by Philip Kerr
“The fireworks started at midnight,” continued the captain. “They lasted approximately thirty minutes.” He moved through the open sliding glass door and out onto the terrace. “My guess is that during the noise, which was considerable, the assassin shot Señor Reles from out here on the terrace.”
We followed the captain outside.
“Possibly he climbed up from the eighth floor using the scaffolding erected around the hotel sign.”
Meyer Lansky glanced over the wall. “That’s a hell of a climb,” he murmured. “What do you think, Jake?”
Jake Lansky nodded. “The captain is right. The killer had to come up here. Either that or he had a key, in which case he would have to have gotten past Waxey. Which doesn’t seem likely.”
“Not likely,” said his brother. “But all the same, it is possible.”
Waxey shook his head. “No fucking way,” he said. Suddenly his normally whispering voice sounded angry.
“Maybe you were asleep,” said the police captain.
Waxey looked very indignant at this suggestion, which was enough to have Jake Lansky stand between him and the police captain and try to defuse a situation that threatened to get ugly. Anything involving Waxey would have threatened that much.
With one hand placed firmly on Waxey’s chest, Jake Lansky said, “I should introduce you, Meyer. This is Captain Sánchez. He’s from the police station around the corner on Zulueta. Captain Sánchez, this is my brother, Meyer. And this”—he looked at me—“this is . . .” He hesitated for a moment, as though trying to remember not my real name—I could see that he knew what that was—but my false one.
“Carlos Hausner,” I said.
Captain Sánchez nodded and then addressed all of his remarks to Meyer Lansky. “I spoke to His Excellency the president just a few minutes ago,” he said. “First of all, he wishes me to express his sympathies to you, Señor Lansky. For the terrible loss of your friend. He also wishes me to reassure you that the Havana police will do everything in its power to catch the perpetrator of this heinous crime.”
“Thank you,” said Lansky.
“His Excellency tells me he spoke with Señor Reles on the telephone last night, as was his custom every Wednesday evening. The call commenced at exactly eleven forty-five p.m. and terminated at eleven fifty-five. Which would also seem to suggest that the time of death was during the fireworks, between twelve and twelve-thirty. In fact, I am convinced of it. Let me show you why.”
He held out a mangled-looking bullet in the palm of his hand.
“This is a bullet that I dug out of the wall in the study. It looks like a thirty-eight-caliber round. A thirty-eight would be a lot of gun to keep quiet at any time. But during the fireworks, six shots might easily be fired without anyone hearing.”
Meyer Lansky looked at me. “What do you think of that idea?” he asked.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Max said you used to be a cop. Kind of cop were you anyway?”
“The honest kind.”
“Fuck that. I mean what was your area of investigation?”
“Homicide.”
“So what do you think of what the captain says?”
I shrugged. “I think we’ve been jumping over one guess after another. I think it might be an idea to let a doctor examine the body and see if we can pin down the time of death. Maybe that will tie in with the fireworks, I don’t know. But that would make sense, I think.” I glanced over the floor of the terrace. “I don’t see any shell casings, so either the killer used an automatic and picked them up in the dark, which seems unlikely, or the gun was a revolver. Either way, it would seem best to find the murder weapon as a matter of priority.”
Lansky looked at Captain Sánchez.
“We already looked for it,” said the captain.
“Looked?” I said. “Looked where?”
“The terrace. The penthouse. The eighth floor.”
“Maybe he threw it into that park,” I said, indicating the Campo de Marte. “A gun might land there in the dark and nobody would notice.”
“Then again, maybe he took it with him,” said the captain.
