by Philip Kerr
S YOU KNOW, Reles had offered me a job at the Saratoga, and I’d accepted it, but only with the intention of finding an opportunity to kill him. How to do this looked more difficult. Max was heavily protected. He lived in a penthouse at the Saratoga that could only be accessed by a key-operated elevator. And the elevator doors in the penthouse were watched closely by Max’s bodyguard, Waxey, who searched everyone going into the penthouse. “But I had the idea how I might do it almost as soon as I saw the type of revolver that your friend Hemingway had given you. The Nagant. I came across that type of pistol a lot during the war. It was the standard-issue sidearm for all Russian army and police officers, and with one important modification—a Bramit silencer—it was the execution weapon of choice for the Russian special services. Between January 1942 and February 1944 I worked for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau investigating both Allied and German atrocities. One of the crimes we investigated was the KatyńForest massacre. This would have been in April 1943, after an Army Group intelligence staff officer had found a mass grave containing the bodies of four thousand Poles some twenty kilometers west of Smolensk. All of the men were officers of the Polish army and had been executed with a single shot in the back of the head by NKVD death squads. And all using the same type of revolver: the Nagant. “The Russians were devious and methodical in the way they had gone about things. The way they are about everything. Sorry, but that’s just the truth. It would have been impossible to execute four thousand men unless certain precautions were first taken to conceal the sound of these executions from those who were yet to die. Otherwise they’d have rioted and overrun their captors. So the murders themselves took place at night, in windowless cells that had been sound-insulated with several mattresses, and using silenced Nagant revolvers. One of these silencers came into my possession during the investigation, and I was able to study its design and to test a silenced weapon on a firing range. Which meant that as soon as I saw your revolver I knew that I could manufacture a Bramit silencer in my metal shop at home. “My next problem was this: How was I going to get into the penthouse carrying the revolver? It so happened that Max had given me a gift—a custom-made backgammon set in an attaché case that contained all the checkers and the dice and the dice cups. But there was also room for a revolver and its newly made silencer. And I thought there was little chance of Waxey searching it, especially as the case had combination locks. “Max had told me that he used to play cards once a week with some of the Havana underworld. He also told me that the game always ended at eleven-thirty, exactly fifteen minutes before he retired to his office and took a phone call from the president, who owns a piece of the Saratoga. He asked me to come along, and when I went, I took with me the attaché case containing the silenced revolver, and placed it on his pool terrace. When I left the penthouse with everyone else at eleven-thirty, I went back down to the casino and waited a few minutes. It was Chinese New Year, the night when they set off a lot of fireworks at the Barrio Chino. It’s pretty deafening, of course. Especially on the rooftop of the Saratoga. “Anyway, because of the fireworks I figured Reles would finish his call with the president early. And as soon as I had let the casino manager see me back in the casino after going up to the penthouse for the first time, I returned to the eighth floor. Which was as far as I could go, of course, without an elevator key. “But on the corner of the building they’re repairing the Saratoga’s neon sign, which meant that there was some scaffolding on which someone might climb up from the eighth floor to the penthouse terrace. Someone with a head for heights. Or someone who was determined to kill Max Reles at almost any cost. It was quite a climb, I can tell you. And I needed both hands to do it. I certainly couldn’t have managed that climb with the revolver in my hand, or tucked into my belt. That was why I needed to leave the weapon on Max’s terrace. “Max was still on the phone when I got up there again. I could hear him talking to Batista, going through the figures with him. It seems that the president takes his thirty percent stake in the Saratoga very seriously. I opened the case, took out the revolver, screwed on the silencer, and quietly approached the open window. Maybe I had a few second thoughts at that moment. And then I remembered 1934 and how he’d shot two people in cold blood right in front of me, when we were aboard a boat on Lake Tegel. You were already on your way back to the States when it happened, but he threatened to have his brother, Abe, kill you when you arrived back in New York unless I cooperated with him. I knew I was safe. More or less. I already had evidence of his corruption that would have put him away. But I had no means of stopping his brother from killing you. After that, we kind of held each other in check, at least until the Olympics were over and he went back to the States. But like I said earlier: he had it coming. And as soon as he put the phone down I fired. