by Philip Kerr
“You know about this stuff?”
“I thought it was illegal in Cuba,” I answered, hardly answering at all.
“The law forbids only the promotion of Nazi ideology,” he said. “Selling historic mementos is permitted.”
“Who buys this stuff?”
“Americans, mostly. A lot of sailors. Then there are also tourists who saw military service in Europe and want to obtain the souvenir they never managed to get when they were over there. Mostly it’s SS stuff they want. I guess there’s a certain gruesome fascination with the SS, for obvious reasons. I could sell any amount of SS stuff. For example, SS daggers are very popular as paper knives. Of course, collecting this sort of memorabilia doesn’t mean you sympathize with Nazism, or condone what happened. It happened, and it’s a part of history, and I don’t see anything wrong with being interested in that, to the extent of owning something that’s an almost living part of that history. How could I see anything wrong with it? I mean, I’m Polish. My name’s Szymon Woytak.”
He held out his hand, and I took it limply and without much enthusiasm for him or his peculiar trade. Through the shop window I could see a troupe of Chinese dancers. They’d removed their lion heads and paused for a cigarette, as if hardly aware of the evil spirits that dwelled within, otherwise they might have come through the door. Woytak picked up the Iron Cross I had asked to see. “How can you tell it’s a fake?” he asked, examining it closely.
“Simple. The fakes are made from one piece of metal. The originals were made of at least three pieces and soldered together. Another way to tell is to get a magnet and see if the cross really is made of iron. Fakes are made from a cheap alloy.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do I know?” I grinned at him. “I had one of these iron baubles myself once, in the Great War,” I said. “But you know, all of it’s fake. All of this. Everything in here.” I waved my hand at the shop. “And the creed that made all of these ridiculous objects? That, too, was just a cheap alloy meant to fool people. A stupid fake that shouldn’t have tricked anyone, except for the fact that people wanted to believe in it. Everyone knew it was a lie. Of course they did. But they wanted, desperately, to believe that it wasn’t. And they forgot to remember that just because Adolf Hitler liked kissing little children it didn’t mean he wasn’t a big, bad wolf. He was that, and much, much worse. That’s history for you, Señor Woytak. Real German history, not this—this ridiculous souvenir shop.”
I took Yara home and spent the rest of the day in my workshop feeling a little depressed. But it wasn’t because of anything I had seen in Szymon Woytak’s shop. That was just Havana. You could always buy anything in Havana, provided you had the money to pay for it. Anything and everything. It was something else getting me down. Something closer to home. Or at least the home of Ernest Hemingway.
Noreen’s daughter, Dinah.
I wanted to like her, but found I couldn’t. Not by a long way. Dinah struck me as willful and spoiled. The willfulness was okay. She’d probably grow out of it. Most people did. But she was going to need a pair of hard slaps to stop her from being such a spoiled brat. It was too bad that Nick and Noreen Charalambides had divorced when Dinah was still a child. Probably her young life had lacked a father’s discipline. Maybe that was the real reason Dinah was planning to marry a man more than twice her age. Lots of girls married father substitutes. Or maybe she was simply trying to get even with her mother for leaving her father. Lots of girls did that, too. Maybe it was both of these things. Or maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about, never having raised a child myself.
It was fortunate that I was in the workshop. “Maybe” is not a word you use in there. When you’re operating a lathe to cut a length of metal, “exactly” is a better word. I had the patience for metalworking. That was easy. Being a parent looked much more difficult.
Later on I had a bath and put on a good suit. Before I went out I bowed my head for a few moments in front of the Santería shrine Yara had built in her room. It was really just a doll’s house covered with white lace and candles. But on each floor of the doll’s house were little animals, crucifixes, nuts, shells, and black-faced figurines in white dresses. There were also several pictures of the Virgin Mary and one picture of a woman with a knife through her tongue. Yara told me this was to stop gossip about her and me, but I hadn’t a clue about what any of the other stuff meant. With the possible exception of the Virgin Mary. I don’t know why I bowed my head to her shrine. I could say that I wanted to believe in something, but in my heart of hearts, I knew Yara’s souvenir shop was just another stupid lie. Just like Nazism.
