If the Dead Rise Not

1

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS from the north, the sea smashes into the wall on the Malecón as if it has been unleashed by a besieging army intent on the revolutionary overthrow of Havana. Gallons of water are launched into the air and then rain down upon the broad, oceanfront highway, washing some of the dust from the big American cars heading west, or drenching those pedestrians who are daring or foolish enough to walk along the wall during winter weather.

For a few minutes, I watched the crashing, moonlit waves with real hope. They were near but not quite near enough to reach the windup gramophone belonging to the Cuban youths who had spent most of the night grouped in front of my apartment building, keeping me and probably several others awake with the rumba music that is everywhere on the island. There were times when I found myself longing for the hob-nailed, juggernaut rhythms of a German brass band; not to mention the street-cleaning properties of a model twenty-four-stick grenade.

Unable to sleep, I considered going to the Casa Marina, and then rejected the idea, certain that, at this late hour, the particular chica I favored would no longer be free. Besides, Yara was asleep in my bed, and while she would never have questioned my leaving the apartment in the small hours of the morning, the ten dollars payable to Doña Marina would probably have been money wasted, since I was no longer equal to the task of making love twice in as many days, let alone in the space of one evening. So I sat down and finished the book I was reading instead.

It was a book in English.

For some time now I’d been learning English, in an effort to persuade an Englishman named Robert Freeman to give me a job. Freeman worked for the British tobacco giant Gallaher, running a subsidiary company called J. Frankau, which had been the UK distributor for all Havana cigars since 1790. I had been cultivating Freeman in the hope that I might talk him into sending me back to Germany—at my own expense, I might add—to see if I couldn’t open up the new West German market. A covering letter of introduction and several boxes of samples would, I supposed, be enough to smooth the arrival of Carlos Hausner, an Argentine of German descent, back to Germany and enable me to blend in.

It wasn’t that I disliked Cuba. Far from it. I had left Argentina with a hundred thousand American dollars, and I lived very comfortably in Havana. But I yearned for somewhere without biting insects, and where people went to bed at a sensible time of night, and where none of the drinks was made of ice: I was tired of getting a freezing headache every time I went into a bar. Another reason I wanted to return to Germany was that my Argentine passport would not last forever. But once I was safely back in Germany, I could disappear. Again.

Going back to Berlin was out of the question, of course. For one thing, it was now landlocked in the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic; and, for another, the Berlin police were probably looking for me in connection with the murders of two women in Vienna, in 1949. Not that I had murdered them. I’ve done a lot of things in my life of which I’m less than proud, but I haven’t ever murdered a woman. Not unless you counted the Soviet woman I’d shot during the long, hot summer of 1941—one of an NKVD death squad who’d just murdered several thousand unarmed prisoners in their cells. I expect the Russians would have counted that as murder, which was another good reason to stay out of Berlin. Hamburg looked like a better bet. Hamburg was in the Federal Republic, and I didn’t know anyone in Hamburg. More important, no one there knew me.

Meanwhile, my life was good. I had what most Habaneros wanted: a large apartment on Malecón, a big American car, a woman to provide sex, and a woman to cook my meals. Sometimes it was the same woman who cooked the food and also provided the sex. But my Vedado apartment was only a few tantalizing blocks from the corner of Twenty-fifth Street, and long before Yara became my devoted housekeeper, I’d got into the habit of paying regular visits to Havana’s most famous and luxurious casa de putas.

I liked Yara, but it wasn’t anything more than that. She stayed when she felt like staying, not because I asked her but because she wanted to. I think Yara was a Negress, but it’s a little hard to be sure about things like that in Cuba. She was tall and slim and about twenty years younger than I with a face like a much-loved pony. She wasn’t a whore, because she didn’t take money for it. She only looked like a whore. Most of the women in Havana looked like whores. Most of the whores looked like your little sister. Yara wasn’t a whore, because she made a better living as a thief stealing from me. I didn’t mind that. It saved me from having to pay her. Besides, she stole only what she thought I could afford to lose, which, as it happened, was a lot less than guilt would have obliged me to pay her. Yara didn’t spit and she didn’t smoke cigars and she was a devotee of the Santería religion, which, it seemed to me, was a bit like voodoo. I liked that she prayed about me to some African gods. They had to work better than the ones I’d been praying to.

As soon as the rest of Havana was awake, I drove along to the Prado in my Chevrolet Styline. The Styline was probably the commonest car in Cuba and very possibly one of the largest. It took more metal to make a Styline than there was in Bethlehem Steel. I parked in front of the Gran Teatro. It was a neo-Baroque building with so many angels crowded onto its lavish exterior it was clear the architect must have thought being a playwright or an actor was more important than being an apostle. These days, anything is more important than being an apostle. Especially in Cuba.

I had arranged to meet Freeman in the smoking room at the nearby Partagas cigar factory, but I was early, so I went to the Hotel Inglaterra and ordered some breakfast on the terrace. There I encountered the usual cast of Havana characters, minus the prostitutes: it was still a little early for the prostitutes. There were American naval officers on furlough from the warship in the harbor, some matronly tourists, a few Chinese businessmen from the nearby Barrio Chino, a couple of underworld types wearing sharkskin suits and small Stetson hats, and a trio of government officials in pin-striped jackets, with faces as dark as tobacco leaves and even darker glasses. I ate an English breakfast and then crossed the busy, palm-shrouded Parque Central to visit my favorite shop in Havana.

Hobby Center, on the corner of Obispo and Berniz, sold model ships, toy cars, and, most important for my purposes, electric train sets. My own layout was a tabletop three-rail Dublo. It wasn’t anything on the scale of the train set I’d once seen in Hermann Goering’s house, but it gave me a lot of pleasure. In the shop I collected a new locomotive and tender I’d ordered from England. I got a lot of models from England, but there were several things on my layout I’d made myself in the workshop at home. Yara disliked the workshop almost as much as she feared the train set. To her there was something devilish about it. Nothing to do with the movement of the actual trains. She wasn’t entirely primitive. No, it was the fascination a train set held for a grown man that she held to be somehow hypnotic and devilish.

The shop was only a few meters from La Moderna Poesia. This was Havana’s largest bookstore, only it looked more like a concrete air-raid shelter. Safely inside, I chose a book of Montaigne’s essays in English, not because I had a burning desire to read Montaigne, whom I’d only vaguely heard of, but because I thought it looked improving. And almost anyone at the Casa Marina could have told me that I needed a bit of improving. At the very least, I thought I needed to start wearing my glasses more often. For a moment, I was convinced I was seeing things. There, in the bookshop, was someone I had last seen in another life, twenty years before.

It was Noreen Charalambides.

Except that she wasn’t Noreen Charalambides. Not any longer. No more than I was Bernhard Gunther. A long time ago she’d left her husband, Nick, and gone back to being Noreen Eisner, and as the author of more than ten successful novels and several celebrated plays, this was how the reading world now knew her. Under the fawning gaze of some oleaginous American tourist, Noreen was signing a book at the till where I was about to pay for Montaigne, which meant that she and I saw each other simultaneously. But for that I would probably have crept away. I would have crept away because I was living in Cuba under a false name, and the fewer people who knew about that, the better. Another reason was that I was hardly looking my best. I hadn’t looked my best since the spring of 1945. Noreen, on the other hand, looked much the same. There were a few flecks of gray in her brown hair and a line or two on her forehead, but she was still a beauty. She wore a nice sapphire brooch and a gold wristwatch. In her hand was a silver fountain pen, and over her arm was an expensive crocodile handbag.

When Noreen saw me she put her hand over her mouth, as if she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she had at that. The older I get, the easier it is to believe that my own past is someone else’s life and that I’m just a soul in limbo, or some kind of flying Dutchman figure doomed to sail the seas for all eternity.

I touched the brim of my hat just to check that my head was still working, and said, “Hello.” I spoke in English, too, which probably left her even more confused. Thinking she must have forgotten my name, I was on the point of removing my hat and thought better of it. Perhaps after all it was better she didn’t remember my name. Not until I’d told her the new one.

“Is it really you?” she whispered.

“Yes.” I had a lump in my throat as big as my fist.

“I thought you were probably dead. In fact, I was sure of it. I can’t believe it’s really you.”

“I have the same problem when I get up in the morning and limp toward the bathroom. It always feels like someone must have stolen my real body in the night and replaced it with my father’s.”

Noreen shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. She opened her handbag and took out a handkerchief that wouldn’t have dried the eyes of a mouse. “Perhaps you’re the answer to my prayer,” she said.

“Then it must have been a Santería prayer,” I said. “A prayer to a Catholic saint who’s really just a disguise for some kind of voodoo spirit. Or something worse.”

For a moment I held my tongue, wondering what ancient demons, what infernal powers would have claimed Bernie Gunther as one of theirs, and nominated him as the dark, mischievous answer to someone’s idle prayer.

I glanced around awkwardly. The fawning American tourist was an overweight lady of around sixty, wearing thin gloves and a summer hat with a veil that made her look like a beekeeper. She was watching Noreen and me carefully, like we were all in a theater. And when she wasn’t watching Noreen and me perform our touching little reunion scene, she was glancing at the signature in her book, as if she couldn’t quite believe that the author had inscribed it.

“Look,” I said, “we can’t talk here. The bar on the corner.”

“The Floridita?”

“Meet me there in five minutes.” Then I looked at the book clerk and said, “I’d like to charge this to my account. The name is Hausner. Carlos Hausner.” I spoke in Spanish, but I was sure Noreen understood. She always had been quick to understand what was going on. I shot her a look and nodded. She nodded back, as if to reassure me that my secret was safe. For now.

“Actually, I’m done here,” said Noreen. She looked at the tourist and smiled. And the tourist smiled back and thanked Noreen profusely, as if she’d been given not an inscribed book but a signed check for a thousand dollars.

“So why don’t I just come with you now?” Noreen said, and threaded her arm through mine. She escorted me to the door of the bookshop. “After all, I wouldn’t want you to disappear now that I’ve found you again.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Oh, I can think of any number of reasons,” she said. “Señor Hausner . I am an author, after all.”

We came out of the shop and walked up a gentle slope toward the Floridita Bar.

“I know. I even read one of your books. The one about the Spanish Civil War: The Worst Turns the Best to the Brave.”

“And what did you think?”

“Honestly?”

“You can give it a try, I suppose, Carlos.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“So it’s not just your name that’s false.”

“No, really, I did.”

We were outside the bar. A man jackknifed off the hood of an Oldsmobile and bowed into our path.

“Taxi, señor? Taxi?”

I waved the man away and let Noreen go into the bar first.

“I’ve time for a quick one, and then I have to go. I have an appointment in fifteen minutes. At the cigar factory. It’s business. A job, maybe, so I can’t break it.”

“If that’s the way you want it. After all, it’s only been half a lifetime.”

2

THERE WAS A MAHOGANY BAR the size of a velodrome and, behind it, a dingy-looking mural of an old sailing ship entering the port of Havana. It might have been a slave ship, but another cargo of tourists or American sailors seemed a more likely bet. The Floridita was full of Americans, most of them fresh off the cruise ship parked next to the destroyer in Havana Harbor. Inside the door, a trio of musicians was setting up to play. We found a table, and I quickly ordered some drinks while the waiter could still hear me.

Noreen was busy checking out my shopping. “Montaigne, huh? I’m impressed.” She was speaking German now, probably getting ready to ask me some awkward questions without our being overheard and understood.

“Don’t be. I haven’t read it yet.”

“What’s this? Hobby Center? Do you have children?”

“No, that’s for me.” Seeing her smile, I shrugged. “I like train sets. I like the way they just keep on going around and around, like one single, simple, innocent thought in my head. That way I can ignore all the other thoughts that are in there.”

“I know. You’re like the governess in The Turn of the Screw.”

“Am I?”

“It’s a novel by Henry James.”

“I wouldn’t know. So. Any kids yourself?”

“I have a daughter. Dinah. She’s just finished school.”

The waiter arrived and neatly set out the drinks in front of us like a chess grand master castling a king and a rook. When he was gone, Noreen said, “What’s the story, Carlos? Are you wanted or something?”

“It’s a long story.” We toasted each other silently.

“I’ll bet.”

I glanced at my watch. “Too long to tell now. Another time. What about you? What are you doing in Cuba? Last I heard, you were up before that stupid kangaroo court. The House Committee on Un-American Activities. The HUAC. When was that?”

“May 1952. I was accused of being a communist. And blacklisted by several Hollywood movie studios.” She stirred her drink with a cocktail stick. “That’s why I’m here. A good friend of mine who lives in Cuba read about the HUAC hearings and invited me to come and live in his house for a while.”

“That’s a good friend to have.”

“He’s Ernest Hemingway.”

“Now, that’s a friend I have heard of.”

“As a matter of fact, this is one of his favorite bars.”

“Are you and he . . . ?”

“No. Ernest is married. Anyway, he’s away right now. In Africa. Killing things. Himself mostly.”

“Is he a communist, too?”

“Good grief no. Ernest isn’t political at all. It’s people that interest him. Not ideologies.”

“Wise man.”

“Not so you’d notice.”

The band started to play, and I groaned. It was the kind of band that made you feel seasick as they swayed one way and then the other. One of the men played a witch doctor’s flute, and another tapped a monotonous cowbell that left you feeling sorry for cows. Their sung harmonies were like a freight locomotive’s horn. The girl yelled solos and played guitar. I never yet saw a guitar that I didn’t want to use to drive a nail into a piece of wood. Or into the head of the idiot strumming it.

“Now I really do have to go,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like music?”

“Not since I came to Cuba.” I finished my drink and glanced at my watch again. “Look,” I said, “my meeting’s only going to take an hour or so. Why don’t we meet for lunch?”

“I can’t. I have to get back. I have people coming to dinner tonight and there are things I have to get for the cook. I’d love you to come if you could.”

“All right. I will.”

“It’s the Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula.” Noreen opened her bag, took out a notepad, and scribbled down an address and telephone number. “Why don’t you come early—say, around five o’clock. Before the rest of my guests arrive. We’ll catch up then.”

“I’d like that.” I took the notepad and wrote out my own address and phone number. “Here,” I said. “Just in case you think I’m going to run out on you.”

“It’s good to see you again, Gunther.”

“You too, Noreen.”

I went to the door and glanced back at the people in the Floridita Bar. No one was listening to the band or even intending to listen. Not while there was drinking to be done. The barman was making daiquiris like they were on special offer, about a dozen at a time. From everything I’d heard and read about Ernest Hemingway, that was the way he liked drinking them, too.

3

I BOUGHT SOME PETIT ROBUSTOS in the cigar factory shop and took them into the smoking room, where a number of men, including Robert Freeman, inhabited an almost infernal world of swirling smoke and igniting matches and glowing tobacco embers. Every time I went into that room, the smell reminded me of the library at the Adlon Hotel, and for a moment I could almost see poor Louis Adlon standing in front of me with a favorite Upmann in his white gloved fingers.

Freeman was a large, bluff man who looked more South American than British. He spoke good Spanish for an Englishman—about as good as my own—which perhaps was hardly surprising given his family history: his great-grandfather, James Freeman, had started selling Cuban cigars as long ago as 1839. He listened politely to the details of my proposal and then told me of his own plans to expand the family business:

“Until recently I owned a cigar factory in Jamaica. But, like the Jamaicans themselves, the product is inconsistent, so I’ve sold that and decided to concentrate on selling Cuban cigars in Britain. I have plans to buy a couple of other companies that will give me about twenty percent of the British market. But the German market. I don’t know. Is there such a thing? You tell me, old boy.”

I told him about Germany’s membership in the European Coal and Steel Community and how the country, benefiting from the currency reform of 1948, had seen the fastest growth of any nation in European history. I told him how industrial production had increased by thirty-five percent and how agricultural production had already surpassed prewar levels. It’s amazing these days how much real information you can get from a German newspaper.

“The question is not,” I said, “can you afford to try to gain a share of the West German market, but can you afford not to try.”

Freeman looked impressed. I was impressed myself. It made a pleasant change to be discussing an export market instead of a pathologist’s report.

And yet all I could think about was Noreen Eisner and seeing her again after such a long time. Twenty years! It seemed almost miraculous after all that we had been through—she, driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War, and me in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In truth, I had no romantic intentions toward her. Twenty years was too long for any feelings to have survived. Besides, our affair had lasted only a few weeks. But I did hope that she and I might become friends again. I didn’t have many friends in Havana, and I was looking forward to sharing a few memories with someone in whose company I might be myself again. My real self, instead of the person I was supposed to be. It was four years since I’d done anything as straightforward as that. And I wondered what a man like Robert Freeman would have said if I’d told him about Bernie Gunther’s life. Probably he’d have swallowed his cigar. As it was, we parted amicably with his declaring that we should meet again, just as soon as he had bought the two competing companies, which would give him the rights to sell the brands Montecristo and Ramon Allones.

“Do you know something, Carlos?” he said as we went out of the smoking room. “You’re the first German I’ve spoken to since before the war.”

“Argentine-German,” I said, correcting him.

“Yes, of course. Not that I’ve anything against the Germans, you understand. We’re all on the same side now, aren’t we? Against the communists, and all that. You know, sometimes I wonder what to make of it all. What happened between our two countries. The war, I mean. The Nazis and Hitler. What do you think about it?”

“I try not to think about it at all,” I said. “But when I do, I think this: that for a short period of time the German language was a series of very large German words, formed from very small German thinking.”

Freeman chuckled and puffed his cigar at the same time. “Quite,” he said. “Oh, quite.”

“It’s the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God,” I added. “But it’s the fate of only a very few races that they’re sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.”

In the sales hall I passed a photograph of the British prime minister with a cigar in his mouth, and nodded. “I’ll tell you another thing. Hitler didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, and he was healthy right up until the day he shot himself.”

“Quite,” said Freeman. “Oh, quite.”

4

FINCA VIGÍA WAS about twelve kilometers southeast of central Havana—a one-story Spanish colonial house set in a twenty-acre estate and boasting a fine view of the bay to the north. I parked next to a lemon Pontiac Chieftain convertible—the one with the chief’s head on the hood that glows when the headlights are switched on. There was something vaguely African about the white house and its situation, and as I climbed out of my car and glanced around at all the mango trees and enormous jacarandas, I thought I could almost have been visiting the home of some district high commissioner in Kenya.

This was an impression strongly enhanced by the interior. The house was a museum to Hemingway’s love of hunting. Each of the many large, airy rooms, including the master bedroom—but not the bathroom—contained the trophy heads of kudu, water buffalo, and ibex. Anything with horns, in fact. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found the head of the last unicorn in that house. Or maybe a couple of ex-wives. As well as these trophies, there were a great many books, even in the bathroom, and unlike in my own house, most of them looked as if they had been read. The tiled floors were largely uncarpeted, which must have been tough on the feet of the several cats who gave the impression of owning the place. There were very few pictures on the whitewashed walls, just a few bullfighting posters. Furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than elegance. In the living room the sofa and armchairs were covered with a flowery material that struck a discordant, feminine touch in the midst of all that masculine love of death. At the very center of the living room, like the twenty-four-carat diamond that was set into the floor of the entrance hall of Havana’s National Capitol Building, and which pinpoints zero for all distance measurements in Cuba, was a drinks table with more bottles than a beer truck.

Noreen poured us a couple of large bourbons, and we carried them out onto a long terrace, where she told me about her life since last I’d seen her. In return I described a version of my own—one that carefully left out my having been in the SS, not to mention my active service with a police battalion in the Ukraine. But I told her about how I’d been a private detective, and a regular cop again, and Erich Gruen and how he and the CIA had managed to frame me as a Nazi war criminal, and how I’d been obliged to seek the help of the Old Comrades to escape Europe and start a new life in Argentina.

“That’s how I ended up with a false name and an Argentine passport,” I explained, glibly. “I’d probably still be there but for the fact that the Perónists discovered I wasn’t really a Nazi at all.”

“But why come to Cuba?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The same reasons as everyone else, I suppose. The climate. The cigars. The women. The casinos. I play backgammon in some of the casinos.” I sipped the bourbon, enjoying the sweet and sour taste of the famous writer’s liquor.

“Ernest came because of the big-game fishing.”

I glanced around, looking for a fish, but there weren’t any.

“When he’s here, he spends most of his time at Cojimar. It’s a crummy little fishing village on the crust of a shoreline where he keeps his boat. Ernest loves fishing. But there’s a nice bar in Cojimar, and I have the sneaking suspicion he likes the bar more than he likes the boat. Or fishing, for that matter. On the whole, I suspect Ernest likes bars more than just about anything.”

“Cojimar. I used to go there a lot until I heard that the militia were using it for target practice. And that sometimes the targets were still breathing.”

Noreen nodded. “I’ve heard that story. And I’m sure it’s true. I could believe almost anything about Fulgencio Batista. Just along from that beach he’s built a village of exclusive villas behind a wire fence, for all his top generals. I drove past it just the other day. They’re all pink. Not the generals—that would be too much to hope for. The villas.”

“Pink?”

“Yes. It looks like a holiday camp in a dream described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”

“He’s someone else I haven’t read. One of these days I’m going to have to learn how. It’s strange. I can buy any amount of books. But I’ve found it’s no substitute for reading them.”

Hearing footsteps on the terrace, I turned around and saw a pretty, young woman approaching. I stood up, and trying to wipe some of the wolf-man from my face, I smiled.

“Carlos, this is my daughter, Dinah.”

She was taller than her mother, and not just because of the stiletto heels on her feet. She wore a polka-dot halter dress that only just covered her knees and left most of her back and a bit beyond exposed, which made the little net gloves look unnecessary. Over her muscular, sunburned forearm was a mohair handbag that was the shape, size, and color of Karl Marx’s best beard. Her own hair was almost blond, but not quite, which suited her better, and all shallow layers and soft waves, and the string of pearls around her slender young neck must have been hung there as tribute from some admiring sea god. Certainly her figure was worth a whole basketful of golden apples. Her mouth was as full as a sail on an oceangoing schooner and lipsticked signal red by a skilled and steady hand that might have been school of Rubens. The eyes were large and blue and twinkling with an intelligence made to look more determined by her square and slightly dimpled chin. There are beautiful girls and there are beautiful girls who know it; Dinah Charalambides was a beautiful girl who knew how to solve a quadratic equation.

“Hey,” she said, coolly.

I nodded back, but I’d already lost her attention.

“Can I have the car, Mom?”

“You’re not going out?”

“I won’t be late.”

“I don’t like you going out at night,” said Noreen. “Suppose you get stopped at an army checkpoint?”

“Do I look like a revolutionary?” asked Dinah.

“Sadly, no.”

“Well, then.”

“My daughter is nineteen, Carlos,” said Noreen. “But she behaves like she’s thirty.”

“Everything I know, I learned from you, mother dear.”

“Where are you going, anyway?”

“The Barracuda Club.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go there.”

“We’ve been through this before.” Dinah sighed. “Look, all my friends are going to be there.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Why can’t you mix with some friends of your own age?”

“Perhaps I would,” Dinah said pointedly, “if we weren’t exiled from our home in Los Angeles.”

“We’re not exiled,” insisted Noreen. “I just needed to get away from the States for a while.”

“I understand that. Of course I do. But please try to understand what it’s like for me. I want to go out and have some fun. Not sit around the dinner table and talk about politics with a lot of boring people.” Dinah glanced at me and flashed me a quick, apologetic smile. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Señor Gunther. From what Mother’s told me, I’m sure you’re a very interesting person. But most of Noreen’s friends are left-wing writers and lawyers. Intellectuals. And friends of Ernest’s who drink too much.”

I flinched a bit when she called me Gunther. It meant Noreen had already revealed my secret to her daughter. That irritated me.

Dinah put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it as if it were a fire-cracker.

“And I do wish you wouldn’t smoke,” said Noreen.

Dinah rolled her eyes and held out one gloved hand. “Keys.”

“On the desk, by the telephone.”

Dinah stalked off in a cloud of scent, cigarette smoke, and exasperation, like the ruthless bitch-beauty in one of her mother’s gothic-American plays. I hadn’t seen any of them onstage, only the movies that had been made of them. These were stories full of unscrupulous mothers, mad fathers, flighty wives, dishonest and sadistic sons, and drunken homosexual husbands—the kind of stories that almost made me glad I didn’t have a family myself. I lit a cigar and tried to contain my amusement.

Noreen poured us both another bourbon from a bottle of Old Forester she’d brought from the living room and helped herself to ice from a bucket fashioned from an elephant’s foot.

“Little bitch,” she said tonelessly. “She has a place at Brown University, and yet she still maintains this fucking fiction that she’s obliged to live here in Havana with me. I didn’t ask her to come. I haven’t written a damn thing since I got here. She sits around and plays records all day. I can’t work when someone plays records. Especially the kind of fucking records she listens to. Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. I ask you. God, I hate those smug bastards. And I can’t work at night when she’s out, because I’m worried something will happen to her.”

A second or two later the Pontiac Chieftain started up and moved off down the drive, with the hood’s Indian head scouting out the way forward in the encroaching darkness.

“You don’t want her here with you?”

Noreen gave me a narrow-eyed stare over the rim of her glass. “You used to be a little quicker on the uptake, Gunther. What happened? Something hit you on the head during the war?”

“Just the odd bit of shrapnel, now and then. I’d show you the scars, but I’d have to take my wig off.”

But she wasn’t ready to be amused again. Not yet. She lit a cigarette and flicked the match into the bushes. “If you had a nineteen-year-old daughter, would you want her to live in Havana?”

“That would depend on whether or not she had any good-looking friends.”

Noreen grimaced. “It’s precisely that kind of remark that made me think she’d be better off in Rhode Island. There are too many bad influences in Havana. Too much easy sex. Too much cheap booze.”

“That’s why I live here.”

“And she’s in with the wrong crowd,” continued Noreen, ignoring me. “As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I asked you here tonight.”

“And there I was, naively thinking that you asked me down here for purely sentimental reasons. You can still pack a punch, Noreen.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No?” I let that one go. I sniffed my drink for a moment, enjoying the combusted aroma. The bourbon smelled like the devil’s coffee cup. “Take it from me, angel, there are many worse places to live than Cuba. I know. I’ve tried living in them. Berlin after the war was no Ivy League dormitory, and neither was Vienna. Especially if you were a girl. Russian soldiers have got pimps and beach-boy gigolos beat for bad influences, Noreen. And that’s not anti-communist, right-wing propaganda, sweetheart, that’s the truth. And, speaking of that delicate subject, how much did you tell her about me?”

“Not much. Until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how much there was to tell. All you said to me this morning—and, by the way, you were speaking not directly to me, but to the book clerk in La Moderna Poesia—was that your name was Carlos Hausner. And why the hell did you pick Carlos as your nom de plume? Carlos is a name for a fat Mexican peasant in a John Wayne movie. No, I don’t see you as a Carlos at all. I expect that’s why I used your real name, Bernie—well, it just sort of slipped out when I was telling her about Berlin in 1934.”

“That’s unfortunate, given how much trouble I went to in order to get a new name. To be quite frank with you, if the authorities found out about me, Noreen, I could be deported back to Germany, which would be awkward, to say the least. Like I told you. There are people—Russian people—who’d probably like to hold a knot under my ear.”

She gave me a look that was full of suspicion. “Maybe that’s what you deserve.”

“Maybe.” I put my drink down on a glass table and weighed her remark in my mind for a moment. “Then again, in most cases it’s only in books that people get what’s coming to them. But if you really think that’s what I deserve, then perhaps I’ll be running along.”

I went into the house and then out again through the front door. She was standing by the railing on the terrace above the steps that led down to my car.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think you deserve it at all, okay? I was just teasing you. Please come back.”

I stood there and looked up at her without much pleasure. I was angry and I didn’t care that she knew it. And not just about the remark she’d made about me deserving to hang. I was angry with her and with myself that I’d not made it clearer that Bernie Gunther no longer existed, and that Carlos Hausner had taken his place.

“I was so excited to see you again, after all these years—” Her voice seemed to catch on something like a cashmere sweater snagging on a nail. “I’m sorry I let your secret out of the bag. I’ll speak to Dinah when she gets home and tell her to keep what I told her in confidence, okay? I’m afraid I didn’t think about the possible implications of telling her about you. But you see, she and I have been very close since Nick, her father, died. We always tell each other everything.”

Most women have a vulnerability dial. They can turn it up pretty much whenever they want, and it works on men like catnip. Noreen was turning the dial now. First the catch in her voice and then a big, unsteady sigh. It was working, too, and she was operating only at level three or four. There was plenty of what makes the weaker sex seem like the weaker sex still in the tank. A moment later her shoulders dropped and she turned away. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t go.” Level five.

I stood on the step looking at my cigar and then down the long, winding drive that led onto the main road into San Francisco de Paula. Finca Vigía. It meant Lookout Farm, and it was well named, because there was a sort of tower to the left of the main building where someone might sit in a room on the top story and write a book and look out on the world below and think himself a sort of god. That was probably why people became writers in the first place. A cat came along and rubbed its gray body along my shins, as if it too were trying to persuade me to stay. On the other hand, it might just have been looking to get rid of a lot of unwanted cat hair on my best trousers. Another cat was sitting like an erect bedspring beside my car, ready to disrupt my departure if its feline colleague failed to do it first. Finca Vigía. Something told me to look out for myself and leave. That if I stayed I might end up like a character in someone’s stupid novel, without any will of my own. That one of them—Noreen or Hemingway—might make me do something I didn’t want to do.

“All right.” My voice sounded like an animal’s in the darkness. Or perhaps an orisha of the forest from the world of Santería.

I threw away the cigar and went back inside. Noreen met me halfway, which was generous, and we embraced fondly. Her body still felt good in my arms and reminded me of everything it was supposed to remind me of. Level six. She still knew how to affect me, that much was certain. She laid her head on my shoulder, but with her face turned away, and let me inhale her beauty for a while. We didn’t kiss. That wasn’t yet required. Not while we were still on level six. Not while her face was turned away. After a moment or two she broke away and sat down again.

“You said something about Dinah’s being in with the wrong crowd,” I said. “That it was one of the reasons you asked me here.”

“I’m sorry I put it so badly. That’s not like me. After all, I’m supposed to be good with words. But I do need your help. With Dinah.”

“It’s been a long time since I knew anything about nineteen-year-old girls, Noreen. And even then, what I knew was probably hopelessly wrong. Short of spanking her, I don’t see what I can do.”

“I wonder if that might work,” she said.

“I don’t think it would help her very much. Of course, there’s always the possibility I might enjoy it, which is another reason to pack her off to Rhode Island. But I agree with you. The Barracuda Club is no place for a nineteen-year-old girl. Although there are much worse places in Havana.”

“Oh, she’s been to them all, I can assure you. The Shanghai Theater. The Cabaret Kursaal. The Hotel Chic. And those are just the match-books I’ve found in her bedroom. It might be even worse than that.”

I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t get any worse than them. Even in Havana.” I fetched my drink off the glass table and poured it safely away in my mouth. “All right, she’s wild. If the movies are right, then most kids are these days. But at least they’re not beating up Jews. And I still don’t see what I can do about it.”

Noreen found the Old Forester and refilled my glass. “Well, maybe we can think of something. Together. Like in the old days, remember? In Berlin? If things had worked out differently, we might even have made a difference. If ever I’d written that article, we might even have put a stop to Hitler’s Olympiad.”

“I’m kind of glad you didn’t write it. If you had, I’d probably be dead.”

She nodded. “For a while, we made quite an investigative team, Gunther. You were my Galahad. My knight of heaven.”