“Maybe. On the other hand, Major Ventura was in the casino last night, which meant there were plenty of police in and around the hotel. I can’t see that anyone who had just shot someone dead would risk running into a cop with a gun that had just been fired six or seven times. Especially if this was a professional killer. Frankly, it looks professional. It takes a cool head to fire that many shots and hit the target several times and expect to get away with it. An amateur would probably have panicked and missed more. Maybe even dropped the gun here. My guess is that he just dumped the gun somewhere on his way out of the hotel. In my experience, all sorts of stuff can get smuggled in and out of a hotel as big as this. Waiters walk around with covered trays. Porters carry bags. Maybe the killer just dropped the gun in a laundry basket.”
Captain Sánchez called one of his men and ordered a search to be made of the Campo de Marte and the hotel laundry baskets.
I went back into the office and, tiptoeing around the bloodstains, stared down at Max Reles. There was something covered with a handkerchief: something bloody that had leaked through the cotton. “What’s that?” I asked the captain when he had finished giving orders to his men.
“His eyeball. It must have popped out when one of the bullets exited the victim’s head.”
I nodded. “Then that’s a hell of a thirty-eight. You might expect that with a forty-five, but not a thirty-eight. May I see the bullet you found, Captain?”
Sánchez handed over the bullet.
I looked at it and nodded. “No, I think you’re right, it does look like a thirty-eight. But something must have given this bullet an extra velocity.”
“Such as?”
“I have no idea.”
“You were a detective, señor?”
“It was a very long time ago. And I didn’t mean to suggest that you don’t know your job, Captain. I’m sure that you have your own way of handling an investigation. But Mr. Lansky here asked me what I thought, and I told him.”
Captain Sánchez sucked the little cigarillo and then dropped it on the floor of the crime scene. He said, “You said Major Ventura was in the casino last night. Does that mean you were here also?”
“Yes. I played backgammon in the casino last night until around ten forty-five, when I came up here to join Señor Reles and his guests for a drink. Mr. Lansky and his brother were among those other guests. And the gentleman in the living room. Mr. Dalitz. Waxey, too. I stayed until about eleven-thirty, when we all left, so that Reles could prepare for his phone call with the president. I’d arranged for my backgammon opponent—Señor García, who owns the Shanghai Theater—to return to the casino and continue our game. Well, I waited, but he didn’t come back. Meanwhile I had a drink with Señor Núñez, the casino manager. Then I went home.”
“At what time was that?”
“Just after twelve-thirty. I remember the time because I’m sure the fireworks ended a few minutes before I got in my car.”
“I see.” The captain lit another cigarillo and allowed some of the smoke to escape from between his extremely white teeth. “So it could have been you who killed Señor Reles, could it not?”
“It could have been, yes. It could have been me who led the attack on the Moncada Barracks, too. But it wasn’t. Max Reles had just given me an extremely well paid job. A job I no longer have. So my motive for killing him looks less than convincing.”
“That’s quite correct, Captain,” said Meyer Lansky. “Max had made Señor Hausner here his general manager.”
Captain Sánchez nodded, as if accepting Lansky’s corroboration of my story; but he wasn’t quite finished with me, and now I was cursing myself for being rash enough to have answered Lansky’s earlier question to me concerning the murder of Max Reles.
“How long did you know the deceased?” asked the captain.
“We first met
in Berlin, about twenty years ago. Until a couple of nights ago, I hadn’t seen him since then.”
“And straightaway he offers you a job? He must have thought very highly of you, Señor Hausner.”
“He had his reasons, I suppose.”
“Perhaps you were holding something over his head. Something from the past.”
“You mean like blackmail, Captain?”
“I most certainly do mean that, yes.”
“That might have been true twenty years ago. As a matter of fact, we both had something on each other. But it certainly wasn’t enough to give me any power over the man. Not anymore.”
“And him. Did he hold any power over you?”
“Sure. You could put it that way, why not? He offered me money to work for him. That’s about the most powerful thing there is on this island that I know of.”
The captain pushed his peaked cap onto the back of his head and scratched his forehead. “But I’m still puzzled. Why? Why did he offer you this job?”
“Like I said, he had his reasons. But if you want me to speculate, Captain, I suppose he liked it that I kept my mouth shut for twenty years. That I kept my word to him. That I wasn’t afraid to tell him to go and fuck himself.”
