by Philip Kerr
“We’re stopping here,” I announced.
“Surely it would be better to keep going.”
“Can you drive?”
“No.”
“Neither can I. Not anymore. I’m beat. It’s another two hundred miles to Santiago, and if we don’t stop soon we’ll both wake up in the morgue.”
Near a brewery—one of the few on the island—we passed a police car, which got me thinking again about Melba and the crime she had committed.
“If you shot a cop, then they must want you bad,” I said.
“Very bad. They bombed the casa where I was working. Several other girls were killed or seriously injured.”
“Which is why Doña Marina agreed to help get you out of Havana?” I nodded. “Yes, it makes sense now. When one casa gets bombed, it’s bad for all of them. In which case it will be safer if we share a room. I’ll say you’re my wife. That way you won’t have to show them your identity card.”
“Look, Señor Hausner, I am grateful to you for taking me with you to Haiti. But there’s one thing you should know. I only volunteered to play the part of a chica to get close to Captain Balart.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“I did it for the—”
“The Revolution. I know. Listen, Melba, your virtue, if there is anything left of it, it’s safe with me. I told you. I’m tired. I could sleep on a bonfire. But I’ll settle for a chair or a sofa and you can have the bed.”
She nodded. “Thank you, señor.”
“And stop calling me that. My name is Carlos. Call me that. I’m supposed to be your husband, remember?”
We checked into the Gran Hotel in the center of town and went up to the room. I crawled straight to bed, which is to say I slept on the floor. During the summer of 1941 some of the floors that I slept on in Russia were the most comfortable beds I ever had, only this wasn’t as comfortable. Then again, I wasn’t nearly as exhausted as I’d been back then. About two o’clock in the morning I awoke to find her wrapped in a sheet and kneeling beside me.
“What is it?” I sat up and groaned with pain.
“I’m so scared,” she said.
“What are you scared about?”
“You know what they’ll do to me if they find me?”
“The police?”
Her nodding turned into a shiver.
“So what do you want from me? A bedtime story? Listen, Melba. In the morning I’ll drive you to Santiago and we’ll get on my boat, and by tomorrow night you’ll be safely off in Haiti, all right? But now I’m trying to sleep. Only the mattress is a little too soft for me. So if you don’t mind.”
“Strangely enough,” she said, “I don’t mind. The bed is quite comfortable. And there’s room for two.”
This was certainly true. The bed was as big as a small farm with one goat. I was pretty sure about the goat because of the way she took me by the hand and led me over to the bed. There was something erotic and alluring about that; or maybe it was just the fact that she left the sheet on the floor. It was a hot night, of course, but that didn’t bother me. I do some of my best thinking when I’m as naked as she was. I tried to picture myself asleep in that bed, only it didn’t work because by now I’d seen what she had displayed in the window and I was about ready to press my nose up against the glass and take a better look. It wasn’t that she wanted me. I can never figure why a woman wants a man at all—not when women look the way they do. It was just that she was young and scared and lonely and wanted someone—anyone would have done, probably—to hold her and make her feel like the world cared about her. I get like that myself sometimes: You’re born alone and you die alone, and the rest of the time you’re on your own.
By the time we got to Santiago the next day, the dark orchid of her head had been resting on my shoulder almost a hundred miles. We were behaving like any young courting couple when one of them happens to be more than twice as old as the other, who also happens to be a murderer. Perhaps that’s a little unfair. Melba wasn’t the only one of us who’d pulled the trigger on someone. I had some experience of murder myself. Quite a lot of experience, as it happens, only I hardly wanted to tell her about that. I was trying to keep my thoughts on what lay ahead of us. Sometimes the future seems a little dark and frightening, but the past is even worse. My past most of all. But now it was the very present danger of the Santiago police I was worried about. They had a reputation for brutality that was probably well deserved and easily explained by the truth of Doña Marina’s remark that all of Cuba’s revolutions got started in Santiago. It was impossible to imagine much else that got started there. A start implied some activity, movement, or even work, and there wasn’t much sign of any of these tiring nouns on the sleepy streets of Santiago. Ladders stood around idle and alone, wheelbarrows sat unattended, horses kicked their heels, boats bobbed in the harbor, and fishing nets lay drying in the sun. About the only people who appeared to be working were the cops, if you could call it work. Parked up in the shade of the city’s pastel-colored buildings, they sat smoking cigarettes and waiting for things to cool down or warm up, depending on how you looked at it. Probably it was too hot and sunny for trouble. The sky was too blue and the cars were too shiny; the sea was too much like glass and the banana leaves were too glossy; the statues were too white and the shadows too short. Even the coconuts were wearing sunglasses.