On my way to the door I picked up Ben Siegel’s backgammon set, and then Yara took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes as if searching for some effect that her peculiar shrine had worked in my soul. Always supposing I had such a thing as that. And, finding something, she took a step back and crossed herself several times.
“You look like the Lord Eleggua,” she said. “He is the owner of the crossroads. And who guards the home against all dangers. He is always justified in all that he does. And it is he who knows what nobody else knows and who always acts according to his perfect judgment.” She took off the necklace she was wearing and tucked this into the breast pocket of my jacket. “For good luck in your game,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “But it is only a game.”
“Not this time,” she said. “Not for you. Not for you, master.”
10
I PARKED MY CAR ON ZULUETA, in sight of the local police station, and walked back to the Saratoga, where there were already plenty of taxis and cars, including a couple of the black Cadillac Seventy-fives, which were beloved to all senior government officials.
I walked through the hotel and into the monastery courtyard, where a series of lights was turning the water in the fountain into several pastel shades of color and left the marble horse looking somewhat bemused—as if it hardly dared to take a drink of the exotic-looking water for fear that it might be poisoned. It was, I reflected, a perfect metaphor for the experience of being in a Havana casino.
A doorman dressed like a wealthy French impressionist opened the door for me, and I entered the casino. It was early, but the place was busy, like a bus station during rush hour, only with chandeliers, and noisy with the clack of chips and dice, the tap-running-into-a-steel-sink sound of metal balls rolling around wooden roulette wheels, the squeals of winners, the groans of losers, the clink of glasses, and always the clear, unexcited, declarative voices of the croupiers jostling the bets and calling the cards and the numbers.
I glanced around and noticed that some local celebrities were already in the place: Desi Arnaz the musician, Celia Cruz the singer, George Raft the movie actor, and Major Esteban Ventura—one of the most feared police officials in Havana. Gamblers in white tuxedoes drifted about, shuffling plaques and prevaricating about where their luck might lie that night: on the roulette wheel or at the craps table. Glamorous women with high hairdos and plunging necklines patrolled the edges of the room like cheetahs trying to identify the weakest men to hunt and bring down. One stalked toward me, but I flicked her off with a toss of my head.
I spotted what looked like the casino manager. I figured he was the one with the folded arms and the tennis umpire’s eyes; also, he wasn’t smoking or holding chips. Like most Habañeros, he wore a schoolboy’s doodle of a mustache and more grease on his head than a Cuban hamburger. He caught my eye and then my nod, unfolded his arms, and walked my way.
“Can I help you, señor?”
“My name is Carlos Hausner,” I said. “I have a meeting upstairs with Señor Reles just before eleven tonight. But before then I’m supposed to meet Señor García, to play backgammon.”
Some of the grease off the manager’s hair must have been on his fingertips, because he started to wring his hands like Pontius Pilate. “Señor García is already here,” he said, leading the way. “Señor Reles asked me to find
you both a quiet corner in our lounge. Between the salon privé and the main gaming room. I shall endeavor to make sure you are not disturbed.”
We went over to a spot next to a palm tree. García was seated on a fancy French dining chair facing the room. There was a gilt, marble-topped table in front of him on which a backgammon set had already been laid out. Behind him, on the canary-yellow wall, was a Fragonard-style mural of a naked odalisque lying with her hand on the lap of a rather bored-looking man wearing a red turban. Considering where her hand was, you’d have thought he might have looked more interested. García’s ownership of the Shanghai made it seem like an entirely appropriate spot to have chosen for our game.
