by Philip Kerr
4 F
INCA VIGÍA WAS about twelve kilometers southeast of central Havana—a one-story Spanish colonial house set in a twenty-acre estate and boasting a fine view of the bay to the north. I parked next to a lemon Pontiac Chieftain convertible—the one with the chief’s head on the hood that glows when the headlights are switched on. There was something vaguely African about the white house and its situation, and as I climbed out of my car and glanced around at all the mango trees and enormous jacarandas, I thought I could almost have been visiting the home of some district high commissioner in Kenya. This was an impression strongly enhanced by the interior. The house was a museum to Hemingway’s love of hunting. Each of the many large, airy rooms, including the master bedroom—but not the bathroom—contained the trophy heads of kudu, water buffalo, and ibex. Anything with horns, in fact. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found the head of the last unicorn in that house. Or maybe a couple of ex-wives. As well as these trophies, there were a great many books, even in the bathroom, and unlike in my own house, most of them looked as if they had been read. The tiled floors were largely uncarpeted, which must have been tough on the feet of the several cats who gave the impression of owning the place. There were very few pictures on the whitewashed walls, just a few bullfighting posters. Furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than elegance. In the living room the sofa and armchairs were covered with a flowery material that struck a discordant, feminine touch in the midst of all that masculine love of death. At the very center of the living room, like the twenty-four-carat diamond that was set into the floor of the entrance hall of Havana’s National Capitol Building, and which pinpoints zero for all distance measurements in Cuba, was a drinks table with more bottles than a beer truck. Noreen poured us a couple of large bourbons, and we carried them out onto a long terrace, where she told me about her life since last I’d seen her. In return I described a version of my own—one that carefully left out my having been in the SS, not to mention my active service with a police battalion in the Ukraine. But I told her about how I’d been a private detective, and a regular cop again, and Erich Gruen and how he and the CIA had managed to frame me as a Nazi war criminal, and how I’d been obliged to seek the help of the Old Comrades to escape Europe and start a new life in Argentina. “That’s how I ended up with a false name and an Argentine passport,” I explained, glibly. “I’d probably still be there but for the fact that the Perónists discovered I wasn’t really a Nazi at all.” “But why come to Cuba?” “Oh, I don’t know. The same reasons as everyone else, I suppose. The climate. The cigars. The women. The casinos. I play backgammon in some of the casinos.” I sipped the bourbon, enjoying the sweet and sour taste of the famous writer’s liquor. “Ernest came because of the big-game fishing.” I glanced around, looking for a fish, but there weren’t any. “When he’s here, he spends most of his time at Cojimar. It’s a crummy little fishing village on the crust of a shoreline where he keeps his boat. Ernest loves fishing. But there’s a nice bar in Cojimar, and I have the sneaking suspicion he likes the bar more than he likes the boat. Or fishing, for that matter. On the whole, I suspect Ernest likes bars more than just about anything.” “Cojimar. I used to go there a lot until I heard that the militia were using it for target practice. And that sometimes the targets were still breathing.” Noreen nodded. “I’ve heard that story. And I’m sure it’s true. I could believe almost anything about Fulgencio Batista. Just along from that beach he’s built a village of exclusive villas behind a wire fence, for all his top generals. I drove past it just the other day. They’re all pink. Not the generals—that would be too much to hope for. The villas.” “Pink?” “Yes. It looks like a holiday camp in a dream described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” “He’s someone else I haven’t read. One of these days I’m going to have to learn how. It’s strange. I can buy any amount of books. But I’ve found it’s no substitute for reading them.” Hearing footsteps on the terrace, I turned around and saw a pretty, young woman approaching. I stood up, and trying to wipe some of the wolf-man from my face, I smiled. “Carlos, this is my daughter, Dinah.” She was taller than her mother, and not just because of the stiletto heels on her feet. She wore a polka-dot halter dress that only just covered her knees and left most of her back and a bit beyond exposed, which made the little net gloves look unnecessary. Over her muscular, sunburned forearm was a mohair handbag that was the shape, size, and color of Karl Marx’s best beard. Her own hair was almost blond, but not quite, which suited her better, and all shallow layers