by Philip Kerr
“You, on the other hand, my friend. You are a little bit of both. You think you’re a black-and-white kind of guy. You think you know what you fucking want. But really you’re not, and you don’t. When I first met you, I thought you were just another dumb ex-copper looking to make a quick bill. I expect there are times when that’s even the way you think of yourself. But you’re more than that. I expect that’s what Noreen saw. Something else. Something complicated. Whatever it was, she wasn’t the type to fall for a guy who didn’t fall for her in the same way.” He shrugged. “With her and me, it was just because she was bored. With you, I think it was the real thing.”
Reles spoke calmly, even reasonably, and, listening to him speak, I found it was hard to believe that he had just murdered two people. If I’d felt any better, I might have argued with him, but with the stomach I had and the talking I’d already done, I was more or less exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep and stay asleep for a very long time. And maybe puke a bit more if and when the need hit me. At least then I would know I was alive.
“As I see it,” he said, “there’s just one remaining problem.”
“I imagine it’s not a problem you can fix with that Colt.”
“Not directly, no. I mean, you could do it for me, but I bet you’re the picky type. Well, you are now. I’d like to meet you in ten years’ time to see how picky you are then.”
“If you mean I’m picky about murdering people in cold blood, then you’re right. Although I could make an exception in your case. At least I could until you’ve sent that telegram.”
“Which is why I’m going to leave you on the boat until I’ve had time to go to the Palace Hotel in Potsdam and send the message to Abe. That’s a nice hotel, by the way. I have a suite there, too, for when I’m in Potsdam.” He shook his head. “No, my problem is this. What am I going to do about that Gestapo captain in Würzburg? What was his name? Weinberger?”
I nodded.
“He knows too much about me.”
I nodded again.
“Tell me, Gunther. Is he married? Does he have any kids? Anyone he loves who I can threaten if he gets out of line?”
I shook my head. “I can honestly say that the only person he really cares about is himself. To that extent at least he’s fairly typical of anyone working for the Gestapo. All Weinberger cares about is his career and getting on, at any price.”
Reles nodded and walked around the deck for a moment. “To that extent at least, you said. In what way is he atypical?”
I shook my head and realized I had a blinding headache. The kind that feels likely to leave you blind. “I’m not sure that I understand what you’re driving at.”
“Is he queer? Does he like little girls? Can he be bribed? What’s his Achilles’ heel? Does he have one?” He shrugged. “Look, I could have him killed, probably, but it makes waves when a cop gets killed. Like that cop who got killed outside the Excelsior, in the summer. The Berlin polenta made all sorts of heat about that, didn’t they?”
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t want to have him killed. But everyone’s got a weakness. Yours is Noreen Charalambides. Mine is that fucking letter that’s in some cop’s desk drawer, right? So what’s this Captain Weinberger’s weakness?”
“Now you come to mention it, there is something.”
He snapped his fingers at me. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
I said nothing.
“Fuck you, Gunther. This isn’t about your conscience. This is about Noreen. This is about her opening the door one night and finding my kid brother, Abe, on her doorstep. In truth, he’s not as skilled with an ice pick as I am. Few people are, except maybe my old man, and the doctor who taught him. Me, I’m just as happy to use a gun. Gets the job done. But Abe.” Max Reles shook his head and smiled. “One time back in Brooklyn, when we were both working the Shapiro brothers—local underworld figures—the kid murdered this guy in a car wash because he didn’t clean his car right. He left the wheels dirty. So Abe told me, anyway. Broad daylight, and the kid knocks him out and then stabs him in the fucking ear with an ice pick. Not a mark. The coppers thought the guy had a heart attack. As it happens, the Shapiros? They’re dead, too. Me and Abe buried Bill alive in a sandpit last May. That’s one of the reasons I came to Berlin in the first place, Gunther. To wait for the heat on that murder to die down a little.” He paused. “So. Am I making myself clear? You want that I should tell the kid to bury the bitch alive, like Bill Shapiro?”
I shook my head. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”
PART TWO
Havana, February 1954
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 m
e 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.
