by Philip Kerr
“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 bough
t 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.”
