Excerpt from Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

With his bag of books over his shoulder and his stomach gurgling in joyful anticipation, Mario Conde returned to the reception room, where the Ferreros awaited him looking grave and anxious. He only then noticed how the fingers of Amalia, who was at that moment wiping the sweat from her hands, were atrophied and sore around the cuticle edges, like frog toes, no doubt because of her compulsive need to nibble her nails and the skin surrounding them.

“All right, I’ll take these sixteen books. There’s only one that’s special, the one on Cuban cooking, though it doesn’t have a high market value . . . I want it for myself. How about five hundred pesos for the lot?. . .”

Dionisio looked at his sister and they stared at each other. They both slowly turned to the Count who rather uneasily anticipated possible recriminations: ‘You don’t think it’s enough?’

“No,” Dionisio immediately replied. ‘No . . . not at all. I mean, it’s very fair.’

Conde smiled with relief.

“It’s not very much, but it’s fair. That price includes my earnings, and the bookseller’s, after he’s paid the space he rents and taxes . . . You get about thirty per cent of any final price tag. That’s how we work out the earnings from books that sell easily, a three-way split.”

“So little?” Amalia couldn’t repress that complaint.

“It’s not so little if you’re convinced I’m not going to swindle you. I’m a decent fellow and, if we don’t fall out, I will buy lots of books from you at a good price.” He smiled, assuming he’d dealt with that quibble, and, before brother and sister could do their sums differently, he handed over the agreed amount.

When he walked out into the street, he was hit in the face by the afternoon humidity the sun had whipped up: a short-lived shower that had stood in for the anticipated storm had merely increased the mugginess of the air. The Count immediately noticed the contrast in temperature: the Ferreros’ house, once the property of the filthy-rich Montes de Ocas, could cope with a Havana summer and for a moment he felt tempted to go back and take a second look at the cool mansion, but an intuition warned him against looking back. If he had, he’d most certainly have been astonished to see a Ferrero running out of the house to the nearest market, trying to arrive before five o’clock when they closed the meat, vegetable and grocery stalls that might spare them for once the obligatory diet of rice and black beans they shared with several million compatriots. But as he walked off in search of a road where he might flag down a passing mini-cab, Mario Conde noted that, although some symptoms had slackened off, his hunch was still alive and kicking, clinging to the skin of his left nipple like a bloodthirsty leech. Yoyi Pigeon, who’d been civically registered and Catholically baptized with the resonant name of Jorge Reutilio Casamayor Riquelmes, was twenty-eight years old, slightly swollen-chested – hence his pigeonnish nickname – and had an irrepressible propensity for verbal wit. He was moreover a man who thought on his feet and was quick and efficient at complex calculations, as endorsed by the academic diploma in civil engineering, framed in a soberly elegant, wrought bronze frame, that hung on the wall of his living room in Víbora Park. He was patiently waiting, said the engineering laureate, for toilet paper to go into short supply so he could adapt the crackling piece of university parchment to such use, given it had brought him little success and no economic advantage. Although the Count was twenty years his senior, he recognized, with a touch of envy, that Yoyi possessed a cynicism and practical knowledge of life he had never and clearly would never possess, even though those qualities were increasingly necessary for survival in the jungle of Creole life in the third millennium.

Excerpted from Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura Copyright © 2009 by Leonardo Padura. Excerpted by permission of Bitter Lemon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher