The Neruda Case Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ve thought about this for months, especially since my health began to suffer in Paris. I thought about turning to comrades at the Party, including a good friend at the embassy in Havana, but I decided against it because, in days like these, I wouldn’t want anything to leak. Politics, you know …”
    Cayetano Brulé looked at the poet. He didn’t know what to say.
    “You must be asking yourself why I’d trust a stranger,” the poet continued, “and the answer is, simply, intuition. When I heard about you recently at a meeting with comrades in this house, I said to myself: He’s the one I need. He doesn’t know anyone in Chile, so he has no alternative but to be discreet. He’s also Cuban, and can visit the island without awakening suspicions. And since he’s unemployed, a job like this could come in handy.”
    “That’s why you came to see me in the library the other Sunday, at the party, right?”
    “
École!
Exactly! It was premeditated and calculated.”
    Cayetano smiled uncomfortably, his hands sweaty, while the poet kept his feet on the white leather footstool, sheathed in woolen socks. It would be difficult to help him, Cayetano thought, but if he didn’t at least try, he’d let the poet down, and the man would never speak to him again. It wasn’t good to lose a friendship—however nascent it might be—with a poet of such importance. In some ways, the poet, with his melancholy eyes and long sideburns, reminded Cayetano of his own father, a trumpet player in a tropical orchestra, a friend of bohemians who was affectionate with his family, who had died in the fifties after a concert on a snowy night in the Bronx, where he’d played for years with Xavier Cugat and even the one and only Beny Moré, the Barbarian of Rhythm, the one who sang “Today as Yesterday” and danced as if he’d been nursed with conga and bolero instead of milk. After his father’s violent death one night on Canal Street, it had become financially impossible for Cayetano’s mother to return to the island of Cuba, and she had to make ends meet as a seamstress in Union City.
    “What’s the Cuban’s name, Don Pablo?”
    “If you want to get into the details, you should promise me first that you’ll do the work in utmost secrecy.”
    “You can trust me, Don Pablo. I’ll be …I’ll be your own private Maigret.”
    “That’s the ticket, young man,” the poet replied with enthusiasm. He turned toward the bar, with its pink walls and bronze bell, and asked, “How about a whiskey on the rocks? I mean a good one, at least eighteen years old. You should know that I’m the best bartender in Chile. Would you prefer a double or a triple?”
    He went to the bar without waiting for a reply. Behind the bar, he picked up a glass, threw in a few ice cubes, and poured generouslyfrom a bottle of Chivas Regal. Cayetano thought that this might not be the best way to start his day, since he still had to pick up his canned Chinese pork at the JAP on San Juan de Dios Hill, but he admitted that it wasn’t every day that a Nobel laureate prepared such a distinguished drink for a mere mortal and contracted him as a private investigator.
    “I can’t toast with you because of the treatment I’m receiving at Van Buren Hospital,” the poet said, lingering over the whiskey’s scent before handing it over. “Although at night, if I’m in the mood for it, I gulp down a glass or two of Oporto without letting my wife, Matilde, see. She’d raise hell if she caught me, but I know there’s no better medicine than Oporto. A bit of whiskey can’t hurt me, don’t you think?”
    With the ice cubes clinking in the glass, Cayetano asked himself how he could ever have been aloof with this man. “As long as you don’t go overboard, Don Pablo, it can’t do you any harm …”
    “Don’t worry, young man, at this age I’m no longer seduced by excess.” He scrutinized Cayetano’s face as he drank. Another gull passed the window with its wings