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. He saw me just before I pulled the trigger the first time. I think he even smiled. “I shot him seven times. I went to the edge of the little terrace and tossed the revolver into a basket of towels by the swimming pool on the eighth floor. Then I climbed down. I covered the revolver with some more towels and went into a bathroom to clean myself up. By the time the firecrackers started I was already in the elevator, going back down to the casino. The plain fact of the matter is that I’d forgotten about the fireworks when I made the silencer, otherwise I might not have bothered. But as it happened, it enabled me to use the fireworks after the fact, as a different kind of cover. “Well, the next day I went back to the Saratoga, like everything was normal in my life. There was no way around that. I had to act normally, or suspicion would have fallen on me. As it was, Captain Sánchez marked my card for the murder right from the very beginning. He might have made it stick, too, until I managed to convince Lansky that the murder might not have taken place under cover of the noise from the fireworks—as everyone seemed to think it had. And the police were helpful there. They hadn’t even bothered to search for the murder weapon. I flexed my Adlon Hotel detective muscles and suggested a search of the laundry baskets. Not long afterward, they found the gun. “As soon as those mobsters saw the silencer on the revolver, they began to think it might be a professional killing—something to do with their business in Havana and probably nothing to do with something that started twenty years ago. Better still, I was able to suggest that the silencer meant that the murder could have happened at any time, not necessarily during the fireworks, as the captain had suggested. Effectively that discredited his theory about my being the killer and left me looking like Nero Wolfe. Anyway, that was Gunther in the clear, I thought, only I’d been too convincing for my own good. Meyer Lansky appreciated the way I’d bested the cop; and since Max had already told him something about my background as a Berlin homicide detective, Lansky decided that, in the interest of avoiding a Mafia war in Havana, I was now the man best qualified to handle the investigation of Max Reles’s death. “For a moment or two I was horrified. And then I began to see the possibility of putting myself completely in the clear for it. All I needed was somewhere safe to lay the blame that wouldn’t result in anyone else getting killed. I had no idea that they would kill Waxey, Max’s bodyguard, as a sort of insurance policy, just in case he really did have something to do with it. So you could say I killed him, too. That was unfortunate. Anyway, by a stroke of good luck for me, although not for him, one of the pit bosses at the Saratoga, a fellow named Irving Goldstein, was involved with a female impersonator at the Palette Club; and when I found out that he’d killed himself because Max had been on the brink of firing him for being a pansy, well, he seemed made to order to take the blame. So the night before last I went to search his apartment with Captain Sánchez, and I planted the technical drawing I’d made of the Bramit silencer and made sure that Sánchez found it. “Later on I showed the drawing to Lansky and told him it was prima facie evidence that it had probably been Goldstein who murdered Max Reles. And Lansky agreed. He agreed because he wanted to agree, because any other result would have been bad for business. More importantly, it left me in the clear. So. There it is. You can
relax. It certainly wasn’t your daughter that killed him. It was me.” “I don’t know how I could ever have suspected her,” said Noreen. “What kind of mother am I?” “Don’t even think about it.” I smiled wryly. “As a matter of fact, when she saw the murder weapon at the penthouse, she recognized it straightaway and later on she told me she thought it might have been you who killed Max. It was all I could do to convince her that the gun was a common one in Cuba. Even though it isn’t. That’s the first Russian weapon I’ve ever seen in Cuba. Of course, I could have told her the truth, but when she announced that she was going back to America, I couldn’t see the point. I mean, if I’d told her that, I might have had to tell her everything else. I mean, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Her to leave Havana, and go to college?” “And that’s why you killed him,” she said. I nodded. “You were quite right. You couldn’t let her stay with a man like that. He was going to take her somewhere they could smoke opium, and God only