“Sure. I remember your letter. I’d like to tell you I still had it, but the Americans reorganized my filing system when they bombed Berlin. You want my advice about Dinah? I reckon you should fix a lock on her door and put her under a nine o’clock curfew. That used to work back in Vienna. When the Four Powers were in charge of the city. Also, you might think about not lending her the car whenever she asks for it. If it was me wearing those heels she had on, I might think twice about walking nine miles into the center of Havana.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Me wearing high heels? Sure, I’m a regular at the Palette Club, although they know me better there as Rita. You know, it’s not a bad thing that children should frequently disobey their parents. Especially when you consider the mistakes the parents made. Especially when they’re as grown up as Dinah obviously is.”

“Perhaps if I gave you all the facts,” she said, “you might understand the problem.”

“You can try. But I’m not a detective anymore, Noreen.”

“But you were, weren’t you?” She smiled a cunning smile. “It was me who got you started. As a private detective. Or maybe you need reminding.”

“So that’s your angle.”

She curled her lip with displeasure. “I certainly didn’t mean it to be an angle, as you put it. Not in the least. But I’m a mother who’s running out of options here.”

“I’ll send you a check. With interest.”

“Oh, stop it, for Pete’s sake. I don’t want your money. I’ve got plenty of money. But you might at least shut up for a minute and do me the courtesy of hearing me out before opening fire with both cannons. I figure you owe me that much. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“All right. I can’t promise to hear anything. But I’ll listen.”

Noreen shook her head. “You know, Gunther, it beats me how you ever survived the war. I’ve only just met you again, and already I want to shoot you.” She laughed scornfully. “You want to be careful, you know. This house has more guns than the Cuban militia. There are nights when I’ve sat here drinking with Hem, and he had a shotgun on his lap for taking potshots at the birds in the trees.”

“Sounds dangerous for the cats.”

“Not just the fucking cats.” Still laughing, she shook her head. “ People, too.”

“My head would look good in your bathroom.”

“What a horrid thought. You looking at me every time I took a bath.”

“I was thinking of your daughter.”

“That’s enough.” Noreen stood up abruptly. “Damn you, get out,” she said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

I went into the house again. “Wait,” she snapped. “Wait, please.”

I waited.

“Why are you such a hard-ass?”

“I guess I’m not used to human society,” I said.

“Please, listen. You could help her. You’re about the one person who can, I think. More than you know. I really don’t know who else to ask.”

“Is she in a jam?”

“Not exactly, no. At least, not yet. There’s a man, you see, whom she’s involved with. Who’s much older than her. I’m worried she’s going to end up like—like Gloria Grahame in that movie. The Big Heat. You know, where that sick bastard throws boiling hot coffee in her face.”

“Didn’t see it. Last film I saw was Peter Pan.”

We both turned around as a white Oldsmobile came up the drive. It had a sun visor and whitewall tires and sounded like the motor bus to Santiago.

“Damn,” said Noreen. “That’s Alfredo.”

The white Olds was followed by a two-door red Buick.

“And, it looks like, the rest of my guests.”

5

THERE WERE EIGHT OF US FOR DINNER. Dinner was prepared and served by Ramón, Hemingway’s Chinese cook, and René, his Negro butler, which only I seemed to find amusing. It certainly wasn’t because I had anything against the Chinese or Negroes. But it struck me as ironic that Noreen and her guests were all solemnly prepared to avow their communism while other men did all the work.

There was no denying what Cuba and its people had suffered, first at the hands of the Spanish, then the Americans, and then the Spanish again. But as bad as any of these perhaps had been the Cuban governments of Ramón Grau San Martín and now Fulgencio Batista. Formerly a sergeant in the Cuban army, F.B.—as most of the Europeans and Americans in Cuba called him—wasn’t much more than an American puppet. So long as he danced to Washington’s tune, American support seemed likely to continue, no matter how brutishly his regime behaved. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls the state-owned means of production was, or ever could be, the answer. And I said as much to Noreen’s left-leaning guests:

“I think communism’s a much greater evil to inflict upon this country than anything that could be conceived and administered by a minor despot like F.B. A small-time thug like him might inflict a few individual tragedies. Perhaps several. But it hardly begins to compare with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. They’ve been the manufacturers of national tragedies. I can’t speak for all the Iron Curtain countries. But I know Germany pretty well, and you can take it from me that the working classes of the GDR would love to change places with the oppressed peoples of Cuba.”

Guillermo Infante was a young student who had just been kicked out of the Havana University School of Journalism. He had also served a short sentence for writing something in a popular opposition magazine called Bohemia. This prompted me to point out that there were no opposition magazines in the Soviet Union, and that even the mildest criticism of the government would have earned him a very long sentence in some forgotten corner of Siberia. Montecristo cigar in hand, Infante proceeded to call me a “bourgeois reactionary” and several other phrases beloved of the Ivans and their acolytes that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Names that almost made me feel nostalgic for Russia, like some wet character in Chekhov.

I fought in my corner for a while, but when two earnest, unattractive women started to call me an “apologist for fascism,” I began to feel beleaguered. It can be fun being insulted by a good-looking woman if you look at it from the point of view that she’s bothered to notice you at all. But it’s no fun at all to be insulted by her two ugly sisters. Finding not much conversational assistance from Noreen, who had perhaps drunk a little too much to come to my aid, I went to the lavatory, and while I was there, decided to cut my evening’s losses and leave.

When I got back to my car, I found one of the other guests already there. He had come to offer an apology of sorts. His name was Alfredo López, and he was a lawyer—one of twenty-two lawyers, it seemed, who had defended the surviving rebels responsible for the attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953. Following the inevitable guilty verdict, the judge in the Santiago Palace of Justice had sentenced the rebels to what I considered to be fairly modest terms of imprisonment. Even the leader of the rebels, Fidel Castro Ruz, had been sentenced to just fifteen years. It was true, fifteen years was not exactly a light sentence, but for a man who had led an armed insurrection against a powerful dictator, it compared very well with a short walk to the guillotine at Plötzensee.

López was in his mid-thirties, good-looking in a grinning, swarthy sort of way, with piercing blue eyes, a thin mustache, and a rubber swimming cap of shiny black hair. He wore white linen trousers and a dark blue open-neck guayabera shirt that helped to hide the beginnings of a potbelly. He smoked long cigarillos that were the color and shape of his womanly fingers. He looked like a very large cat that had been handed the cream-colored keys of the Caribbean’s largest dairy.

“I am very sorry about that, my friend,” he said. “Lola and Carmen shouldn’t have been so rude. Putting politics ahead of simple politeness is unforgivable. Especially at the dinner table. If one cannot be civilized over a meal, what hope can there be for proper debate elsewhere?”

“Forget it. I’m thick-skinned enough not to care very much. Besides, I’ve never been all that interested in politics. Especially not interested in talking about them. It always seems to me that by browbeating others we hope to be able to convince ourselves.”

“Yes, there’s something in that, I think,” he allowed. “But you have to remember that Cubans are a very passionate people. Some of us are already convinced.”

“Are you? I wonder.”

“Take my word for it. There are many of us who are willing to sacrifice everything for freedom in Cuba. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what the tyrant’s name.”

“Perhaps I’ll have the chance to remind you of that one day, when your man is in charge of the tyranny.”

“Fidel? Oh, he’s not at all a bad fellow. Perhaps if you knew a little more about him, you might be a little more sympathetic to our cause.”

“I doubt it. Today’s freedom fighters are tomorrow’s dictators.”

“No, really. Castro’s very different. He’s not out for himself.”

“Did he tell you that? Or have you actually seen his bank statement?”

“No, but I’ve seen this.”

López opened the door of his car and fetched a briefcase from which he took a small, pamphlet-sized booklet. He had dozens more in the briefcase. As well as a large automatic pistol. I supposed he kept it handy for the occasions when proper, civilized political debate just wasn’t working. He held out the booklet in both his hands, as if it were something precious, like an auctioneer’s assistant showing a rare object to a roomful of potential buyers. On the front of the pamphlet was the picture of a rather stout-looking young man, not unlike López himself, with a thin mustache and hooded dark eyes. The man on the pamphlet looked more like a bandleader than the revolutionary I had read about in the newspapers.

“This is a copy of the statement Fidel Castro made at his trial last November,” said López.

“The tyranny allowed him the opportunity to speak, then,” I said, pointedly. “As I recall, Judge Roland Freisler—Raving Roland, they used to call him—he just screamed abuse at the men who had tried to blow up Hitler. Before sending them to the gallows. Oddly enough, I don’t remember any of them writing a pamphlet, either.”

López ignored me. “It’s called History Will Absolve Me. And we’ve only just finished printing it. So you can have the honor of being one of the first to read it. In the coming months, we’re planning to distribute this pamphlet all over the city. Please, señor. At least read it, eh? If only because the man who wrote it is currently languishing in the Model Prison of the Isle of Pines.”

“Hitler wrote a rather longer book, in Landsberg Prison, in 1928. I didn’t read that one, either.”

“Don’t joke about this, please. Fidel is a friend to the people.”

“So am I. Cats and dogs seem to like me, too. But I don’t expect them to put me in charge of the government.”

“Promise me you’ll at least look at it.”

“All right,” I said, taking it, keen to get rid of him. “If it means that much to you, I’ll read it. Just don’t ask me questions about it afterward. I’d hate to forget anything that might lose me the chance to gain a share of a collective farm. Or the opportunity to denounce someone for sabotaging the five-year plan.”

I climbed back into my car and quickly drove away, hardly satisfied at the way the evening had turned out. At the bottom of the drive, I wound down the window and tossed Castro’s stupid pamphlet into the bushes before turning onto the main road north, to San Miguel del Padrón. I had a different plan in mind than the Cuban rebel leader, although it did involve the girls at the Casa Marina: from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs. That was the sort of Cuban Marxian dialectic with which I was in complete sympathy.

It was just as well that I had thrown away Castro’s pamphlet, because in front of the gas station around the next bend in the highway was a military roadblock. An armed militiaman flagged me down and ordered me to step out of the car. With my hands in the air, I meekly stood at the side of the road, while two other soldiers searched me and then my car under the steady gaze of the rest of the platoon and their boyish officer. I didn’t even look at him. My eyes were fixed on the two bodies lying facedown on the grass shoulder with most of their brains spilling out from under their hairlines.

FOR A MOMENT it was June 1941, and I was back with my reserve police battalion, the 316th, on the road to Smolensk, at a place called Goloby, in the Ukraine, holstering my pistol. I was the officer in charge of a firing squad that had just executed a security unit of NKVD. This particular unit had recently finished murdering three thousand Ukrainian prisoners in the cells of the NKVD Prison at Lutsk, when our panzer wagons caught up with them. We shot them all. All thirty of them. Over the years I had tried to justify this execution to myself, but without much success. And many were the times when I woke up thinking about those twenty-eight men and two women. The majority of whom just happened to be Jews. Two of them I’d shot myself, delivering the so-called coup de grâce. But there was no grace in it. You could tell yourself it was war. You could even tell yourself that the people of Lutsk had begged us to go after the unit that had murdered their relatives. You could tell yourself that a bullet in the head was a quick, merciful death compared to what these people had meted out to their prisoners—most of them burned to death when the NKVD deliberately set fire to the prison. But it still felt like murder.

AND WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING at the two bodies lying by the side of the road I was watching the police van parked a few meters away, and the several, frightened-looking occupants of its brightly lit interior. Their faces were bruised and bloodied and full of fear. It was like staring into a tank full of lobsters. You had the impression that at any moment one of them might be taken out and killed, like the two on the grass shoulder. Then the officer checked my identity card and asked me several questions in a nasal, cartoonish voice that might have made me smile had the situation seemed less lethal. A few minutes later, I was free to proceed with my journey back to Vedado.

I drove on for about half a kilometer and then stopped at a little pink stone café by the roadside, where I asked the owner if I might use the telephone, thinking to call Finca Vigía and warn Noreen—and, in particular, Alfredo López—about the roadblock. It wasn’t that I liked the lawyer so much. I never yet met a lawyer I didn’t want to slap. But I didn’t think he deserved a bullet in the back of the head—which, almost certainly, was what would happen to him if the militia found him in possession of those pamphlets and a pistol. Nobody deserved that kind of ignominious fate. Not even the NKVD.

The café owner was bald and clean-shaven, with thick lips and a broken nose. The man told me the phone had been out of order for days and blamed it on pequeños rebeldes who liked to demonstrate their devotion to the revolution by shooting their catapultas at the ceramic conductors on the telephone poles. If I wanted to warn López, it wasn’t going to be by telephone.

Experience told me that the militia seldom allowed anyone to drive back through a roadblock. They would assume, rightly, that I intended to warn someone. I would have to find another route back to Finca Vigía—one that took me through the little side streets and avenues of San Francisco de Paula. But it was not an area I knew well, especially in the dark.

“Do you know Finca Vigía—the American writer’s house?” I asked the café owner.

“Of course. Everyone knows the house of Ernesto Hemingway.”

“How would a man get there who didn’t want to drive down the main road, south to Cotorro?” I held up a five-peso note to help him think.

The café owner grinned. “Do you perhaps mean a man who didn’t want to drive through the roadblock near the gas station?”

I nodded.

“Keep your money, señor. I would not take money from a man who merely wished to avoid our beloved militia.” He led me out of the café.

“Such a man as yourself would drive north, past the gas station in Diezmero, and turn left onto Varona. Then go across the river in Mantilla. At the junction he would go south, on Managua, and follow the road until he came upon the main highway going west toward Santa María del Rosario. At which point you would cross the main road north again and find Finca Vigía from there.”

This series of directions was accompanied by much pointing, and like almost everything in Cuba, we had soon attracted a small crowd of café patrons, small boys, and stray dogs.

“It will take you fifteen minutes, perhaps,” said the man. “Assuming you don’t end up in the Río Hondo or shot by the militia.”

A couple of minutes later I was bouncing through the poorly lit, leafy backstreets of Mantilla and El Calvario like the crew of a stricken Dornier and wearily regretting the consumption of too much bourbon and red wine and probably a brandy or two. I steered the Chevrolet west, south, and then east again. Off the two-lane blacktop the roads weren’t much more than dirt tracks, and the Chevy’s rear end held its line with less grip than a recently sharpened ice skate. Unnerved by the sight of the two bodies, I was probably driving too fast. Suddenly there was a flock of goats in the road, and I twisted the wheel hard to the left so that the car spun around in a cloud of dust, narrowly missing a tree, and then the fence around a tennis court. Something gave way under the car as I braked and brought the car to a halt. And, thinking I might have a flat or, worse, a broken axle, I flung the door open and leaned out of the car to inspect the damage.

“This is what you get for trying to do someone a favor,” I told myself, irritably.

I saw that the car was undamaged and that the front left tire seemed to have broken through several planks of wood that were buried in the ground.

I sat up straight and carefully reversed back onto the road. Then I got out to take another, closer look at what was buried. But because it was dark I couldn’t see very clearly, even in the car headlights, and I had to fetch a flashlight from the trunk to shine through the broken planks. Lifting one of the boards, I shone the flashlight through the hole and peered inside what appeared to be a buried crate. The size was difficult to determine, but inside the crate were several smaller wooden boxes. Stenciled on the lid of one of these boxes was MARK 2 FHGS; and on another was BROWNING M19.

I had stumbled onto a hidden weapons cache.

Immediately I switched off the flashlight and then the headlights of the car, and looked around in case anyone had seen me. The tennis court was clay and in a poor state of repair, with some of the white plastic rails missing or broken and the net hanging slackly like an old woman’s nylon stocking. Beyond the court was a dilapidated villa with a veranda and a big heavy gate that was badly rusted. Stucco was peeling off the villa’s façade, and there were no lights visible anywhere. No one had lived there for some time.

After a while I lifted one of the broken planks and used it like a snowplow to move some dirt back on top of the weapons cache— enough to conceal it. Then I quickly marked the site with three stones I took from the other side of the road. All this took less than five minutes. It wasn’t a place I wanted to linger. Not with militia in the area. They were hardly likely to accept my explanation for how it was I came to be burying a weapons cache at midnight on a lonely road in El Calvario, no more than the people who had buried it there would have believed that I wasn’t going to inform the police. I had to get away from there as quickly as possible. So I jumped back in my car and drove off.

I arrived back at Finca Vigía just as Alfredo López was getting back into the white Oldsmobile to drive himself home. I reversed up next to him. Then I wound down my window. López did the same.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“It could be. If you were a man with a thirty-eight and a briefcase full of rebel pamphlets.”

“You know I am.”

“López, my friend, you might care to think about getting out of the pamphleteering business for a while. There’s a militia roadblock on the main road north, just next to the gas station in Diezmero.”

“Thanks for the warning. I guess I’ll have to find another route home.”

I shook my head. “I drove back here through Mantilla and El Calvario. There was another truckload of them getting ready to deploy down there, as well.” I said nothing about the weapons cache I’d found. I thought it was best that I forget all about that. For now.

“It would seem that they’re looking to catch some fish tonight,” he observed.

“The keep net was full, it’s true,” I said. “But it looked to me as if they were planning to do a little more than just catch fish. Shoot them in a barrel, perhaps. I saw two on the side of the road. And they looked as dead as a couple of smoked mackerel.”

“These were individual tragedies, I suppose,” he said. “Of course, a couple of deaths are hardly comparable with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.”

“Think what you like. I didn’t come here to make a convert. Just to save your stupid neck.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry.” López pursed his lips for a moment and then bit one of them hard enough to hurt. “They don’t usually bother coming as far south of Havana as this.”

Noreen came out of the house and down the front steps. A glass was in her hand, and it wasn’t empty. She didn’t look drunk. She didn’t even sound drunk. But since I was probably drunk myself, none of that counted for anything.

“What’s the matter?” she asked me. “Change your mind about leaving, did you?” There was a note of sarcasm in her voice.

“That’s right,” I said. “I came back to see if anyone had an unwanted copy of The Communist Manifesto.”

“You could have said something when you left,” she said stiffly.

“It’s a funny thing, but I didn’t think anyone would mind.”

“So why did you come back?”

“The militia are setting up roadblocks in the area,” López explained. “Your friend was kind enough to come back here to warn me of the danger.”

“Why would they do that?” she asked him. “There aren’t any targets the rebels would want to attack around here. Are there?”

López said nothing.

“What he’s trying to say,” I said, “is that it depends on what you mean by a target. On the way back here I saw a sign for an electricity-generating station. That’s just the kind of target the rebels might pick. After all, there’s a lot more to fighting a revolution than assassinating government officials and hiding weapons. Cutting the electricity supply helps to demoralize the population at large. Makes them believe the government is losing control. It’s also a lot safer than an attack on an army garrison. Isn’t that right, López?”

López was looking bemused. “I don’t get it. You’re not at all sympathetic to our cause, and yet you took a risk coming back here to warn me. Why?”

“The phone lines are down,” I said. “Otherwise I’d have called.”

López grinned and shook his head. “No. I still don’t get it.”

I shrugged. “It’s true, I don’t like communism. But sometimes it pays to back the underdog. Like Braddock versus Baer in 1935. Besides, I thought it would embarrass you all—me, a bourgeois reactionary and an apologist for fascism, coming back here to pull your Bolshevik nuts out of the fire.”

Noreen shook her head and smiled. “With you, that’s just bloody-minded enough to be true.”

I grinned and bowed slightly in her direction. “I knew you’d see the funny side.”

“Bastard.”

“You know, it might not be safe for you to go back through the roadblock,” said López. “They might remember you and put two and two together. Even the militia aren’t so stupid that they can’t make four.”

“Fredo’s right,” said Noreen. “It’s not safe for you to go back into Havana tonight, Gunther. It might be better if you stayed here tonight.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble,” I said.

“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I’ll go and tell Ramón to fix you up a bed.”

She turned and walked away, humming quietly to herself, scooping up a cat, and placing her empty glass on the terrace as she went.

López watched her behind in retreat for longer than I did. I had time to observe him doing it. He watched her with the eyes of an admirer and possibly the mouth as well: he licked his lips while he was doing it, which made me wonder if their common ground wasn’t just political but sexual, too. And, thinking I might prompt him to reveal something of his feelings for her, I said, “Quite a woman, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said, absently. “She is.” Smiling, he added, quickly, “A wonderful writer.”

“I wasn’t looking at her backlist.”

López chuckled. “I’m not quite so ready to believe the worst of you. Despite what Noreen said back there.”

“Did she say something?” I shrugged. “I wasn’t listening when she insulted me.”

“What I mean to say is, thank you, my friend. Thank you indeed. Tonight you have undoubtedly saved my life.” He fetched the briefcase off the seat of the Oldsmobile. “If I had been caught with this, they would certainly have murdered me.”

“Will you be safe driving home?”

“Without this? Yes. I’m a lawyer, after all. A respectable lawyer, too, in spite of what you might think of me. No, really. I have lots of famous and wealthy clients here in Havana. Including Noreen. I drew up her will. And Ernest Hemingway’s. It was he who introduced the two of us. If you ever have need of a good lawyer, I would be happy to act for you, señor.”

“Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Tell me. I’m curious.”

“In Cuba? That might not be healthy.”

“The pamphlet I gave you. The militia didn’t find it?”

“I threw it away in the bushes at the bottom of the drive,” I said. “Like I told you before. I’m not interested in local politics.”

“I can see Noreen was correct about you, Señor Hausner. You have a great instinct for survival.”

“Has she been talking about me again?”

“Only a little. Despite any earlier evidence to the contrary, she has a high opinion of you.”

I laughed. “That was maybe true twenty years ago. She wanted something then.”

“You underestimate yourself,” he said. “Quite considerably.”

“It’s been a while since anyone said that to me.”

He glanced down at the briefcase in his arms. “Perhaps . . . perhaps I could prevail on your kindness and courage one more time.”

“You can give it a try.”

“Perhaps you would be good enough to bring this briefcase to my office. It’s in the Bacardi Building.”

“I know it. There’s a café there I go to sometimes.”

“You like it, too?”

“Coffee’s the best in Havana.”

“I don’t think there’s any great risk in your doing this, being a foreigner. But there might be some.”

“That’s honest, at any rate. All right. I’ll do that for you, Señor López.”

“Please. Call me Fredo.”

“Okay, Fredo.”

“Shall we say eleven o’clock, tomorrow morning?”

“If you like.”

“You know, it may be that there’s something I can do for you.”

“You can buy me a cup of coffee. I don’t want a will any more than I want a pamphlet.”

“But you will come.”

“I said I’ll be there. And I’ll be there.”

“Good.” López nodded patiently. “Tell me, have you met Noreen’s daughter, Dinah?”

I nodded.

“What did you think of her?”

“I’m still thinking.”

“Quite a girl, isn’t she?” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

“If you say so. The only thing I know about young women in Havana is that most of them are more efficient Marxists than you and your friends. They know more about the redistribution of wealth than anyone I’ve ever met. Dinah strikes me as the type of girl who knows just what she wants.”

“Dinah wants to be an actress. In Hollywood. In spite of everything that’s happened to Noreen with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The blacklist. The hate mail. I mean, you can see how all that might upset Dinah.”

“I got the impression that wasn’t what’s worrying her.”

“There’s any number of things to worry about when you have a daughter as headstrong as Dinah, believe me.”

“It sounded like just the one thing to me. She mentioned something about Dinah’s being in with the wrong crowd. Anything in that?”

“Friend, this is Cuba.” López grinned. “We’ve got wrong crowds like some countries have different religions.” He shook his head. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk some more. In private.”

“Come on. Give. I just saved you from a late night out with the militia.”

“The militia’s not the only dangerous dog in town.”

“Meaning?”

There was a squeal of tires at the bottom of the drive. I looked around as yet another car purred up to the house. I say a car, but the Cadillac with its wraparound windshield was more like something from Mars—a red convertible from the red planet. The sort of car on which the built-in fog lamps might easily have been heat rays for the methodical extermination of earthlings. It was as long as a fire truck and probably as well equipped.

“Meaning, I think you’re about to find out,” said López.

The Cadillac’s big, five-liter engine took a last breath from the four-barrel carburetor and then exhaled loudly through dual exhausts that were built into the bumpers. One of the rakish cut-down doors opened, and out stepped Dinah. She looked great. The drive had stirred her hair a little and made her look more natural than before. Sexier, too, if such a thing was possible. There was a stole over her shoulders that could have been honey-ranch mink, but I wasn’t looking anymore. I was too busy noticing the driver stepping out on the other side of the red Eldorado. He was wearing a well-cut, lightweight gray suit with a white shirt and a pair of flashing gem cuff links that matched the car. He stared straight at me with a mixture of amusement and deliberation, as if noting the changes in my face and wondering how I might have come by them. Dinah reached his side after a long pilgrimage around the farthest point of the car and eloquently threaded one arm through his.

“Hello, Gunther,” said the man, speaking German.

He had a mustache now, but he still looked like a pit bull in a bucket.

It was Max Reles.

6

SURPRISED TO SEE ME?” He chuckled his familiar chuckle.

“I guess we’re both surprised, Max.”

“As soon as Dinah told me about you, I started thinking, It couldn’t be him. And then she described you, and well. Christ Almighty. Noreen won’t like my being here, but I just had to come down to take a look for myself and see if it really was the same fucking pain-in-the-ass guy.”

I shrugged. “Who believes in miracles anymore?”

“Jesus, Gunther, I thought you must be dead for sure, what with the Nazis and the Russians and that smart fucking mouth of yours.”

“These days I’m a little more close-lipped.”

“Only bullshit shoots its mouth off,” said Reles. “What’s genuine in a man stays silent. Jesus, how long has it been?”

“Must be a thousand years. That’s how long Hitler said his Reich would last.”

“That long, huh?” Reles shook his head. “What the hell brings you to Cuba?”

“Oh, you know. Getting away from it all.” I shrugged. “And by the way, my name is Hausner. Carlos Hausner. At least, that’s what it says on my Argentine passport.”

“Like that, huh?”

“I like the car. I guess you must be doing all right. What’s the ransom for a one-man motorcade like that?”

“Oh, about seven thousand dollars.”

“The labor rackets must be good in Cuba.”

“I’m out of that shit now. These days I’m in the hotel and entertainment business.”

“Seven thousand dollars is a lot of bed and breakfast.”

“That’s just your copper’s nose twitching.”

“It does that sometimes. But I don’t pay it any mind. These days I’m just a citizen.”

Reles grinned. “That covers a lot in Cuba. Especially at this house. There are citizens here who make Joseph Stalin look like Theodore Roosevelt.” While he spoke, Reles was looking coldly at Alfredo López, who nodded a farewell at me and then slowly drove away.

“You two know each other?” I asked.

“You could say that.”

Dinah interrupted us, speaking in English. “I didn’t know you spoke German, Max.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, honey.”

“I sure as hell won’t tell her anything,” I told him, in German. “Not that I’ll have to. I expect Noreen has done that already. You must be the bad crowd of people in Havana that she was telling me about. The one Dinah’s got herself involved with. I can’t say I blame her, Max. If she was my daughter I’d be worried myself.”

Reles smiled wryly. “I’m not like that anymore,” he said. “I’ve changed.”

“Small world.”

Another car came up the drive. It was getting to be like the front door at the National Hotel. Someone was driving Noreen’s Pontiac.

“No, really,” insisted Reles. “These days I’m a respectable businessman.”

The man driving the Pontiac stepped out of the car and silently got into the passenger seat of the car Reles had been driving. Suddenly the Cadillac looked very small. The man’s eyes were dark, and his face pale and puffy. He was wearing a loose white suit with big black buttons. His hair was curly and black and gray and plentiful, as if there had been a sale of wire wool at the dollar store on Obispo. He looked sad, perhaps because it was probably several minutes since he’d eaten anything. He looked like he ate a lot. Roadkill probably. He was smoking a cigar the size and shape of an armor-piercing shell, but in his mouth it was like a sty on an eyelid. You looked at him and thought of Pagliacci with two tenors in the part of Canio instead of one: a tenor down each trouser leg. He looked about as respectable as a roll of quarters in a boxing glove.

“Respectable, yeah.” I eyeballed the big man in the Cadillac. I let Reles see me doing it and said, “I suppose that ogre is really your bookkeeper.”

“Waxey? He’s a babke. A real sweet cake. Besides, I have some very big books.”

Dinah sighed and rolled her eyes like a petulant schoolgirl. “Max,” she complained, “it’s rude to carry on a conversation in German when you know I don’t speak the language.”

“I can’t understand that.” Reles spoke in English. “Really I can’t, when your mother speaks such excellent German.”

Dinah pulled a face. “Who wants to learn German? The Germans murdered ninety percent of the Jews in Europe. Nobody wants to learn German these days.” She looked at me and shrugged ruefully. “Sorry, but that’s how it is, I guess.”

“That’s okay. I’m sorry, too. It was my fault. For speaking German to Max, I mean. Not for the other thing. Although obviously I’m sorry for that, as well.”

“You krauts are going to be sorry for a long time.” Max laughed. “We Jews are going to make sure of that.”

“Very sorry. Believe me, I was only obeying orders.”

Dinah wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening, because it wasn’t something she was good at. Although, to be fair, Max had his nose in her ear and then his lips on her cheek, which could have distracted anyone who hadn’t had all their shots.

“Forgive me, honik,” he murmured to her. “But you know it’s been twenty years since I saw this fershtinkiner.” He left off tasting her face for a moment and looked at me again. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“That she is, Max, that she is. What’s more, she has her whole life ahead of her, too. Unlike you and me.”

Reles bit his lip. I sort of fancied he’d preferred it to have been my neck. Then he smiled and wagged his finger at me. I smiled back, like it was a game of tennis we were playing. I was hitting the ball at him hard. Harder than he was used to, I imagined.

“Still the same awkward bastard,” he said, shaking his head. The big face on the front of it had always been square and pugnacious, but now it was tanned and leathery, and there was a scar on his cheek as big as a luggage label. I wondered what Dinah could see in a man like him. “Still the same old Gunther.”

“Now, there you and Noreen seem to be in agreement,” I said. “You’re right, of course. I am an awkward old bastard. And getting worse all the time. Mind you, it’s the old part that really pisses down my trouser leg. The fascination I once felt at the contemplation of my own physical excellence is now matched by the horror I find in the evidence of my own advancing middle age. My belly, bowlegs, thinning hair, shortsightedness, and receding gums. By anyone’s reckoning, I’m past it. Still there is one consolation, I suppose: I’m not as old as you, Max.”

Reles kept on grinning, only this time he had to take a breath to keep on doing it. Then he shook his head and looked at Dinah and said, “Jesus Christ, will you listen to this guy? In front of you he insults me to my face.” He let out a laugh of amazement. “Isn’t he beautiful? That’s what I like about this bum. Nobody has ever talked to me the way this guy talks to me. I love that about him.”

“I don’t know, Max,” she said. “Sometimes you’re a very weird kind of guy.”

“You should listen to her, Max,” I said. “She’s not just beautiful. She’s very smart, too.”

“Enough already,” said Reles. “You know, let’s you and me talk again. Come and see me tomorrow.”

I stared at him politely.

“Come and see me at my hotel.” He put his hands together, like he was praying. “Please.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Saratoga in old Havana. Opposite the Capitolio? I own it.”

“Right. I get it. The hotel and entertainment business. The Saratoga. Sure, I know it.”

“Will you come? For old times’ sake.”

“You mean our old times, Max?”

“Sure, why not? All that stuff was over and done with twenty years ago. Twenty years. But it feels like a thousand. Just like you said. Come for lunch.”

