by Philip Kerr
“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 midd
le 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 reb
els. 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.”