knows what else. I killed him because of what she might have become if she’d actually married him.” “And because of what Fredo told you when you went to his office in the Bacardi Building.” “He told you about that?” “On the way to the hospital. That’s why you helped him, isn’t it? Because he told you that Dinah is your daughter.” “I was waiting to hear you say it, Noreen. And now you have, I guess I can mention it. Is it true?” “It’s a little late to be asking that, isn’t it? In view of what happened to Max.” “I could say much the same thing to you, Noreen. Is it true?” “Yes. It’s true. I’m sorry. I should have told you, but that would have meant telling Dinah that Nick wasn’t her father; and until he died, she’d always had a much better relationship with him than with me. It felt like I’d have been taking that away from Dinah at a time when I most needed to exercise some influence over her, do you see? If I’d told her, I don’t know what the result might have been. When it happened—I mean, in 1935, when she was born—I thought about writing to you. Several times. But each time I thought about it, I saw how good Nick was with her, and I simply couldn’t do it. He always thought Dinah was his daughter. But a woman always knows these things. As the months and then the years went by, it seemed less and less relevant. Eventually the war came, and that appeared to end for good any idea of telling you that you had a daughter. I wouldn’t have known where to write. When I saw you again, in the bookstore, I couldn’t believe it. And naturally I thought about telling you that same evening. But you made a rather tasteless remark that left me thinking you might be another of Havana’s bad influences. You seemed so hard-bitten and cynical I hardly recognized you.” “I know the feeling. These days I hardly recognize myself. Or even worse, I recognize my own father. I look in the mirror and see him staring back at me with amused contempt for my own previous failure to understand that I am and always would be exactly like him. If not him exactly. But you were quite right not to tell her I’m her father. Max Reles wasn’t the only man Dinah couldn’t be around. It’s me, too. I know that. And I don’t intend to try and see her and establish some kind of relationship with her. It’s rather late in the day for that, I think. So you can rest assured on that count. It’s enough for me to know that I have a daughter and to have met her. All thanks to Alfredo López.” “As I said, I didn’t know he’d told you until we went to the hospital just now. Lawyers aren’t supposed to tell strangers about their clients’ affairs, are they?” “After I pulled his nuts out of the fire with those pamphlets, he figured he owed me and that I was the kind of father who might be able to help her somehow. That’s what he told me, anyhow.” “He was right. I’m glad he did.” She hugged me closer. “And you did help her. I’d have killed Max myself if I’d been able.” “We all do what we can do.” “And this is why you went to SIM headquarters and persuaded them to let Fredo go. Because you thought you wanted to pay Fredo back.” “What he said. It gave me some kind of hope that my life hasn’t entirely been wasted.” “But how? How did you persuade them to let him go?” “A while ago I stumbled across a weapons cache on the road to Santa María del Rosario. I traded it for his life.” “Nothing else?” “What else could there be?” “I don’t know how to begin to thank you,” she said. “You go back to writing books, and I’ll go back to playing backgammon and smoking cigars. From the look of things, you’re getting ready to move into that new house of yours. I hear Hemingway will soon be back here again.” “Yes, he’ll be here in June. Hem’s lucky to be alive after what happened. He was seriously injured in two consecutive plane crashes. He then got himself badly burned in a bushfire. By rights, the man should be dead. Some American newspapers even published his obituary.” “So he’s risen from the dead. It’s not all of us who can say as much.” Later on, I went out to my car, and in the shifting dark I thought I saw the figure of the dead gardener, standing beside the well where he’d drowned. Maybe the house was haunted, after all. And if the house wasn’t haunted, I know I was, and probably always would be. Some of us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer than that. Years, perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again, like Ernest Hemingway. If the dead rise not, then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body shall we live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps, if the dead could rise and be incorruptible, and I could be changed forever in the blinking of an eye, then dying might just be worth the trouble of getting killed, or killing myself. Back in Havana, I went to the Casa Marina and spent the night with a couple of willing girls. They didn’t make me feel any less alone. All they did was help me to pass the time. What little of it we have.
