Blues (5 page)

KILLER OF CROCODILES

A
ngel's grandfather, Pedro Romero, was the best policeman in Havana. They say he wasn't afraid of anyone, un macho de verdad, they say, driven to ridding the city of the criminal elements who dominated the streets, even if he had to break the law to do so. Angel met Pedro in a nursing home in Miami, thirty years after Angel's grandmother threw him out of the house for his philandering ways. Pedro took up with a woman with whom he had a daughter, and after she, too, broke with him, he fake-married a simple twenty-year-old girl from the country. They say his cousin, Gustavo, a lawyer and notary public, arranged the whole thing but never submitted the papers to the marriage bureau, so as far as the law was concerned, the marriage never took place. Pedro was merely interested in getting the guajira into bed. He wound up falling in love and stayed with her for fifteen years until he left for the United States. By then he had retired from the police force but his reputation preceded him everywhere he went. He was, after all, the man who had tracked, found, and killed Manolito Rivas, one of the most notorious murderers ever to roam the streets of the capital. Whenever Pedro entered a bar, people bought him drinks, and more than once he was seen walking down the Malecón with a tall, blonde Americana on his arm.

By the time Angel met Pedro he'd been writing for ten years. He'd published two books that sold a total of a thousand copies, give or take a dozen, and after considering his meager success, he was almost ready to give up writing for good. His ambition, his last thread of hope, was to write a story about Pedro that would revive his sputtering writer's soul.

Pedro was a shriveled old man who could hardly speak due to the laryngeal cancer that was killing him but who still whistled at all the nurses who entered his room, even the ugly ones. As a result the nurses gave him special treatment, bringing him chocolate treats to suck on and cans of Orange Crush, the only liquid that slaked his ever-present thirst. When he saw Angel, he raised his hands in an inquiring gesture, and Angel answered that he was Zoila's grandson and therefore his as well. Pedro started shaking so badly that he had to sit down. He waved Angel over to the chair and embraced him, planting a wet, unpleasant kiss on his cheek. Then he told that old joke about an inventor who had developed a fruit that tasted like a woman's vagina. Angel forced out a laugh.

You don't like the joke? he asked. Angel could practically hear his vocal chords straining to vibrate.

I've heard it before, Angel said.

The truth was that laughing was difficult because Angel had inherited his family's resentment over the way Pedro had treated them. What kind of man would abandon his wife and children just like that? His father was forced to leave school and work sweeping the floors of a soap factory at fourteen, and his uncle was so traumatized by the absence of a father that he started drinking at sixteen, and by the time he was twenty-five he was a hopeless dipsomaniac. Angel's grandmother, Zoila, became a recluse, embittered by what Pedro had done yet unable to forget the only man who had brought any kind of happiness to her life. As she drew her last breath she called out: Pedro,
ven a mí.
Come to me.

How is your grandmother? Pedro asked, looking at Angel intently.

She's fine, Angel lied and quickly changed the conversation. Manolito Rivas, the famous murderer. You found him?

Yes, he said and then remained silent for some time. His eyes were frozen and unmoored. His jaw dropped open.

If the old man dies now, Angel thought, I won't get my story, and so he called out to him several times until he awoke.

Did you hear the one about Mr. Pérez and Mr. Brown at a bar in South Miami? Pedro asked.

Angel listened to the joke and this time he laughed heartily. He waited a few minutes before asking Pedro again to tell him about his pursuit of Manolito Rivas.

Pedro smiled, his eyes fixed on the wall by the door, then shook his head slowly as if remembering something fanciful, a story he had once invented to entertain friends but which had now become more real than the rest of his life. He opened a fresh can of Orange Crush and began to speak.