and soft waves, and the string of pearls around her slender young neck must have been hung there as tribute from some admiring sea god. Certainly her figure was worth a whole basketful of golden apples. Her mouth was as full as a sail on an oceangoing schooner and lipsticked signal red by a skilled and steady hand that might have been school of Rubens. The eyes were large and blue and twinkling with an intelligence made to look more determined by her square and slightly dimpled chin. There are beautiful girls and there are beautiful girls who know it; Dinah Charalambides was a beautiful girl who knew how to solve a quadratic equation. “Hey,” she said, coolly. I nodded back, but I’d already lost her attention. “Can I have the car, Mom?” “You’re not going out?” “I won’t be late.” “I don’t like you going out at night,” said Noreen. “Suppose you get stopped at an army checkpoint?” “Do I look like a revolutionary?” asked Dinah. “Sadly, no.” “Well, then.” “My daughter is nineteen, Carlos,” said Noreen. “But she behaves like she’s thirty.” “Everything I know, I learned from you, mother dear.” “Where are you going, anyway?” “The Barracuda Club.” “I wish you wouldn’t go there.” “We’ve been through this before.” Dinah sighed. “Look, all my friends are going to be there.” “That’s what I’m talking about. Why can’t you mix with some friends of your own age?” “Perhaps I would,” Dinah said pointedly, “if we weren’t exiled from our home in Los Angeles.” “We’re not exiled,” insisted Noreen. “I just needed to get away from the States for a while.” “I understand that. Of course I do. But please try to understand what it’s like for me. I want to go out and have some fun. Not sit around the dinner table and talk about politics with a lot of boring people.” Dinah glanced at me and flashed me a quick, apologetic smile. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Señor Gunther. From what Mother’s told me, I’m sure you’re a very interesting person. But most of Noreen’s friends are left-wing writers and lawyers. Intellectuals. And friends of Ernest’s who drink too much.” I flinched a bit when she called me Gunther. It meant Noreen had already revealed my secret to her daughter. That irritated me. Dinah put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it as if it were a fire-cracker. “And I do wish you wouldn’t smoke,” said Noreen. Dinah rolled her eyes and held out one gloved hand. “Keys.” “On the desk, by the telephone.” Dinah stalked off in a cloud of scent, cigarette smoke, and exasperation, like the ruthless bitch-beauty in one of her mother’s gothic-American plays. I hadn’t seen any of them onstage, only the movies that had been made of them. These were stories full of unscrupulous mothers, mad fathers, flighty wives, dishonest and sadistic sons, and drunken homosexual husbands—the kind of stories that almost made me glad I didn’t have a family myself. I lit a cigar and tried to contain my amusement. Noreen poured us both another bourbon from a bottle of Old Forester she’d brought from the living room and helped herself to ice from a bucket fashioned from an elephant’s foot. “Little bitch,” she said tonelessly. “She has a place at Brown University, and yet she still maintains this fucking fiction that she’s obliged to live here in Havana with me. I didn’t ask her to come. I haven’t written a damn thing since I got here. She sits around and plays records all day. I can’t work when someone plays records. Especially the kind of fucking records she listens to. Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. I ask you. God, I hate those smug bastards. And I can’t work at night when she’s out, because I’m worried something will happen to her.” A second or two later the Pontiac Chieftain started up and moved off down the drive, wit
h the hood’s Indian head scouting out the way forward in the encroaching darkness. “You don’t want her here with you?” Noreen gave me a narrow-eyed stare over the rim of her glass. “You used to be a little quicker on the uptake, Gunther. What happened? Something hit you on the head during the war?” “Just the odd bit of shrapnel, now and then. I’d show you the scars, but I’d have to take my wig off.” But she wasn’t ready to be amused again. Not yet. She lit a cigarette and flicked the match into the bushes. “If you had a nineteen-year-old daughter, would you want her to live in Havana?” “That would depend on whether or not she had any good-looking friends.” Noreen grimaced. “It’s precisely that kind of remark that made me think she’d be better off in Rhode Island. There are too many bad influences in Havana. Too much easy sex. Too much cheap booze.” “That’s why I live here.” “And she’s in with the wrong crowd,” continued Noreen, ignoring me. “As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I asked you here tonight.” “And there I was, naively thinking that you asked me down here for purely sentimental reasons. You can still pack a punch, Noreen.” “I didn’t mean it like that.” “No?” I