I thought for a moment. I was going to the offices of Alfredo López in the Bacardi Building at eleven, and the Bacardi was just a few blocks from the Saratoga Hotel. Suddenly I was a man with two appointments in one day. Maybe I’d have to buy a diary soon. Maybe I’d have to get my hair and nails done. I was almost feeling relevant again, although in what sense I could ever be relevant, I wasn’t quite sure. Not yet, anyway.

I guessed it would take no time at all to return the briefcase with the gun and the pamphlets to Alfredo López. Lunch at the Saratoga sounded all right. Even if it was with Max Reles. The Saratoga was a good hotel. With an excellent restaurant. And lepers can’t be choosers in Havana. Especially lepers like me.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come around twelve.”

7

THE SARATOGA WAS at the south end of the Prado, and just across the street from the Capitolio. It was a fine-looking eight-story white colonial that reminded me of a hotel I’d once seen in Genoa. I went inside. It was just after one o’clock. The girl at the desk in the lobby directed me to the elevators and told me to go up to the eighth floor. I walked into a colonnaded courtyard, which brought to mind a monastery, and waited for the car. In the center of the courtyard was a fountain and the marble figure of a horse by the Cuban sculptress Rita Longa. I knew it was by her because the car took a while and because there was an easel next to the horse with some “useful information” about the artist. The information wasn’t particularly useful beyond what I had already worked out for myself, which was that Rita knew nothing about horses and very little about sculpture. And I was more interested in peering through a set of smoked-glass doors that led into the hotel’s gaming rooms. With their magnificent chandeliers, tall gilt mirrors, and marble floors, the gaming rooms evoked Belle Époque Paris. Somewhere classier than Havana, anyway. There were no slot machines, only roulette tables, blackjack, craps, poker, baccarat, and punto banco. Clearly no expense had been spared, and perhaps with some justification, the Saratoga’s casino described itself—on another easel inside the glass doors—as “the Monte Carlo of the Americas.”

Since dollar controls had only just started to be lifted, it seemed less than likely this claim would be put to the test anytime soon by any of the American salesmen and their wives who went gambling in Havana. Myself, I disliked nearly all forms of gambling ever since I had been obliged to drop a small fortune at a casino in Vienna, during the winter of 1947. Luckily the small fortune did not belong to me, but there was something about losing money—even other people’s money—that I didn’t like. It was one of the reasons that, when I gambled at all, I preferred to play backgammon. It’s a game that very few people play, which means you can never lose very much. And, besides, I was good at it.

I rode the car up to the eighth floor and the rooftop pool, which was the only one in Havana.

I say rooftop, but there was another, higher level set back from the pool terrace and, according to my new friend, Alfredo López, this was the exclusive penthouse where Max Reles lived in considerable luxury. The only way up there was to have a special key to the elevator—again, according to López. But glancing around the deserted pool terrace—the weather was too blowy for anyone to be sunbathing—I filled my idle mind with thoughts of how a man with a head for heights might climb up onto that penthouse terrace from the outside. Such a man would have had to clamber out onto the parapet encircling the pool, walk precariously around the corner, and then climb up on some scaffolding being used to repair the hotel’s neon sign that adorned the curved corner façade. There were some people who went on a rooftop and enjoyed the view; and there were others, like me, who remembered crime scenes and snipers and, above all, the war on the eastern front. In Minsk, a Red Army marksman had sat on the roof of the city’s only hotel for three whole days picking off German army officers before being nailed with an antitank gun. Such a man would have appreciated the rooftop terrace of the Saratoga.

Then again, Max Reles probably had that possibility covered. According to Alfredo López, Reles wasn’t the kind of man who took any chances with his personal security. He had too many friends to do something like that. Havana friends, that is. The kind who make enthusiastic understudies of deadly enemies.

“I thought maybe you’d changed your mind,” Max said, emerging from a doorway that led along to the elevators. “That you weren’t going to show up.” His tone was reproachful and a little puzzled, as if he were annoyed that he couldn’t work out any good reason why I might have been late for our lunch.

“I’m sorry. I got a little held up. You see, last night I told López about that roadblock on the road north out of San Francisco de Paula.”

“What the hell did you do that for?”

“He had a briefcase full of rebel pamphlets, and I don’t know why, but I agreed to take them for him and then deliver them back to him this morning. There was a police truck outside the Bacardi Building when I arrived, and I had to wait until it was gone.”

“You shouldn’t get involved with a man like that,” said Reles. “Really, you shouldn’t. That shit’s dangerous. You want to keep away from the politics on this island.”

“You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t. And I don’t know why I said I’d do it. Probably I’d drunk too much. I do a lot of that. There’s nothing much else to do in Cuba except drink too much.”

“That figures. Everyone at that damn house drinks too much.”

“But I said I’d do it, and when I say I’ll do something, I generally see it through. I was always kind of stupid like that.”

“True.” Max Reles grinned. “Very true. Did he say anything about me? López.”

“Only that you and he used to be business associates.”

“That’s almost true. Let me tell you about our pal Fredo. F.B.’s brother-in-law is a man named Roberto Miranda. Miranda owns every one of the traganiqueles in Havana. You know, the slot machines. You want some in your place, then you rent them from him. Plus he gets fifty percent of the take. Which, let me tell you, can be a lot in a Havana casino. Anyway, Fredo López used to come and empty the slots for me at the Saratoga. I thought that having a lawyer do it was the best way of preventing any dishonesty. But very early on I discovered that only a quarter of the money was going to Miranda. The rest López was skimming to help feed the families of those men who attacked the Moncada Barracks last year. For a while I turned a blind eye to it. He knew that I was turning a blind eye to it, too. I figured, to hedge my bets with the rebels. But then Miranda figured out that he was being cheated and, wouldn’t you know it, he blamed yours truly. Which left me with a choice. Keep the slots, but get rid of López, and risk being made a target by the rebels. Or get rid of the slots and put up with Miranda’s displeasure. I chose to get rid of the slots. And as a result of that, once a week I now have to go through my books with F.B. himself on account of the fact that he owns a substantial stake in this place. The whole thing cost me a lot of fucking money and inconvenience. And the way I see it, that bastard Fredo López is a very lucky fuck. Lucky to be alive, that is.”

“You’re right, Max. You have changed. The old Max Reles would have stuck an ice pick in his ear.”

He grinned at the memory of his former self. “Wouldn’t I just? Wouldn’t I? Things were more straightforward then. I’d have killed him without a second thought.” He shrugged. “But this is Cuba, and we try to do things a little differently here. I figured that maybe, when he thought about it, the little prick would realize it. And act like he’s just a little grateful. But not a bit of it. He goes behind my back and pours poison in Noreen’s ear about me when I’m trying to build some bridges with her because of my relationship with Dinah.”

“So you were giving money to Batista and the rebels,” I said.

“Indirectly,” he said. “Frankly, I give them a snowball’s chance in hell, but you never know with these bastards.”

“But you do give them a chance.”

“Before the incident with the slots, I saw something interesting. One day I was looking out of a downstairs window of the hotel, not thinking anything in particular, like you do sometimes, and I saw this young Habañero who was walking along the street outside—just a kid, you know. And as I watched him pass by my Cadillac I saw him kick the fender.”

“That cute little ragtop? Where was the ogre?”

“Waxey? He’s not nearly quick enough on his toes to have stood half a chance of catching this fucking kid. Anyway, it bothered me. Not the mark on the car. That was nothing really. No, it was something else. I thought about it a lot, see? At first I thought the kid did it to amuse his girlfriend. Then I thought maybe he had something against Cadillacs. Finally it hit me, Bernie. I realized it wasn’t fucking Cadillacs he didn’t like. It was Americans. Which made me think about this revolution. I mean, like most people, I thought it was all over after last July. After Moncada Barracks, you know? But, seeing that fucking kid kick my car, I thought that maybe it isn’t over at all. And maybe they hate Americans as much as they hate Batista. In which case, if they ever get rid of him, they might get rid of us, too.”

I was fresh out of insightful incidents of my own, so I stayed silent. Besides, I didn’t have a particularly warm opinion of Americans myself. They weren’t as bad as the Russians or the French, but then they didn’t expect to be liked and they didn’t much care when they weren’t. Americans were different: even after they’d dropped a couple of atom bombs on the Japs, they still wanted to be liked. Which struck me as just a little naive. So I stayed silent and, almost like two old friends, together we enjoyed the view from the rooftop for a while. It was a great view. Beneath us were the treetops of Campo de Marte, and to the right, like an enormous wedding cake, was the Capitol Building. Behind that you could see the Partagas cigar factory and the Barrio Chino. I could see as far south as the American warship in the harbor, and west as far as the rooftops of Miramar, but only with my glasses on. The glasses made me look older, of course. Older than Max Reles. Then again, he probably had some glasses of his own somewhere and just didn’t want to let me see him wearing them.

He was trying, without success, to light a large cigar in the stiffening rooftop breeze. One of the parasols, which were all closed, blew over, which seemed to irritate him.

“I always say,” he said, “that the best way to see Havana is from the rooftop of a good hotel.” He gave up with the cigar. “The National has a view, but it’s just the fucking sea or the rooftops of Vedado, and in my humble opinion, that view doesn’t begin to compare with this one.”

“I agree.” For the moment I was through needling him. I was just beginning to have my reasons for that.

“Of course, it does get a bit windy up here sometimes, and when I catch up with the sonofabitch who persuaded me to buy all these fucking parasols, I’m going to give him a lesson in what it’s like when the wind catches one of these things and carries it over the side.” He grinned in a way that made me think he meant every word of it.

“It’s a great view,” I said.

“Isn’t it? You know, I’ll bet Hedda Adlon would have given her eye-teeth for a view like this one.”

I nodded, hardly wanting to tell him that the Adlon’s rooftop had afforded the hotel patrons with one of the best views in Berlin. I’d watched the Reichstag burning from that particular hotel rooftop. And you don’t get much better views than that.

“What ever happened to her, anyway?”

“Hedda used to say that a good hotelier always hopes for the best, but expects the worst. The worst is what happened. She and Louis kept the hotel going all through the war. Somehow it always escaped the bombing. Maybe someone in the RAF had stayed there once. But then, during the Battle for Berlin, the Ivans subjected the city to a barrage that destroyed almost everything that hadn’t been destroyed by the RAF. The hotel caught fire and was all but destroyed. Hedda and Louis retreated to their country estate near Potsdam and waited. When the Ivans turned up, they looted the house, and mistaking Louis for an escaping German general, they put him in front of a firing squad and shot him. Hedda was raped, many times, like most of the women in Berlin. I don’t know what happened to her after that.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Reles. “What a story. Pity. I liked them both a lot. Jesus, I didn’t know.”

He sighed and made another attempt to light his cigar, and this time he succeeded. “You know, it’s funny you turning up like this, Gunther.”

“I told you before, Max. It’s Hausner now. Carlos Hausner.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. You and me, we don’t have to worry about that shit. This island’s got more aliases than a filing cabinet in the FBI. If you ever get any problems with the militia about your passport, your visa, anything like that, you come to me. I can fix it.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“Like I was saying, it’s funny you turning up like this. You see, the Adlon’s one of the reasons I got into the hotel business here in Havana. I loved that hotel. I wanted to own a classy place like the Adlon here, in old Havana, instead of in Vedado like Lansky and all those other connected guys. I always had the idea that this is the kind of place Hedda would have picked herself, don’t you agree?”

“Maybe. Why not? I was just the house peeper, so what do I know? But she used to say that a good hotel is like a car. What it looks like is only half as important as how it drives: how fast it can go and if the brakes work all right and if it’s comfortable are what really matters. Everything else is just bullshit.”

“She was right, of course,” said Reles. “God, I could use some of her old European experience right now. I’m after the same high-end crowd here, you see. The senators and the diplomats. I’m trying to run a quality hotel and an honest casino. The truth is, you hardly need to run a crooked one. The odds always favor the house, and the money floods in. It’s as simple as that. Almost. True, in a city like Havana you gotta watch out for the sharks and the grifters. Not to mention the faggots and the female impersonators. Hell, I don’t even allow hookers to operate in this place. Not unless they’re on the arm of someone important. I leave that kind of vice to the Cubans. They’re a degenerate lot. Those guys would pimp their own grandmothers for five bucks. And, believe me, I should know. I’ve had more than my fair share of mocha-flavored flesh in this city.

“At the same time,” he continued, “you shouldn’t ever underestimate these people. They think nothing of putting a bullet in your head if they’re connected. Or tossing a grenade in your john if they’re into politics. A man in my position needs to get eyes in the back of his head or pretty soon the back of his head will be lying on a floor. Which is where you come in, Gunther.”

“Me? I don’t see how I can help you, Max.”

“Let’s have some lunch. And I’ll tell you how.”

We rode the elevator up to the penthouse, where we were met by Waxey. Seen from up close, his face was like that of a Mexican wrestler—the kind that usually wears a mask. Come to think of it, the rest of him looked like a Mexican wrestler, too. Each of his shoulders resembled the Yucatán peninsula. He didn’t say anything. He just frisked me with hands like Esau’s black-sheep uncle.

The penthouse was modern and about as comfortable as a space-ship. We sat at a glass table and watched each other’s shoes while we ate. Mine were locally sourced and none too clean. My host’s shoes were shinier than a brass bell and every bit as loud. To my surprise the food was kosher, or at least Jewish, since the tall, good-looking woman who served it was also black. Then again, maybe she was a convert to Judaism. She was a good cook.

“The older I get, the more I like Jewish cooking,” Max explained. “I guess it reminds me of when I was a kid. All the food the other kids had, but never me, because my bitch of a mother ran off with a tailor, and Abe and I never saw her again.”

When we got to the coffee, he relit his half-smoked cigar, while I fetched one from his cemetery-sized humidor.

“So let me tell you how you can help me, Gunther. For one thing, you’re not Jewish.”

I let that one go. A quarter-Jew seemed hardly worth mentioning these days.

“You’re not Italian. You’re not Cuban. You’re not even American, and you don’t owe me a damn thing. Hell, Gunther, you don’t even like me that much.”

I didn’t contradict him. We were big boys now. But I didn’t underline it, either. Twenty years was a long time to forget a lot, but I had more reason to dislike him than he would ever know or remember.

“All of this makes you independent. Which is a very valuable quality to possess in Havana. Because it means you owe no one allegiance. None of that would matter if you were a potchka, but you’re not a potchka, you’re a mensch, and the plain fact of the matter is that I could use a mensch who has grand hotel experience—to say nothing of your years with the Berlin police. Why? To help me keep things straight here, that’s why. I want you to take on the role of general manager. In the hotel and in the casino. Someone I can trust. Someone who doesn’t give me any shit. Someone who shoots straight from the hip. Who better than you?”

“Look, Max, I’m flattered, don’t think I’m not. But I don’t need a job right now.”

“Don’t think of it as a job. This is not a job. There’s no nine-to-five with this business. It’s an occupation. Every man needs an occupation, right? A place to go every day. Some days you’re around more than others. Which is good, because that’ll keep the bastards who work for me guessing. Look, I hate to sound like a noodge, but you’d be doing me a favor here. A big favor. Which is why I’m prepared to pay you top dollar. How does twenty thousand dollars a year sound? I bet you never made that kind of money at the Adlon. A car. An office. A secretary who crosses her legs a lot and doesn’t wear any panties. You name it.”

“I don’t know, Max. If I did it, I’d have to do it my way. Straight or not at all.”

“Didn’t you hear me saying that’s what I want? There’s no other way but straight for a business like this.”

“I’m serious. No interference. I report to you and no one else.”

“You got it.”

“What would I do? Give me an example.”

“One of the things I want you to do right away is take charge of the hirings and the firings. There’s a pit boss I want you to fire. He’s a faggot, and I don’t like faggots working in my hotel. Also, I want you to handle all the interviews for any positions in the hotel and casino that come up. You got a nose for these things, Gunther. A cynical bastard like you will want to make certain that we’re hiring honest, straight people. That’s not always so easy. You can get a lot of smoke blown in your eyes. For instance. I pay top money here. Better than any other hotel in Havana. Which means that most of the girls who want to work here—and it’s mainly girls I hire, because that’s what the customers want to see—well, they will do anything for a job. And I mean anything. Only that’s not always so good for business, see? And it’s not always so good for me. I’m only human, and that amount of major fucking temptation is not what I want in my life right now. I’m through with all of that fucking around. You know why? Because I’m going to marry Dinah, that’s why.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“Does she know?”

“Of course she knows, you nudnik. The girl’s meshugge about me and I feel the same way about her. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say—I’m old enough to be her father. Don’t start with the gray hair and false teeth again, like last night, because this is the real thing. I’m going to marry her, and then I’m going to use all my show-business connections to help make that girl a movie star.”

“What about Brown?”

“Brown? What’s Brown?”

“That’s the university Noreen wants her to go to.”

Reles grimaced. “That’s what Noreen wants for Noreen. Not for Dinah. Dinah wants to be in motion pictures. I already introduced her to Sinatra. George Raft. Nat King Cole. Did Noreen tell you the girl can sing?”

“No.”

“With her talent and my connections, Dinah can be pretty much anything she wants.”

“Does that include being happy?”

Reles winced. “Including being happy, yeah. God damn it, Gunther, you’re a hard fucking bastard. Why is that?”

“I’ve had a lot of practice. More than you, perhaps. And I guess that’s saying something. I’m not going to give you the whole lousy résumé, Max. But by the time the war ended, I’d already seen and done a few things that would have given Jiminy Cricket a heart attack. The conscience I’d started out in with life grew a couple of extra layers, like the skin on my feet. Then I was a houseguest of the Soviets for two years in one of their rest homes for exhausted German POWs. I learned a lot from the Ivans about good hospitality. But only what it isn’t. When I escaped I killed two people. That was a pleasure. Like it never was before. And you can take that to mean whatever you want. After that I ran a hotel of my own until my second wife died in a lunatic asylum. I wasn’t cut out for that. I might as well have tried running a finishing school in Switzerland for young English ladies. Come to think of it, I wish I had. I could have finished quite a few, forever. Good manners, German courtesy, charm, hospitality—I come up short on all of those, Max. I make hard bastards feel good about themselves. They meet me and then go home and read their Bibles and thank God they’re not me. So what makes you think I’m up to this?”

“You really want to know?” He shrugged. “All those years ago. The boat on Lake Tegel? You remember that?”

“How could I forget?”

“I told you then I liked you, Gunther. I told you then that I’d thought of offering you a job, only I had no use for an honest man.”

“I remember. The whole evening is still etched on my eyeballs.”

“Well, now I have a use for one. It’s as simple as that, pal. I need a man of character. Pure and simple.”

A person of character, he said. A mensch, he said. I had my doubts. Would a mensch have helped Max Reles to silence Othman Weinberger by handing the American the means to destroy Weinberger’s career, and possibly his life, too? After all, it was I who had told Reles about Weinberger’s Achilles’ heel: that the little Gestapo man from Würzburg was suspected, wrongly, of being a Jew. And it was I who had told Max Reles about Emil Linthe, the forger, and how a man like Linthe might bribe his way in the public records office and give another man like Weinberger a Jewish transfusion just as easily as he’d given me an Aryan one. In my own defense, I could argue that I’d done all of that to protect Noreen Charalambides from being murdered by Max’s brother. But what character was left to a man who’d done something like that? A mensch? No, I was anything but that.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take the job.”

“You will?” Max Reles sounded surprised. He stared at me for a while with narrowing eyes. “So now I’m curious. What was it persuaded you?”

“Maybe we’re more alike than I care to admit. Maybe it was the thought of that brother of yours and what he might do to me with an ice pick if I said no. How is the kid?”

“Dead.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. The kid turned rat on some friends of mine to save his own skin. He sent six guys to the electric chair. Including someone I went to school with. But he was a canary who couldn’t fly. Abe was about to finger a boss when he got himself thrown out of a high window of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island in November 1941.”

“You know who did it?”

“He was in protective custody at the time, so, sure, I know. And one day I’ll take my revenge on these guys. Blood is blood, after all, and there never was any permission asked or given. But right now it wouldn’t be good for business.”

“Sorry I asked.”

Reles nodded grimly. “And I’d appreciate it if you never asked me about it again.”

“I already forgot the question. Listen, we Germans are good at forgetting all kinds of things. We’ve spent the last nine years trying to forget there ever was a man called Adolf Hitler. Believe me, if you can forget him, you can forget anything.”

Reles grunted.

“One name I do remember,” I said. “Avery Brundage. What ever happened to him?”

“Avery? We kind of fell out after he got himself on the America First committee to keep the U.S. out of the war. It made a change from trying to keep Jews out of Chicago country clubs. But that slippery bastard’s done all right for himself. He’s made millions of dollars. His construction company built a large chunk of Chicago’s gold coast: Lake Shore Drive. At one stage he was going to run as a candidate for governor of Illinois until certain people in Chicago told him to stick to sports administration. You might say we’re competitors these days. He owns the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. The Cosmopolitan in Denver. The Hollywood Plaza in California. And a large chunk of Nevada.” Reles nodded. “Life’s been kind to Avery. Recently he got himself elected as president of the International Olympic Committee.”

“I suppose you made a fortune in 1936.”

“Sure. But so did Avery. After the Olympics were over, he got himself a contract from the Nazis to build the new German embassy in Washington. That was payback from a grateful Führer for heading off an American boycott. He must have made millions. And I didn’t see a cent of it.” Reles grinned. “But it was all a long time ago. Dinah’s the best thing that’s happened to me since then. She’s a hell of a girl.”

“Just like her mother.”

“Wants to try everything.”

“I guess you must be the one who took her to the Shanghai Theater.”

“I wouldn’t have done it,” said Reles. “Taken her there. But she insisted. And the girl gets what she wants. Dinah’s got a hell of a temper.”

“And how was the show?”

“How do you think?” He shrugged. “To tell the truth, I don’t think it bothered her much. That little girl is game for anything. Right now she wants me to take her to an opium den.”

“Opium?”

“You should try it yourself sometime. Opium’s great for keeping down the weight.”

He slapped his belly with the flat of his hand and, in truth, he did look slimmer than I remembered him in Berlin. “There’s a little joint on Cuchillo where you can smoke a few pipes and forget everything. Even Hitler.”

“Then perhaps I’ll have to try it, after all.”

“I’m glad you’re on board, Gunther. Tell you what. Come back tomorrow night and I’ll introduce you to some of the boys. They’ll all be here. Wednesday night’s my cards night. You play cards?”

“No. Just backgammon.”

“Backgammon? That’s dice for queers, isn’t it?”

“Not really.”

“I’m just kidding you. I had a friend who used to play. You any good?”

“Depends on the dice.”

“Come to think of it, García plays backgammon. José Orozco García. The sleazeball who owns the Shanghai. He’s always looking for a game.” Reles grinned. “Jesus, I’d love it if you could beat that fat bastard. Want me to fix you up to play him? Tomorrow night, maybe? It’ll have to be early, because he likes to keep an eye on the theater after eleven. You know, that could work out well. Play him at eight. Come up here around ten forty-five. Meet the boys. Maybe with some extra money in your pocket.”

“Sounds good. I can always use a little extra money.”

“Speaking of which.”

He took me into his office. There was a modern teakwood writing desk with an off-white veneered top and some leather chairs that looked as if they’d come off a sportfishing boat.

He opened a drawer and took out an envelope, which he handed to me. “There’s a thousand pesos,” he said. “Just to show you my offer is a serious one.”

“I always take you seriously, Max,” I told him. “Ever since that night on the lake.”

On the walls were several big, frameless paintings that were either extremely good representations of vomit or modern abstracts. I couldn’t decide. One wall was given over entirely to some dark wood bookshelves that were filled with records and magazines, art objects, and even some books. On the far wall was a big sliding glass door, and through it I could see a smaller, private version of the pool that existed on the floor below. There was a button-backed leather daybed and beside it a tulip table, on which stood a bright red telephone. Reles pointed at the phone.

“See that phone? It’s a special line to the Presidential Palace. And it makes just the one call a week. The one I told you about? Every Wednesday, at a quarter to midnight, without fail, I use that phone to call F.B. and take him through the figures. I never knew a guy who was so interested in money as F.B. Sometimes we speak for as long as half an hour. Which is one reason Wednesday night is my card night. I play a few hands with the boys, and then throw them out at exactly eleven-thirty. No broads. I make my phone call and go straight to bed. You work for me, you might as well know you also work for F.B. He owns thirty percent of this hotel. But you can leave that spic to me. For now.”

Reles went over to the bookcase, tugged open a drawer, and took out an expensive-looking leather attaché case, which he handed to me.

“I want you to have this, Gunther. To celebrate our new business association.”

I brandished the envelope of pesos. “I thought you already gave me something for that.”

“Something extra.”

I glanced at the combination locks.

“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s not locked. Incidentally, the combinations are six-six-six on each side. But if you like, you can change it with a little key that’s hidden in the carrying handle.”

I snapped open the case and saw that it was a handsome backgammon set, custom-made. The checkers were made of ivory and ebony, and the dice and doubling cube had pips made of diamonds.

“I can’t take this,” I said.

“Sure you can. That set used to belong to a friend of mine called Ben Siegel.”

“Ben Siegel, the gangster?”

“Naw. Ben was a gambler and a businessman. Same as me. His girlfriend, Virginia, had that backgammon set especially made for his fo rty-first birthday, by Asprey of London. Three months later he was dead.”

“He was shot, wasn’t he?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Didn’t she want it?”

“She gave it to me as a keepsake. And now I’d like you to have it. Let’s hope it’s luckier for you than it was for him.”

“Let’s hope.”

8

FROM THE SARATOGA I DROVE down to Finca Vigía. The Chieftain was exactly where Waxey had parked it, except there was now a cat on the roof. I got out of my car and walked up to the front door and rang the ship’s bell hanging on the porch. Another cat was watching me from the bough of a giant ceiba tree. A third on the terrace poked its head through the white railings as if waiting for the firemen to come and get it out. I stroked the cat’s head as footsteps came slowly to the door. The door opened, and the slight figure of Hemingway’s Negro servant, René, was standing there. He was wearing a white cotton waiter’s jacket. Sunlight shining through the house behind him gave him the air of a Santería priest. He said, “Good afternoon, señor.”

“Is Señora Eisner at home?”

“Yes, but she is sleeping.”

“How about the señorita?”

“Miss Dinah. I believe she’s in the swimming pool, señor.”

“Do you think she’ll mind me seeing her?”

“I don’t think she minds anyone seeing her,” said René.

I didn’t pay much attention to that and made my way along the path to the pool, which was surrounded with royal palms, flamboyán trees, and several almond trees as well as flower beds filled with ixora—a hardy red Indian flower better known as jungle flame. It was a nice-looking pool, but even with all that water it was easy to see how any jungle might have caught fire. My own eyeballs felt scorched just looking at it. Dinah was doing a graceful, leisurely backstroke up and down the steaming water. I supposed it was steaming for the same reason my eyeballs were scorched and the jungle was in flames. Her bathing suit was an appropriate-looking leopard print, only at that particular moment it seemed slightly less appropriate, given that she wasn’t actually wearing it. The suit lay on the path to the pool alongside my jaw.

She had a beautiful body: long, athletic, shapely. In the water her nude figure was the color of honey. Being German, I wasn’t exactly shocked by her nakedness. Naked culture societies had existed in Berlin since before the Great War, and until the Nazis, it had been impossible to visit certain Berlin parks and swimming pools without seeing lots of nudists. Besides, Dinah herself hardly seemed to mind. She even managed to perform a couple of tumble turns that left little to my imagination.

“Come on in,” she said. “The water’s lovely.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Besides, I hardly think your mother would approve.”

“Maybe not, but she’s drunk. Or at least she’s sleeping it off. She was drinking all last night. Noreen always drinks too much after we’ve had an argument.”

“What was it about?”

“What do you think it was about?”

“Max, I suppose.”

“Check. So how did you and he get along?”

“We got along just fine, he and I.”

Dinah executed another perfect tumble turn. By now I was beginning to know her better than her doctor. I might even have enjoyed the show but for the fact of who she was and why I was there. Turning my back on the pool, I said, “Perhaps I’d better wait in the house.”

“Do I embarrass you, Señor Gunther? I’m sorry. I mean Señor Hausner.” She stopped swimming, and I heard her climb out of the pool behind me.

“You’re nice to look at, but I’m your mother’s friend, remember? And there are certain things that men don’t do to the daughters of their friends. I imagine she sort of trusts me not to press my nose up against your windowpane.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

I could hear the water dripping off her naked body. If I had licked her from top to bottom, she wouldn’t have sounded any different.

“Why don’t you be a good girl and put your bathing suit back on, and then we can talk?”

“All right.” A few moments passed. Then she said, “You can relax now.”

I turned around and nodded my thanks curtly. She made me feel as awkward as hell, even now that she was wearing her costume again. Avoiding the sight of beautiful young women when they were naked: that was a new thing for me.

“As a matter of fact, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “This morning she was kind of suicidal.”

“Kind of?”

“Kind of, yeah. What I mean is that she threatened to shoot herself if I didn’t promise her that I wouldn’t see Max anymore.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Promise not to see him anymore?”

“No, of course I didn’t. I mean that’s just emotional blackmail.”

“Mmm-hmm. Does she have a gun?”

“Silly question, in this house. There’s a gun cupboard in the tower with enough weaponry to start another revolution. But as it happens, she has her own gun. Ernest gave it to her. I guess he thought he could spare her one.”

“Think she’d ever do it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I mentioned it just now, I suppose. I really don’t know. She and Ernest used to talk about suicide. All the time. And she wonders why I want to go out with Max instead of hanging around here.”

“When exactly is Hemingway coming back here?”

“July, I think. He’d be back here now, except for the fact that he’s in a hospital in Nairobi.”

“I guess one of those animals must have fought back.”

“No, it was a plane crash. Or a bush fire. Maybe both. I don’t know. But he was pretty bad for a while.”

“What happens when he does come back? Are he and your mother involved?”

“Christ no. Ernest has a wife, Mary. Although I don’t think something like that would stop them. Besides, she’s seeing someone, I think. Noreen, I mean. Anyway, she’s bought a house in Marianao and we’re supposed to move into it sometime in the next month or two.”

Dinah found a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and blew smoke down at the ground and away from me. “I’m going to marry him, and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do about it.”

“Except shoot herself. People have shot themselves for less.”

Dinah made a face. It matched the one I might have made when she told me that Noreen was seeing someone.

“And what do you think?” she asked. “About me and Max.”

“Would it make the slightest difference if I told you?”

She shook her head. “So what did you and he talk about?”

“He offered me a job.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve said I would. But I’m kind of squeamish about working for a gangster.”

“Is that what you think he is?”

“I told you. It doesn’t matter what I think. And all he offered me was a job, angel. Not a proposal of marriage. If I don’t like working for him, I can quit, and he won’t lose any sleep over it. But somehow I have the romantic idea that he feels differently about you. Any man would.”

“You’re not making a pass at me, are you?”

“If I was going to do that, I’d be in the swimming pool.”

“Max is going to help me become a movie actress.”

“So I heard. Is that why you’re going to marry him?”

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t.” She colored a little, and her voice became more petulant. “It just so happens that we love each other.”

It was my turn to pull a face.

“What’s the matter, Gunther? Weren’t you ever in love with someone?”

“Oh, sure. Your mother, for instance. But that was twenty years ago. In those days I could still tell someone I was in love with her and mean it with every fiber of my being. These days they’re just words. A man gets to my age and it’s not about love. He can persuade himself it’s love. But it’s not that at all. It’s always about something else.”

“You think he just wants to marry me for sex, is that it?”

