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

Ever since the Count had become one of Pigeon’s suppliers three or four years ago, his earnings from buying and selling secondhand books had rocketed most pleasingly. Out of his many business ventures – the purchase of jewels and antiques, works of art, two cars now ready for hire and the ownership of twenty-five per cent of the shares in a small, entirely illegal building firm – Yoyi’s only official connection with the authorities was his licence to set up a stall for the sale of books in the plaza de Armas, which was in fact supervised by a maternal uncle he visited a couple of times a week in order to supply new goods and control the commercial wellbeing of the business that served him as a front. The Count had finally concluded that the young man’s innate ability to trade, sell at a good price and cajole potential customers – who, according to his principles, you always tried to rip off – must be the result of a genetic legacy from his general-store-owning Spanish grandfather to whom he also owed the name of Reutilio, for the boy had grown up in a country where scarcity and shortages had banished the art of making a good sale several decades ago. People sold and bought from necessity; while some sold what they could, others bought what their bottomless pockets allowed, with no stock exchange complications and, in particular, without the stress that choice entailed: take it or leave it, it’s this or nothing, hurry up or it will be gone, buy what’s there although right now you don’t need it . . . But not Yoyi Pigeon. He was a consummate artist, able to place luxury items at unbelievable prices, and the Count bet that even if he realized his dream of leaving the island – to go anywhere, Madagascar included – he’d end up a successful entrepreneur. When they met, Conde felt he was reluctantly rejecting the youth because of his appearance, his love of the jewels he displayed on his hands and neck and his relentless cultivation of his own body. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two, born of purely commercial motives, had successfully surmounted the iron barrier of the Count’s prejudices and started to turn into friendship, perhaps because their complementary qualities balanced out any apparent shortcomings. The young man’s pitilessly mercantile vision and the Count’s outdated romanticism, the former’s rash impetuosity and the latter’s scrupulous calm, Pigeon’s occasionally unthinking outspokenness and the Count’s guile forged by years in the police gave them a strange equilibrium.

Their friendship had been definitively cemented one afternoon three years ago when the Count called in at his partner’s house on the pretext that he had to tell him he’d be bringing a load of books the day after, although what he really wanted was a cup of the excellent coffee the lad’s mother used to make. But that afternoon, Conde’s presence had saved him – at the very least – from a scam that was proceeding undetected by Pigeon’s beady eyes. Conde had arrived at Yoyi’s just as the latter, dazzled by a joblot of jewels offered at an unbelievably reasonable price by two characters who’d come recommended by a jeweller, was about to fetch from his bedroom the 2,200 dollars they’d agreed as an overall amount. When he arrived, Conde had greeted Yoyi and the jewelsellers and discreetly made for the lobby, driven by a hunch that not everything was as it should be. He’d squeezed his memory hard and prised out an image of one of the would-be sellers, implicated years ago in a case of violent robbery. He immediately concluded the deal was fraudulent: either the jewels came from a robbery that had yet to be rumbled or, more dangerously, were simply a ploy to strip Yoyi of his money. Conde had no time to intervene and abort that operation, so he made his way along the passage down the side of the house to the backyard where he picked up a piece of iron piping which he flourished like a baseball bat. He retraced his steps and by the time he’d reached the living room, the scene had reached climax point: one of the sellers was threatening Yoyi with a huge knife, and demanding the money, while the other collected up the jewels. Almost without thinking Conde brought the pipe down on the rib cage of the armed man, who dropped his knife and fell to his knees in front of Yoyi, who kicked him in the jaw and sent him flying on his back. Seeing all this happening, the other thief grabbed the jewels as best he could and ran between Yoyi and Conde to get to the street before the ex-policeman struck again with his makeshift weapon. Feeling his body shaking after he’d acted so violently, Conde handed the iron pipe to Yoyi, kicked the knife away, and flopped down on the sofa, beseeching the young man: “Don’t hit him again. Let him be. Don’t complicate life . . .” But this afternoon, as on other lucky ones, Yoyi smiled contentedly when he saw his partner approaching with a bag of books. After asking his mother to prepare the indispensable cups of coffee, Yoyi followed the Count onto the terrace, where several pots of ferns and malangas fought for space, favoured as they were by the protective shade of the fruit trees growing in the next-door yard. The Count emptied his bag on the table and told Pigeon that this little consignment was only a very light hors d’oeuvre compared to the banquet of books he’d just discovered. The young lad listened to him as impatiently as ever, caressing the jutting keel of his sternum. “I swear, my partner’s a silly bastard,” he finally commented.

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