The Shanghai on Zanja was Havana’s most obscene and, as a result, most notorious and popular burlesque house. Even with 750 seats, there was always a long line of excited men outside the place—mostly juvenile American sailors—waiting to pay $1.25 to get in and see a show that made anything I had seen in Weimar Berlin look tame. Tame and, by comparison, rather tasteful, too. There was nothing in the least bit tasteful about the show at the Shanghai. Mostly this was thanks to the presence on the bill of a tall mulatto called Superman whose erect member was as big as a cattle prod and which he used to rather similar effect. The climax of the show involved the mulatto outraging a succession of innocent-looking blondes to the vociferous encouragement of Uncle Sam. It wasn’t a place to take a liberal-minded satyr, let alone a nineteen-year-old girl.
García stood up politely, but I disliked him on sight in the same way I would have disliked a pimp or, for that matter, a gorilla in a tuxedo, which is what he looked like. He moved with the economy of a robot, his thick arms held stiffly at his sides until, equally stiffly, one of them came my way, extending a hand the size and color of a falconer’s glove. The bald head, with its enormous ears and thick lips, might have been looted from some Egyptian archaeological site—if not the Valley of the Kings, then perhaps the gully of the slimy-looking satraps. I felt the strength in his hand before he took it away and slipped it into the pocket of his tuxedo. The hand came out with a bundle of money, which he tossed onto the table beside the board.
“A cash game would be best, don’t you agree?” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and laid the envelope of money Reles had given me earlier beside García’s. “But we can settle up at the end of the evening, surely. Or do you want to do it at the end of every game?”
“At the end of the evening is fine,” he said.
“In which case,” I said, pocketing my envelope, “there’s no real need for this, now that we both know the other is carrying a substantial amount of cash.”
He nodded and took back the bundle of money. “I have to leave for a while at around eleven,” he said. “I have to be back to supervise the door at the Shanghai for the eleven-thirty show.”
“And what about the nine-thirty show?” I asked. “Or does that just run itself?”
“You know my theater?”
He made it sound like the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The voice was what I expected: too many cigars and not enough exercise. A wallowing hippo’s voice. Muddy and full of yellowing teeth and gas. Dangerous, too, probably.
“I know it,” I said.
“But I can always come back afterward,” he said. “To give you a chance to win back your money.”
“And I can always extend you the same courtesy.”
“To answer your earlier question.” The thick lips stretched like a cheap, pink garter. “The eleven-thirty show is always the more difficult one to handle. People have had more to drink by that time of the evening. And sometimes there’s trouble if they can’t get in. The police station on Zanja is conveniently close, but it’s not unknown that they need a cash incentive to put in an appearance.”
“Money talks.”
“It does in this city.”
I glanced down at the backgammon board if only to avoid looking at his ugly face and inhaling the even uglier stink of his breath. From almost a meter away I could smell it. To my surprise, I found myself staring at a backgammon set of a design that was remarkable in its obscenity. The points on the board, black or white and shaped like spearheads on any ordinary set, were here each shaped like erect phalluses. Between phalluses, or perhaps draped over them like artists’ models, were naked figures of girls. The checkers were painted to look like the bare behinds of black and white women, while the two cups from which each player would throw his dice were the shape of a female breast. These slotted together to form a chest that would have been the envy of any Oktoberfest waitress. Only the four dice and the doubling cube met the eye with any kind of decorum.
“You like my set?” he asked, chuckling like a foul-smelling mud bath.
“I like mine better,” I said. “But my set is locked, and I can’t remember the combination. So if it amuses you to play with this one, that’s fine by me. I’m quite broad-minded.”
“Have to be if you live in Havana, right? Play on pips or just the cube?”
“I’m feeling lazy. All that math. Let’s stick to the cube. Shall we say ten pesos a game?”