After a couple of wrong turns I spotted the coaling station of Cincoreales that was a landmark for finding my way around the shantytown of boatyards, booms, quays, pontoons, dry docks, and slipways that serviced the flotilla of boats in Santiago Bay. I pointed the car down a steep, cobbled hill and along a narrow street. Heavy brackets for trams that were no longer running hung over our heads like the rigging of a schooner that had long ago sailed without it. I steered onto the sidewalk in front of an open set of double doors and peered down into a boatyard.
A bearded, weather-beaten man wearing shorts and sandals was maneuvering a boat that hung from an ancient-looking crane. I didn’t mind when the boat clunked against the harbor wall and then hit the water like a bar of soap. But then, it wasn’t my boat.
We got out of the Chevy. I fetched Melba’s suitcase from the trunk and carried it into the yard, stepping carefully around or over tins of paint, buckets, lengths of rope and hose line, pieces of wood, old tires, and oil cans. The office in a little wooden hut at the back was no less of a shambles than the yard. Mendy wasn’t about to win the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval anytime soon, but he knew boats, and since I knew them hardly at all, this was just as well.
Once, a long time ago, Mendy had been white. But a lifetime on and by the sea had turned the part of his face that wasn’t covered by a salt-and-pepper beard to the color and texture of an old baseball mitt. He belonged in a hammock on some pirate ship bound for Hispaniola, with a hornpipe in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other. He finished what he was doing and didn’t seem to notice me until the crane was out of the way, and even then all he said was “Señor Hausner.”
I nodded back at him. “Mendy.”
He fetched a half-smoked cigar from the breast pocket of his grubby shirt and plugged it into a space between his beard and his mustache and spent the next few minutes while we talked patting himself down for a light.
“Mendy, this is Señorita Otero. She’s coming on the boat with me. I told her it was just a crummy fishing boat—only she and her suitcase appear to be under the illusion that we’re going sailing on the Queen Mary.”
Mendy’s eyes flicked between Melba and me as if he had been watching a game of table tennis. Then he smiled at her and said, “But the senõrita is absolutely right, Señor Hausner. The first rule of going to sea is to be prepared for absolutely anything.”
“Thank you,” said Melba. “That’s what I said.”
Mendy looked at me and shook his head. “Clearly, you know nothing about women, senõr,” he said.
“About as much as I know about boats,” I said.
Mendy chuckled. “For your sake, I hope it’s a little more than that.”
He led the way out of the boatyard and down to the L-shaped pontoon, where a wooden launch was moored. We stepped aboard and sat down. Mendy tugged a motor into life and then steered us out into the bay. Five minutes later, we were tying up alongside a thirty-five-foot wooden sportfishing boat.
La Guajaba was narrow, with a broad stern, a bridge, and three compartments. There were two Chrysler engines, each producing about ninety horsepower, giving the boat a top speed of about nine knots. And that was more or less everything I knew about her other than where I kept the brandy and the glasses. I’d won the boat in a game of backgammon from an American who owned the Bimini Bar on Obispo Street. With a full tank of fuel La Guajaba had a range of about five hundred miles, and it was less than half that to Port-au-Prince. I’d used the boat about three times in as many years, and what I didn’t know about boats would have filled several nautical almanacs, possibly all of them. But I knew how to use a compass, and I figured all I needed to do was point the bow east and then, according to the Thor Heyerdahl principle of navigation, keep going until we hit something. I couldn’t see how what we hit wouldn’t be the island of Hispaniola; after all, there were thirty thousand square miles of it to aim at.
