Free Havana Gold by Leonardo Padura

bet you anything. He was jealous and that’s why he killed her, but he fucked her first.”
    â€œDon’t be ridiculous, nobody does that kind of thing these days. You know, savage, it was a lunatic that did it, one of those psychopaths who assaults, rapes and strangles. I saw the film last Saturday night.”

    â€œGentlemen, gentlemen, have you ever stopped to think what would have happened if the girl rather than being a teacher had been, by way of example, you know, an opera singer, a very famous one, naturally, and that instead of killing her in her flat, they’d killed her in the middle of a performance of Madame Butterfly , in a packed theatre, at the moment . . .”
    â€œWhy don’t the three of you go lick your arses?” the Count finally asked quite seriously, as his three friends smiled and Josefina smiled and nodded as if to say, they’re only pulling your leg, my little Count. “The fact is they like playing the fool. I’ll make the coffee and you lot can wash up,” he concluded and got up to get the coffee pot.
    Skinny Carlos, Rabbit and Andrés scrutinized him from a table strewn with what could have been leftovers from a nuclear castastrophe: plates, bowls, serving platters, glasses and bottles of rum bled to death by the voracious, alcoholic appetites of those four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Josefina had thought of the idea of inviting Andrés tonight, who’d now become her general practitioner after a lot of new pain beset her three months ago, and, as usual, she’d anticipated the reasonable rather than random possibility that the Count, as starving as ever, would turn up – and then Rabbit also put in an appearance, he’d brought some books for Skinny, he said, and eagerly signed up for that priority activity, as
he dubbed the repast well seasoned by the nostalgia of four Pre-Uni schoolmates now in the fast lane to forty. But Josefina wasn’t daunted – she’s invincible, thought the Count, when he saw her smile, after clasping her hands to her head for almost a minute, while the light of her culinary inspiration flashed: she could kill the hunger of that predatory foursome.
    â€œ Ajiaco sailor-style,” she announced, putting her banquet stew-pot on the stove almost half filled with water, adding the head of glassy-eyed stone-bass, two of the sweetest, off-white corncobs, half a pound of yellow malanga , half of white, and a similar amount of yam and marrow, two green plantains and others drippingly over-ripe, a pound of yucca and sweetpotato. She squeezed in a lemon, and drowned a pound of white flesh from that fish the Count hadn’t tasted for so long he thought it must be on the way to extinction, and, like someone keen to offload, she added another pound of prawns. “You could also add in lobster or crab,” added Josefina, like a witch from Macbeth before the stew-pot of life, finally throwing onto all that solid matter a third of a cup of oil, an onion, two cloves of garlic, a big pepper, a cup of tomato puree, three, no better four small spoonfuls of salt – “The other day I read it’s not as bad for you as they say, just as well” – and half a spoonful of pepper, almost completing that creation which had every
possible flavour, smell, colour and texture, with a last quarter of a spoonful of oregano and another such of cumin, cast in the pot almost in a mood of irritation. Josefina smiled as she started stirring her concoction. “There’s enough for ten people, but with four men like you . . . My grandfather used to make this, he was a sailor from Galicia, and according to him this ajiaco is the daddy of all ajiacos and any day beats Castilian pisto , French pot-pourri , Italian minestrone , Chilean cazuela , Dominican sancocho and, naturally, Slav borsch , that hardly merits a place in this Latin stew competition. The secret lies in the mix of fish and vegetables, but you