by Philip Kerr
“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 d
irt 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.”
