Free Havana Noir by Achy Obejas

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