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say is very orthodox; I brought you in to offer a straightforward deal: solve this case for me and I’ll sign you off . . . Please don’t imagine for one minute that I’m using your discharge as blackmail: let’s say rather that I’m compelling you to help me, because I need your assistance now and because you know that if I don’t sign the paper here on my desk, you won’t be discharged for several months . . . I told you I didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t I? I should tell you that the truth is it was your fault I didn’t sleep properly: I couldn’t think how to suggest something to you that might sound like blackmail and persuade you in the nicest possible way to take on this specific case. So I decided the best thing was to be completely frank with you . . . But first of all I’ll run through the case and you can say yea or nay, and we’ll see what happens, because although you’re hearing me being
so polite and calm, I can also dig my heels in and make things difficult. Believe me . . . The problem is that on Saturday night they found a man’s corpse, a Cuban with US citizenship who’d come to visit his family . . . A real problem, you know? The man went out for a drive by himself on Thursday evening in his brother-in-law’s car; he’d said he wanted to see a bit of Havana, and that was the last that was seen of him, he didn’t appear until eleven p.m. Saturday when some fishermen found the corpse on Goat Beach, at the exit to the bay tunnel. You with me? According to the forensic, the man was dead before he was thrown into the sea, a blow to the head from a blunt instrument. He died of a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage. From the nature of the blow, the forensic thinks the object could have been something like a baseball bat, one of the old wooden sort . . . So far, so reasonably mysterious and politically complicated, but one can’t overlook a detail that makes things even more difficult: the dead man’s penis and testicles had been cut off, evidently with a blunt kitchen knife . . . What do you think, then? Doesn’t the story grab you? Of course, it must be revenge, but we have to prove it and find the guilty party, before the scandal blows up in Miami and the government’s accused of doing the evil deed. Because the man who died from several blows to the head, the man whose genitals were mutilated comes with a name and a history: he was Miguel Forcade Mier, and in the sixties he was deputy head of the Provincial Office for Expropriated Property, and national deputy director for Planning and the Economy until he stopped off in Madrid in 1978, on his way back from the Soviet Union . . . Now, doesn’t this case really grab you?”

    In his ten years working as a policeman Mario Conde had internalized a few basic lessons to guarantee his survival: first of all came the concept of loyalty. Only by preserving the group spirit, by protecting the other members of the police tribe to which he himself belonged, could he guarantee that the others would provide him with similar protection and that their unity was really genuine. Even when he never felt like a real policeman, and preferred to operate without a pistol or uniform and even hated the idea of employing violence, when he dreamed he would soon jettison all that to embark on a normal life – now what the fuck was normality? he would also wonder, imagining a log cabin with a tiled roof facing the sea, where he would live and write – the Count always practised that code, perhaps to excess, as Major Rangel also did, only to end up betrayed by those bastards he’d stubbornly defended, even to the point of putting his own neck on the block when sentences were meted out. Consequently at that moment Mario Conde’s police and street ethics walked a dramatic tightrope: either he kept to his decision to leave Headquarters because they’d removed Major