“No. It’s more complicated than that. It’s about wanting to feel young again. That’s why a lot of older men marry younger women. Because they think youth is infectious. And it isn’t, of course. Old age, on the other hand, now, that is infectious. I mean, I can more or less guarantee that, in time, you’ll catch it, too.” I shrugged. “But like I keep telling you, angel, it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m just some slob who used to be in love with your mother.”

“That’s not such an exclusive club.”

“I don’t doubt it. Your mother’s a beautiful woman. Everything you got, you got from her, I guess.” I nodded. “What you were saying. About her being suicidal. I’ll look in on her before I go.”

I quickly went away from her and back to the house before I said anything nasty. Which was what I felt like saying.

At the rear of the house, the French doors were open and just an antelope was on guard, so I went inside and took a squint in Noreen’s bedroom. She was sleeping, naked on the top sheet, and I stood there looking for all of a minute. Two naked women in one afternoon. It was like going to the Casa Marina except for the fact that now I realized I was in love with Noreen again. Or maybe they were the same feelings I’d always had and, perhaps, I’d just forgotten where I’d buried them. I don’t know, but in spite of what I’d told Dinah, there were plenty of feelings I could have tossed Noreen’s way if she’d been awake. And probably I’d have meant a few of them, too.

Her thighs yawned open, and courtesy obliged me to look away, which was when I noticed the gun on the bookshelves next to some photographs and a jar containing a frog preserved in formaldehyde. It looked like any old frog. But it wasn’t just any old gun. It might have been designed and produced by a Belgian who had given the revolver his name, but the Nagant had been the standard-issue sidearm for all Russian officers in the Red Army and NKVD. It was an odd, heavy weapon to have found in that house. I picked it up, curious to find myself reacquainted with it. This one had an embossed red star on the handle, which seemed to put its origins beyond any doubt.

“That’s her gun,” said Dinah.

I looked around as she came into the bedroom and drew the sheet across her mother. “Not exactly a ladies’ gun,” I said.

“You’re telling me.”

Then she went into the bathroom.

“I’ll leave my number on the desk by the telephone,” I called after her. “You can give me a ring if you really think she’s serious about harming herself. It doesn’t matter what time.”

I buttoned my jacket and walked out of the bedroom. Momentarily I caught sight of Dinah sitting on the lavatory and, hearing the sound of her peeing, I hurried on through to the study.

“I don’t think she meant it,” said Dinah. “She says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”

“We all do.”

There was a three-drawer wooden desk covered with carved animals and different-sized shotgun cartridges and rifle bullets that someone had stood on their ends like so many lethal lipsticks. I found a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled out my telephone number in large writing so that it wouldn’t be missed. Unlike me. And then I left.

I drove home and spent the rest of the day and half the night in my little workshop. While I worked I thought about Noreen and Max Reles and Dinah. Nobody called me on the phone. But there was nothing unusual about that.

9

HAVANA’S CHINESE QUARTER—the Barrio Chino—was the largest in Latin America, and since it was Chinese New Year the streets off Zanja and Cuchillo were decorated with paper lanterns and given over to open-air markets and lion-dance troupes. At the intersection of Amistad and Dragones was a gateway as big as the Forbidden City. Later that evening, it would be the center of a tremendous fireworks barrage, which was the climax of the celebrations.

Yara loved any kind of noisy parade, and this was the reason why, unusually, I had chosen to take her out for the afternoon. The streets of Chinatown were full of laundries, noodle houses, dried-goods shops, herbalists, acupuncturists, sex clubs, opium dens, and brothels. But above all, the streets were full of people. Chinese people, mostly. So many that you wondered where they had been hiding themselves.

I bought Yara some small gifts—fruit and candies—which delighted her. In return she insisted on buying me a cup of macerated medicinal liquor at a traditional medicine market, which, she assured me, would make me very virile; and it was only after drinking it that I found out that it contained wolfberry, iguana, and ginseng. It was the iguana ingredient I objected to, and for several minutes after drinking this horrible beverage I was convinced I had been poisoned. So much so that I was firmly of the opinion that I must be hallucinating when, right on the edge of Chinatown, on the corner of Manrique and Simón Bolívar, I came across a shop I had never seen before. Not even in Buenos Aires, where the existence of such a business might, perhaps, more easily have been explained. It was a shop selling Nazi memorabilia.

After a moment or two I realized Yara had seen the shop, too, and, leaving her on the street, I went inside, as curious to know what kind of person might sell this kind of stuff as I was about who might buy it.

Inside the shop were glass cases containing Luger pistols, Walther P-38s, Iron Crosses, Nazi Party armbands, Gestapo identity tokens, and SS daggers. Several copies of Der Stürmer newspapers were laid out in cellophane, like freshly laundered shirts. A mannequin was wearing the dress uniform of an SS captain, which somehow seemed only appropriate. Behind a counter and between two Nazi banners stood a youngish man with a black beard who couldn’t have looked less German. He was tall and thin and cadaverous, like someone from a painting by El Greco.

“Looking for something in particular?” he asked me.

“An Iron Cross, perhaps,” I told him. I asked to see an Iron Cross not because I was interested in it but because I was interested in him.

He opened one the glass cases and laid the medal on the counter as if it had been a ladies’ diamond brooch, or a handsome watch.

I looked at it for a while, turning it over in my fingers.

“What do you think of it?” he asked.

“It’s a fake,” I said. “And not a very good fake. And another thing: the cross belt on the SS captain’s uniform is over the wrong shoulder. A fake is one thing. But an elementary mistake like that is something else.”

“You know about this stuff?”

“I thought it was illegal in Cuba,” I answered, hardly answering at all.

“The law forbids only the promotion of Nazi ideology,” he said. “Selling historic mementos is permitted.”

“Who buys this stuff?”

“Americans, mostly. A lot of sailors. Then there are also tourists who saw military service in Europe and want to obtain the souvenir they never managed to get when they were over there. Mostly it’s SS stuff they want. I guess there’s a certain gruesome fascination with the SS, for obvious reasons. I could sell any amount of SS stuff. For example, SS daggers are very popular as paper knives. Of course, collecting this sort of memorabilia doesn’t mean you sympathize with Nazism, or condone what happened. It happened, and it’s a part of history, and I don’t see anything wrong with being interested in that, to the extent of owning something that’s an almost living part of that history. How could I see anything wrong with it? I mean, I’m Polish. My name’s Szymon Woytak.”

He held out his hand, and I took it limply and without much enthusiasm for him or his peculiar trade. Through the shop window I could see a troupe of Chinese dancers. They’d removed their lion heads and paused for a cigarette, as if hardly aware of the evil spirits that dwelled within, otherwise they might have come through the door. Woytak picked up the Iron Cross I had asked to see. “How can you tell it’s a fake?” he asked, examining it closely.

“Simple. The fakes are made from one piece of metal. The originals were made of at least three pieces and soldered together. Another way to tell is to get a magnet and see if the cross really is made of iron. Fakes are made from a cheap alloy.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do I know?” I grinned at him. “I had one of these iron baubles myself once, in the Great War,” I said. “But you know, all of it’s fake. All of this. Everything in here.” I waved my hand at the shop. “And the creed that made all of these ridiculous objects? That, too, was just a cheap alloy meant to fool people. A stupid fake that shouldn’t have tricked anyone, except for the fact that people wanted to believe in it. Everyone knew it was a lie. Of course they did. But they wanted, desperately, to believe that it wasn’t. And they forgot to remember that just because Adolf Hitler liked kissing little children it didn’t mean he wasn’t a big, bad wolf. He was that, and much, much worse. That’s history for you, Señor Woytak. Real German history, not this—this ridiculous souvenir shop.”

I took Yara home and spent the rest of the day in my workshop feeling a little depressed. But it wasn’t because of anything I had seen in Szymon Woytak’s shop. That was just Havana. You could always buy anything in Havana, provided you had the money to pay for it. Anything and everything. It was something else getting me down. Something closer to home. Or at least the home of Ernest Hemingway.

Noreen’s daughter, Dinah.

I wanted to like her, but found I couldn’t. Not by a long way. Dinah struck me as willful and spoiled. The willfulness was okay. She’d probably grow out of it. Most people did. But she was going to need a pair of hard slaps to stop her from being such a spoiled brat. It was too bad that Nick and Noreen Charalambides had divorced when Dinah was still a child. Probably her young life had lacked a father’s discipline. Maybe that was the real reason Dinah was planning to marry a man more than twice her age. Lots of girls married father substitutes. Or maybe she was simply trying to get even with her mother for leaving her father. Lots of girls did that, too. Maybe it was both of these things. Or maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about, never having raised a child myself.

It was fortunate that I was in the workshop. “Maybe” is not a word you use in there. When you’re operating a lathe to cut a length of metal, “exactly” is a better word. I had the patience for metalworking. That was easy. Being a parent looked much more difficult.

Later on I had a bath and put on a good suit. Before I went out I bowed my head for a few moments in front of the Santería shrine Yara had built in her room. It was really just a doll’s house covered with white lace and candles. But on each floor of the doll’s house were little animals, crucifixes, nuts, shells, and black-faced figurines in white dresses. There were also several pictures of the Virgin Mary and one picture of a woman with a knife through her tongue. Yara told me this was to stop gossip about her and me, but I hadn’t a clue about what any of the other stuff meant. With the possible exception of the Virgin Mary. I don’t know why I bowed my head to her shrine. I could say that I wanted to believe in something, but in my heart of hearts, I knew Yara’s souvenir shop was just another stupid lie. Just like Nazism.

On my way to the door I picked up Ben Siegel’s backgammon set, and then Yara took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes as if searching for some effect that her peculiar shrine had worked in my soul. Always supposing I had such a thing as that. And, finding something, she took a step back and crossed herself several times.

“You look like the Lord Eleggua,” she said. “He is the owner of the crossroads. And who guards the home against all dangers. He is always justified in all that he does. And it is he who knows what nobody else knows and who always acts according to his perfect judgment.” She took off the necklace she was wearing and tucked this into the breast pocket of my jacket. “For good luck in your game,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “But it is only a game.”

“Not this time,” she said. “Not for you. Not for you, master.”

10

I PARKED MY CAR ON ZULUETA, in sight of the local police station, and walked back to the Saratoga, where there were already plenty of taxis and cars, including a couple of the black Cadillac Seventy-fives, which were beloved to all senior government officials.

I walked through the hotel and into the monastery courtyard, where a series of lights was turning the water in the fountain into several pastel shades of color and left the marble horse looking somewhat bemused—as if it hardly dared to take a drink of the exotic-looking water for fear that it might be poisoned. It was, I reflected, a perfect metaphor for the experience of being in a Havana casino.

A doorman dressed like a wealthy French impressionist opened the door for me, and I entered the casino. It was early, but the place was busy, like a bus station during rush hour, only with chandeliers, and noisy with the clack of chips and dice, the tap-running-into-a-steel-sink sound of metal balls rolling around wooden roulette wheels, the squeals of winners, the groans of losers, the clink of glasses, and always the clear, unexcited, declarative voices of the croupiers jostling the bets and calling the cards and the numbers.

I glanced around and noticed that some local celebrities were already in the place: Desi Arnaz the musician, Celia Cruz the singer, George Raft the movie actor, and Major Esteban Ventura—one of the most feared police officials in Havana. Gamblers in white tuxedoes drifted about, shuffling plaques and prevaricating about where their luck might lie that night: on the roulette wheel or at the craps table. Glamorous women with high hairdos and plunging necklines patrolled the edges of the room like cheetahs trying to identify the weakest men to hunt and bring down. One stalked toward me, but I flicked her off with a toss of my head.

I spotted what looked like the casino manager. I figured he was the one with the folded arms and the tennis umpire’s eyes; also, he wasn’t smoking or holding chips. Like most Habañeros, he wore a schoolboy’s doodle of a mustache and more grease on his head than a Cuban hamburger. He caught my eye and then my nod, unfolded his arms, and walked my way.

“Can I help you, señor?”

“My name is Carlos Hausner,” I said. “I have a meeting upstairs with Señor Reles just before eleven tonight. But before then I’m supposed to meet Señor García, to play backgammon.”

Some of the grease off the manager’s hair must have been on his fingertips, because he started to wring his hands like Pontius Pilate. “Señor García is already here,” he said, leading the way. “Señor Reles asked me to find you both a quiet corner in our lounge. Between the salon privé and the main gaming room. I shall endeavor to make sure you are not disturbed.”

We went over to a spot next to a palm tree. García was seated on a fancy French dining chair facing the room. There was a gilt, marble-topped table in front of him on which a backgammon set had already been laid out. Behind him, on the canary-yellow wall, was a Fragonard-style mural of a naked odalisque lying with her hand on the lap of a rather bored-looking man wearing a red turban. Considering where her hand was, you’d have thought he might have looked more interested. García’s ownership of the Shanghai made it seem like an entirely appropriate spot to have chosen for our game.

The Shanghai on Zanja was Havana’s most obscene and, as a result, most notorious and popular burlesque house. Even with 750 seats, there was always a long line of excited men outside the place—mostly juvenile American sailors—waiting to pay $1.25 to get in and see a show that made anything I had seen in Weimar Berlin look tame. Tame and, by comparison, rather tasteful, too. There was nothing in the least bit tasteful about the show at the Shanghai. Mostly this was thanks to the presence on the bill of a tall mulatto called Superman whose erect member was as big as a cattle prod and which he used to rather similar effect. The climax of the show involved the mulatto outraging a succession of innocent-looking blondes to the vociferous encouragement of Uncle Sam. It wasn’t a place to take a liberal-minded satyr, let alone a nineteen-year-old girl.

García stood up politely, but I disliked him on sight in the same way I would have disliked a pimp or, for that matter, a gorilla in a tuxedo, which is what he looked like. He moved with the economy of a robot, his thick arms held stiffly at his sides until, equally stiffly, one of them came my way, extending a hand the size and color of a falconer’s glove. The bald head, with its enormous ears and thick lips, might have been looted from some Egyptian archaeological site—if not the Valley of the Kings, then perhaps the gully of the slimy-looking satraps. I felt the strength in his hand before he took it away and slipped it into the pocket of his tuxedo. The hand came out with a bundle of money, which he tossed onto the table beside the board.

“A cash game would be best, don’t you agree?” he said.

“Sure,” I said, and laid the envelope of money Reles had given me earlier beside García’s. “But we can settle up at the end of the evening, surely. Or do you want to do it at the end of every game?”

“At the end of the evening is fine,” he said.

“In which case,” I said, pocketing my envelope, “there’s no real need for this, now that we both know the other is carrying a substantial amount of cash.”

He nodded and took back the bundle of money. “I have to leave for a while at around eleven,” he said. “I have to be back to supervise the door at the Shanghai for the eleven-thirty show.”

“And what about the nine-thirty show?” I asked. “Or does that just run itself?”

“You know my theater?”

He made it sound like the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The voice was what I expected: too many cigars and not enough exercise. A wallowing hippo’s voice. Muddy and full of yellowing teeth and gas. Dangerous, too, probably.

“I know it,” I said.

“But I can always come back afterward,” he said. “To give you a chance to win back your money.”

“And I can always extend you the same courtesy.”

“To answer your earlier question.” The thick lips stretched like a cheap, pink garter. “The eleven-thirty show is always the more difficult one to handle. People have had more to drink by that time of the evening. And sometimes there’s trouble if they can’t get in. The police station on Zanja is conveniently close, but it’s not unknown that they need a cash incentive to put in an appearance.”

“Money talks.”

“It does in this city.”

I glanced down at the backgammon board if only to avoid looking at his ugly face and inhaling the even uglier stink of his breath. From almost a meter away I could smell it. To my surprise, I found myself staring at a backgammon set of a design that was remarkable in its obscenity. The points on the board, black or white and shaped like spearheads on any ordinary set, were here each shaped like erect phalluses. Between phalluses, or perhaps draped over them like artists’ models, were naked figures of girls. The checkers were painted to look like the bare behinds of black and white women, while the two cups from which each player would throw his dice were the shape of a female breast. These slotted together to form a chest that would have been the envy of any Oktoberfest waitress. Only the four dice and the doubling cube met the eye with any kind of decorum.

“You like my set?” he asked, chuckling like a foul-smelling mud bath.

“I like mine better,” I said. “But my set is locked, and I can’t remember the combination. So if it amuses you to play with this one, that’s fine by me. I’m quite broad-minded.”

“Have to be if you live in Havana, right? Play on pips or just the cube?”

“I’m feeling lazy. All that math. Let’s stick to the cube. Shall we say ten pesos a game?”

I lit a cigar and settled into my chair. As the game progressed, I forgot about the board’s pornographic design and my opponent’s breath. We were more or less even until García threw two more doubles in a row and, turning the four to an eight, pushed the doubling cube my way. I hesitated. His two doubles in a row were enough to make me cautious to accept the new stake. I’d never been the kind of percentage player who could look at the positions of all the checkers on the board and calculate the difference in pips between myself and the other player. I preferred to base my game on the look of things and my remembering the run of the dice. Deciding I had to be due a double soon to make up for his three, I picked up the cube and immediately threw a double five, which at that particular moment was exactly what I needed, and left both of us bearing off, neck and neck.

We were each down to the last few checkers in our home boards—twelve in his and ten in mine—when he offered me the cube again. The math was on my side, so long as he didn’t throw a fourth double, and since this seemed improbable, I took it. Any other decision would have demonstrated a lack of what the Cubans called cojones and would certainly have had a disastrous effect on the rest of the evening’s play. The stake was now 160 pesos.

He threw a double four, which now left him even with me and likely to win the game unless I threw a double myself. His eyes hardly flickered as once again I threw a one and a two when I needed it least and managed to bring off only one checker. He threw a six and a five, bearing off two. I threw a five and a three, bearing off two. Then he threw another double and took off four more—his two against my five. Not even a double could save me now.

García didn’t smile. He just picked up his cup and emptied the dice, with no more feeling than if it had been the first throw of the game. Meaningless. Everything still to play for. Except that the first game was now over, and I had lost.

He bore off his last two checkers and slipped the big paw into the pocket of his tuxedo again. This time it came out with a little black leather notebook and a silver mechanical pencil, with which he wrote the number 160 onto the first page.

It was eight-thirty. Twenty minutes had passed. An expensive twenty minutes. García might have been a pornographer and a pig, but there wasn’t much wrong with his luck or his ability to play the game. I realized this was going to be harder than I’d thought.

11

I HAD STARTED PLAYING BACKGAMMON IN URUGUAY. In the café of the Hotel Alhambra in Montevideo, I had been taught to play by a former champion. But Uruguay was expensive—much more expensive than Cuba—which was the main reason I had come to the island. Usually I played with a couple of secondhand booksellers in a café on Havana’s Plaza de Armas, and only for a few centavos. I liked backgammon. I liked the neatness of it—the arrangement of checkers on points and the tidying of them all away that was required to finish the game. The neatness and order of it always struck me as very German. I also liked the mixture of skill and luck; more luck than was needed for bridge and more skill than was needed for a game like blackjack. Above all I liked the idea of taking risks against the celestial bank, of competing against fate itself. I liked the feeling of cosmic justice that could be invoked with every roll of the dice. In a sense my whole life had been lived like that. Against the grain.

It wasn’t García I was playing—he was merely the ugly face of Chance—it was life itself.

So I relit my cigar, rolled it around in my mouth, and waved a waiter toward me. “I’ll have a small carafe of peach schnapps, chilled, but no ice,” I told the man. I didn’t ask if García wanted a drink. I hardly cared. All I cared about now was beating him.

“Isn’t that a woman’s drink?” he asked.

“I hardly think so,” I said. “It’s eighty proof. But you may believe what you like.” I picked up my dice cup.

“And for you, señor?” The waiter was still there.

“A lime daiquiri.”

We continued with the game. García lost the next game on pips, and the one after that when he declined my double. And gradually he became a little more reckless, hitting blots when he should have left them alone and then accepting doubles when he should have refused. He began to lose heavily, and by ten-fifteen I was up by more than a thousand pesos and feeling quite pleased with myself.

There was still no trace of emotion on the argument in favor of Darwinism my opponent called his face, but I knew he was rattled by the way he was throwing his dice. In backgammon, it’s customary to throw your dice in your home board, and both dice have to come to rest there, completely flat. But several times during the last game, García’s hand had got a little overexcited, and his dice had crossed the bar or not landed flat. In each case the rules required him to throw again, and on one occasion this meant he had missed out on a useful double.

There was another reason I knew I had rattled him. He suggested that we should increase our ten-peso game stake. When a man does that, you can be certain he thinks he’s already lost too much and is keen to win it back and as quickly as possible. But this is to ignore the central principle of backgammon, which is that it’s the dice that dictate how you play the game, not the cube or the money.

I sat back and sipped my schnapps. “How much were you thinking of?”

“Let’s say a hundred pesos a game.”

“All right. But on one condition. That we also play the beaver rule.”

He grinned, almost as if he had wanted to suggest it himself.

“Agreed.” He picked up the cup, and although it wasn’t his turn to throw first, he rolled a six.

I rolled a one. García won the throw and simultaneously made his bar point. He pushed himself close to the table, as if eager to win back his money. A little sheen of sweat appeared on his elephantine head, and, seeing it, I doubled immediately. García took the double and tried to double back until I reminded him that I hadn’t yet taken my turn. I rolled a double four, which took both of my runners past his bar point for the moment, rendering it redundant.

García winced a little at this but doubled all the same and then threw a two and a one, which disappointed him. I had the doubling cube now and, sensing I had the psychological advantage, turned the cube and said, “Beaver,” effectively doubling the cube without the requirement of his consent. I then paused and offered him a double on top of my beaver. He bit his lip at this and, already facing a potential loss of eight hundred pesos—on top of what he had already lost—he ought to have declined my double. Instead he accepted. Now I rolled a double six, which left me able to make my bar point and the ten point. The game had already turned my way, with a stake of sixteen hundred pesos.

His throwing became more agitated. First he cocked his dice. Then he threw a double four, which might have dug him out of the hole he was in but for the fact that one of the fours was in his outer board and therefore could not count. Angrily he snatched up both dice, dropped them into the cup, and threw them again, with considerably less success: a two and a three. Things deteriorated rapidly for him after that, and it wasn’t long before he was locked out of my home board, with two checkers sitting on the bar.

I started to bear off, with him still locked out. Now there was a real danger that he might not get any of his checkers back to his own home board before I finished bearing off. This was called a “gammon” and would have cost him double the stake on the cube.

García was throwing like a madman now, and there was no sign of his earlier sangfroid. With each roll of the dice he remained locked out. The game was lost, with nothing left to play for but the possibility of saving the gammon. Finally he was back on the board and racing for home, with me left with only six checkers to bear off. But low throws continued to dog his progress. A few seconds later, the game and gammon were mine.

“That’s gammon,” I said quietly. “That makes double what’s on the cube. I make that thirty-two hundred pesos. Plus the eleven hundred forty you already owe me, and that makes—”

“I can add,” he said brusquely. “There’s nothing wrong with my math.”

I resisted the temptation to point out that it was his skill at backgammon that was at fault, not his math.

García looked at his watch. And so did I. It was ten-forty.

“I have to leave,” he said, closing the board abruptly.

“Are you coming back?” I asked. “After you’ve been to your club?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll be here for a while. To give you a chance to win it back.”

But we both knew he wouldn’t be returning. He counted out forty-three hundred-peso notes from a fifty-note bundle and handed them over.

I nodded and said, “Plus ten percent for the house, that’s two hundred each.” I riffled my fingers at his remaining cash. “I’ll pay for the drinks myself.”

Sullenly he thumbed another couple of bills at me. Then he closed the catches on top of the ugly backgammon set, tucked it under his arm, and quickly walked away, shouldering his way through the other gamblers like a character in a horror movie.

I pocketed my winnings and went to find the casino manager again. He looked as if he’d hardly moved since I’d last spoken to him.

“Is the game over?” he asked.

“For the moment. Señor García has to visit his club. And I have a meeting upstairs with Señor Reles. After that we may resume. I said I’d wait here to give him a chance to win back his money. So we’ll see.”

“I’ll keep the table free,” said the manager.

“Thank you. And perhaps you’d be kind enough to let Señor Reles know that I’m on my way up to see him now.”

“Yes, of course.”

I handed him four hundred pesos. “Ten percent of the table stakes. I believe that’s normal.”

The manager shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. Thank you for beating him. For a long time now I’ve been hoping that someone could humiliate that pig. And from the look of things, you must have beat him good.”

I nodded.

“Perhaps, after you have finished your meeting with Señor Reles, you could come to my office. I should like to buy you a drink to celebrate your victory.”

12

STILL CARRYING BEN SIEGEL’S BACKGAMMON SET, I caught the elevator car up to the eighth floor and the hotel pool terrace, where I found Waxey and another elevator car already waiting for me. Max’s bodyguard was a little friendlier this time, but not so as you’d have noticed unless you were a lip-reader. For a big man he had a very quiet voice, and it was only later on I discovered that Waxey’s vocal cords had been damaged as a result of being shot in the throat. “Sorry,” he whispered. “But I gotta frisk you before you go upstairs.”

I put down the case and lifted my arms and looked past him while he went about his job. In the distance, the Barrio Chino was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“What’s in the case?” he asked.

“Ben Siegel’s backgammon set. It was a gift from Max. Only he didn’t tell me the correct combination for the locks. He said it was six-six-six. Which would seem appropriate if it was. Only it’s not.”

Waxey nodded and stood back. He was wearing loose black slacks and a gray guayabera that matched the color of his hair. When his jacket was off I could see his bare arms, and I got a better idea of his probable strength. His forearms were like bowling pins. The loose shirt was probably supposed to conceal the holstered weapon on the back of his hip, except that the hem had got caught under the polished-wood grip of a .38 Colt Detective Special—probably the finest snubbie ever made.

He reached down into his trouser pocket and took out a key on a silver chain, stuck it into the elevator panel, and turned it. He didn’t have to press any other button. The car went straight up. The doors opened again. “They’re on the terrace,” Waxey said.

I smelled them first. The powerful scent of a small forest fire: several large Havana cigars. Then I heard them: loud American voices, raucous male laughter, relentless profanity, the odd Yiddish and Italian word or phrase, more raucous laughter. I came past the detritus of a card game in the living room: a big table covered with chips and empty glasses. Now that the card game was over, they were all out on the little pool terrace: men in sharp suits with blunt faces, but maybe not so tough anymore. Some of them wore glasses and sports coats with neat handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. All of them looked exactly like what they claimed to be: businessmen, hoteliers, club owners, restaurateurs. And perhaps only a policeman or FBI agent would have recognized these men for what they really were—all of them with reputations earned on the streets of Chicago, Boston, Miami, and New York during the Volstead years. The minute I walked onto that terrace, I knew I was among the big beasts of Havana’s underworld—the high-profile Mafia bosses Senator Estes Kefauver was so keen to talk to. I’d watched some of the Senate committee testimonies on the newsreels. The hearings had made household names out of a lot of the bosses, including the little man with the big nose and neat, dark hair. He was wearing a brown sports coat with an open shirt. It was Meyer Lansky.

“Oh, here he is,” said Reles. His voice was a little louder than usual, but he was a model of sartorial rectitude. He wore gray flannel trousers, neat brown shoes with Oxford toe caps, a blue button-down shirt, a blue silk cravat, and a cashmere navy blue blazer. He looked like the membership secretary of the Havana Yacht Club.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the guy I was telling you about. This is Bernie Gunther. This is the guy who’s going to be my new general manager.”

Like always, I flinched at the sound of my own name, put down the attaché case, and took Max’s hand.

“Relax, will you?” he said. “There’s not one of us here that doesn’t have as much fucking history as you do, Bernie. Maybe more. Nearly all of the guys here have seen the inside of a prison cell at one time or another. Including myself.” He chuckled the old Max Reles chuckle. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

I shook my head.

“Like I say, we all of us got plenty of fucking history. Bernie, say hello to Meyer Lansky; his brother, Jake; Moe Dalitz; Norman Rothman; Morris Kleinman; and Eddie Levinson. I bet you didn’t know there were so many heebs on this island. Naturally, we’re the brains of the outfit. For everything else we got wops and micks. So say hello to Santo Trafficante, Vincent Alo, Tom McGinty, Sam Tucker, the Cellini brothers, and Wilbur Clark.”

“Hello,” I said.

Havana’s underworld stared back at me with modest enthusiasm.

“It must have been some card game,” I observed.

“Waxey, get Bernie a drink. What are you drinking, Bernie?”

“A beer’s fine.”

“Some of us play gin, some of us play poker,” said Max. “Some of us don’t know a game of cards from a sorting office in a post office, but the important thing is that we meet and we talk, in the spirit of healthy competition. Like Jesus and the fucking disciples. You ever read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Bernie?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Smith talks about something he calls the ‘invisible hand.’ He said that in a free market, an individual pursuing his self-interest tends to promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called ‘the invisible hand.’ ” He shrugged. “What we do. That’s all it is. An invisible hand. And we’ve been doing it for years.”

“That we have,” growled Lansky.

Reles chuckled. “Meyer thinks he’s the clever one, on account of how he reads a lot.” He wagged his finger at Lansky. “But I read, too, Meyer. I read, too.”

“Reading. It’s a Jew thing,” said Alo. He was a tall man with a long, sharp nose that might have made me think he was one of the Jews; but he was one of the Italians.

“And they wonder why the Jews do well,” said a man with an easy grin and a nose like a speed bag. This man was Moe Dalitz.

“I read two books in my life,” said one of the micks. “Hoyle on gambling, and the Cadillac handbook.”

Waxey returned with my beer. It was cold and dark, like his eyes.

“F.B.’s thinking of resurrecting his old rural education program,” said Lansky. “Sounds like some of you guys should try to get in on it. You could use a bit of education.”

“Is that the same one he ran in thirty-six?” said his brother, Jake.

Meyer Lansky nodded. “Only he’s worried that some of the kids he’s teaching to read, that they’re going to be tomorrow’s rebels. Like this last lot that’s now doing a stretch on the Isle of Pines.”

“He’s right to worry,” said Alo. “They get weaned on communism, some of these bastards.”

“Then again,” said Lansky, “when the economy of this country takes off, really takes off, then we’re going to need educated people to work in our hotels. To be tomorrow’s croupiers. You gotta be smart to be a croupier. Math smart. You read much, Bernie?”

“More and more,” I admitted. “And for me it’s like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.”

Max Reles was looking at his wristwatch. “Talking of books, it’s time I threw you guys out. I got my call with F.B. To go through the books.”

“How does that work?” asked someone. “On the telephone.”

Reles shrugged. “I read out the numbers, and he writes them down. We both know that one day he’s gonna check, so why the fuck would I cheat him?”

Lansky nodded. “That is definitely verboten.”

We moved off the terrace toward the elevators. As I stepped into one of the cars, Reles took my arm and said, “Start work tomorrow. Come around ten and I’ll show you around.”

“All right.”

I went back down to the casino. I felt a certain amount of awe at the company I was keeping these days. I felt like I’d just been up to the Berghof for an audience with Hitler and the other Nazi leaders.

13

WHEN I RETURNED TO THE SARATOGA the following morning at ten o’clock, as arranged, a very different scene presented itself. There were police everywhere—outside the main entrance of the hotel and in the lobby. When I asked the receptionist to announce my arrival to Max Reles, she told me that no one was being allowed up to the penthouse except the hotel owners and the police.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said the receptionist. “They won’t tell us anything. But there’s a rumor that one of the hotel guests has been murdered by the rebels.”

I turned and walked back to the front door and met the diminutive figure of Meyer Lansky.