let that one go. I sniffed my drink for a moment, enjoying the combusted aroma. The bourbon smelled like the devil’s coffee cup. “Take it from me, angel, there are many worse places to live than Cuba. I know. I’ve tried living in them. Berlin after the war was no Ivy League dormitory, and neither was Vienna. Especially if you were a girl. Russian soldiers have got pimps and beach-boy gigolos beat for bad influences, Noreen. And that’s not anti-communist, right-wing propaganda, sweetheart, that’s the truth. And, speaking of that delicate subject, how much did you tell her about me?” “Not much. Until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how much there was to tell. All you said to me this morning—and, by the way, you were speaking not directly to me, but to the book clerk in La Moderna Poesia—was that your name was Carlos Hausner. And why the hell did you pick Carlos as your nom de plume? Carlos is a name for a fat Mexican peasant in a John Wayne movie. No, I don’t see you as a Carlos at all. I expect that’s why I used your real name, Bernie—well, it just sort of slipped out when I was telling her about Berlin in 1934.” “That’s unfortunate, given how much trouble I went to in order to get a new name. To be quite frank with you, if the authorities found out about me, Noreen, I could be deported back to Germany, which would be awkward, to say the least. Like I told you. There are people—Russian people—who’d probably like to hold a knot under my ear.” She gave me a look that was full of suspicion. “Maybe that’s what you deserve.” “Maybe.” I put my drink down on a glass table and weighed her remark in my mind for a moment. “Then again, in most cases it’s only in books that people get what’s coming to them. But if you really think that’s what I deserve, then perhaps I’ll be running along.” I went into the house and then out again through the front door. She was standing by the railing on the terrace above the steps that led down to my car. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think you deserve it at all, okay? I was just teasing you. Please come back.” I stood there and looked up at her without much pleasure. I was angry and I didn’t care that she knew it. And not just about the remark she’d made about me deserving to hang. I was angry with her and with myself that I’d not made it clearer that Bernie Gunther no longer existed, and that Carlos Hausner had taken his place. “I was so excited to see you again, after all these years—” Her voice seemed to catch on something like a cashmere sweater snagging on a nail. “I’m sorry I let your secret out of the bag. I’ll speak to Dinah when she gets home and tell her to keep what I told her in confidence, okay? I’m afraid I didn’t think about the possible implications of telling her about you. But you see, she and I have been very close since Nick, her father, died. We always tell each other everything.” Most women have a vulnerability dial. They can turn it up pretty much whenever they want, and it works on men like catnip. Noreen was turning the dial now. First the catch in her voice and then a big, unsteady sigh. It was working, too, and she was operating only at level three or four. There was plenty of what makes the weaker sex seem like the weaker sex still in the tank. A moment later her shoulders dropped and she turned away. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t go.” Level five. I stood on the step looking at my cigar and then down the long, winding drive that led onto the main road into San Francisco de Paula. Finca Vigía. It meant Lookout Farm, and it was well named, because there was a sort of tower to the left of the main building where someone might sit in a room on the top story and write a book and look out on the world below and think himself a sort of god. That was probably why people became writers in the first place. A cat came along and rubbed its gray body along my shins, as if it too were trying to persuade me to stay. On the other hand, it might just have been looking to get rid of a lot of unwanted cat hair on my best trousers. Another cat was sitting like an erect bedspring beside my car, ready to disrupt my departure if its feline colleague failed to do it first. Finca Vigía. Something told me to look out for myself and leave. That if I stayed I might end up like a character in someone’s stupid novel, without any will of my own. That one of them—Noreen or Hemingway—might make me do something I didn’t want to do. “All right.” My voice sounded like an animal’s in the darkness. Or perhaps an orisha of the forest from the world of Santería. I threw away the cigar and went back inside. Noreen met me halfway, which was generous, and we embraced fondly. Her body still felt good in my arms and reminded me of everything it was supposed to remind me of. Level six. She still knew how to affect me, that much was certain. She laid her head on my shoulder, but with her face turned away, and let me inhale her beauty for a