Manolito Rivas was a dandy, always dressed impeccably in the latest styles. His hair was slicked back and shiny, and his fingernails were perfectly manicured. To see him walking down the street you'd think he was a successful actor or musician or a child of privilege. In reality he was a brutal killer, murdering women with impunity and then boasting about his exploits in the barrios of the city. Despite his life of crime, maybe because of it—you never know about these things—Manolito Rivas had become a legend in Havana. Newspapers carried front-page stories about his antics—how he'd set a woman on fire after raping her; how he'd enamored the scion of a wealthy banking family, then drowned her in the bathtub and distributed her money among the poor who lived in La Plaza del Vapor. His last victim was the widow of a government retiree whom he'd suffocated and then shoved her dentures down her throat. What a way to die, devoured by your own mouth!

At this point Pedro had a coughing fit and he had to stop. When Angel asked him if he should get the nurse, Pedro waved his hand dismissively and took several sips of his Orange Crush until he settled down.

All the city newspapers fulminated against police incompetence. Politicians' switchboards lit up with calls from worried citizens. Finally, at the urging of the First Lady, who became convinced no woman was safe as long as Manolito Rivas roamed the streets, the president himself demanded immediate action. That's when the police chief called Pedro, whose honesty and peculiar adherence to the law had won him the respect of his peers. Pedro had been whiling away his time in Vedado, an upper-class neighborhood of Havana, where he arrested petty thieves, gave them a good beating, and sent them home with the warning that next time he would not be so lenient. Vedado was a highly coveted assignment in those days as the residents were fond of tipping the police generously to take special care of their properties. Pedro came home every night with wads of cash stuffed in his pockets, making Zoila the happiest woman on her block. Pedro, however, had not joined the police force to be rich but to be respected. And so, when the police chief offered him the Manolito Rivas case, he jumped at the opportunity.

At this point Pedro pointed at his throat and made a grimace. He got up from his chair, lay down on the bed, and promptly fell asleep. Not wanting to return to the nursing home, Angel waited for a while hoping that he would wake, rested and ready to continue his story, then resigned himself to the fact that he'd have to come the next day.

That night, after too many drinks, Angel asked his father what he remembered about Pedro. His father poured himself a whiskey and said that Pedro seemed intent on ridding Havana of undesirable elements and was always running after some criminal or other, sometimes not coming home for days at a time. When he did, he was usually too tired to talk to his children, instead changing into his pajamas and going straight to bed without so much as a hello or a good-night. He was not a good father, his father said and asked Angel why he was digging all this up now. I'm writing a story about him, Angel said, and his father responded that he'd rather he wrote a story about someone not in the family. Family matters are private. Then he changed the conversation to a real-estate deal he had just closed in Hialeah.

Angel awoke the next morning with a bad headache and a worse disposition and waited until the middle of the afternoon to return to the nursing home. Pedro was not in his room and for a moment Angel worried that he might have died during the night. It was not a worry he entertained very long. Angel found him in the recreation room surrounded by a group of residents. With his Orange Crush can next to him on a table, Pedro stood in front of his aluminum walker telling them jokes. His audience sat in their wheelchairs as if transfixed, but on closer look Angel realized that most of them were barely conscious. Only one of them was smiling, permanently, a string of saliva dripping down onto a plastic bib.

When Pedro saw Angel he smiled and waved him over. His voice was less scratchy that day, and he proudly introduced Angel to the group as his grandson, the famous writer. There was no response from any of them except for a small fellow in the back who started hiccupping and was soon led away by one of the nurses.

You want to tell them a joke? Pedro asked his grandson.

He said he wasn't good at jokes.

It doesn't matter, Pedro said. Their minds are gone. They can't tell the difference between a joke and a sermon.

Now Angel was on the spot. His headache was returning and his mouth was as dry as chalk. Angel told the one about the two drunks who think they are climbing the stairway to heaven but are merely crawling on a railroad track. Not even Pedro cracked a smile.

You weren't kidding, he said. Are you sure you're my grandson?

They went back to his room, where, without any prodding on Angel's part, Pedro continued the story.