I handed Mendy a fistful of cash and my car keys and then climbed aboard. I’d thought about mentioning Omara and how it might have been better for me if he had kept his mouth shut, only there didn’t seem to be much point. It would have risked incurring some of the brutal candor for which Cubans are justly famous, and doubtless he would have told me that I was just another gringo with too much money and unworthy of the boat I owned, which would have been true: If you make yourself like sugar, the ants will eat you.
As soon as we were under way, Melba went below and put on a two-piece swimsuit with a leopard-skin print that would have made a mackerel whistle. That’s the nice thing about boats and warm weather. They bring out the best in people. Beneath the battlements of Morro Castle, which stands on the summit of a two-hundred-foot-high rock promontory, the harbor entrance is almost as wide. A long flight of crumbling steps, hewn out of the rock, leads up from the water’s edge to the castle, and I almost made the boat try to climb them. Two hundred feet of open sea to aim at and I still managed to nearly put us on the rocks. So long as I was looking at Melba, it wasn’t looking good for our chances of hitting Haiti.
“I wish you’d put some clothes on,” I said.
“Don’t you like my bikini?”
“I like it fine. But there’s a good reason Columbus didn’t take women with him on the Santa María. When they’re wearing bikinis they affect the ship’s steering. With you around, they’d probably have discovered Tasmania.”
She lit a cigarette and ignored me, and I did my best to ignore her back. I checked the tachometer, the oil level, the ammeter, and the motor temperature. Then I glanced out of the wheelhouse window. Smith Key, a small island once held by the British, lay ahead of us. It was home to many of Santiago’s fishing folk and pilots, and its red-tiled houses and small ruined chapel made it look very picturesque. But it wasn’t much next to the scene in Melba’s bikini pants.
The sea was calm until we reached the mouth of the harbor, where the water started to swell a bit. I pushed the throttle forward and held the boat on a steady east-southeast course until Santiago was no longer visible. Behind us the boat’s wake unzipped a great white scar in the ocean that was hundreds of feet long. Melba sat in the fisherman’s chair and squealed with excitement as our speed increased.
“Can you believe it?” said Melba. “I live on an island and I’ve never been on a boat before.”
“I’ll be glad when we’re off this tub,” I said, and fetched a bottle of rum from the chart drawer.
After about three or four hours it got dark and I could see the lights of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, twinkling on our port side. It was like staring at the ancient stars of some near galaxy that was at the same time a vision of the future in which American democracy ruled the world with a Colt in one hand and a stick of chewing gum in the other. Somewhere in the tropical darkness of that Yankee littoral thousands of men in white suits were engaged in the meaningless routines of their oceangoing, imperial service. In response to the cold imperative of new enemies and new victories they sat inside their floating, steel-gray cities of death, drinking Coca-Cola, smoking their Lucky Strikes, and preparing to free the rest of the world from its unreasonable desire to be different. Because Americans and not Germans were now the master race and Uncle Sam had replaced Hitler and Stalin as the face of the new empire.
Melba saw my lip curl and must have read my mind. “I hate them,” she said.
“Who? The yanquis?”
“Who else? Our good neighbors have always wanted to make this island one of their United States. And but for them Batista could never have remained in power.”
I couldn’t argue with her. Especially now that we’d spent the night together. Especially now that I was planning to do the same again, just as soon as we were installed in a nice hotel. I’d heard that Le Refuge in the holiday resort of Kenscoff, six miles outside of Port-au-Prince, might be just the kind of place I was looking for. Kenscoff is four thousand feet above sea level and the climate there is fine all year round. Which is almost as long as I was planning to stay. Of course, Haiti had its problems, just like Cuba, but they weren’t my problems. So what did I care? I had other things to worry about, such as what I was going to do when my Argentine passport expired. And now there was the small problem of taking a small boat safely through the Windward Passage. I probably shouldn’t have been drinking, but even with La Guajaba’s running lights there was something about driving a boat across the sea in darkness that I found unnerving. And fearing that we might hit something—a reef, or a whale—I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax until it was light again, by which time I hoped we would be halfway across the ocean to Hispaniola.