while. We didn’t kiss. That wasn’t yet required. Not while we were still on level six. Not while her face was turned away. After a moment or two she broke away and sat down again. “You said something about Dinah’s being in with the wrong crowd,” I said. “That it was one of the reasons you asked me here.” “I’m sorry I put it so badly. That’s not like me. After all, I’m supposed to be good with words. But I do need your help. With Dinah.” “It’s been a long time since I knew anything about nineteen-year-old girls, Noreen. And even then, what I knew was probably hopelessly wrong. Short of spanking her, I don’t see what I can do.” “I wonder if that might work,” she said. “I don’t think it would help her very much. Of course, there’s always the possibility I might enjoy it, which is another reason to pack her off to Rhode Island. But I agree with you. The Barracuda Club is no place for a nineteen-year-old girl. Although there are much worse places in Havana.” “Oh, she’s been to them all, I can assure you. The Shanghai Theater. The Cabaret Kursaal. The Hotel Chic. And those are just the match-books I’ve found in her bedroom. It might be even worse than that.” I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t get any worse than them. Even in Havana.” I fetched my drink off the glass table and poured it safely away in my mouth. “All right, she’s wild. If the movies are right, then most kids are these days. But at least they’re not beating up Jews. And I still don’t see what I can do about it.” Noreen found the Old Forester and refilled my glass. “Well, maybe we can think of something. Together. Like in the old days, remember? In Berlin? If things had worked out differently, we might even have made a difference. If ever I’d written that article, we might even have put a stop to Hitler’s Olympiad.” “I’m kind of glad you didn’t write it. If you had, I’d probably be dead.” She nodded. “For a while, we made quite an investigative team, Gunther. You were my Galahad. My knight of heaven.” “Sure. I remember your letter. I’d like to tell you I still had it, but the Americans reorganized my filing system when they bombed Berlin. You want my advice about Dinah? I reckon you should fix a lock on her door and put her under a nine o’clock curfew. That used to work back in Vienna. When the Four Powers were in charge of the city. Also, you might think about not lending her the car whenever she asks for it. If it was me wearing those heels she had on, I might think twice about walking nine miles into the center of Havana.” “I’d like to see that.” “Me wea
ring high heels? Sure, I’m a regular at the Palette Club, although they know me better there as Rita. You know, it’s not a bad thing that children should frequently disobey their parents. Especially when you consider the mistakes the parents made. Especially when they’re as grown up as Dinah obviously is.” “Perhaps if I gave you all the facts,” she said, “you might understand the problem.” “You can try. But I’m not a detective anymore, Noreen.” “But you were, weren’t you?” She smiled a cunning smile. “It was me who got you started. As a private detective. Or maybe you need reminding.” “So that’s your angle.” She curled her lip with displeasure. “I certainly didn’t mean it to be an angle, as you put it. Not in the least. But I’m a mother who’s running out of options here.” “I’ll send you a check. With interest.” “Oh, stop it, for Pete’s sake. I don’t want your money. I’ve got plenty of money. But you might at least shut up for a minute and do me the courtesy of hearing me out before opening fire with both cannons. I figure you owe me that much. That’s fair, isn’t it?” “All right. I can’t promise to hear anything. But I’ll listen.” Noreen shook her head. “You know, Gunther, it beats me how you ever survived the war. I’ve only just met you again, and already I want to shoot you.” She laughed scornfully. “You want to be careful, you know. This house has more guns than the Cuban militia. There are nights when I’ve sat here drinking with Hem, and he had a shotgun on his lap for taking potshots at the birds in the trees.” “Sounds dangerous for the cats.” “Not just the fucking cats.” Still laughing, she shook her head. “ People, too.” “My head would look good in your bathroom.” “What a horrid thought. You looking at me every time I took a bath.” “I was thinking of your daughter.” “That’s enough.” Noreen stood up abruptly. “Damn you, get out,” she said. “Get the fuck out of here.” I went into the house again. “Wait,” she snapped. “Wait, please.” I waited. “Why are you such a hard-ass?” “I guess I’m not used to human society,” I said. “Please, listen. You could help her. You’re about the one person who can, I think. More than you know. I really don’t know who else to ask.” “Is she in a jam?” “Not exactly, no. At least, not yet. There’s a man, you see, whom she’s involved with. Who’s much older than her. I’m worried she’s going to end up like—like Gloria Grahame in that movie. The Big Heat