Manolito Rivas was as slippery as an eel and blatant as a foghorn. No sooner did you think you had him cornered than a mist of uncertainty would surround you. He was here, he was there, he was everywhere. One day you heard he was in El Cerro entertaining the neighbors by singing boleros with a street band; the next someone had caught sight of him miles away playing dice at a bodega in Jaimanitas. Finally, after many weeks of work, I found Manolito in a rented room in the Colón district as he was dressing to go on his evening rounds. I showed him my badge and pointed my gun right at his heart. Manolito smiled, one leg in his pants, the other out, and said, I am a real criminal and I am not surrendering. You are a real cop. Shoot me.

I did. End of story.

Angel had heard from both his uncle and grandmother when she was alive that Pedro had spent weeks searching for the killer, disguising himself as a bourgeois matron, a streetwalker, even a nun, in hopes of catching Manolito in the act. Pedro had become a regular at several bordellos that the criminal was rumored to frequent, leading Zoila to exclaim that it was more than his duty that her husband was performing. Angel's uncle added that when Pedro ran out of leads, he would ride trolleys from one end of the city to another at all hours, hoping to catch sight of the killer. Once, Pedro disguised himself as a guajiro, a country bumpkin, replete with straw hat, leggings, and machete, and took his two sons, then seven and eight years old, to La Concha, the public beach where he had heard Manolito Rivas would sometimes go for a swim, and there the three of them spent the day frying in the sun.

When Angel asked Pedro why he did all of this, he shook his head and dismissed it with a wave of the hand.

Part of the work, he said. Part of the work. The important thing is that I caught and killed him.

Did you feel any remorse about shooting him? Angel asked.

What kind of question is that?

Well, you killed a human being.

Pedro looked at Angel as if he were mentally deficient. I killed a crocodile, he said.

That night as Angel sat in his father's backyard drinking a Materva and waiting for the heat to abate, he considered what Pedro had said. For him, being a policeman, whether apprehending a burglar or shooting a criminal, was a matter of duty. Simple. Why couldn't Angel think that way? Why couldn't writing be his duty? He avoided the issue by calling Luli, a former lover of his he hadn't seen in five years, and asking her to have a drink with him. She'd been supportive of his work back then and he thought she'd be supportive of it now. He needed something simple. As they shared mojitos in Coral Gables, Angel asked her what she thought of him as a writer.

I think you're a two-timing hijo de puta.

As a writer, damn it!

Do you know what you put me through?

Yes. But if you can put that aside for a moment . . .

Of course she couldn't. She downed her third mojito, picked up her purse, and left the bar. His instinct was to run after her and apologize. Despite her forty-plus years, her body was still shapely and her face glowed with sensuality. He was lonely. He remembered their days of passion and glory when they made the bed levitate and angels and demons dance cheek to cheek around them, but he stayed at the bar and ordered another drink. It would never happen again. Whatever they could recover would dissipate like smoke the moment he entered the house and fear took over, fear of entanglement, fear of having to repeat forever the anticipation that leads to lust, fear of the habits that couples fall into in order to disguise the loss of desire.

With the aid of the mojitos he was able to reconsider the possibility that he wasn't good enough, that he should give up his writing career in favor of something more lucrative, maybe join his father in the real-estate business or go to law school. As his grandmother told him a few months before she died, You're still young. You can do anything you want. That's what grandmothers always say. After his fifth drink his will wavered and he envisioned his two books, standing at a doorway like forlorn children whose father is about to abandon them.

The next morning Angel was at the nursing home promptly at nine. He found Pedro in his room shaving. He was wearing a pajama top but no bottom. His legs were wrinkled and veiny and his testicles hung midway down his thighs. For a moment Angel saw himself in his place and considered the awful fate that awaited him.

Grandfather, he said, addressing him for the first time in the familial way.

Aren't you a little early? he said looking at Angel through the mirror.

There are a few details I need to know for my story.

I told you all there is. Angel could hear the double razor scratching at the bristles on his neck, going over the scars where the surgeons had gone in.

Some things don't add up, Angel said, having no idea what he was referring to but sensing that Pedro wasn't telling him the whole story.