by Philip Kerr
Noreen was busy checking out my shopping. “Montaigne, huh? I’m impressed.” She was speaking German now, probably getting ready to ask me some awkward questions without our being overheard and understood.
“Don’t be. I haven’t read it yet.”
“What’s this? Hobby Center? Do you have children?”
“No, that’s for me.” Seeing her smile, I shrugged. “I like train sets. I like the way they just keep on going around and around, like one single, simple, innocent thought in my head. That way I can ignore all the other thoughts that are in there.”
“I know. You’re like the governess in The Turn of the Screw.”
“Am I?”
“It’s a novel by Henry James.”
“I wouldn’t know. So. Any kids yourself?”
“I have a daughter. Dinah. She’s just finished school.”
The waiter arrived and neatly set out the drinks in front of us like a chess grand master castling a king and a rook. When he was gone, Noreen said, “What’s the story, Carlos? Are you wanted or something?”
“It’s a long story.” We toasted each other silently.
“I’ll bet.”
I glanced at my watch. “Too long to tell now. Another time. What about you? What are you doing in Cuba? Last I heard, you were up before that stupid kangaroo court. The House Committee on Un-American Activities. The HUAC. When was that?”
“May 1952. I was accused of being a communist. And blacklisted by several Hollywood movie studios.” She stirred her drink with a cocktail stick. “That’s why I’m here. A good friend of mine who lives in Cuba read about the HUAC hearings and invited me to come and live in his house for a while.”
“That’s a good friend to have.”
“He’s Ernest Hemingway.”
“Now, that’s a friend I have heard of.”
“As a matter of fact, this is one of his favorite bars.”
“Are you and he . . . ?”
“No. Ernest is married. Anyway, he’s away right now. In Africa. Killing things. Himself mostly.”
“Is he a communist, too?”
“Good grief no. Ernest isn’t political at all. It’s people that interest him. Not ideologies.”
“Wise man.”
“Not so you’d notice.”
The band started to play, and I groaned. It was the kind of band that made you feel seasick as they swayed one way and then the other. One of the men played a witch doctor’s flute, and another tapped a monotonous cowbell that left you feeling sorry for cows. Their sung harmonies were like a freight locomotive’s horn. The girl yelled solos and played guitar. I never yet saw a guitar that I didn’t want to use to drive a nail into a piece of wood. Or into the head of the idiot strumming it.
“Now I really do have to go,” I said.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you like music?”
“Not since I came to Cuba.” I finished my drink and glanced at my watch again. “Look,” I said, “my meeting’s only going to take an hour or so. Why don’t we meet for lunch?”
“I can’t. I have to get back. I have people coming to dinner tonight and there are things I have to get for the cook. I’d love you to come if you could.”
“All right. I will.”
“It’s the Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula.” Noreen opened her bag, took out a notepad, and scribbled down an address and telephone number. “Why don’t you come early—say, around five o’clock. Before the rest of my guests arrive. We’ll catch up then.”
“I’d like that.” I took the notepad and wrote out my own address and phone number. “Here,” I said. “Just in case you think I’m going to run out on you.”
“It’s good to see you again, Gunther.”
“You too, Noreen.”
I went to the door and glanced back at the people in the Floridita Bar. No one was listening to the band or even intending to listen. Not while there was drinking to be done. The barman was making daiquiris like they were on special offer, about a dozen at a time. From everything I’d heard and read about Ernest Hemingway, that was the way he liked drinking them, too.
3
I BOUGHT SOME PETIT ROBUSTOS in the cigar factory shop and took them into the smoking room, where a number of men, including Robert Freeman, inhabited an almost infernal world of swirling smoke and igniting matches and glowing tobacco embers. Every time I went into that room, the smell reminded me of the library at the Adlon Hotel, and for a moment I could almost see poor Louis Adlon standing in front of me with a favorite Upmann in his white gloved fingers.
Freeman was a large, bluff man who looked more South American than British. He spoke good Spanish for an Englishman—about as good as my own—which perhaps was hardly surprising given his family history: his great-grandfather, James Freeman, had started selling Cuban cigars as long ago as 1839. He listened politely to the details of my proposal and then told me of his own plans to expand the family business:
“Until recently I owned a cigar factory in Jamaica. But, like the Jamaicans themselves, the product is inconsistent, so I’ve sold that and decided to concentrate on selling Cuban cigars in Britain. I have plans to buy a couple of other companies that will give me about twenty percent of the British market. But the German market. I don’t know. Is there such a thing? You tell me, old boy.”
I told him about Germany’s membership in the European Coal and Steel Community and how the country, benefiting from the currency reform of 1948, had seen the fastest growth of any nation in European history. I told him how industrial production had increased by thirty-five percent and how agricultural production had already surpassed prewar levels. It’s amazing these days how much real information you can get from a German newspaper.
“The question is not,” I said, “can you afford to try to gain a share of the West German market, but can you afford not to try.”
Freeman looked impressed. I was impressed myself. It made a pleasant change to be discussing an export market instead of a pathologist’s report.
And yet all I could think about was Noreen Eisner and seeing her again after such a long time. Twenty years! It seemed almost miraculous after all that we had been through—she, driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War, and me in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In truth, I had no romantic intentions toward her. Twenty years was too long for any feelings to have survived. Besides, our affair had lasted only a few weeks. But I did hope that she and I might become friends again. I didn’t have many friends in Havana, and I was looking forward to sharing a few memories with someone in whose company I might be myself again. My real self, instead of the person I was supposed to be. It was four years since I’d done anything as straightforward as that. And I wondered what a man like Robert Freeman would have said if I’d told him about Bernie Gunther’s life. Probably he’d have swallowed his cigar. As it was, we parted amicably with his declaring that we should meet again, just as soon as he had bought the two competing companies, which would give him the rights to sell the brands Montecristo and Ramon Allones.
“Do you know something, Carlos?” he said as we went out of the smoking room. “You’re the first German I’ve spoken to since before the war.”
“Argentine-German,” I said, correcting him.
“Yes, of course. Not that I’ve anything against the Germans, you understand. We’re all on the same side now, aren’t we? Against the communists, and all that. You know, sometimes I wonder what to make of it all. What happened between our two countries. The war, I mean. The Nazis and Hitler. What do you think about it?”
“I try not to think about it at all,” I said. “But when I do, I think this: that for a short period of time the German language was a series of very large German words, formed from very small German thinking.”
Freeman chuckled and puffed his cigar at the same time. “Quite,” he said. “Oh, quite.”
“It’s the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God,” I added. “But it’s the fate of only a very fe
w races that they’re sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.”
In the sales hall I passed a photograph of the British prime minister with a cigar in his mouth, and nodded. “I’ll tell you another thing. Hitler didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, and he was healthy right up until the day he shot himself.”
“Quite,” said Freeman. “Oh, quite.”
4
FINCA 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, with 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.”