“You leaving?” he asked. “Why?”

“They won’t let me upstairs,” I said.

“Come with me.”

I followed Lansky to the elevator car, where a policeman was about to prevent our using it, until his officer recognized the gangster and saluted. Inside the car, Lansky produced a key from his pocket—one like Waxey’s—and used it to take us up to the penthouse. I noticed that his hand was shaking.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

Lansky shook his head.

The elevator doors parted to reveal yet more police, and in the living room we found a captain of militia, Waxey, Jake Lansky, and Moe Dalitz.

“Is it true?” Meyer Lansky asked his brother.

Jake Lansky was a little taller and more coarse-featured than his brother. He had thick, bottle-glass spectacles and eyebrows like a pair of mating badgers. He wore a cream-colored suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. His face had laugh lines, only he wasn’t using them right now. He nodded gravely. “It’s true.”

“Where?”

“In his office.”

I followed the two Lanskys into the office of Max Reles. A uniformed police captain brought up the rear.

Someone had been redecorating the walls. They looked as if Jackson Pollock had come in and actively expressed himself with a ceiling brush and a large pot of red paint. Only it wasn’t red paint that was splashed all over the office; it was blood, and lots of it. Max Reles was going to need a new chinchilla rug, too, except that it wasn’t going to be he who would go to a store to buy a replacement. He was never going to buy anything again—not even a funeral casket, which was what he now needed most. He lay on the floor, still in what seemed to be the same clothes he’d been in the night before, but the blue shirt now had some dark brown spots. He was staring at the cork-tiled ceiling with only one eye. The other eye appeared to be missing. From the look of him, two shots had hit him in the head, but there was a strong case for thinking that at least two or three more had ended up in his back and chest. It seemed like a real gangster-style murder, in that the gunman had done a very thorough job of making sure he was dead. And yet, apart from the police captain who had followed us into the office—more out of curiosity than anything else, it seemed—there were no police in there, no one taking photographs of the body, no one with a measuring tape, nothing of what might normally have been expected. Well, this was Cuba, after all, I told myself, where everything took just that little bit longer to get done, including, perhaps, the dispatching of forensic scientists to the scene of a homicide. Max Reles was already dead, so where was the hurry?

Waxey appeared behind us in the doorway of his dead master’s office. There were tears in his eyes, and in his encyclopedia-sized hand, a white handkerchief that looked as if it might have been tugged off one of the double beds. He sniffed for a moment and then blew his nose loudly, sounding like a passenger ship making port.

Meyer Lansky looked at him with irritation. “So where the hell were you when he got his brains blown out?” he said. “Where were you, Waxey?”

“I was right here,” whispered Waxey. “Like I always am. I thought the boss had gone to bed. After his phone call to F.B. He always had an early night after that. Regular as clockwork. First thing I knew about it was when I came in here at seven o’clock this morning and found him like this. Dead.”

He added the word “dead” as if there had been some doubt about that fact.

“He wasn’t shot with a BB gun, Waxey,” said Lansky. “Didn’t you hear nothing?”

Waxey shook his head, miserably. “Nothing. Like I said.”

The police captain finished lighting a little cigarillo and said, “It’s possible Señor Reles was shot during last night’s fireworks,” he said.

“For Chinese New Year? That would certainly have covered up the sound of any gunshots.”

He was a smallish, handsome, clean-shaven man. His neat olive-green uniform seemed to complement the light brown color of his smooth face. He spoke English with only a trace of a Spanish accent. And all the time he was speaking he leaned casually on the doorjamb, as if doing nothing more pressing than offering a halfhearted solution for fixing a broken-down car. Almost as if he didn’t really care who had murdered Max Reles. And perhaps he didn’t. Even in Batista’s militia there were plenty of people who didn’t much care for the presence of American gangsters in Cuba.

“The fireworks started at midnight,” continued the captain. “They lasted approximately thirty minutes.” He moved through the open sliding glass door and out onto the terrace. “My guess is that during the noise, which was considerable, the assassin shot Señor Reles from out here on the terrace.”

We followed the captain outside.

“Possibly he climbed up from the eighth floor using the scaffolding erected around the hotel sign.”

Meyer Lansky glanced over the wall. “That’s a hell of a climb,” he murmured. “What do you think, Jake?”

Jake Lansky nodded. “The captain is right. The killer had to come up here. Either that or he had a key, in which case he would have to have gotten past Waxey. Which doesn’t seem likely.”

“Not likely,” said his brother. “But all the same, it is possible.”

Waxey shook his head. “No fucking way,” he said. Suddenly his normally whispering voice sounded angry.

“Maybe you were asleep,” said the police captain.

Waxey looked very indignant at this suggestion, which was enough to have Jake Lansky stand between him and the police captain and try to defuse a situation that threatened to get ugly. Anything involving Waxey would have threatened that much.

With one hand placed firmly on Waxey’s chest, Jake Lansky said, “I should introduce you, Meyer. This is Captain Sánchez. He’s from the police station around the corner on Zulueta. Captain Sánchez, this is my brother, Meyer. And this”—he looked at me—“this is . . .” He hesitated for a moment, as though trying to remember not my real name—I could see that he knew what that was—but my false one.

“Carlos Hausner,” I said.

Captain Sánchez nodded and then addressed all of his remarks to Meyer Lansky. “I spoke to His Excellency the president just a few minutes ago,” he said. “First of all, he wishes me to express his sympathies to you, Señor Lansky. For the terrible loss of your friend. He also wishes me to reassure you that the Havana police will do everything in its power to catch the perpetrator of this heinous crime.”

“Thank you,” said Lansky.

“His Excellency tells me he spoke with Señor Reles on the telephone last night, as was his custom every Wednesday evening. The call commenced at exactly eleven forty-five p.m. and terminated at eleven fifty-five. Which would also seem to suggest that the time of death was during the fireworks, between twelve and twelve-thirty. In fact, I am convinced of it. Let me show you why.”

He held out a mangled-looking bullet in the palm of his hand.

“This is a bullet that I dug out of the wall in the study. It looks like a thirty-eight-caliber round. A thirty-eight would be a lot of gun to keep quiet at any time. But during the fireworks, six shots might easily be fired without anyone hearing.”

Meyer Lansky looked at me. “What do you think of that idea?” he asked.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. Max said you used to be a cop. Kind of cop were you anyway?”

“The honest kind.”

“Fuck that. I mean what was your area of investigation?”

“Homicide.”

“So what do you think of what the captain says?”

I shrugged. “I think we’ve been jumping over one guess after another. I think it might be an idea to let a doctor examine the body and see if we can pin down the time of death. Maybe that will tie in with the fireworks, I don’t know. But that would make sense, I think.” I glanced over the floor of the terrace. “I don’t see any shell casings, so either the killer used an automatic and picked them up in the dark, which seems unlikely, or the gun was a revolver. Either way, it would seem best to find the murder weapon as a matter of priority.”

Lansky looked at Captain Sánchez.

“We already looked for it,” said the captain.

“Looked?” I said. “Looked where?”

“The terrace. The penthouse. The eighth floor.”

“Maybe he threw it into that park,” I said, indicating the Campo de Marte. “A gun might land there in the dark and nobody would notice.”

“Then again, maybe he took it with him,” said the captain.

“Maybe. On the other hand, Major Ventura was in the casino last night, which meant there were plenty of police in and around the hotel. I can’t see that anyone who had just shot someone dead would risk running into a cop with a gun that had just been fired six or seven times. Especially if this was a professional killer. Frankly, it looks professional. It takes a cool head to fire that many shots and hit the target several times and expect to get away with it. An amateur would probably have panicked and missed more. Maybe even dropped the gun here. My guess is that he just dumped the gun somewhere on his way out of the hotel. In my experience, all sorts of stuff can get smuggled in and out of a hotel as big as this. Waiters walk around with covered trays. Porters carry bags. Maybe the killer just dropped the gun in a laundry basket.”

Captain Sánchez called one of his men and ordered a search to be made of the Campo de Marte and the hotel laundry baskets.

I went back into the office and, tiptoeing around the bloodstains, stared down at Max Reles. There was something covered with a handkerchief: something bloody that had leaked through the cotton. “What’s that?” I asked the captain when he had finished giving orders to his men.

“His eyeball. It must have popped out when one of the bullets exited the victim’s head.”

I nodded. “Then that’s a hell of a thirty-eight. You might expect that with a forty-five, but not a thirty-eight. May I see the bullet you found, Captain?”

Sánchez handed over the bullet.

I looked at it and nodded. “No, I think you’re right, it does look like a thirty-eight. But something must have given this bullet an extra velocity.”

“Such as?”

“I have no idea.”

“You were a detective, señor?”

“It was a very long time ago. And I didn’t mean to suggest that you don’t know your job, Captain. I’m sure that you have your own way of handling an investigation. But Mr. Lansky here asked me what I thought, and I told him.”

Captain Sánchez sucked the little cigarillo and then dropped it on the floor of the crime scene. He said, “You said Major Ventura was in the casino last night. Does that mean you were here also?”

“Yes. I played backgammon in the casino last night until around ten forty-five, when I came up here to join Señor Reles and his guests for a drink. Mr. Lansky and his brother were among those other guests. And the gentleman in the living room. Mr. Dalitz. Waxey, too. I stayed until about eleven-thirty, when we all left, so that Reles could prepare for his phone call with the president. I’d arranged for my backgammon opponent—Señor García, who owns the Shanghai Theater—to return to the casino and continue our game. Well, I waited, but he didn’t come back. Meanwhile I had a drink with Señor Núñez, the casino manager. Then I went home.”

“At what time was that?”

“Just after twelve-thirty. I remember the time because I’m sure the fireworks ended a few minutes before I got in my car.”

“I see.” The captain lit another cigarillo and allowed some of the smoke to escape from between his extremely white teeth. “So it could have been you who killed Señor Reles, could it not?”

“It could have been, yes. It could have been me who led the attack on the Moncada Barracks, too. But it wasn’t. Max Reles had just given me an extremely well paid job. A job I no longer have. So my motive for killing him looks less than convincing.”

“That’s quite correct, Captain,” said Meyer Lansky. “Max had made Señor Hausner here his general manager.”

Captain Sánchez nodded, as if accepting Lansky’s corroboration of my story; but he wasn’t quite finished with me, and now I was cursing myself for being rash enough to have answered Lansky’s earlier question to me concerning the murder of Max Reles.

“How long did you know the deceased?” asked the captain.

“We first met in Berlin, about twenty years ago. Until a couple of nights ago, I hadn’t seen him since then.”

“And straightaway he offers you a job? He must have thought very highly of you, Señor Hausner.”

“He had his reasons, I suppose.”

“Perhaps you were holding something over his head. Something from the past.”

“You mean like blackmail, Captain?”

“I most certainly do mean that, yes.”

“That might have been true twenty years ago. As a matter of fact, we both had something on each other. But it certainly wasn’t enough to give me any power over the man. Not anymore.”

“And him. Did he hold any power over you?”

“Sure. You could put it that way, why not? He offered me money to work for him. That’s about the most powerful thing there is on this island that I know of.”

The captain pushed his peaked cap onto the back of his head and scratched his forehead. “But I’m still puzzled. Why? Why did he offer you this job?”

“Like I said, he had his reasons. But if you want me to speculate, Captain, I suppose he liked it that I kept my mouth shut for twenty years. That I kept my word to him. That I wasn’t afraid to tell him to go and fuck himself.”

“And maybe you were not afraid to kill him, either.”

I smiled and shook my head.

“No, hear me out,” said the captain. “Max Reles has lived in Havana for many years. He is a law-abiding, taxpaying, upstanding citizen. He’s a friend of the president. Then one day he meets you, someone he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Two or three days later, he’s murdered. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“When you put it like that, I wonder why the hell you don’t arrest me. It would certainly save you the time and trouble of conducting a proper murder investigation with forensic evidence and witnesses who saw me do the shooting. The usual stuff. Run me down to the station, why don’t you? Maybe you can strong-arm a confession out of me before you finish your shift. I can’t imagine it would be the first time you’ve done something like that.”

“You mustn’t believe everything you read in Bohemia, señor.”

“No?”

“Do you really think we torture suspects?”

“Mostly I don’t give the matter any thought at all, Captain. But maybe I’ll go and visit some prisoners on the Isle of Pines and see what they have to say about it and then get back to you. It’ll make a change from picking my feet at home.”

But Sánchez wasn’t listening. He was looking at the revolver one of his men was presenting to him on a towel, like a crown of laurel or wild olive. I heard the man say that the gun had been found in a laundry basket on the eighth floor. There was a red star on the handle. And it certainly looked like the murder weapon. For one thing, it was wearing a silencer.

“It looks like Señor Hausner was right, wouldn’t you say, Captain?” said Meyer Lansky.

Sánchez and the cop turned and went into the living room.

“And not a moment too soon,” I told Lansky. “That stupid cop liked me for it.”

“Didn’t he just? Me, I liked you for the way you spoke to him. It reminded me of me. I suppose that was the murder weapon.”

“I’d bet the hard way on it. That’s a seven-shot Nagant. My guess is they’ll dig seven out of Max’s body and the walls.”

“A Nagant? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Designed by a Belgian. But the red star on the handle means that one’s Russian made,” I said.

“Russian, huh? Are you telling me Max was killed by communists?”

“No, Mr. Lansky, I was telling you about the gun. Soviet murder squads used that type of gun to murder Polish officers in 1940. They shot them in the back of the head and then buried the bodies in the Katyń Forest and later blamed the Germans for it. There were plenty of guns like that in Europe at the end of the war. But oddly, not that many on this side of the Atlantic. Especially not with a Bramit silencer. That alone makes this killing look professional. You see, sir, even with a silencer, all pistols will still make a noise. Maybe enough noise to alert Waxey. But a Nagant’s the only kind of pistol you can silence completely. You see, there’s no gap between the cylinder and the barrel. It’s what they call a ‘closed firing system,’ which means you can suppress whatever noise comes out of the barrel one hundred percent—provided, that is, you have a Bramit silencer. Frankly, it’s the perfect weapon for a clandestine killing. The Nagant would also account for the higher velocity of the thirty-eight-caliber bullet, too. Enough to knock out an eyeball that got in the way. So what I’m saying is this. Whoever shot Max Reles didn’t need to do it during last night’s fireworks. They could have shot him at any time between midnight and when Waxey found the body this morning, and nobody would have heard a damn thing. Oh, and by the way, this isn’t exactly the kind of gun you can buy in your local gun store. Least of all with a silencer. These days the Ivans prefer the much lighter Tokarev TT. That’s an automatic, in case you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know,” agreed Lansky. “But as it happens I’m not as ignorant about the Russians as you might think, Gunther. My family was from Grodno, on the Russian-Polish border. Me and my brother, Jake, we left when we were kids. To get away from the Russians. Jake here knew one of those Polish officers who got themselves killed. People today talk about German anti-Semitism, but for my family, the Russians were just as bad. Maybe worse.”

Jake Lansky nodded. “I think so,” he said. “And so did Pop.”

“So how come you know so much about this stuff?”

“During the war, I was in German military intelligence,” I said. “And for a short while afterward I was in a Soviet POW camp. If I’m cagey about my name, it’s because I killed a couple of Ivans while making my escape from a train bound for a uranium mine in the Urals. I doubt I’d have come back from there. Very few German POWs have ever come back from the Soviet Union. They ever catch up with me, I’m soap on a rope, Mr. Lansky.”

“I figured it was something like that.” Lansky shook his head and glanced down at the dead body. “Someone should cover him up.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Lansky,” I said. “Not yet. It’s just possible that Captain Sánchez will get wise to the proper procedures here.”

“Don’t you worry none about him,” said Lansky. “He gives you any trouble, I’ll call his boss and have him lay off. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. Come on. Let’s get out of this room. I can’t bear to be here any longer. Max was like a second brother to me. I knew him since I was fifteen years old in Brownsville. He was the smartest kid I ever knew. With the proper education Max could have been anything he wanted. Maybe even the president of the United States.”

We went into the living room. Sánchez was there with Waxey and Dalitz. The gun was lying in a plastic bag, on the table where Max and I had eaten lunch less than forty hours before.

“So what happens now?” asked Waxey.

“We bury him,” said Meyer Lansky. “Like a good Jew. That’s what Max would have wanted. When the cops have finished with the body, we got three days to make the arrangements and everything.”

“Leave it to me,” said Jake. “It’d be an honor.”

“Someone ought to tell that girl of his,” said Dalitz.

“Dinah,” whispered Waxey. “Her name is Dinah. They were going to get married. With a rabbi and the whole broken wineglass, everything. She’s Jewish, too, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Dalitz.

“She’ll be all right,” said Meyer Lansky. “Someone ought to tell her, sure, but she’ll be all right. The young always are. Nineteen years old, she’s got her whole life ahead of her. God rest Max’s soul, I thought she was too young for him, but what do I know? You can’t blame a guy for wanting a little piece of happiness. For a guy like Max, Dinah was as good as it gets. But you’re right, Moe, someone ought to tell her.”

“Tell me what? Has something happened? Where’s Max? Why are the police here?”

It was Dinah.

“Well, isn’t anyone going to say anything? Is Max all right? Is he sick? God damn it, what the hell is happening here?”

Then she saw the gun on the table. I suppose she must have guessed the rest, because she started to scream, loudly. It was a sound that could have raised the dead.

But not this time.

14

WAXEY DROVE DINAH BACK to Finca Vigía in the red Cadillac Eldorado. Under the circumstances, perhaps it ought to have been me who took her home. I might have been able to offer Noreen some support in dealing with her daughter’s grief. But Waxey was eager to get out from under Meyer Lansky’s shrewd, searching eye, as if he felt the Jewish gangster suspected him of some involvement in the murder of Max Reles. Besides, it was much more likely that I’d only have been in the way. I wasn’t much of a shoulder to cry on. Not anymore. Not since the war, when so many German women had, of necessity, learned to cry by themselves.

Grief: I no longer had the patience for it. What did it matter if you grieved for people when they died? It certainly couldn’t bring them back. And they weren’t even particularly grateful for your grief. The living always get over the dead. That’s what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they’d only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when I felt equal to the task of driving down to the Hemingway house to offer my sympathies. Despite the fact that Max’s death had done me out of a salary worth twenty-thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t sorry he was dead. But for Dinah’s sake I was willing to pretend.

The Pontiac wasn’t there, just a white Oldsmobile with a sun visor I seemed to recognize.

Ramón admitted me to the house, and I found Dinah in her room. She was seated in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, watched closely by a glum-looking water buffalo. The buffalo reminded me of myself, and it was perhaps easy to see why he was looking glum: Dinah’s suitcase was open on her bed. It was packed neatly with her clothes, as if she were preparing to leave the country. On a table by the arm of her chair were a drink and a hardwood ashtray. Her eyes were red, but she seemed to be all cried out.

“I came to see how you are,” I said.

“As you can see,” she said, calmly.

“Going somewhere?”

“So you were a detective.”

I smiled. “That’s what Max used to say. When he wanted to needle me.”

“And did it?”

“At the time, yes, it did. But there’s not much that gets to me now. I’m rather more impervious these days.”

“Well, that’s a lot more than Max can say.”

I let that one go.

“What would you say if I told you that my mother killed him?” she said.

“I’d say that it might be best to keep a wild thought like that to yourself. Not all of Max’s friends are as forgetful as me.”

“But I saw the gun,” she said. “The murder weapon. In the penthouse at the Saratoga. It was my mother’s gun. The one Ernest gave her.”

“It’s a common enough gun,” I said. “I saw plenty of guns like that during the war.”

“Her gun is missing,” said Dinah. “I already looked for it.”

I was shaking my head. “Do you remember the other day? When you said you thought she was suicidal? I took the gun away just in case she decided to use it on herself. I should have mentioned it at the time. I’m sorry.”

“You’re lying,” she said.

She was right, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “No, I’m not,” I said. “The gun is missing, and so is she.”

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation for why she’s not here.”

“Which is that she murdered him. She did it. Or Alfredo López. That’s his car out there. Neither of them liked Max. One time Noreen as good as told me that she wanted to kill him. To stop me from marrying him.”

“Just how much do you really know about your late boyfriend?”

“I know he wasn’t exactly a saint, if that’s what you mean. He never professed to be.” She flushed. “What are you driving at?”

“Just this: Max was a very long way from being a saint. You won’t like this, but you’re going to hear it anyway. Max Reles was a gangster. During Prohibition he was a ruthless bootlegger. Max’s brother, Abe, was a hit man for the mob before someone tossed him out of a hotel window.”

“I’m not listening to this.”

Dinah shook her head and stood up, but I pushed her back down onto the chair again.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “You’re listening to it because somehow you’ve never heard it before. Or if you did, then maybe you just buried your head in the sand like some stupid ostrich. You’re going to listen to it because it’s the truth. Every damned word. Max Reles was into every dirty racket that there is. More recently he was part of an organized crime syndicate started in the 1930s by Charlie Luciano and Meyer Lansky. He stayed in business because he didn’t mind murdering his rivals.”

“Shut up,” she said. “It’s not true.”

“He told me himself that he and his brother murdered two men, the Shapiro brothers, in 1933. One of them he buried alive. After Prohibition ended, he went into labor racketeering. Some of it was in Berlin, which was where I first met him. While he was there, he murdered a German businessman called Rubusch who refused to be intimidated by him. I myself witnessed him murder two other people. One of them was a prostitute, Dora, with whom he had been conducting a relationship. He shot her in the head and dumped her body in a lake. She was still breathing when she hit the water.”

“Get out,” she snapped. “Get out of here.”

“And maybe your mother already told you about the man he murdered on a passenger ship between New York and Hamburg.”

“I didn’t believe her, and I don’t believe you now.”

“Sure you do. You believe all of it. Because you’re not stupid, Dinah. You’ve always known what kind of a man he was. Maybe you liked that. Maybe it gave you a cheap little thrill to be near someone like that. It can happen like that sometimes. There’s a fascination all of us feel for the kind of people who inhabit the shadows. Maybe that’s it, I don’t know, and I really don’t care. But if you didn’t know Max Reles was a gangster, then you certainly suspected as much. Strongly suspected, because of the company he kept. Meyer and Jake Lansky. Santo Trafficante. Norman Rothman. Vincent Alo. Every one a gangster. With Lansky the most notorious gangster of them all. Just four years ago Lansky was facing a congressional committee investigating organized crime in the United States. So was Max. That’s why they came to Cuba.

“I know of six people that Max has murdered, but I’m certain there are plenty more. People who crossed him. People who owed him money. People who were just inconveniently in his way. He’d have killed me, too, but I had something on him. Something he couldn’t afford to let be known. Max was shot. But his own weapon of choice was an ice pick, with which he stabbed people in the ear. That’s the kind of man he was, Dinah. A rotten, murdering gangster. One of many rotten, murdering gangsters who run the hotels and casinos here in Havana, any one of whom probably had his own very good reasons for wanting Max Reles out of the way.

“So keep your stupid mouth shut about your mother. I’m telling you now that she had nothing to do with it. You keep your mouth shut, or she’ll wind up dead on account of you. You, too, if you happen to get in the way. You don’t tell anyone what you told me. Got that?”

Dinah nodded, sullenly.

I pointed at the glass by her arm. “You drinking that?”

She looked at it and then shook her head. “No. I don’t even like whiskey.”

I reached forward and picked it up. “Do you mind?”

“Go ahead.”

I poured the contents into my mouth and sucked on them for a while before letting the whiskey drip down my throat. “I talk too much,” I said. “But this certainly helps.”

She shook her head. “All right. You’re right. I did suspect what he was like. But I was afraid to leave him. Afraid of what he might do. In the beginning it was just a bit of fun. I was bored here. Max introduced me to people I’d only ever read about. Frank Sinatra. Nat King Cole. Can you imagine it?” She nodded. “You’re right. And what you said. I had it coming.”

“We all make mistakes. God knows, I’ve made a few myself.” There was a pack of cigarettes on top of her clothes in the suitcase. I picked them up. “Do you mind? I’ve given up. But I could use a smoke.”

“Help yourself.”

I lit it quickly and sent some smoke down my hatch to go after the whiskey.

“Where will you go?”

“The States. To Rhode Island and Brown University, like my mother wanted. I suppose.”

“What about the singing?”

“I suppose Max told you that, did he?”

“As a matter of fact, he did. He seemed to think very highly of your talents.”

Dinah smiled sadly. “I can’t sing,” she said. “Although Max seemed to think I could. I don’t know why. I suppose he thought the best of me in all respects, including that one. But I can’t sing, and I can’t act. For a while it was fun pretending that any of that might be possible. But in my heart of hearts I knew it was all pie in the sky.”

A car came up the drive. I looked out of the open window and saw the Pontiac pull up next to the Oldsmobile. The doors opened, and a man and a woman got out. They weren’t dressed for the beach, but that was where they had been, all right, and you didn’t need to be a detective to know it. With Alfredo López, the sand was mostly on his knees and on his elbows; with Noreen it was almost everywhere else. They didn’t see me. They were too busy grinning at each other and dusting themselves off as they sauntered up the steps to the front door. Her smile faltered a little as she caught sight of me in the window. Perhaps she blushed. Maybe.

I went into the hall and met them as they came through the front door. By now the grins on their faces had turned to guilt, but it had nothing to do with the death of Max Reles. Of that much I was certain.

“Bernie,” she said awkwardly. “What a lovely surprise.”

“If you say so.”

Noreen went to the drinks trolley and began fixing herself a large one. López was smoking a cigarette and looking sheepish while pretending to read a magazine from a rack as big as a newspaper kiosk.

“What brings you down here?” she asked.

So far she had done a great job of not meeting my eye. Not that I was trying to put it in her way, exactly. But both of us knew that I knew what she and López had been doing. You could actually smell it on them. Like fried food. I decided to offer a swift explanation and then make myself scarce.

“I came to see if Dinah was all right,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t she be all right? Has something happened?” Noreen was looking at me, her embarrassment now temporarily overcome by concern for her daughter. “Where is she? Is Dinah all right?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “But Max Reles isn’t looking his best right now, on account of how someone pumped seven bullets into him late last night. As a matter of fact, he’s dead.”

Noreen stopped making her drink for a moment. “I see,” she said. “Poor Max.” Then she pulled a face. “Listen to me. What a damn hypocrite I am. As if I’m actually sorry he’s dead. And it’s not like I’m in the least bit surprised, given who and what he was.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry to sound callous. How’s Dinah taken it? Oh, Lord—she wasn’t there, was she, when he . . . ?”

“No, she wasn’t,” I said. “Dinah’s just fine. Already getting over it, wouldn’t you know?”

“Do the police have any idea who killed Max?” asked López.

“Now, that’s a question, isn’t it?” I said. “I formed the impression that this is one crime the police are hoping will solve itself. Either that or someone else will solve it for them.”

López nodded. “Yes, you’re probably right, of course. The Havana militia can hardly start asking too many questions without the risk of upsetting the whole rotten apple cart. In case it turns out that one of Havana’s other gangsters should prove to be responsible for Max’s murder. There’s never been a gangland murder in Cuba. Not of a boss, anyway. The last thing I imagine Batista needs is a gangland war on his doorstep.” He smiled. “Yes, I think I’m pleased to say that the politics of this thing look fiendishly complicated.”

As it turned out, things were a lot more complicated than that.

15

I GOT BACK AROUND SEVEN and ate the cold dinner that Yara had left for me on a covered plate. While I ate I looked through the evening newspaper. There was a nice picture of the president’s wife, Marta, opening a new school in Boyeros; and something about the forthcoming visit to Havana of the U.S. senator from Florida, George Smathers. But Max Reles didn’t get a mention, not even in the obituaries column. After dinner I fixed myself a drink. There wasn’t much to that. I just poured some vodka from the refrigerator into a clean glass and drank it. I was settling down to take the place of Montaigne’s dead friend. It seemed a pretty good definition of a reader. Then the telephone rang, which reminded me that there are times when a dead friend is your best friend.

But it wasn’t a friend. It was Meyer Lansky, and he sounded annoyed.

“Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been ringing all afternoon.”

“I went to see Max’s girl, Dinah.”

“Oh. How is she?”

“Like you said. She’ll be all right.”

“Listen, Gunther, I want to talk to you, only not on the telephone. I don’t like telephones. Never have liked them. This number you’re on: 7-8075. That’s a Vedado number, right?”

“Yes. I live on Malecón.”

“Then we’re practically neighbors. I’m in a suite at the National Hotel. Could you come here at nine?”

I turned over a few polite rebuffs in my mind, but none of them sounded polite enough for a gangster like Meyer Lansky. So I said, “Sure. Why not? I could use a stroll along the seafront.”

“Do me a favor, will you?”

“I thought that’s what I was doing.”

“On your way over here, get me a couple of packs of Parliament, will you? The hotel’s run out.”

I walked west, along Malecón, bought Lansky’s smokes, and went into Havana’s largest hotel. This was more like a cathedral than Havana’s cathedral on Empedrado. The lobby was easily bigger than San Cristóbal’s nave, with a fine painted wooden ceiling that would have been the envy of many a medieval palacio. It smelled a lot better than the cathedral, too, since the hotel lobby was swarming with well-washed or even scented human traffic, although, to my tutored eye, the hotel itself looked badly understaffed, with long lines of guests in front of the reception desk, the cashier, and the concierge, like so many people queuing for tickets in a railway station. Somewhere, someone was playing a tinny piano that brought to mind a dance class in a girls’ ballet school. Four long-case clocks were arranged along the length of the lobby. They were not synchronized, and they struck the hour consecutively, one after the other, as if time itself was an elastic concept in Havana. Near the elevator doors was a wall adorned with a full-length picture of the president and his wife, both dressed in white—she in a two-piece tailored suit, and he in a tropical-weight military uniform. They looked like a cut-rate version of the Peróns.

I rode the elevator to the top of the building. In contrast with the railway-station atmosphere of the lobby, the executive floor was sepulchrally quiet. Very possibly it was even quieter than that, since most sepulchers don’t have carpets that run to ten dollars a square meter. The doors to the executive suites were all louvered, which may have been meant to help the free flow of air or cigar smoke. The whole floor smelled like a tobacco grower’s humidor.

Lansky’s suite was the only one with its own doorman. He was a tall man, wearing square sleeves and with a chest like a housekeeping cart. He turned to face me as I walked as silently as Hiawatha along the corridor, and I let him pat me down as if he were looking for his matches in my pockets. He didn’t find them. Then he opened the door, admitting me to a suite the size of an empty billiard hall. The atmosphere was every bit as hushed. But instead of another Jew with an overactive pituitary gland, I was met by a petite, green-eyed redhead in her forties who looked and sounded like a New York hairdresser. She smiled pleasantly, told me her name was Teddy, and that she was Meyer Lansky’s wife, and ushered me through a living room and a set of sliding windows onto a wraparound balcony.

Lansky was seated on a wicker chair, staring out into darkness over the sea, like Canute.

“You can’t see it,” he said. “The sea. But you can sure smell it. And you can hear it. Listen. Listen to that sound.” He held up his forefinger as if drawing my attention to the song of a nightingale on Berkeley Square.

I listened, carefully. In my unreliable ears it sounded very much like the sea.

“The way the sea draws back and off the beach and then begins again. Everything in this lousy world changes, but not that sound. For thousands of years that sound has always been exactly the same. That’s a sound I never get tired of.” He sighed. “And there are times when I get very tired of almost everything. Do you ever get like that, Gunther? Do you ever get tired?”

“Tired? Mr. Lansky, there are times when I get so tired of things that I think maybe I must be dead. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m sleeping all right, life might be almost intolerable.”