“And maybe you were not afraid to kill him, either.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“No, hear me out,” said the captain. “Max Reles has lived in Havana for many years. He is a law-abiding, taxpaying, upstanding citizen. He’s a friend of the president. Then one day he meets you, someone he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Two or three days later, he’s murdered. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”
“When you put it like that, I wonder why the hell you don’t arrest me. It would certainly save you the time and trouble of conducting a proper murder investigation with forensic evidence and witnesses who saw me do the shooting. The usual stuff. Run me down to the station, why don’t you? Maybe you can strong-arm a confession out of me before you finish your shift. I can’t imagine it would be the first time you’ve done something like that.”
“You mustn’t believe everything you read in Bohemia, señor.”
“No?”
“Do you really think we torture suspects?”
“Mostly I don’t give the matter any thought at all, Captain. But maybe I’ll go and visit some prisoners on the Isle of Pines and see what they have to say about it and then get back to you. It’ll make a change from picking my feet at home.”
But Sánchez wasn’t listening. He was looking at the revolver one of his men was presenting to him on a towel, like a crown of laurel or wild olive. I heard the man say that the gun had been found in a laundry basket on the eighth floor. There was a red star on the handle. And it certainly looked like the murder weapon. For one thing, it was wearing a silencer.
“It looks like Señor Hausner was right, wouldn’t you say, Captain?” said Meyer Lansky.
Sánchez and the cop turned and went into the living room.
“And not a moment too soon,” I told Lansky. “That stupid cop liked me for it.”
“Didn’t he just? Me, I liked you for the way you spoke to him. It reminded me of me. I suppose that was the murder weapon.”
“I’d bet the hard way on it. That’s a seven-shot Nagant. My guess is they’ll dig seven out of Max’s body and the walls.”
“A Nagant? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Designed by a Belgian. But the red star on the handle means that one’s Russian made,” I said.
“Russian, huh? Are you telling me Max was killed by communists?”
“No, Mr. Lansky, I was telling you about the gun. Soviet murder squads used that type of gun to murder Polish officers in 1940. They shot them in the back of the head and then buried the bodies in the Katyń Forest and later blamed the Germans for it. There were plenty of guns like that in Europe at the end of the war. But oddly, not that many on this side of the Atlantic. Especially not with a Bramit silencer. That alone makes this killing look professional. You see, sir, even with a silencer, all pistols will still make a noise. Maybe enough noise to alert Waxey. But a Nagant’s the only kind of pistol you can silence completely. You see, there’s no gap between the cylinder and the barrel. It’s what they call a ‘closed firing system,’ which means you can suppress whatever noise comes out of the barrel one hundred percent—provided, that is, you have a Bramit silencer. Frankly, it’s the perfect weapon for a clandestine killing. The Nagant would also account for the higher velocity of the thirty-eight-caliber bullet, too. Enough to knock out an eyeball that got in the way. So what I’m saying is this. Whoever shot Max Reles didn’t need to do it during last night’s fireworks. They could have shot him at any time between midnight and when Waxey found the body this morning, and nobody would have heard a damn thing. Oh, and by the way, this isn’t exactly the kind of gun you can buy in your local gun store. Least of all with a silencer. These days the Ivans prefer the much lighter Tokarev TT. That’s an automatic, in case you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know,” agreed Lansky. “But as it happens I’m not as ignorant about the Russians as you might think, Gunther. My family was from Grodno, on the Russian-Polish border. Me and my brother, Jake, we left when we were kids. To get away from the Russians. Jake here knew one of those Polish officers who got themselves killed. People today talk about German anti-Semitism, but for my family, the Russians were just as bad. Maybe worse.”
Jake Lansky nodded. “I think so,” he said. “And so did Pop.”
“So how come you know so much about this stuff?”
