Havana Best Friends
four present signed, Elena was given the carbon copy, and the captain and the neighbours left. A minute later, as she sat on the chesterfield holding her head in her hands, the buzzer startled her. It was Trujillo, asking whether it would be possible for Elena to be at the IML at eight the following morning to identify the body. She limited her reply to a nod and closed the door.
    Half an hour later, still angst-ridden, lying in bed with the night lamp on, Elena suddenly realized she was doing something she hadn’t done in the last thirty-one years – sucking her thumb. She pulled it out in disgust. What was the matter with her? Regressing to childhood? Totally freaked out? She turned the lamp off and tried to relax.
    Her unruly memory began replaying her greatest personal calamity, the one that had made her reflect philosophically for the first time about life, love, and God. Her angelic son, the most beautiful child in the whole world, in his white small coffin, eyelids closed, golden locks framing his head.
No!
She set the memory aside. No more thoughts of death. No more wading through the saddest moments of her past, either. Elena turned the light back on. She would make espresso and read until daybreak, then call her mother.

    Trujillo drove the Ural back to his outfit on Marino Street, between Tulipán and Conill, where he got receipts from the storeroomclerk for the video cassettes and the money, then walked back home. He lived ten blocks away at 453 Falgueras Street, in a one-storey wooden house with a red-tile roof. Over the years, the structure had tilted to the right and now it leaned against its neighbour, as if tired after a century of sheltering people.
    By the time Trujillo slipped his key into the lock it was 11:50 p.m. Everybody was in bed, the kitchen light left on for him. His mother had left rice, black beans, and a hard-boiled egg in a covered frying pan for him; a pot full of water for his bath. He lit the range and smoked a cigarette as the water warmed. In the bathroom he poured the hot water into an almost-full bucket of water, then tiptoed into his bedroom where he found clean underwear and a fast-asleep wife. After his bath he warmed and ate the food, made some espresso, then smoked a second cigarette.
    As he was doing the dishes, Trujillo’s thoughts turned back to the videos. If the whole batch of them were porn, Pablo Miranda must have been one of three things: best client, salesman, or producer. The money found in his bedroom might be related to the videos, and his being able to meet with foreigners at his workplace pointed in the same direction. A considerable number of Italian and Spanish tourists were single men who came to Cuba looking for cheap sex.
    All this and the cocaine inclined the captain to believe that Pablo had been involved in something reprehensible, illegal, and sex-related. His murder had all the trappings of a settlement of accounts, professionally carried out. The murderer may just have been following orders from someone who’d decreed Pablo Miranda’s execution. The contradictory indications – the bite marks, the stolen wallet and watch, the two hundred dollars leftin a pocket – likely were an attempt to send the police on a wild-goose chase after a sex maniac or a dumb thief. Had Pablo been blackmailing somebody? Had he demanded a bigger share of the profits? What was his role in the videos? Cameraman? Editor? Talent scout?
    Police knew that the production of Cuban porn films was on the rise. Customs confiscated copies at the airport, officers raiding whorehouses and flophouses found some more, but so far no producer had been caught. At national police headquarters a special unit had been put together under a full colonel. Trujillo’s boss, Major Pena, was one of the officers working on it in Havana. So far, Pena had said, three hookers and two male prostitutes had been identified, busted, and questioned. Each of them had told the same story: A man they had never

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