I gave him his cigarettes. He started to get out his wallet until I stopped him. “Keep it,” I told him. “I like the idea of you owing me money. It feels safer than the other way round.”

Lansky smiled. “Drink?”

“No, thanks. I like to keep a clear head when I’m talking business with Lucifer.”

“Is that what I am?”

I shrugged. “It takes one to know one.” I watched him light one of the cigarettes and added, “I mean, that is why I’m here, isn’t it? Business? I can’t imagine you want to reminisce about what a great guy Max was.”

Lansky gave me a narrow look.

“Before he died, Max told me all about you. Or at least as much as he knew. Gunther, I’ll come straight to the point. There were three reasons Max wanted you to work for him. You’re an ex-cop, you know hotels, and you’re not affiliated with any of the families who’ve got business here in Havana. I’ve got two of those reasons and one of my own that make me think you’re the man to find out who killed Max. Hear me out, please. The one thing we can’t have here in Havana is a gang war. It’s bad enough we’ve got the rebels. More trouble we don’t need. We can’t rely on the cops to investigate this thing properly. You must have gathered that yourself from your conversation with Captain Sánchez this morning. Actually, he’s not a bad cop at all. But I liked the way you spoke to him. And it strikes me that you’re not someone who’s easily intimidated. Not by cops. Not by me. Not by my associates.

“Anyway, I spoke to some of the other gentlemen you met last night, and we’re all of us of the opinion that we don’t want you managing the Saratoga, like you agreed with Max. Instead, we want you to investigate Max’s murder. Captain Sánchez will give you any assistance you require, but you can have carte blanche, so to speak. All we want is to avoid any possible dispute among ourselves. You do this, Gunther, you investigate this murder, and I’ll owe you more than the price of two packs of cigarettes. For one thing, I’ll pay you what Max was going to pay you. And for another, I’ll be your friend. You think about that before you say no. I can be a good friend to people who’ve done me a service. Anyway, my associates and myself, we’re all agreed. You can go anywhere. You can speak to anyone. The bosses. The soldiers. Wherever the evidence takes you. Sánchez won’t interfere. You say jump, he’ll ask how high.”

“It’s been a long time since I investigated a murder, Mr. Lansky.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’m not as diplomatic as I used to be, either. Dag Hammarskjöld, I am not. And just suppose I do find out who killed Max. What then? Have you considered that?”

“You let me worry about that, Gunther. Just make sure you speak to everyone. And that everyone can give you an alibi. Norman Rothman and Lefty Clark at the Sans Souci. Santo Trafficante at the Tropicana. My own people, the Cellini brothers at the Montmartre. Joe Stassi, Tom McGinty, Charlie White, Joe Rivers, Eddie Levinson, Moe Dalitz, Sam Tucker, Vincent Alo. Not forgetting the Cubans, of course: Amedeo Barletta and Amleto Battisti at the Hotel Sevilla. Relax. I’ll supply you with a list to work from. A list of suspects, if you like. With my name at the top.”

“That could take a while.”

“Naturally. You’ll want to be thorough. And just so as everyone knows it’s fair, you shouldn’t leave anyone out. Justice being seen to be done, so to speak.” He tossed the cigarette over the balcony. “You’ll do it, then?”

I nodded. I still hadn’t thought of any rebuffs that were polite enough to give the little man, especially after he’d offered to be my friend. Plus, there was a flip side to that.

“You can start right away.”

“That would probably be best.”

“What will you do first?”

I shrugged. “Go back to the Saratoga. Find out if anyone saw anything. Review the crime scene. Speak to Waxey, I guess.”

“You’ll have to find him first,” said Lansky. “Waxey’s gone missing. He drove the broad to her house this morning, and no one’s seen him since.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’ll turn up at the funeral.”

“When’s that?”

“Day after tomorrow. At the Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa.”

“I know it.”

My route back home from the National took me right past the Casa Marina again. And this time I went in.

16

THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS BRIGHT but windy, and half the winter sea was crashing down on the Malecón, like a deluge sent by a God saddened at the wickedness of mankind. I woke early, thinking that I would have liked to sleep longer and probably would have done so, except for the fact that the phone was ringing. Suddenly everyone in Havana seemed to want to speak to me.

It was Captain Sánchez.

“How’s the great detective this morning?”

He sounded like he didn’t much like the idea of my playing the sleuth for Lansky. I wasn’t too happy about it myself.

“Still in bed,” I said. “I had a late night.”

“Interviewing suspects?”

I thought of the girls at the Casa Marina and the way Doña Marina, who also ran a chain of lingerie stores across Havana, liked it when you asked her girls lots of questions before deciding which one to take up to the third floor. “You could say that.”

“Think you’re going to find the killer today?”

“Probably not today,” I said. “Wrong kind of weather for it.”

“You’re right,” said Sánchez. “It’s a day for finding bodies, not the people who killed them. Suddenly we’ve got corpses all over Havana. There’s one in the harbor at the petrochemical works in Regla.”

“Am I an undertaker? Why tell me?”

“Because he was driving a car when he went into the water. Not just any car, mind you. This is a big red Cadillac Eldorado. A convertible.”

I closed my eyes for a second. Then I said, “Waxey.”

“We wouldn’t have found him at all but for the fact that a fishing boat dragging its anchor snagged the car’s bumper and pulled it up to the surface. I’m just on my way over to Regla now. I was thinking that maybe you’d like to come along.”

“Why not? It’s been a while since I went fishing.”

“Be outside your apartment building in fifteen minutes. We’ll drive over there together. On the way maybe I can pick up a few tips from you on how to be a detective.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that.”

“I was joking,” he said stiffly.

“Then you’re off to a great start, Captain. You’ll need a sense of humor if you’re going to be a good detective. That’s my first tip.”

Twenty minutes later we were driving south, east, and then north around the harbor, into Regla. It was a small industrial town that was easily identified from a distance by the plumes of smoke emanating from the petrochemical plant, although historically it was better known as a center of Santería and as the place where Havana’s corridas had been fought until Spain lost control of the island.

Sánchez drove the large black police sedan like a fighting bull, charging red lights, braking at the last moment, or turning suddenly and without warning to the left or the right. By the time we skidded to a halt at the end of a long pier, I was ready to stick a sword in his muscular neck.

A small group of policemen and dockworkers had gathered to view the arrival of a barge and the drowned car it had taken from the fishing boat’s anchor and then hoisted on top of a large heap of coal. The car itself looked like a fantastic variety of sport fish, a red marlin—if there was such a thing—or a gigantic species of crustacean.

I followed Sánchez down a series of stone steps made slippery from the recent high tide, and as one of the men on the barge grabbed hold of a mooring ring, we jumped onto the moving deck.

The barge captain came forward and spoke to Sánchez, but I didn’t understand his very broad Cuban accent, which was not uncommon whenever I moved outside Havana. He was a bad-tempered sort with an expensive-looking cigar, which was the cleanest and most respectable thing about him. The rest of the crew stood around chewing gum and awaiting an order. Finally one came, and a crewman jumped down onto the coal mountain and drew a tarpaulin over it so that Sánchez and I might climb up to the car without becoming as dirty as he was. Sánchez and I clambered down onto the tarpaulin and picked our way up the shifting slope of coal to look over the car. The white hood—which was up—was dirty but largely intact. The front bumper where the fishing boat had hooked it was badly out of shape. The interior was more like an aquarium. But somehow the red Cadillac still managed to look like the handsomest car in Havana.

The crewman, still mindful of Sánchez’s well-pressed uniform, had gone ahead of us to open the driver door on the captain’s say-so. When the word came and the door opened, water flooded out of the car, soaking the crewman’s legs and amusing his chattering colleagues.

The driver of the car slowly leaned out like a man falling asleep in the bath. For a moment I thought the steering wheel would check his exit, but the barge wallowed in the choppy, undulating sea, then came up again, tipping the dead man onto the tarpaulin like a dirty dish-cloth. It was Waxey, all right, and while he looked like a drowned man, it wasn’t the sea that had killed him. Nor was it loud music, although his ears, or what was left of them, were encrusted with what resembled dark red coral.

“Pity,” said Sánchez.

“I didn’t really know him,” I said.

“The car, I mean,” said Sánchez. “The Cadillac Eldorado is just about my favorite car in the world.” He shook his head in admiration. “Beautiful. I like the red. Red’s nice. But me, I think I’d have had a black one, with whitewall tires and a white hood. Black has much more class, I think.”

“Red seems to be the color of the moment,” I said.

“You mean his ears?”

“I wasn’t talking about his manicure.”

“A bullet in each ear, it looks like. That’s a message, right?”

“Like it was Cable and Wireless, Captain.”

“He heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear.”

“Flip the coin again. He didn’t hear something he was supposed to hear.”

“You mean like someone shooting his employer seven times in the adjoining room?”

I nodded.

“Think he was involved in the shooting?” he asked.

“Go ahead and ask him.”

“I guess we’ll never know for sure.” Sánchez took off his peaked cap and scratched his head. “Too bad,” he said.

“The car again?”

“That I couldn’t have interviewed him first.”

17

JEWS HAD BEEN ARRIVING IN CUBA since the time of Columbus. Many who had been forbidden entry to the United States of America more recently than that had been given sanctuary by the Cubans, who, with reference to the Jews’ most common country of origin, called them polacos. Judging from the number of graves in the Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa, there were a lot more polacos in Cuba than might have been thought. The cemetery was on the road to Santa Fé, behind an impressive gated entrance. It wasn’t exactly the Mount of Olives, but the graves, all white marble, were set on a pleasant hill overlooking a mango plantation. There was even a small monument to the Jewish victims of the Second World War in which, it was said, several bars of soap had been buried as a symbolic reminder of their supposed fate.

I might have told anyone who was interested that while it was now widely believed that Nazi scientists had made soap from the corpses of murdered Jews, this had never actually happened. The practice of calling Jews “soap” had simply been a very unpleasant joke among members of the SS, and merely another way of dehumanizing—and sometimes threatening—their most numerous victims. Since human hair from concentration camp inmates had commonly been used on an industrial scale, describing Jews as “felt”—felt for clothes, roofing materials, carpeting, and in the German car industry—might have been a more accurate epithet.

But this wasn’t what people arriving for Max Reles’s funeral wanted to hear about.

Myself, I was little surprised when I was offered a yarmulke outside the gate of Guanabacoa. Not that I didn’t expect to cover my head at a Jewish funeral. I was already wearing a hat. What surprised me about being offered a yarmulke was the person handing them out. This was Szymon Woytak, the cadaverous Pole who owned the Nazi memorabilia store on Manrique. He was wearing a yarmulke himself, and I took this and his presence at the funeral to be a strong clue that he was also a Jew.

“Who’s minding the store?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I always close the shop for a couple of hours when I’m helping out my brother. He’s the rabbi reading kaddish for your friend Max Reles.”

“And who are you? The program seller?”

“I’m the cantor. I sing the Psalms and whatever else the deceased’s family requests.”

“How about the Horst Wessel song?”

Woytak smiled patiently and handed the person behind me a yarmulke. “Look,” he said, “everyone has to make a living, right?”

There was no family. Not unless you counted Havana’s Jewish mob. The chief mourners seemed to be the Lansky brothers; Meyer’s wife, Teddy; Moe Dalitz; Norman Rothman; Eddie Levinson; Morris Kleinman; and Sam Tucker. But there were plenty of Gentiles other than myself present: Santo Trafficante, Vincent Alo, Tom McGinty, and the Cellini brothers, to name just a few. What was interesting to me—and might have been of interest to the racial theorists of the Third Reich, such as Alfred Rosenberg—was how Jewish everyone looked when he was wearing a yarmulke.

Also present were several government officials and policemen, including Captain Sánchez. Batista did not attend the funeral of his former partner for fear of being assassinated. Or so Sánchez told me afterward.

Noreen and Dinah didn’t come, either. Not that I had expected them to come. Noreen didn’t come, for the simple reason that she had feared and detested Max Reles in equal measure. Dinah didn’t come, because she had already returned to the United States. Since this was exactly what Noreen had always wanted her daughter to do, I imagined she was now feeling too happy to come to a funeral. For all I knew, she had gone to the beach with López again. Which wasn’t any of my business. Or so I kept telling myself.

As the pallbearers carried the casket, haltingly, to the graveside, Captain Sánchez appeared at my elbow. We still weren’t friends, but I was beginning to like him.

“What’s the German opera where the murderer gets fingered by the victim?” he asked.

“Götterdämmerung,” I said. “The Twilight of the Gods.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe Reles will point him out to us.”

“I wonder how that would play out in court.”

“This is Cuba, my friend,” said Sánchez. “In this country, people still believe in Baron Samedi.” He lowered his voice. “And talking of the voodoo master of death, we have our own creature of the invisible world here with us today. He who escorts souls from the land of the living to the graveyard. Not to mention two of his most sinister avatars. The man in the beige uniform who looks like a younger General Franco? That’s Colonel Antonio Blanco Rico, head of the Cuban military intelligence service. Take my word for it, señor, that man has made more souls disappear in Cuba than any voodoo spirit. The man to his left is Colonel Mariano Faget, of the militia. During the war Faget was in charge of a counterespionage unit that successfully targeted several Nazi agents who were reporting on the movements of Cuban and American to German submarines.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were shot by firing squad.”

“Interesting. And the third man?”

“That’s Faget’s CIA liaison officer, Lieutenant José Castaño Quevedo. A very nasty piece of work.”

“And why are they here, exactly?”

“To pay their respects. It’s certain that from time to time the president would ask your friend Max to pay off these men by making sure they won in his casino. Actually, most of the time they don’t even have to take the trouble to gamble. They just go into the salon privé at the Saratoga, or for that matter any of the other casinos, collect several handfuls of chips, and cash them in. Of course, Señor Reles knew exactly how to look after men such as these. And it is certain they will have taken his death very personally. So they too are very interested in the progress of your inquiry.”

“They are?”

“For sure. You may not know it, but it’s not just Meyer Lansky you’re working for, it’s them, too.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

“You should be especially careful of Lieutenant Quevedo. He is very ambitious, and that’s a bad thing to be if you’re a policeman here in Cuba.”

“Aren’t you ambitious, Captain Sánchez?”

“I intend to be. But not right now. I will be ambitious after the election in October. Until I see who wins, I will be very happy to achieve very little in my career. Incidentally, the lieutenant has asked me to spy on you.”

“That seems rather presumptuous, you being a captain.”

“In Cuba, one’s rank is not an indicator of one’s importance. For example, the head of the National Police is General Canizares, but everyone knows that the power lies with Blanco Rico and with Colonel Piedra, the head of our Bureau of Investigation. Similarly, before he was president, Batista was the most powerful man in Cuba. Now that he is, he isn’t, if you follow me. These days, all power lies with the army and the police. Which is why Batista always thinks he is a target for assassination. In a sense, that is his job. To draw attention away from others. Sometimes it is best to appear to be what you are not. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Captain. That has been the story of my life.”

18

A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER I was at the Tropicana watching the show while I waited to speak to the Cellini brothers. Bare flesh was the order of the day for the performers, and lots of it. They tried to make it seem more glamorous by wearing some thoughtfully placed sequins and triangles, but the result was much the same: it was bacon with cheese on top, however you cooked it. Most of the chorus boys looked as if they’d have been a lot happier wearing a cocktail dress. Most of the chorus girls didn’t look happy at all. All of them smiled, but the smiles on their rigid little faces had been molded on, back at the doll factory. Meanwhile they danced with all the joie de vivre of kids who knew that one fluffed pirouette or ill-timed lift would earn them a one-way ticket back to Matanzas or whatever crummy peasant town they came from.

On Truffin Avenue in the Havana suburb of Marianao, the Tropicana occupied the lushly landscaped gardens of a mansion—now demolished—formerly owned by the U.S. ambassador to Cuba. The mansion had been replaced by a building of striking modernity with five reinforced concrete semicircular vaults connecting a series of glass ceilings, which created the illusion of a semi-feral show staged under the stars and the trees. Next to this amphitheater, which seemed like something out of a pornographic science-fiction movie, was a smaller glass ceiling that housed a casino. And here there was even a salon privé with an armor-plated door, behind which government officials could gamble without fear of assassination.

I wasn’t interested in any of that any more than I was interested in the show, or listening to the band. Mostly I just watched the ash on the end of my cigar or the faces of the suckers at the other tables: women with bare shoulders and too much makeup, and men with Vaselined hair, clip-on ties, and Cricketeer suits. A couple of times the showgirls came parading around the tables just so that you could get a closer look at their costumes and wonder how something so small could keep a girl decent. My eyes were still brimful of wonder when, to my surprise, I saw Noreen Eisner coming through the club in my direction. And, sidestepping a girl who was all breasts and feathers, she sat down opposite me.

Noreen was probably the one woman at the Tropicana who wasn’t displaying either some cleavage or the whole toy shop. She wore a two-piece lavender-colored suit with tailored pockets, high shoes, and a couple of strings of pearls. The band was too loud for her to say anything or for me to hear it, and until the number finished, we just sat looking at each other dumbly and tapping our fingers impatiently on the table. It gave me plenty of time to wonder what was so urgent that she had driven all the way from Finca Vigía. I certainly didn’t think her being there was a coincidence. I supposed she had gone to my apartment first, and Yara had told her where I was. Maybe Yara would have let off some steam about how I hadn’t allowed her to come with me to the Tropicana, which meant that Noreen’s arrival wouldn’t have helped persuade her that my visit to the nightclub was for the strictly business reasons I had claimed. There probably would be some kind of scene when I got home.

I hoped Noreen was there to tell me what I wanted to hear. Certainly she looked grave enough. And sober, too. Which made a change. She was carrying a navy blue beaded evening bag with a petit-point floral chintz decoration. Opening the silver metal clasp, she took out a pack of Old Gold and lit one with a pearl gray lacquer cigarette lighter with little rhinestones on it, the only thing about her that was at all in keeping with the Tropicana.

Like most bands in Havana, this one took a while longer than was tolerable. I didn’t own a gun in Cuba, but if I had, I might have enjoyed using a set of maracas or a conga drum for a little target practice—really, any Latin American instrument, as long as it was actually in use at the time. Finally I could stand it no longer. I stood up and, taking Noreen’s hand, led her out.

In the foyer, she said, “This is where you spend your spare time, is it?” Out of habit she spoke German to me. “So much for Montaigne.”

“As a matter of fact, he already wrote an essay about this place and the custom of wearing clothes. Or not wearing them. If we were born with the need for wearing petticoats and trousers, nature, he says, would no doubt have equipped us with a thicker skin to withstand the rigors of the seasons. On the whole, I think he’s pretty good. Gets it right most of the time. About the only thing that man doesn’t explain is why you came all the way over here to see me. I’ve got my own ideas about that.”

“Let’s take a walk in the garden,” she said, quietly.

We went outside. The Tropicana’s garden was a jungle paradise of royal palms and towering mamoncillo trees. According to Caribbean wisdom, girls learn the art of kissing by eating the sweet flesh of the mamoncillo fruit. Somehow I had the feeling that kissing me was the last thing on Noreen’s mind.

In the center of the sweeping driveway was a large marble fountain that had once graced the entrance of the National Hotel. The fountain was a round basin surrounded by eight life-sized naked nymphs. It was rumored that the Tropicana’s owners had paid thirty thousand pesos for the fountain, but it reminded me of one of those Berlin culture schools once run by Adolf Koch at Lake Motzen for overweight German matrons who liked to throw medicine balls at each other in the nude. And, in spite of what Montaigne has to say about the matter, it made me glad that mankind had invented the needle and thread.

“So,” I said, “what did you want to tell me?”

“This isn’t easy for me to say.”

“You’re a writer. You’ll think of something.”

She puffed silently on her cigarette, considered this idea for a moment, and then shrugged, as if she’d thought of a way, after all. Her voice was soft. In the moonlight she looked as lovely as ever. Seeing her, I was filled with a dull ache of longing, as if the scent of the mamoncillo’s greenish-white flowers contained some sort of magical juice that made fools like me fall in love with queens like her.

“Dinah’s gone back to the States,” she said, still not quite coming to the point. “But you knew about that, didn’t you?”

I nodded. “Is this about Dinah?”

“I’m worried about her, Bernie.”

I shook my head. “She’s left the island. She’s going to Brown. I don’t see what you could possibly have to worry about. I mean, isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Oh, sure. No, it’s the way she suddenly changed her mind. About everything.”

“Max Reles was murdered. I think that might have had something to do with her decision.”

“Those gangsters he associated with. You know some of them, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do they have any idea who killed Max yet?”

“None at all.”

“Good.” She threw away her cigarette and quickly lit another. “You’ll probably think me crazy. But you see, it crossed my mind that, perhaps, Dinah might have had something to do with his murder.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one thing, my gun—the one Ernest gave me—it’s gone. It was a Russian revolver. I had it lying around the house somewhere, and now I can’t find it. Fredo—Alfredo López? My lawyer friend has a friend in the police who told him that Reles had been shot with a Russian revolver. It sort of made me wonder. If Dinah could have done it.”

I was shaking my head. I hardly liked to tell her that Dinah had suspected that her own mother might be the murderer.

“There’s all that, and there’s the fact that she seemed to get over it so quickly. Like she wasn’t in love with him at all. I mean, didn’t it make any of those Mafia guys suspicious that she wasn’t at the funeral? Like she didn’t care?”

“I think people thought she was probably too upset to go.”

“That’s my point, Bernie. She wasn’t. And this is why I’m worried. If the Mafia comes around to the opinion that she did have something to do with Max’s murder, then maybe they’ll do something about it. Maybe they’ll send someone after her.”

“I don’t think it works like that, Noreen. Right now all they’re really concerned about is the possibility that Max Reles was killed by one of their own. You see, if it turns out that one of the other hotel and casino owners was behind the killing, then there could be a gang war. That would be very bad for business. Which is the last thing they want. Besides, it’s me they’ve asked to help find out who killed Max.”

“The mob has asked you to investigate Max’s murder?”

“In my capacity as a former homicide detective.”

Noreen shook her head. “Why you?”

“I guess they think I can be objective, independent. More objective than the Cuban militia. Dinah’s nineteen years old, Noreen. She strikes me as a lot of things. As a selfish little bitch, for one. But she’s not a murderer. Besides, it takes a certain kind of person to climb over a wall eight floors up and shoot a man seven times in cold blood. Wouldn’t you say?”

Noreen nodded and stared off into the distance. She dropped her second cigarette on the ground, half smoked, and then lit a third. Something was still troubling her.

“So, you can rest assured I’m not about to lay the blame at Dinah’s door.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it. She is a bitch, you’re right. But she’s mine and I’d do absolutely anything to keep her safe.”

“I know that.” I flicked my cigar at the fountain. It hit one of the nymphs on her bare behind and fell into the water. “Is that really what you wanted to tell me?”

“Yes,” she said. She thought for a moment. “But it wasn’t everything, you’re right, damn you.” She bit her knuckle. “I don’t know why I ever try to deceive you. There are times when I think you know me better than I know myself.”

“It’s always a possibility.”

She threw the third cigarette away, opened her bag, took out a little matching handkerchief, and blew her nose with it. “The other day,” she said. “When you were at the house. And you saw Fredo and me coming back from the beach at Playa Mayor. I suppose you must have guessed that he and I have been seeing each other. That we’ve become, well, intimate.”

“I try not to do too much guessing these days. Especially concerning things I know absolutely nothing about.”

“Fredo likes you, Bernie. He was very grateful to you. The night of the pamphlets.”

“Oh, I know. He told me himself.”

“You saved his life. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. Or thank you properly. What you did was very courageous.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I didn’t come to see you about Dinah. Oh, perhaps I just wanted to hear you reassure me that she couldn’t have done it, but I’d have known. A mother knows that kind of thing. She couldn’t have hid that from me.”

“So what did you come to see me about?”

“It’s Fredo. He’s been arrested by the SIM—the secret police—and accused of helping the former minister of education in the Prío government, Aureliano Sánchez Arango, to enter the country illegally.”

“And did he?”

“No, of course not. When he was arrested, however, he was with someone who is in the AAA. That’s the Association of Friends of Aureliano. It’s one of the leading opposition groups in Cuba. But Fredo’s loyalty is to Castro and the rebels on the Isle of Pines.”

“Well, I’m sure when he explains that, they’ll be happy to send him home.”

Noreen didn’t share the joke. “This isn’t funny,” she said. “They could still torture him in the hope that he’ll tell them where Aureliano is hiding. That would be doubly unfortunate, because of course he doesn’t know anything.”

“I agree. But I really don’t see what I can do.”

“You saved his life once, Bernie. Maybe you can do it again.”

“So López can have you instead of me?”

“Is that what you want, Bernie?”

“What do you think?” I shrugged. “Why not? Under the circumstances that’s not so very strange. Or have you forgotten?”

“Bernie, it was twenty years ago. I’m not the same woman I used to be. Surely you can see that.”

“Life will do that to you sometimes.”

“Can you do anything for him?”

“What makes you think that’s even a possibility?”

“Because you know Captain Sánchez. People say that you and he are friends.”

“What people?” I shook my head, exasperated. “Look, even if he was my friend—and I am not at all sure about that—Sánchez is militia. And you said yourself that López has been arrested by the SIM. That means it’s nothing to do with the militia.”

“The man who arrested Fredo was at the funeral of Max Reles,” said Noreen. “Lieutenant Quevedo. Perhaps, if you asked him, Captain Sánchez would speak to Lieutenant Quevedo. He could intercede.”

“And say what?”

“I don’t know. But you might think of something.”

“Noreen, it’s a hopeless case.”

“Aren’t they the ones you used to be good at?”

I shook my head and turned away.

“You remember that letter I wrote to you, when I left Berlin?”

“Not really. It was a very long time ago, like you said.”

“Yes, you do. I called you my knight of heaven.”

“That’s the plot of Tannhäuser, Noreen. Not me.”

“I asked you always to seek the truth and to go to the aid of the people who needed your help. Because it’s the right thing to do, and in spite of the fact that it’s dangerous. I’m asking that now.”

“You’ve no right to ask it. Can’t be done. I’ve changed too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I don’t think so.”

“More than you could ever know. Knight of heaven, you say?” I laughed. “More like knight of hell. During the war, I got drafted into the SS, because I was a policeman. Did I tell you that? My armor’s very dirty, Noreen. You don’t know how dirty.”

“You did what you had to do, I expect. But inside, I think you’re probably the same man you always were.”

“Tell me this: Why should I look out for López? I’ve got enough on my plate. I can’t help him, and that’s the truth, so why should I even bother to try?”

“Because that’s what life is about.” Noreen took my hand and searched my face—for what, I don’t know. “That’s what life is about, isn’t it? Looking for the truth. Going to the aid of the people we don’t think we can help, but trying all the same.”

I felt myself flush with anger.

“You’ve got me confused with some kind of saint, Noreen. The kind who’s okay with being martyred as long as his halo’s straight in the photograph. If I’m going to throw myself to the lions, I want it to mean a lot more than just being remembered in some milkmaid’s prayers on a Sunday morning. I never was a man for a useless gesture. That’s how I stayed alive this long, angel. Only there’s more to it than that. You talk about the truth like it means something. But when you throw the truth in my face, it’s just a couple of handfuls of sand. It’s not the truth at all. Not the truth I want to hear, anyway. Not from you. So let’s not fool ourselves, eh? I won’t play the sucker for you, Noreen. Not until you’re prepared to stop treating me like one.”

Noreen did an impersonation of a tropical fish that was all popping eyes and open mouth, and then shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t have the least idea of what you’re talking about.” Then she laughed an off-key laugh in my face and, before I could say another word, turned on her heel and walked quickly toward the parking lot.

I went back inside the Tropicana.

The Cellinis didn’t give me much. Giving wasn’t exactly their strong suit. Nor was answering questions. Old habits die hard, I suppose. They kept on telling me how sorry they were about the death of a great guy like Max and how keen they were to cooperate with Lansky’s investigation and, at the same time, not having the first clue about anything I asked them. If they had been asked Capone’s Christian name, they would probably have shrugged and said they didn’t know it. Probably even denied he had one.

It was late when I got home, and Captain Sánchez was waiting for me. He’d helped himself to a drink and a cigar and was reading a book in my favorite armchair.

“It seems I’m popular with all kinds of people these days,” I said. “People just drop in, like this is some kind of club.”

“Don’t be like that,” said Sánchez. “We’re friends, you and I. Besides, the lady let me in. Yara, isn’t it?”

I glanced around the apartment for her, but it was plain that she’d already gone.

He shrugged apologetically. “I think I scared her off.”

“I expect you’re used to that, Captain.”

“I should be at home myself, but you know what they say. Crime doesn’t keep office hours.”

“Is that what they say?”

“Another body has been found. A man called Irving Goldstein. At an apartment in Vedado.”

“I never heard of him.”

“He was an employee of the Hotel Saratoga. A pit boss in the casino.”

“I see.”

“I was hoping you might accompany me to the apartment. You being a famous detective. Not to mention his employer. In a manner of speaking.”

“Sure. Why not? I was only planning to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.”

“Excellent.”

“Give me a minute to change, will you?”

“I will wait for you downstairs, señor.”

19

THE NEXT MORNING I was awakened by the telephone.

It was Robert Freeman. He’d telephoned to offer me a six-month contract to open up the West German Havana cigar market for J. Frankau.

“However, I don’t think that Hamburg’s the right place to base yourself, Carlos,” he told me. “It’s my opinion that Bonn would be better. There’s the fact that it’s the West German capital, of course. Both houses of parliament are situated there, not to mention all the government institutions and foreign embassies. Which is the kind of well-heeled market we’re looking for, after all. Then there’s the fact that it’s in the British zone of occupation. We’re a British company, so that should make things easier for us, too. Plus, Bonn is only twenty miles from Cologne, one of the largest cities in Germany.”

All I knew about Bonn was that it was the birthplace of Beethoven, and before the war that it had been the home of Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. When Berlin ceased being the capital of anything except the cold war, and West Germany needed a new capital, Adenauer had, very conveniently for himself, chosen the quiet little town where he had lived quietly throughout the years of the Third Reich. As it happened, I’d been to Bonn. Just once. By mistake. But before 1949 few people had ever heard of Bonn, let alone known where it was, and even today it was jokingly known as “the federal village.” Bonn was small, Bonn was insignificant, and Bonn was above all things a backwater, and I wondered why I hadn’t considered living there before. For a man like me, intent on living a life of complete anonymity, it seemed perfect.

Quickly I told Freeman that Bonn was fine by me and that I would begin to make travel arrangements to go there as soon as possible. And Freeman told me he would go about drawing up my all-important business credentials.

I was going home. After almost five years of exile, I was going back to Germany. With money in my pocket. I could hardly believe my luck.

There was that, and the events of the previous evening, at an apartment in Vedado.

As soon as I was washed and dressed, I drove to the National and went up to that big, spacious suite on the executive floor to inform the Lansky brothers that I had “solved” the Reles case. Not that you could ever have really called it a case. Public-relations exercise might have been a more accurate way of describing my investigation, provided your idea of a public was all of the mobbed-up casinos and hotels in Havana.

“You mean you’ve got a name?” Meyer’s voice had the deep-fried, rich tone of an Indian chief in a western. Jeff Chandler, maybe. The little man had the same sort of inscrutable face, too. Certainly the nose was exactly the same.

As before, we sat on the balcony with the same ocean view, except that now I could see the ocean as well as hear and smell it. I was going to miss the grating roar of that ocean.