“During the war, I was in German military intelligence,” I said. “And for a short while afterward I was in a Soviet POW camp. If I’m cagey about my name, it’s because I killed a couple of Ivans while making my escape from a train bound for a uranium mine in the Urals. I doubt I’d have come back from there. Very few German POWs have ever come back from the Soviet Union. They ever catch up with me, I’m soap on a rope, Mr. Lansky.”
“I figured it was something like that.” Lansky shook his head and glanced down at the dead body. “Someone should cover him up.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Lansky,” I said. “Not yet. It’s just possible that Captain Sánchez will get wise to the proper procedures here.”
“Don’t you worry none about him,” said Lansky. “He gives you any trouble, I’ll call his boss and have him lay off. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. Come on. Let’s get out of this room. I can’t bear to be here any longer. Max was like a second brother to me. I knew him since I was fifteen years old in Brownsville. He was the smartest kid I ever knew. With the proper education Max could have been anything he wanted. Maybe even the president of the United States.”
We went into the living room. Sánchez was there with Waxey and Dalitz. The gun was lying in a plastic bag, on the table where Max and I had eaten lunch less than forty hours before.
“So what happens now?” asked Waxey.
“We bury him,” said Meyer Lansky. “Like a good Jew. That’s what Max would have wanted. When the cops have finished with the body, we got three days to make the arrangements and everything.”
“Leave it to me,” said Jake. “It’d be an honor.”
“Someone ought to tell that girl of his,” said Dalitz.
“Dinah,” whispered Waxey. “Her name is Dinah. They were going to get married. With a rabbi and the whole broken wineglass, everything. She’s Jewish, too, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Dalitz.
“She’ll be all right,” said Meyer Lansky. “Someone ought to tell her, sure, but she’ll be all right. The young always are. Nineteen years old, she’s got her whole life ahead of her. God rest Max’s soul, I thought she was too young for him, but what do I know? You can’t blame a guy for wanting a little piece of happiness. For a guy like Max, Dinah was as good as it gets. But you’re right, Moe, someone ought to tell her.”
“Tell me what? Has something happened? Where’s Max? Why are t
he police here?”
It was Dinah.
“Well, isn’t anyone going to say anything? Is Max all right? Is he sick? God damn it, what the hell is happening here?”
Then she saw the gun on the table. I suppose she must have guessed the rest, because she started to scream, loudly. It was a sound that could have raised the dead.
But not this time.
14
WAXEY DROVE DINAH BACK to Finca Vigía in the red Cadillac Eldorado. Under the circumstances, perhaps it ought to have been me who took her home. I might have been able to offer Noreen some support in dealing with her daughter’s grief. But Waxey was eager to get out from under Meyer Lansky’s shrewd, searching eye, as if he felt the Jewish gangster suspected him of some involvement in the murder of Max Reles. Besides, it was much more likely that I’d only have been in the way. I wasn’t much of a shoulder to cry on. Not anymore. Not since the war, when so many German women had, of necessity, learned to cry by themselves.
Grief: I no longer had the patience for it. What did it matter if you grieved for people when they died? It certainly couldn’t bring them back. And they weren’t even particularly grateful for your grief. The living always get over the dead. That’s what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they’d only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when I felt equal to the task of driving down to the Hemingway house to offer my sympathies. Despite the fact that Max’s death had done me out of a salary worth twenty-thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t sorry he was dead. But for Dinah’s sake I was willing to pretend.
The Pontiac wasn’t there, just a white Oldsmobile with a sun visor I seemed to recognize.
Ramón admitted me to the house, and I found Dinah in her room. She was seated in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, watched closely by a glum-looking water buffalo. The buffalo reminded me of myself, and it was perhaps easy to see why he was looking glum: Dinah’s suitcase was open on her bed. It was packed neatly with her clothes, as if she were preparing to leave the country. On a table by the arm of her chair were a drink and a hardwood ashtray. Her eyes were red, but she seemed to be all cried out.