And then there was something more tangible to worry about. Another vessel was approaching quickly from the north. It was moving too fast to be a fishing boat, and the big searchlight picking us out of the darkness was too powerful for it to belong to anything but a U.S. Navy patrol boat.
“Who are they?” asked Melba.
“The American navy, I imagine.”
Even above our twin Chrysler engines I heard Melba swallow. She still looked beautiful, only now she looked worried as well. She turned suddenly and stared at me with wide brown eyes.
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “That boat can probably outrun us and certainly outgun us. The best thing you can do is go below, climb into bed, and stay there. I’ll handle things up here.”
She shook her head. “I won’t let them arrest me,” she said. “They’d hand me over to the police and—”
“No one’s going to arrest you,” I said, touching her cheek in an effort to reassure her. “My guess is that they’re just going to look us over. So do as I say and we’ll be okay.”
I throttled back and put the gearshift in neutral. When I came out of the wheelhouse, the blinding searchlight was in my face. I felt like a giant gorilla on a skyscraper with the patrol boat circling me at a distance. I went to the gently pitching stern, had another drink, and coolly awaited their pleasure.
A minute passed and then an officer wearing whites came to the starboard side of the gunboat with a bullhorn in his hand.
“We’re looking for some sailors,” he said, speaking to me in Spanish. “They stole a boat from the harbor at Caimanera. A boat like this one.”
I threw my hands up and shook my head. “There are no American sailors on this boat.”
“Mind if we come aboard and take a look for ourselves?”
Minding very much, I told the American officer I didn’t mind at all. There seemed to be little point in arguing. A sailor manning a fifty-caliber machine gun on the foredeck of the American boat had the bes
t way of winning an argument I could think of. So I threw them a line, put out some fenders, and let them tie up alongside La Guajaba. The officer came aboard with one of his NCOs. There wasn’t much you could say about either of them except that their shoes were black and they looked the way all men look when you take away most of their hair and their capacity for independent action. They were carrying sidearms, a couple of flashlights, and a vague smell of mint and tobacco, as if they’d just disposed of their gum and their cigarettes.
“Anyone else on board?”
“I have a lady friend in the forward cabin,” I said. “She’s asleep. On her own. The last American sailor we saw was Popeye.”
The officer smiled a wry smile and bounced a little on the balls of his feet. “Mind if we take a look for ourselves?”
“I don’t mind at all. But just let me see if my lady friend is dressed to receive visitors.”
He nodded, and I went forward and below. The damp-smelling cabin had a closet, a little cabinet, and a double berth containing Melba with a blanket drawn up to her neck. Underneath she was still wearing the bikini, and I promised myself to drop anchor when the Amis were gone and help her take it off. There’s nothing like sea air to give you an appetite.
“What’s going on?” she asked fearfully. “What do they want?”
“Some American sailors stole a boat from Caimanera,” I explained. “They’re looking for them. I don’t think there’s anything really to worry about.”
She rolled her eyes. “Caimanera. Yes, I can imagine what they were doing there, the pigs. Just about every hotel in Caimanera is a brothel. The casas even have patriotic American names, like the Roosevelt Hotel. The bastards.”
I might have wondered how she knew this, but I was rather more concerned with satisfying their curiosity than the small matter of how they satisfied their sexual desires. “It’s what Eisenhower calls the domino effect. When some guys lay one down they like to make a big show of it.” I jabbed my thumb back at the cabin door. “Look, they’re outside. They just want to check their men aren’t hiding under the bed or anything. I said they could as soon as I checked you were decent.”