Meyer wore a pair of gray gabardine trousers, a matching cardigan, a plain white sports shirt, and thick-framed sunglasses that made him look more like an accountant than a gangster. Jake was similarly informal. He wore a loose terry-cloth shirt and a bookmaker’s little straw Stetson with a hatband that was as tight and narrow as his mouth. And hovering in the background was the tall, angular figure of Vincent Alo, whom I now knew better as Jimmy Blue Eyes. Alo wore gray flannels, a white mohair cardigan with a wide collar, and a patterned silk cravat. The cardigan was bulky, but not enough to hide the spare rib he was wearing under his arm. He looked like anyone’s idea of an Italian playboy as long as the play was a Roman revenge tragedy written by Seneca for the amusement of the Emperor Nero.

We were drinking coffee from little cups, Italian style, pinkies out.

“I’ve got a name,” I told them.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Irving Goldstein.”

“The guy who killed himself?”

Goldstein had been a pit boss at the Saratoga, occupying a high chair over the craps table. Originally from Miami, he had trained as a croupier in several illegal gambling houses in Tampa before his arrival in Havana in April 1953. This followed the deportation from Cuba of thirteen American-born card dealers who were employees of the Saratoga, the Sans Souci, the Montmartre, and Tropicana casinos.

“With the help of Captain Sánchez I searched his apartment in Vedado last night. And we found this.”

I handed Lansky a technical drawing and let him stare at it awhile.

“Goldstein had become involved with a man who was a female impersonator at the Palette Club. It’s my information that before he died, Max had found out about it and, not at all comfortable with Goldstein’s homosexuality, he subsequently told him to look for a job at another casino. The Saratoga casino manager, Núñez, confirmed that the two men argued about something not long before Max died. It’s my belief that this is what they argued about. And that Goldstein murdered Max in revenge for his dismissal. So he probably had the motive. He almost certainly had the opportunity: Núñez told me that Goldstein went on his break at around two a.m. on the night of the murder. And that he was away from the craps tables for about thirty minutes.”

“And your proof is . . . this?” Lansky brandished the sheet of paper I had given him. “I’m looking at it and I still don’t know what the hell it is. Jake?” Lansky handed the paper to his brother, who stared at it uncomprehendingly, as if it were the blueprint of a new missile-guidance system.

“That’s a very accurate and precise drawing for a Bramit silencer,” I said. “A custom-made sound suppressor for the Nagant revolver. Like I said before, because of the Nagant’s closed firing system—”

“What does that mean?” asked Jake. “ ‘Closed firing system.’ All I know about guns is how to shoot them. And even then they make me nervous.”

“Especially, then,” said Meyer. He shook his head. “I don’t like guns.”

“What does it mean? Just this. The Nagant has a mechanism which, as the hammer is cocked, first turns the cylinder and then moves it forward, closing the gap between the cylinder and the barrel that exists with every other model of revolver. With this gap sealed, the velocity is increased; more important, it makes the Nagant the only weapon you can effectively silence. During the war, Goldstein was in the army and afterward he was stationed in Germany. I imagine he must have swapped revolvers with a Red Army soldier. A lot of men did.”

“And you think this faygele made the silencer himself? Is that what you’re saying?”

“He was a homosexual, Mr. Lansky,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t handle precision metalworking tools.”

“Got that right,” muttered Alo.

I shook my head. “The drawing was hidden in his bureau. And to be honest, I don’t think I’m going to find any better proof than that.”

Meyer Lansky nodded. He fetched a pack of Parliaments off the coffee table and lit one with a silver table lighter. “What do you think, Jake?”

Jake pulled a face. “Bernie’s right. Proof is always hard to come by in these situations, but that drawing sure looks like the next best thing. As you yourself know only too well, Meyer, the Feds have made a case with a lot less. Besides, if this guy Goldstein did whack Max, then it’s one of ours and there’s no debt to settle with anyone else. He’s a Jew. From the Saratoga. It keeps everything neat and tidy, just the way we wanted. Frankly, I don’t see how we could have ended up with a better result. Business can proceed without any interruptions.”

“Nothing is more important,” said Meyer Lansky.

“How’d he kill himself, anyway?” asked Vincent Alo.

“He opened his veins in a hot tub,” I said. “Roman style.”

“I guess that makes a change from doggy style,” said Alo.

Meyer Lansky winced. It was plain he didn’t much like that kind of joke. “Yes, but why?” he asked. “Why kill himself? With all due respect to you, Bernie, he’d got away with the murder, hadn’t he? More or less. So why do himself in? His secret was safe.”

I shrugged. “I spoke to some people at the Palette Club. The whole point of the club is that some of the girls are real and some are cut-jobs. The club’s shtick is that you can’t tell the difference. It seems that in the beginning Irving Goldstein might have had the same problem. That the girl he thought he fell in love with was in fact a man. When he discovered the truth, he tried to live with it, which is when Max found out about it. Some of the people at the Palette think that the shame finally got to him. I think that maybe he planned to kill himself, but before he did, he decided to get even with Max.”

“Who knows what’s in the mind of a guy like that?” said Alo. “Confused, or what?”

Meyer Lansky nodded. “All right. I’ll buy it. You’ve done a good job, Gunther. A nice quick result with no one offended. I couldn’t have ordered it better if I was in La Zaragozana.”

This was the name of a famous restaurant in Old Havana.

“Jimmy? Get this man his money. He earned it.”

Vincent Alo said, “Sure, Meyer,” and went out of the suite.

“You know, Gunther,” said Lansky, “next year, things are really going to take off for us here in Havana. We got this sweet new law coming. The Hotel Law. All new hotels are going to be granted tax-exempt status, which means there’s going to be more money to be made on this island than anyone ever dreamed of. I’m planning a new casino hotel myself, which is going to be the biggest in the world, outside of Las Vegas. The Riviera. And I could use a man like you in a place like that. Until then, I’d like you to come over to the Montmartre and work for me there. You can do the same thing you were going to do at the Saratoga.”

“I’ll certainly give it some thought, Mr. Lansky.”

“Vincent’s going to run the Saratoga now.”

Vincent Alo had returned to the balcony. He was holding out a gambler’s chip bag for high rollers. He smiled, but his blue eyes remained without emotion. It was easy to see how he’d earned his nickname, Jimmy Blue Eyes. His eyes were as blue as the sea on the other side of the Malecón, and just as cold.

“That doesn’t look like twenty thousand dollars,” I said.

“Looks can be deceptive,” said Alo. He loosened the neck of the drawstring bag and took out a purple thousand-dollar plaque. “There are nineteen more like this one in the bag. You take this to the cash desk at the Montmartre, and they’ll give you your money. Simple as that, my kraut friend.”

The neoclassical Montmartre on P Street and Twenty-third was just a short walk from the National. Formerly a dog track, it occupied a whole block and was the only casino in Havana open twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t even lunchtime, and the Montmartre was already doing a brisk business. At that early hour, most of the gamblers were Chinese. But they usually are, at any hour of the day. And they couldn’t have looked less interested in the evening’s big Midnight in Paris stage show being announced on the casino’s public-address system.

For me, on the other hand, Europe already seemed a little nearer and more attractive as I walked away from the cash window with forty pictures of President William McKinley. And the only reason I hadn’t turned Lansky’s offer of a full-time job down flat was that I hardly wanted to tell him I was leaving the country. That might have made him suspicious. Instead I was hoping to deposit my money with the rest of what I’d saved in the Royal Bank of Canada and then, armed with my new credentials, leave Cuba as soon as possible.

I felt a spring in my step as I went back through the gates of the National Hotel to get the car I was planning to give Yara as my leaving-her present. I hadn’t felt quite so optimistic about my prospects since being reunited with my late wife Kirsten in Vienna, during September of 1947. So optimistic that I felt I might even go see Captain Sánchez and discover if there wasn’t something I could do for Noreen Eisner and Alfredo López after all.

At the end of the day, optimism is nothing more than a naive and i ll-informed hope.

20

THE CAPITOLIO WAS BUILT in the style of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., by the dictator Machado, but it was too big for an island the size of Cuba. It would have been too big for an island the size of Australia. Inside the rotunda was a seventeen-meter-high statue of Jupiter, which looked a lot like an Academy Award, and certainly most of the tourists who visited the Capitolio seemed to think it was a good picture. Now that I was planning to leave Cuba I was thinking I might have to take a few photographs of my own. So that I could remind myself of what I was missing when I was living in Bonn and going to bed at nine o’clock at night. What else is there to do in Bonn at nine o’clock at night? If Beethoven had lived in Havana—especially if he’d lived around the corner from the Casa Marina—it’s almost certain he’d have been lucky to write just one string quartet, let alone sixteen of them. But you could live all your life in Bonn and not even notice that you were deaf.

The police station on Zulueta was a few minutes’ walk from the Capitolio, but I didn’t mind the walk. Only a few months before, outside the police station in Vedado, a Havana University professor had been killed by a car bomb when rebels had mistaken his 1952 black Hudson for an identical model driven by the deputy head of the Cuban Bureau of Investigations. Ever since, I had been careful never to leave my Chevrolet Styleline outside a police station.

The station itself was an old colonial building with a peeling white stucco facade and louvered green shutters on the windows. A Cuban flag hung limply over the square portico like a brightly decorated beach towel that had fallen from one of the upper-floor windows. On the outside, the drains didn’t smell so good. On the inside, you barely noticed it as long as you didn’t breathe in.

Sánchez was on the second floor, in an office overlooking a small park. There was a flag on a pole in the corner, and on the wall, a picture of Batista facing a cabinet full of rifles in case the parade-ground patriotism of the flag and the picture didn’t pay off. There was a small, cheap wooden desk and a lot of space around it if you had a tapeworm. The walls and ceiling were dust-bowl beige, and the brown linoleum on the warped floor resembled the shell of a dead tortoise. An expensive rosewood humidor that belonged on a presidential sideboard sat on the desk like a Fabergé egg in a plastic picnic set.

“You know, it was quite a stroke of luck, me finding that drawing,” said Sánchez.

“There’s an element of luck in most police work.”

“Not to mention your murderer being dead already.”

“Any objections?”

“How could there be? You solve the case and at the same time you take the loose ends and make a bow. Now, that’s what I call detective work. Yes indeed, I can see why Lansky thought you were the man for the case. A real Nero Wolfe.”

“You say all that like you think I chalked him up for it, like a tailor.”

“Now you’re being cruel. I’ve never been to a tailor in my life. Not on my salary. I own a nice linen guayabera, and that’s about it. For anything more formal I usually wear my best uniform.”

“Is that the one without the bloodstains?”

“Now you’re confusing me with Lieutenant Quevedo.”

“I’m glad you mentioned him, Captain.”

Sánchez shook his head. “Such a thing is not possible. No one with ears is ever glad to hear the name of Lieutenant Quevedo.”

“Where might I find him?”

“You do not find Lieutenant Quevedo. Not if you had any sense. He finds you.”

“Surely he can’t be that elusive. I saw him at the funeral, remember?”

“It’s his natural habitat.”

“A tall man. Buzz-cut hair, with a sort of clean-cut face, for a Cuban. What I mean is, there was something vaguely American about his face.”

“It’s as well we only see the faces of men and not their hearts, don’t you think?”

“Anyway, you said that I was working not just for Lansky, but also for Quevedo. And so—”

“Did I say that? Perhaps. How shall we describe someone like Meyer Lansky? The man is as slippery as chopped pineapple. But Quevedo is something else. We have a saying here in the militia: ‘God made us, and we wonder at it, but more especially in the case of Lieutenant Quevedo.’ Mentioning him to you as I did at the funeral, I intended only to make you aware of him as I would perhaps draw your attention to a venomous snake. So that you could avoid him.”

“Your warning is noted.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“But I’d still like to speak to him.”

“About what, I wonder.” He shrugged and, ignoring the expensive humidor, lit a cigarette.

“That’s my business.”

“In point of fact, no, it’s not.” Sánchez smiled. “Certainly it is the business of Señor López. Perhaps in the circumstances it is also the business of Señora Eisner. But your business, Señor Hausner? No, I don’t think so.”

“Now it’s you who looks like chopped pineapple, Captain.”

“Perhaps that’s only to be expected. You see, I graduated from law school in September 1950. Two of my contemporaries at university were Fidel Castro Ruz and Alfredo López. Unlike Fidel, Alfredo and I were politically illiterate. In those days the university was closely tied to the government of Grau San Martín, and I was convinced that I might help to effect democratic change in our police force by becoming a policeman myself. Of course, Fidel thought differently. But after Batista’s coup in March 1952, I decided I was probably wasting my time and resolved to be less strenuous in my defense of the regime and its institutions. I would try to be a good policeman only and not an instrument of dictatorship. Does that make sense, señor?”

“Strangely enough, it does. To me, anyway.”

“Of course, this isn’t as easy as it might sound.”

“I know that, too.”

“I have had to make compromises with myself on more than one occasion. I have even thought of leaving the militia. But it was Alfredo who persuaded me that perhaps I might do more good by remaining a policeman.”

I nodded.

“It was I,” he continued, “who informed Noreen Eisner that Alfredo had been arrested and by whom. She asked me what was to be done, and I told her I could think of nothing. But, as I’m sure you know, she is not a woman who gives up easily, and, aware that you and she were old friends, I suggested that she ask you to help her.”

“Me? Why on earth would you say that?”

“The suggestion was not entirely serious. I was exasperated with her, it’s true. I must confess I was also exasperated with you. Exasperated and, yes, a little jealous of you, too.”

“Jealous? Of me? Why on earth should you be jealous of me?”

Captain Sánchez shifted on his chair and smiled sheepishly.

“A number of reasons,” he said. “The way you solved this case. The faith that Meyer Lansky seems to have in your abilities. The nice apartment on Malecón. Your car. Your money. Let’s not forget that. Yes, I freely admit it, I was jealous of you. But I am not so very jealous that I would let you do this thing that you are thinking of. Because I must also freely admit that I like you, Hausner. And I couldn’t in all conscience allow you to put your head into the lion’s mouth.” He shook his head. “I told her I was not serious about this suggestion, but evidently she did not believe me and spoke to you herself.”

“Maybe I’ve put my head in a lion’s mouth before,” I said.

“Maybe. But this isn’t the same lion. All lions are different.”

“We’re friends, right?”

“Yes. I think so. But Fidel used to say you shouldn’t trust someone merely because he is a friend. It’s good advice. You should remember that.”

I nodded. “Oh, sure. And believe me, I know. Looking out for number one is usually what I do best. I’m an expert in survival. But from time to time I get this stupid urge to do a good turn for someone. Someone like your friend Alfredo López. It’s been a while since I did anything as selfless as something like that.”

“I see. At least I begin to think I do. You think that by helping him you’ll be helping her. Is that it?”

“Something like that. Perhaps.”

“And what do you think you can tell a man like Quevedo that might persuade him to release López?”

“That’s between me and him and what I rather quaintly used to call my conscience.”

Sánchez sighed. “I did not take you for a romantic. But that is what you are, I think.”

“You forgot the word ‘fool,’ didn’t you? But it’s more what the French call ‘existential’ than that. After all these years I still haven’t quite admitted my own insignificance. I still believe what I do makes a difference. Absurd, isn’t it?”

“I’ve known Alfredo López since 1945,” said Sánchez. “He’s a decent enough fellow. But I fail to see how Noreen Eisner prefers him to a man like you.”

“Maybe that’s what I want to prove to her.”

“Anything is possible, I suppose.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he is a better man than me.”

“No, just a younger one.”

21

THE SIM BUILDING in the center of Marianao looked like something out of Beau Geste—a white, two-story, comic-book fort wherein you might have discovered a company of dead legionnaires propped up along the blue castellated rooftop. It was a strange building to find in an area otherwise given over to schools and hospitals and comfortable-looking bungalows.

I parked a few streets away and walked along to the entrance, where a dog was lying on the grass shoulder. Dogs sleeping on the streets of Havana were neater and tidier about the way they did this than any dogs I had seen before, as if they were keen not to get in anyone’s way. Some were so neat and tidy about how they slept on the street that they looked dead. But you stroked any of them at your peril. Cuba was the very well-deserved home of the expression “Let sleeping dogs lie.” It was good advice for everyone and everything. If only I had taken it.

Inside the heavy wooden door, I gave my name to an equally sleepy-looking soldier and, having delivered my request to see Lieutenant Quevedo, I waited in front of another portrait of F.B., the one with him wearing the uniform with the lampshade epaulettes and a cat-that-had-all-the-cream smile. Knowing what I now knew about his share of casino money, I thought he probably had a lot to smile about.

When I had tired of being inspired by the self-satisfied face of the Cuban president, I went to a big window and stared out at a parade ground, where several armored cars were parked. Looking at them, I found it hard to see how Castro and his rebels had ever thought they stood a chance against the Cuban army.

Finally I was greeted by a tall man in a beige uniform, with gleaming leather, buttons, teeth, and sunglasses. He looked dressed up for a portrait of his own.

“Señor Hausner? I’m Lieutenant Quevedo. Would you come this way, please?”

I followed him upstairs, and while we walked, Lieutenant Quevedo talked. He had an easy way about him and seemed different from the picture Captain Sánchez had painted of the man. We came along a corridor that looked as if it could be a Life magazine pictorial biography of the little president: F.B. in sergeant’s uniform; F.B. with President Grau; F.B. wearing a trench coat and accompanied by a trio of Afro-Cuban bodyguards; F.B. and several of his top generals; F.B. wearing a hilariously outsized officer’s cap, making a speech; F.B. sitting in a car with Franklin D. Roosevelt; F.B. gracing the cover of Time magazine; F.B. with Harry Truman; and, finally, F.B. with Dwight D. Eisenhower. As if the armored cars weren’t enough for the rebels to deal with, there were the Americans, too. Not to mention three American presidents.

“We call this our wall of heroes,” Quevedo said, jokingly. “As you can see, we have only the one hero. Some people call him a dictator. But if he is, then he’s a very popular one, it seems to me.”

I halted momentarily in front of the Time magazine cover. I had a copy of the same magazine somewhere in my apartment. There was a critical remark about Batista on my copy that was absent from this one, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

“You’re wondering where the title went, perhaps,” observed Quevedo. “And what it said?”

“Was I?”

“Of course you were.” Quevedo smiled benignly. “It said, ‘Cuba’s Batista: He Got Past Democracy’s Sentries.’ Which is something of an exaggeration. For example, in Cuba there are no restrictions on freedom of speech or freedom of the press or freedom of religion. The Congress can override any legislation or refuse to pass what he wants passed. There aren’t any generals in his cabinet. Is this really what dictatorship means? Can one really compare our president to a Stalin? Or a Hitler? I don’t think so.”

I didn’t reply. What he said reminded me of something I myself had said at Noreen’s dinner party; and yet, in Quevedo’s mouth, it sounded somehow less than convincing. He opened the door to an enormous office. There was a big mahogany desk; a radio with a vase on top; another, smaller desk with a typewriter on it; and a television set that was switched on but had the sound turned down. A baseball game was in progress; and on the walls were pictures not of Batista but ballplayers such as Antonio Castaño and Guillermo “Willie” Miranda. There wasn’t much on the desk: a pack of Trend, a tape-recording machine, a couple of highball glasses with American flags embossed on their outsides, a magazine with a picture of mambo dance star Ana Gloria Varona on the cover.

Quevedo waved me to a seat in front of the desk and, folding his arms, sat on the edge and looked down at me as if I were some kind of student who had brought him a problem.

“Naturally I know who you are,” he said. “And I believe I’m right in thinking that the unfortunate murder of Señor Reles has now been satisfactorily explained.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And are you here on Señor Lansky’s account, or on your own?”

“My own. I know you’re a busy man, Lieutenant, so I’ll come straight to the point. You have a prisoner named Alfredo López here. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I was hoping I might persuade you to let him go. His friends assure me that he has had nothing to do with Arango.”

“And your interest in López is what, exactly?”

“He’s a lawyer, as you know. As a lawyer, he did me a good service, that’s all. I was hoping to be able to return the favor.”

“Very commendable. Even lawyers need representation.”

“You were talking about democracy and freedom of speech. I feel much the same way as you, Lieutenant. So I’m just here to help prevent a miscarriage of justice. I’m certainly not a supporter of Dr. Castro and his rebels.”

Quevedo nodded. “Castro is a natural criminal. Some of the newspapers compare him to Robin Hood, but I myself don’t see it. The man is quite ruthless and dangerous, like all communists. Probably he has been a communist since 1948, when he was still a student. But in his heart he’s worse than a communist. He’s a communist and a natural autocrat. He’s a Stalinist.”

“I’m sure I agree with you, Lieutenant. I certainly have no desire to see this country collapse into communism. I despise all communists.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

“As I said, I’m hoping to do López a good turn, is all. It just happens that I might be able to do you a good turn too.”

“A quid pro quo, so to speak.”

“Maybe.”

Quevedo grinned. “Well, now I’m intrigued.” He collected the pack of Trend off the desk and lit one of the little cigars. It seemed almost unpatriotic to smoke such a diminutive cigar. “Please, do go on.”

“According to what I read in the newspapers, the Moncada Barracks rebels were poorly armed. Shotguns, a few M1 rifles, a Thompson, a bolt-action Springfield.”

“That’s quite correct. Most of our efforts are directed toward preventing ex-President Prío from getting arms to the rebels. So far we’ve been very successful. In the last couple of years we’ve seized over one million dollars’ worth of arms.”

“What if I was to tell you the location of an arms cache that contains everything from grenades to a belt-fed machine gun?”

“I should say that it was your duty as a guest in my country to tell me where those arms can be found.” He sucked on the little cigar for a moment. “Then I should also say that I could certainly arrange for your friend to be freed immediately once the arms cache is found. But might I inquire how it is you come to know about these weapons?”

“A while ago I was driving my car in El Calvario. It was late, the road was dark, I’d probably had a little too much to drink, and I was certainly driving too fast. I lost control of my car and skidded off the road. At first I thought I had a flat or a broken axle, and I got out to take a look with a flashlight. In fact, my tires had churned up a lot of dirt and broken through some wooden planks that were covering up something buried underneath. I lifted one plank, shone the flashlight inside, and saw a box of Mark 2 FHGs and a Browning M19. Probably there was a whole lot more, only I didn’t figure it was safe to stay there for very long. So I covered the boards with earth again and marked the spot with some stones so that I could find it. Anyway, last night I went to check, and the stones hadn’t been moved, which leads me to suppose that the cache is still there.”

“Why didn’t you report this at the time?”

“I certainly intended to, Lieutenant. But by the time I got back home I decided that if I told the authorities, someone might get the idea that there was a lot more to tell than I’ve told you, and I lost my nerve.”

Quevedo shrugged. “There doesn’t seem to be much that’s wrong with your nerves now.”

“Don’t be too sure of that. Inside, my stomach is turning over like a washing machine. But as I told you, I owe López a favor.”

“He’s a lucky man to have a friend like you.”

“That’s for him to say.”

“True.”

“Well? Do we have a trade?”

“You’ll take us to where this arms cache is hidden?”

I nodded.

“Then, yes. We have a trade. But how shall we do this?” He stood up and walked around his office thoughtfully. “Let’s see now. I know. We’ll take López with us, and if the weapons are where you say they are, then you can take him with you. As simple as that. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll need a little time to organize everything. Why don’t you wait in here and watch the television while I go and set things up? Do you like baseball?”

“Not particularly. I can’t relate to it. In real life there are no third chances.”

Quevedo shook his head. “It’s a cop’s game. Believe me, I’ve thought about it. You see, when you hit something with a club, it changes everything.” Then he went out.

I picked up the magazine on the desk and got a little better acquainted with Ana Gloria Varona. She was a little bombshell type with a backside for cracking walnuts, and a large chest that was crying out for a child-sized sweater. When I had finished admiring her I tried to watch the baseball. But I figured it was one of those curious sports in which the history is obviously more important than the game. After a while I closed my eyes, which usually takes some doing in a police station.

Quevedo came back about twenty minutes later, alone and carrying a briefcase. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me expectantly. “Shall we go?”

I followed him downstairs.

Alfredo López was standing between two soldiers in the entrance hall, but only just. He was filthy and unshaven and had two black eyes, except that wasn’t the worst of it. Both his hands were freshly bandaged, which made the manacles on his wrists look pointless. Seeing me, he tried to smile, only the effort was probably too much for him and he almost fainted. The two soldiers grabbed him by the elbows and held him up like the accused at some sort of show trial.

I wanted to ask Quevedo about his hands and then changed my mind, anxious not to say or do anything that might prevent me from achieving what I had set out to do. But I had little doubt that López had been tortured.

Quevedo was still being pleasant. “Do you have a car?”

“It’s a gray Chevrolet Styline,” I said. “I’m parked just down the street. I’ll drive back here, and then you can follow me.”

Quevedo looked pleased. “Excellent. To El Calvario, you say?”

I nodded.

“Havana traffic being what it is, if we are separated, we shall meet at the local post office.”

“Very well.”

“One more thing.” The smile turned wintry. “If this is some kind of trap. If this has been an elaborate hoax to lure me out into the open and have me assassinated—”

“It’s not a trap,” I said.

“Then the first person to be shot will be our friend here.” He tapped the holster on his belt with meaning. “In any event, I shall shoot you both if the weapons cache is not where you say it is.”

“The weapons are there, all right,” I said. “And you’re not going to be assassinated, Lieutenant. People like you and me are never assassinated. We’re murdered, pure and simple. It’s the Batistas and Trumans and King Abdullahs of this world who get themselves assassinated. So take it easy. Relax. Because this is your lucky day. You’re about to do something that’ll make you a captain. So maybe you should ride that luck and buy a lottery ticket or a number on the bolita. If it comes to that, maybe we should both buy a number.”

It was probably just as well that I didn’t.

22

WITH ONE EYE on my rearview mirror and the army car tailing me, I drove east through the new tunnel underneath the Almendares River and then south through Santa Catalina and Vibora. Along the central divider of the boulevard, city gardeners were trimming trees into the shape of bells, only none of them was going off in my head. I was still telling myself that I could get away with making a deal with the devil. I’d done it before, after all, and with many worse devils than Lieutenant Quevedo. Heydrich, for one. Goering, for another. They didn’t come any more devilish than them. But no matter how smart you think you are, there’s always something unexpected that you have to be prepared for. I thought I was prepared for anything. Except the one thing that happened.

It got a little warmer. Warmer than on the north coast. And most of the houses here were owned by people with money. You could tell they were people with money because they were also people with big gates on their big houses. You could tell how much money a man had by the height of the white walls and the amount of iron on his black gates. A set of imposing gates was an advertisement for a ready supply of wealth for confiscation and redistribution. If the communists ever reached Havana, they wouldn’t have to look hard for the best people to steal money from. You didn’t have to be clever to be a communist. Not when the rich made it as easy as this.

When I reached Mantilla, I turned south on Managua, which was a poorer, more down-at-heel district, and followed the road until I came upon the main highway going west toward Santa María del Rosario. You could tell the neighborhood was poorer and more down-at-heel because children and goats wandered freely by the side of the road, and men were carrying machetes with which to work in the surrounding plantations.

When I saw the disused tennis court, and the dilapidated villa with the rusted gate, I held the steering wheel tight and rode the bump as I turned the Chevrolet off the road and through the trees. As I hit the brakes, the car bucked like a rodeo bull and made more dust than an exodus from Egypt. I switched off the engine and sat there doing nothing, my hands clasped behind my head, just in case the lieutenant was the nervous type. I hardly wanted to get shot reaching for my pocket humidor.

The army car pulled up behind me, and the two soldiers got out, followed by Quevedo. López stayed put in the rear seat. He wasn’t going anywhere. Except maybe the hospital. I leaned out of my window and, closing my eyes, pushed my face into the sun for a moment and listened to the engine block cool. When I opened them again the two soldiers had fetched shovels from the trunk of the car and were awaiting instructions. I pointed in front of us.

“See those three white rocks?” I said. “Dig in the center.”

I closed my eyes again momentarily, but this time I was praying that everything was going to work out the way I had hoped.

Quevedo came toward the Chevrolet. He was carrying his briefcase. He opened the front passenger door and slid in beside me. Then he wound down the window, but it wasn’t enough to spare me the smell of his pungent cologne. For a moment, we sat watching the two soldiers shoveling dirt, not saying anything at all.

“Mind if I turn on the radio?” I said, reaching for the knob.

“I think you’ll find I have more than enough conversation to keep your attention,” he said ominously. He took off his cap and rubbed his buzz-cut head. It sounded like someone polishing a shoe. Then he grinned, and there was humor in his grin, but I didn’t like the look of it. “Did I tell you I trained with the CIA, in Miami?”

We both knew that it wasn’t really a question. Few of his questions were. Most of the time they were meant to be unsettling, or he already knew the answers.

“Yes, I was there for six months, last summer. Have you ever been to Miami? It’s probably the least interesting place you could ever hope to see. It’s like Havana without a soul. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. And now that I’m back here, one of my functions is to liaise with the Agency’s chief of station here in Havana. As you can probably imagine, U.S. foreign policy is driven by a fear of communism. A justifiable fear, I might add, given the political loyalties of López and his friends on the Isle of Pines. So the Agency is planning to help us set up a new anti-communist intelligence bureau next year.”

“Just what the island needs,” I said. “More secret police. Tell me, how will the new anti-communist intelligence bureau differ from the current one?”

“Good question. Well, we’ll have more money from the Americans, of course. Lots more money. That’s always a good start. The new bureau will also be trained, equipped, and tasked directly by the CIA to identify and repress only communist activities; as opposed to the SIM, which exists to eliminate all forms of political opposition.”

“This is the democracy you were talking about, right?”

“No, you’re quite wrong to be sarcastic about this,” insisted Quevedo. “The new bureau will be commanded directly by the greatest democracy in the world. So that ought to count for something, surely. And, of course, it goes without saying that international communism isn’t exactly known for its own toleration of opposition. To some extent you have to fight like with like. I’d have thought you of all people would understand and appreciate that, Señor Hausner.”

“Lieutenant, I meant what I said when I told you I have no desire to see this country turn red. But that’s all I meant. My name is not Senator Joseph McCarthy, it’s Carlos Hausner.”

Quevedo’s smile widened. I imagine he could have done a pretty good imitation of a snake at a children’s party, if ever any children had been allowed near a man like Quevedo.

“Yes, let’s talk about that, shall we? Your name, I mean. It isn’t Carlos Hausner, any more than you are or ever were a citizen of Argentina, is it?”

I started to speak, but he closed his eyes as if he wouldn’t hear of being contradicted, and patted the briefcase on his lap. “No, really. I know quite a bit about you. It’s all in here. I have a copy of the CIA’s file on you, Gunther. You see, it’s not just Cuba where there’s a new spirit of cooperation with the United States. It’s Argentina, too. The CIA is just as keen to prevent the growth of communism in that country as it is here in Cuba. Because the Argentines have their own rebels, just as we do. Why, only last year the communists exploded two bombs in the main square of Buenos Aires, killing seven people. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

“When Meyer Lansky told me about your background in German intelligence, fighting Russian communism during the war, I must confess I was fascinated and decided to find out more. Selfishly I wondered if we might be able to make use of you in our own war on communism. So I contacted the Agency chief and asked him to check with his opposite number in Buenos Aires, to see what they could tell us about you. And they told us a great deal. It appears that your real name is Bernhard Gunther and that you were born in Berlin. There you were first a policeman, then something in the SS, and finally something in German military intelligence—the Abwehr. The CIA checked you out with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects—CROWCASS—and also the Berlin Document Center. And while there’s no record of your being wanted for any war crimes, it does seem that there’s a warrant out on you from the police in Vienna. For the murders of those two unfortunate women.”