I lit a cigar and settled into my chair. As the game progressed, I forgot about the board’s pornographic design and my opponent’s breath. We were more or less even until García threw two more doubles in a row and, turning the four to an eight, pushed the doubling cube my way. I hesitated. His two doubles in a row were enough to make me cautious to accept the new stake. I’d never been the kind of percentage player who could look at the positions of all the checkers on the board and calculate the difference in pips between myself and the other player. I preferred to base my game on the look of things and my remembering the run of the dice. Deciding I had to be due a double soon to make up for his three, I picked up the cube and immediately threw a double five, which at that particular moment was exactly what I needed, and left both of us bearing off, neck and neck.
We were each down to the last few checkers in our home boards—twelve in his and ten in mine—when he offered me the cube again. The math was on my side, so long as he didn’t throw a fourth double, and since this seemed improbable, I took it. Any other decision would have demonstrated a lack of what the Cubans called cojones and would certainly have had a disastrous effect on the rest of the evening’s play. The stake was now 160 pesos.
He threw a double four, which now left him even with me and likely to win the game unless I threw a double myself. His eyes hardly flickered as once again I threw a one and a two when I needed it least and managed to bring off only one checker. He threw a six and a five, bearing off two. I threw a five and a three, bearing off two. Then he threw another double and took off four more—his two against my five. Not even a double could save me now.
García didn’t smile. He just picked up his cup and emptied the dice, with no more feeling than if it had been the first throw of the game. Meaningless. Everything still to play for. Except that the first game was now over, and I had lost.
He bore off his last two checkers and slipped the big paw into the pocket of his tuxedo again. This time it came out with a little black leather notebook and a silver mechanical pencil, with which he wrote the number 160 onto the first page.
It was eight-thirty. Twenty minutes had passed. An expensive twenty minutes. García might have been a pornographer and a pig, but there wasn’t much wrong with his luck or his ability to play the game. I realized this was going to be harder than I’d thought.
11
I HAD STARTED PLAYING BACKGAMMON IN URUGUAY. In the café of the Hotel Alhambra in Montevideo, I had been taught to play by a former champion. But Uruguay was expensive—much more expensive than Cuba—which was the main reason I had come to the island. Usually I played with a couple of secondhand booksellers in a café on Havana’s Plaza de Armas, and only for a few centavos. I liked backgammon. I liked the neatness of it—the arrangement of checkers on points and the tidying of them all away that was required to finish the game. The neatness and order of
it always struck me as very German. I also liked the mixture of skill and luck; more luck than was needed for bridge and more skill than was needed for a game like blackjack. Above all I liked the idea of taking risks against the celestial bank, of competing against fate itself. I liked the feeling of cosmic justice that could be invoked with every roll of the dice. In a sense my whole life had been lived like that. Against the grain.
It wasn’t García I was playing—he was merely the ugly face of Chance—it was life itself.
So I relit my cigar, rolled it around in my mouth, and waved a waiter toward me. “I’ll have a small carafe of peach schnapps, chilled, but no ice,” I told the man. I didn’t ask if García wanted a drink. I hardly cared. All I cared about now was beating him.
“Isn’t that a woman’s drink?” he asked.
“I hardly think so,” I said. “It’s eighty proof. But you may believe what you like.” I picked up my dice cup.
“And for you, señor?” The waiter was still there.
“A lime daiquiri.”
We continued with the game. García lost the next game on pips, and the one after that when he declined my double. And gradually he became a little more reckless, hitting blots when he should have left them alone and then accepting doubles when he should have refused. He began to lose heavily, and by ten-fifteen I was up by more than a thousand pesos and feeling quite pleased with myself.
There was still no trace of emotion on the argument in favor of Darwinism my opponent called his face, but I knew he was rattled by the way he was throwing his dice. In backgammon, it’s customary to throw your dice in your home board, and both dice have to come to rest there, completely flat. But several times during the last game, García’s hand had got a little overexcited, and his dice had crossed the bar or not landed flat. In each case the rules required him to throw again, and on one occasion this meant he had missed out on a useful double.