There seemed little point in denying what he’d said, even though I hadn’t murdered anyone in Vienna. But I thought I might explain it away to his political satisfaction.

“After the war,” I said, “and because of my experience fighting the Russians, I was recruited by American counterintelligence: first by the 970th CIC in Germany, and then the 430th in Austria. As I’m sure you’re aware, the CIC was the forerunner of the CIA. Anyway, I was instrumental in uncovering a traitor in their organization. A man named John Belinsky, who turned out to have been working for the Russian MVD. This would have been in September 1947. The two women were much later on. That was in 1949. One of them I killed because she was the wife of a notorious war criminal. The other was a Russian agent. The Americans will probably deny it now, of course, but they were the ones who got me out of Austria. On the ratline they provided for escaping Nazis. They provided me with a Red Cross passport in the name of Carlos Hausner and got me on the boat to Argentina, where, for a while, I worked for the secret police. The SIDE. At least I did until the job I was on turned into an embarrassment for the government, and I became persona non grata. They fixed me up with an Argie passport and some visas, which is how I fetched up here. Since then I’ve been trying to keep out of trouble’s way.”

“There’s no doubt about it, you’ve had an interesting life.”

I nodded. “Confucius used to think so,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. I’ve been living here quietly since 1950. But recently I bumped into an old acquaintance, Max Reles, who, knowing my background with the Berlin Criminal Police, offered me a job. I was going to take it, too, until he got himself killed. By now Lansky knew something of my background as well, and when Max got himself killed, he asked me to look over the shoulder of the local militia. Well, you don’t say no to Meyer Lansky. Not in this town. And now here we are. But I really don’t see how I can help you, Lieutenant Quevedo.”

There was a shout from one of the soldiers digging in front of us. The man threw down his shovel, knelt down for a moment, peered into the ground, straightened, and then gave us a sign that he had found what they were looking for.

I pointed at them. “I mean, beyond the help I’ve already given you with this arms cache.”

“For which I am very grateful, as soon I’ll prove to your satisfaction, Señor Gunther. I may call you that, may I not? It is your name, after all. No, I want something else. Something quite different. Don’t get me wrong. This is good. This is very good. But I want something more enduring. Let me explain: it’s my understanding that Lansky has offered you a job working for him. No, that’s not quite the truth. It’s rather more than an understanding. As a matter of fact, it was my idea—that he offer you a job.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. I imagine he’ll pay well. Lansky is a generous man. For him, this is simply good business. You get what you pay for. He’s a gambler, of course. And like most intelligent gamblers he dislikes uncertainty. If he can’t have certainty, he’ll do the next best thing and hedge his bet. Which is where you come in. You see, my employers would like to know if and when he tries to hedge his bet on Batista by offering the reds financial support.”

“You want me to spy on him, is that it?”

“Exactly so. How difficult can this be for a man such as yourself? Lansky is a Jew, after all. Spying on a Jew should be second nature to a Nazi.”

There seemed to be no point in arguing with that. “And in return?”

“In return, we agree not to deport you to Austria to face those murder charges. You also get to keep whatever Lansky pays you.”

“You know, I had been planning a short trip home to Germany. To take care of some family business.”

“I regret that will no longer be possible. After all, if you left, what guarantee could we have that you would ever return? And we would have lost this excellent chance to spy on Lansky. Incidentally, for your sake it might be best if you didn’t report our conversation to your new employer. With this man, people whose loyalties are in any way questionable have a dreadful habit of disappearing. Señor Waxman, for example. Almost certainly Lansky had this man killed. It would be no different for you, I think. He is the kind of man for whom the saying ‘Better safe than sorry’ is a way of life. And who can blame him for being so cautious? After all, he has millions invested in Havana. And it’s certain he won’t allow anything to get in the way of that. Not you. Not me. Not even the president himself. All he wants to do is keep on making money, and it makes little or no difference to him and his friends if he does it under one regime or another.”

“This is fantasy,” I insisted. “Surely Lansky’s not going to help the communists.”

“Why not?” Quevedo shrugged. “Now you’re just being stupid, Gunther. And you’re not a stupid man. Look here, it might interest you to know that, according to the CIA, in the last American presidential election Lansky gave a substantial donation to both the Republicans, who won, and the Democrats, who lost. That way, whoever won would be sure to be grateful to him. That’s what I’m getting. Do you see? You can’t put a price on political influence. Lansky knows this only too well. As I say, it’s just good business. I’d do the same in his shoes. Besides, I already know that Max Reles secretly paid money to the families of some of the Moncada rebels. How do I know this? López volunteered the information.”

I looked back at the other car. López was asleep in the backseat. Then again, maybe he wasn’t asleep at all. The sun was shining directly on his unshaven face. He looked like a dead Christ.

“Volunteered. You think I believe that?”

“Eventually, I could not stop him from telling me things. You see, I had already pulled out every one of his fingernails.”

“You bastard.”

“Come now. That’s my job. And perhaps, a long time ago, it was yours, too. In the SS. Who can say? Not you, I’ll bet. I’m sure that with a bit more digging we could find some dirty secrets of your own, my Nazi friend. But that’s of no interest to me. What I should like to know now is if Reles gave this money with the knowledge of Lansky. And I should very much like to know if ever he does the same thing himself.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Castro got fifteen years. The revolution’s a toothless lion with him behind bars. And if it comes to that, so am I.”

“You’re wrong on both counts. About Castro, that is. He has plenty of friends. Powerful friends. In the police. In our judicial system. Even in government. You doubt me, I can tell. But did you know that the army officer who captured Castro after the Moncada Barracks attack also saved his life? That the court which tried him in Santiago allowed the man to make a two-hour speech in his own defense? That Ramón Hermida, our present minister of justice, made sure that instead of keeping Castro separate from all the other prisoners, as was the army’s recommendation, they were all sent to the Isle of Pines, where they’ve been allowed books and writing materials? And Hermida is not the only one in government who is a friend to this criminal. There are already those in the senate and the house of representatives who speak of amnesty. Tellaheche. Rodríguez. Agüero. Amnesty, I ask you. In almost any other country, such a man as this would have been shot. And deservedly so. I tell you this quite frankly, my friend. That I will be surprised if Dr. Castro serves more than five years in jail. Yes, he’s a lucky man. But you need more than good fortune to be as lucky as him. You need friends. And this leopard does not change his spots. The day Castro is released from prison is the day that the revolution begins in earnest. But I for one hope to prevent this from ever happening.”

He lit a little cigar. “What? Nothing to say? I thought you would need more persuasion. I thought you would need documentary evidence that I know your real identity. But now I can see I needn’t have bothered bringing the briefcase.”

“I know who I am, Lieutenant. I don’t need anyone to prove it. Not even you.”

“Cheer up. It’s not like you’ll be spying for nothing. And there are worse places to be than Havana. Especially for a man as comfortably off as you. But you’re mine now. Is that quite clear? Lansky will think you are his, but you’ll report to me, once a week. We’ll arrange to meet somewhere nice and quiet. The Casa Marina, perhaps. You like it there, I believe. We can choose a room where we won’t be disturbed, and everyone will think that we are spending time with some obliging little whore. Yes. You’ll jump when I tell you to jump, and squeak when I tell you to squeak. And maybe when you’re old and gray—that is to say, older and grayer than you are now—I’ll let you crawl back under your stone like the nasty little Nazi you are. But listen. You cross me just once, and I promise that you’ll be on the first plane back to Vienna with a rope under your ear. Which is very probably what you deserve.”

I took all of that without a word. He had me cold. Like I was a billfish hanging by my tail over the pier at Barlovento’s having my photograph taken. And not just any billfish. A billfish that had been heading home when it got itself hauled out of the gulf on a rod and reel. I hadn’t even managed to put up much of a fight. But I wanted to. More than that. I badly wanted to kill Quevedo now, even assassinate him—yes, I was more than happy to give him an opera-sized death. Just as long as I could pull the trigger on that smug bastard and his smug-bastard smile.

I glanced across at the army car and saw that López had recovered a little and was staring straight back at me. Probably wondering what kind of a lousy deal I had made to save his lousy skin. Or maybe it was Quevedo he was looking at. Possibly López was hoping he might get a chance to pull a trigger on the lieutenant himself. Just as soon as he had grown some new fingernails. He had more right to do it than I did, too. My hatred of the young lieutenant was only getting started. López had a good head start on me in that respect.

López closed his eyes again and laid his head on the seat. The two soldiers were pulling a box out of a hole in the ground. It was time to leave. If we were allowed. Quevedo was just the type to break a deal just because he could. And there would be nothing that I could do about it, either. I had always known that was a possibility, and had figured it was worth the risk. After all, it wasn’t my weapons cache. But I hadn’t figured on Quevedo turning me into his pet informer. Already I hated myself. More than I already hated myself.

I bit my lip for a moment, and then said, “All right. I kept my end of the deal. This deal. The arms cache for López. So how about it? Are you going to let him go, like you agreed? I’ll be your dirty little spy, Quevedo, but only if you keep your end of this. D’you hear? You keep your word or you can send me back to Vienna and be damned.”

“That was a brave speech,” he said. “I admire you for it. No, really I do. One day in the future when you’re feeling a little less emotional about this, you can tell me all about being a policeman in Hitler’s Germany. I’m sure I’d be fascinated to find out more and understand what it must have been like. I’ve always been interested in history. Who knows? Maybe we’ll discover that we have something in common.”

He raised a forefinger as if he’d only just thought of something.

“One thing I really don’t understand: why you ever wanted to stick your neck out for a man like Alfredo López.”

“Believe me, I’m asking myself the same question.”

Quevedo smiled a smile of disbelief. “I don’t buy that. Not for a moment. When we were driving over here from Marianao just now, I asked him about you. And he told me that before today he’d only met you three times in his life. Twice at the home of Ernest Hemingway. And once at his office. And he said it was you who did him a good turn, not the other way around. Before today, that is. That you got him out of a tight spot once before. He didn’t say what that was. And frankly, I’ve already asked him so many questions I didn’t feel like pursuing the matter. Besides, he has no more fingernails to lose.” He shook his head. “So. Why? Why help him again?”

“Not that it’s any of your damn business, but López gave me a reason to believe in myself again.”

“What reason?”

“Nothing you would understand. I hardly understand it myself. But it was enough to make me want to carry on in the hope that my life might mean something.”

“I must have misjudged him. I took him for a deluded fool. But you make him sound like some kind of saint.”

“Every man finds his redemption where and when he can. One day, perhaps, when you’re where I am now, you’ll remember that.”

23

I DROVE ALFREDO LÓPEZ BACK TO FINCA VIGÍA. He was in bad shape, but I didn’t know where the nearest hospital was, and neither did he.

“I owe you my life, Gunther,” he said. “And a great deal of thanks.”

“Forget it. You don’t owe me anything. But please don’t ask me why. I’m through explaining myself for one day. That bastard Quevedo has an annoying habit of asking questions you’d rather not answer.”

López smiled. “Don’t I know it?”

“Of course. I’m sorry. It was nothing compared to what you must have been through.”

“I could use a cigarette.”

I kept a pack of Luckies in the glove box. At the junction of the road north into San Francisco de Paula I pulled up and put one in his mouth.

“Here,” I said, finding a match and lighting it.

He puffed for a moment and nodded his thanks.

“Let me do that for you.” I fetched the cigarette from his lips. “Just don’t expect me to come into the bathroom with you.”

I put the cigarette back in his mouth and drove on.

We reached the house. There had been a strong wind the previous night, and some of the ceiba tree’s leaves and branches were strewn across the steps in front of the house. A tall Negro was picking them up and putting them in a wheelbarrow, but he might just as easily have been putting them on the ground, as if someone had ordered the man to honor López’s return with a carpet of palms. Either way, he was making slow work of it. Like he’d just got two numbers on the bolita.

“Who’s that?” asked López.

“The gardener,” I said. I pulled up next to the Pontiac and switched off the engine.

“Yes, of course. For a moment—” He grunted. “The previous gardener committed suicide, you know. Drowned himself in the well.”

“I guess that explains why no one here seems to drink water very much.”

“Noreen thinks there’s a ghost.”

“No, that would be me.” I looked at him and frowned. “Can you make it up the steps?”

“I might need a bit of help.”

“You should be in a hospital.”

“That’s what I kept on telling Quevedo. But by then he’d stopped listening to me. That was after he gave me the free manicure.”

I got out of the car and slammed the door. Around there, that was like ringing the doorbell. I went around to the passenger’s side and opened the door for him. He was going to need a lot of that in the coming days, and I was already imagining myself driving away again, leaving her to it. I’d done enough. If he wanted to scratch the back of his head, Noreen could do it.

She came out of the front door as López stepped out of the car and swayed like a drunk who still had room for more. Gingerly he held on to the window pillar for a moment with the inside of his wrists and then put his spine into a smile for Noreen as she hurried down the steps. His lips parted, and the cigarette he was still smoking fell onto his shirt-front. I grabbed the cigarette, like the shirt actually mattered. It was a sure thing he wouldn’t be wearing it to the office again. Lots of blood on sweat-stained white cotton was hardly fashionable that year.

“Fredo,” she said, anxiously. “Are you all right? My God, what has happened to your hands?”

“The cops were expecting Horowitz at their annual fund-raiser,” I said.

López smiled, but Noreen wasn’t amused.

“I don’t see what there is to joke about, Bernie,” she said. “Really I don’t.”

“You had to be there, I guess. Look, when you’ve finished getting stiff with me, your legal friend here deserves to be in a hospital. I’d have driven him to one myself, but Fredo insisted we drive here first and convince you that he’s all right. I guess he rates you a higher priority than playing the piano again. That’s quite understandable, of course. I feel much the same way.”

Noreen wasn’t listening to most of that. She retuned her wavelength the moment I said “hospital.” She said, “There’s one in Cotorro. I’ll take him there myself.”

“Hop in and I’ll drive you.”

“No, you’ve done enough. Was it very difficult? Getting him out of police custody.”

“A little more difficult than putting a request in the suggestion box. And it was the army that had him, not the police.”

“Look, why don’t you wait in the house? Make yourself at home. Fix yourself a drink. Ask Ramón to make you something to eat if you want. I won’t be long.”

“I really ought to be running along. After the events of this morning, I feel a pressing need to renew all my insurance policies.”

“Bernie, please. I want to thank you properly. And speak to you about something.”

“All right. I can put up with that.”

I watched her drive him away and then went inside and flirted with the drinks trolley, but I was in no mood to play hard-to-get with Hemingway’s bourbon, and swallowed a glass of Old Forester in less time than it took to pour. With another large one waiting in my hand, I took a tour of the house and tried to ignore the obvious comparison between my own situation and that of a trophy on Hemingway’s wall. I’d been bagged by Lieutenant Quevedo just as surely as if I’d been shot with an express rifle. And Germany now looked about as far away to me as the snows of Kilimanjaro or the green hills of Africa.

One of the rooms was full of packing cases and suitcases, and for one stomach-churning moment I thought she might be leaving Cuba until I realized that Noreen was probably getting ready to move into her new house in Marianao.

After a while, and another drink, I walked outside and climbed the four-story tower. It wasn’t difficult. A half-covered staircase on the outside went right up to the top. There was a bath on the first floor and some cats playing cards on the second. The third floor was where all the rifles were kept, in locked glass cabinets, and the way I was feeling it was probably just as well I hadn’t brought any keys. The uppermost story was furnished with a small desk and a large library full of military books. I stayed there for a long while. I didn’t much care for Hemingway’s taste in literature, but there was no arguing with the view. Max Reles would have liked it a lot. From each of the windows the view was all you could see. For miles around. Right up until the moment that the light began to fade. And then some.

When just a ribbon of orange was left over the trees, I heard a car and saw the Pontiac’s headlights and the little chieftain’s head coming back up the drive. When Noreen got out of the car she was alone. By the time I had descended the tower, she was in the house and fixing herself a drink with a bottle of Cinzano vermouth and some tonic water. Hearing my footsteps, she said, “Freshen your glass?”

“I’ll help myself,” I said, coming over to the little table. She turned away as I came alongside her. I heard a little peal of ice cubes as she upended the tall glass and swallowed the frozen contents.

“They’re keeping him in for observation,” she said.

“Good idea.”

“Those fucking bastards pulled out all his fingernails.”

Without López around to see the funny side of that, I was through making jokes about it. I hardly wanted Noreen getting sharp with me again. I’d had enough of that for one day. I just wanted to sit down in an armchair and have her stroke my head, if only to remind me that it was still on my shoulders and not hanging on anyone’s wall.

“I know. They told me.”

“The army?”

“It certainly wasn’t the Red Cross that did it.”

She was wearing navy blue slacks and a matching bouclé cardigan. The slacks weren’t particularly slack in the only place it counted, and the cardigan seemed to be short a couple of little plaited leather buttons on the lower slopes of her bosom. Her hand sported a sapphire that was the bigger sister of the two in her earlobes. The shoes were dark brown leather, as were the belt around her waist and the handbag she had tossed onto an armchair. Noreen had always been good at matching things. It was only me that seemed to clash with the rest of her. She looked awkward and ill at ease.

“Thanks,” she said. “For what you did.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“No. And I think I can understand why. But thank you anyway. I’m sure it’s the most courageous thing I’ve heard of since I came to Cuba.”

“Don’t tell me that. I feel bad enough already.”

She shook her head. “Why? I don’t understand you at all.”

“Because it makes me sound like what I’m not. In spite of what you once thought, angel, I was never cut out to be a hero. If I was anything like the person you think I am, I wouldn’t have lasted half as long as I have. I’d be dead in some Ukrainian field, or forgotten forever in some stinking Russian prison camp. Not to mention what happened before all that, in those comparatively innocent times when people thought the Nazis were the last word in true evil. You tell yourself you can put aside your principles and make a pact with the devil just to keep out of trouble and remain alive. But you do it often enough, and it gets so that you’ve forgotten what those principles were. I used to think I could stand apart from it all. That I could somehow inhabit a nasty, rotten world and not become like that myself. But I found out that you can’t. Not if you want to see another year. Well, I’m still alive. I’m still alive because, if the truth be told, I’m just as bad as the rest of them. I’m alive because other people are dead, and some of them were killed by me. That’s not courage. That’s just this.” I pointed at the antelope head on the wall. “He understands what I’m talking about even if you don’t. The law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.”

Noreen shook her head. “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re talking nonsense. That was war. It was kill or be killed. That’s what war is. And it was ten years ago. Lots of men feel the way you do about what they did in the war. You’re being much too hard on yourself.” She took hold of me and put her head on my chest. “I won’t let you say those things about yourself, Bernie. You’re a good man. I know it.”

She looked up at me, wanting me to kiss her. I stood there, letting her hold me tight. I didn’t pull away or push her off. I didn’t kiss her, either. Although I badly wanted to. Instead I grinned at her, tauntingly.

“What about Fredo?”

“Let’s not talk about him right now. I’ve been stupid, Bernie. I can see that now. I should have been honest with you from the beginning. You’re not really a killer.” She hesitated. Her eyes were filling with tears. “Are you?”

“I love you, Noreen. Even after all these years. I didn’t know it myself until quite recently. I love you, but I can’t lie to you. A man who really wanted to have you would do that, I think. Lie to you, I mean. He’d say anything to get you back at all costs. I’m certain of it. Well, I can’t do it. There has to be someone in this world you can tell the truth to.”

I took hold of her elbows and looked her squarely in the eye.

“I’ve read your books, angel. I know what kind of a person you are. It’s all there, between the covers, hidden under the surface like an ice-berg. You’re a decent person, Noreen. Well, I’m not. I’m a killer. And I’m not just talking about the war. As a matter of fact, I killed someone only last week, and it certainly wasn’t a case of kill or be killed. I killed a man because he had it coming and because I was afraid of what he might do. But mostly I killed him because I wanted to kill him.

“It wasn’t Dinah who killed Max Reles, angel. It wasn’t even any of his Mafia friends in the casino, either. It was me. I killed him. I shot Max Reles.”

24

AS YOU KNOW, Reles had offered me a job at the Saratoga, and I’d accepted it, but only with the intention of finding an opportunity to kill him. How to do this looked more difficult. Max was heavily protected. He lived in a penthouse at the Saratoga that could only be accessed by a key-operated elevator. And the elevator doors in the penthouse were watched closely by Max’s bodyguard, Waxey, who searched everyone going into the penthouse.

“But I had the idea how I might do it almost as soon as I saw the type of revolver that your friend Hemingway had given you. The Nagant. I came across that type of pistol a lot during the war. It was the standard-issue sidearm for all Russian army and police officers, and with one important modification—a Bramit silencer—it was the execution weapon of choice for the Russian special services. Between January 1942 and February 1944 I worked for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau investigating both Allied and German atrocities. One of the crimes we investigated was the Katyń Forest massacre. This would have been in April 1943, after an Army Group intelligence staff officer had found a mass grave containing the bodies of four thousand Poles some twenty kilometers west of Smolensk. All of the men were officers of the Polish army and had been executed with a single shot in the back of the head by NKVD death squads. And all using the same type of revolver: the Nagant.

“The Russians were devious and methodical in the way they had gone about things. The way they are about everything. Sorry, but that’s just the truth. It would have been impossible to execute four thousand men unless certain precautions were first taken to conceal the sound of these executions from those who were yet to die. Otherwise they’d have rioted and overrun their captors. So the murders themselves took place at night, in windowless cells that had been sound-insulated with several mattresses, and using silenced Nagant revolvers. One of these silencers came into my possession during the investigation, and I was able to study its design and to test a silenced weapon on a firing range. Which meant that as soon as I saw your revolver I knew that I could manufacture a Bramit silencer in my metal shop at home.

“My next problem was this: How was I going to get into the penthouse carrying the revolver? It so happened that Max had given me a gift—a custom-made backgammon set in an attaché case that contained all the checkers and the dice and the dice cups. But there was also room for a revolver and its newly made silencer. And I thought there was little chance of Waxey searching it, especially as the case had combination locks.

“Max had told me that he used to play cards once a week with some of the Havana underworld. He also told me that the game always ended at eleven-thirty, exactly fifteen minutes before he retired to his office and took a phone call from the president, who owns a piece of the Saratoga. He asked me to come along, and when I went, I took with me the attaché case containing the silenced revolver, and placed it on his pool terrace. When I left the penthouse with everyone else at eleven-thirty, I went back down to the casino and waited a few minutes. It was Chinese New Year, the night when they set off a lot of fireworks at the Barrio Chino. It’s pretty deafening, of course. Especially on the rooftop of the Saratoga.

“Anyway, because of the fireworks I figured Reles would finish his call with the president early. And as soon as I had let the casino manager see me back in the casino after going up to the penthouse for the first time, I returned to the eighth floor. Which was as far as I could go, of course, without an elevator key.

“But on the corner of the building they’re repairing the Saratoga’s neon sign, which meant that there was some scaffolding on which someone might climb up from the eighth floor to the penthouse terrace. Someone with a head for heights. Or someone who was determined to kill Max Reles at almost any cost. It was quite a climb, I can tell you. And I needed both hands to do it. I certainly couldn’t have managed that climb with the revolver in my hand, or tucked into my belt. That was why I needed to leave the weapon on Max’s terrace.

“Max was still on the phone when I got up there again. I could hear him talking to Batista, going through the figures with him. It seems that the president takes his thirty percent stake in the Saratoga very seriously. I opened the case, took out the revolver, screwed on the silencer, and quietly approached the open window. Maybe I had a few second thoughts at that moment. And then I remembered 1934 and how he’d shot two people in cold blood right in front of me, when we were aboard a boat on Lake Tegel. You were already on your way back to the States when it happened, but he threatened to have his brother, Abe, kill you when you arrived back in New York unless I cooperated with him. I knew I was safe. More or less. I already had evidence of his corruption that would have put him away. But I had no means of stopping his brother from killing you. After that, we kind of held each other in check, at least until the Olympics were over and he went back to the States. But like I said earlier: he had it coming. And as soon as he put the phone down I fired. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. He saw me just before I pulled the trigger the first time. I think he even smiled.

“I shot him seven times. I went to the edge of the little terrace and tossed the revolver into a basket of towels by the swimming pool on the eighth floor. Then I climbed down. I covered the revolver with some more towels and went into a bathroom to clean myself up. By the time the firecrackers started I was already in the elevator, going back down to the casino. The plain fact of the matter is that I’d forgotten about the fireworks when I made the silencer, otherwise I might not have bothered. But as it happened, it enabled me to use the fireworks after the fact, as a different kind of cover.

“Well, the next day I went back to the Saratoga, like everything was normal in my life. There was no way around that. I had to act normally, or suspicion would have fallen on me. As it was, Captain Sánchez marked my card for the murder right from the very beginning. He might have made it stick, too, until I managed to convince Lansky that the murder might not have taken place under cover of the noise from the fireworks—as everyone seemed to think it had. And the police were helpful there. They hadn’t even bothered to search for the murder weapon. I flexed my Adlon Hotel detective muscles and suggested a search of the laundry baskets. Not long afterward, they found the gun.

“As soon as those mobsters saw the silencer on the revolver, they began to think it might be a professional killing—something to do with their business in Havana and probably nothing to do with something that started twenty years ago. Better still, I was able to suggest that the silencer meant that the murder could have happened at any time, not necessarily during the fireworks, as the captain had suggested. Effectively that discredited his theory about my being the killer and left me looking like Nero Wolfe. Anyway, that was Gunther in the clear, I thought, only I’d been too convincing for my own good. Meyer Lansky appreciated the way I’d bested the cop; and since Max had already told him something about my background as a Berlin homicide detective, Lansky decided that, in the interest of avoiding a Mafia war in Havana, I was now the man best qualified to handle the investigation of Max Reles’s death.

“For a moment or two I was horrified. And then I began to see the possibility of putting myself completely in the clear for it. All I needed was somewhere safe to lay the blame that wouldn’t result in anyone else getting killed. I had no idea that they would kill Waxey, Max’s bodyguard, as a sort of insurance policy, just in case he really did have something to do with it. So you could say I killed him, too. That was unfortunate. Anyway, by a stroke of good luck for me, although not for him, one of the pit bosses at the Saratoga, a fellow named Irving Goldstein, was involved with a female impersonator at the Palette Club; and when I found out that he’d killed himself because Max had been on the brink of firing him for being a pansy, well, he seemed made to order to take the blame. So the night before last I went to search his apartment with Captain Sánchez, and I planted the technical drawing I’d made of the Bramit silencer and made sure that Sánchez found it.

“Later on I showed the drawing to Lansky and told him it was prima facie evidence that it had probably been Goldstein who murdered Max Reles. And Lansky agreed. He agreed because he wanted to agree, because any other result would have been bad for business. More importantly, it left me in the clear. So. There it is. You can relax. It certainly wasn’t your daughter that killed him. It was me.”

“I don’t know how I could ever have suspected her,” said Noreen. “What kind of mother am I?”

“Don’t even think about it.” I smiled wryly. “As a matter of fact, when she saw the murder weapon at the penthouse, she recognized it straightaway and later on she told me she thought it might have been you who killed Max. It was all I could do to convince her that the gun was a common one in Cuba. Even though it isn’t. That’s the first Russian weapon I’ve ever seen in Cuba. Of course, I could have told her the truth, but when she announced that she was going back to America, I couldn’t see the point. I mean, if I’d told her that, I might have had to tell her everything else. I mean, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Her to leave Havana, and go to college?”

“And that’s why you killed him,” she said.

I nodded. “You were quite right. You couldn’t let her stay with a man like that. He was going to take her somewhere they could smoke opium, and God only knows what else. I killed him because of what she might have become if she’d actually married him.”

“And because of what Fredo told you when you went to his office in the Bacardi Building.”

“He told you about that?”

“On the way to the hospital. That’s why you helped him, isn’t it? Because he told you that Dinah is your daughter.”

“I was waiting to hear you say it, Noreen. And now you have, I guess I can mention it. Is it true?”

“It’s a little late to be asking that, isn’t it? In view of what happened to Max.”

“I could say much the same thing to you, Noreen. Is it true?”

“Yes. It’s true. I’m sorry. I should have told you, but that would have meant telling Dinah that Nick wasn’t her father; and until he died, she’d always had a much better relationship with him than with me. It felt like I’d have been taking that away from Dinah at a time when I most needed to exercise some influence over her, do you see? If I’d told her, I don’t know what the result might have been. When it happened—I mean, in 1935, when she was born—I thought about writing to you. Several times. But each time I thought about it, I saw how good Nick was with her, and I simply couldn’t do it. He always thought Dinah was his daughter. But a woman always knows these things. As the months and then the years went by, it seemed less and less relevant. Eventually the war came, and that appeared to end for good any idea of telling you that you had a daughter. I wouldn’t have known where to write. When I saw you again, in the bookstore, I couldn’t believe it. And naturally I thought about telling you that same evening. But you made a rather tasteless remark that left me thinking you might be another of Havana’s bad influences. You seemed so hard-bitten and cynical I hardly recognized you.”

“I know the feeling. These days I hardly recognize myself. Or even worse, I recognize my own father. I look in the mirror and see him staring back at me with amused contempt for my own previous failure to understand that I am and always would be exactly like him. If not him exactly. But you were quite right not to tell her I’m her father. Max Reles wasn’t the only man Dinah couldn’t be around. It’s me, too. I know that. And I don’t intend to try and see her and establish some kind of relationship with her. It’s rather late in the day for that, I think. So you can rest assured on that count. It’s enough for me to know that I have a daughter and to have met her. All thanks to Alfredo López.”

“As I said, I didn’t know he’d told you until we went to the hospital just now. Lawyers aren’t supposed to tell strangers about their clients’ affairs, are they?”

“After I pulled his nuts out of the fire with those pamphlets, he figured he owed me and that I was the kind of father who might be able to help her somehow. That’s what he told me, anyhow.”

“He was right. I’m glad he did.” She hugged me closer. “And you did help her. I’d have killed Max myself if I’d been able.”

“We all do what we can do.”

“And this is why you went to SIM headquarters and persuaded them to let Fredo go. Because you thought you wanted to pay Fredo back.”

“What he said. It gave me some kind of hope that my life hasn’t entirely been wasted.”

“But how? How did you persuade them to let him go?”

“A while ago I stumbled across a weapons cache on the road to Santa María del Rosario. I traded it for his life.”

“Nothing else?”

“What else could there be?”

“I don’t know how to begin to thank you,” she said.

“You go back to writing books, and I’ll go back to playing backgammon and smoking cigars. From the look of things, you’re getting ready to move into that new house of yours. I hear Hemingway will soon be back here again.”

“Yes, he’ll be here in June. Hem’s lucky to be alive after what happened. He was seriously injured in two consecutive plane crashes. He then got himself badly burned in a bushfire. By rights, the man should be dead. Some American newspapers even published his obituary.”

“So he’s risen from the dead. It’s not all of us who can say as much.”

Later on, I went out to my car, and in the shifting dark I thought I saw the figure of the dead gardener, standing beside the well where he’d drowned. Maybe the house was haunted, after all. And if the house wasn’t haunted, I know I was, and probably always would be. Some of us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer than that. Years, perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again, like Ernest Hemingway. If the dead rise not, then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body shall we live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps, if the dead could rise and be incorruptible, and I could be changed forever in the blinking of an eye, then dying might just be worth the trouble of getting killed, or killing myself.

Back in Havana, I went to the Casa Marina and spent the night with a couple of willing girls. They didn’t make me feel any less alone. All they did was help me to pass the time. What little of it we have.