by Philip Kerr
There was another reason I knew I had rattled him. He suggested that we should increase our ten-peso game stake. When a man does that, you can be certain he thinks he’s already lost too much and is keen to win it back and as quickly as possible. But this is to ignore the central principle of backgammon, which is that it’s the dice that dictate how you play the game, not the cube or the money.
I sat back and sipped my schnapps. “How much were you thinking of?”
“Let’s say a hundred pesos a game.”
“All right. But on one condition. That we also play the beaver rule.”
He grinned, almost as if he had wanted to suggest it himself.
“Agreed.” He picked up the cup, and although it wasn’t his turn to throw first, he rolled a six.
I rolled a one. García won the throw and simultaneously made his bar point. He pushed himself close to the table, as if eager to win back his money. A little sheen of sweat appeared on his elephantine head, and, seeing it, I doubled immediately. García took the double and tried to double back until I reminded him that I hadn’t yet taken my turn. I rolled a double four, which took both of my runners past his bar point for the moment, rendering it redundant.
García winced a little at this but doubled all the same and then threw a two and a one, which disappointed him. I had the doubling cube now and, sensing I had the psychological advantage, turned the cube and said, “Beaver,” effectively doubling the cube without the requirement of his consent. I then paused and offered him a double on top of my beaver. He bit his lip at this and, already facing a potential loss of eight hundred pesos—on top of what he had already lost—he ought to have declined my double. Instead he accepted. Now I rolled a double six, which left me able to make my bar point and the ten point. The game had already turned my way, with a stake of sixteen hundred pesos.
His throwing became more agitated. First he cocked his dice. Then he threw a double four, which might have dug him out of the hole he was in but for the fact that one of the fours was in his outer board and therefore could not count. Angrily he snatched up both dice, dropped them into the cup, and threw them again, with considerably less success: a two and a three. Things deteriorated rapidly for him after that, and it wasn’t long before he was locked out of my home board, with two checkers sitting on the bar.
I started to bear off, with him still locked out. Now there was a real danger that he might not get any of his checkers back to his own home board before I finished bearing off. This was called a “gammon” and would have cost him double the stake on the cube.
García was throwing like a madman now, and there was no sign of his earlier sangfroid. With each roll of the dice he remained locked out. The game was lost, with nothing left to play for but the possibility of saving the gammon. Finally he was back on the board and racing for home, with me left with only six checkers to bear off. But low throws continued to dog his progress. A few seconds later, the game and gammon were mine.
“That’s gammon,” I said quietly. “That makes double what’s on the cube. I make that thirty-two hundred pesos. Plus the eleven hundred forty you already owe me, and that makes—”
“I can add,” he said brusquely. “There’s nothing wrong with my math.”
I resisted the temptation to point out that it was his skill at backgammon that was at fault, not his math.
García looked at his watch. And so did I. It was ten-forty.
“I have to leave,” he said, closing the board abruptly.
“Are you coming back?” I asked. “After you’ve been to your club?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll be here for a while. To give you a chance to win it back.”
But we both knew he wouldn’t be returning. He counted out forty-three hundred-peso notes from a fifty-note bundle and handed them over.
I nodded and said, “Plus ten percent for the house, that’s two hundred each.” I riffled my fingers at his remaining cash. “I’ll pay for the drinks myself.”
Sullenly he thumbed another couple of bills at me. Then he closed the catches on top of the ugly backgammon set, tucked it under his arm, and quickly walked away, shouldering his way through the other gamblers like a character in a horror movie.
I pocketed my winnings and went to find the casino manager again. He looked as if he’d hardly moved since I’d last spoken to him.
“Is the game over?” he asked.
“For the moment. Señor García has to visit his club. And I have a meeting upstairs with Señor Reles. After that we may resume. I said I’d wait here to give him a chance to win back his money. So we’ll see.”
“I’ll keep the table free,” said the manager.
“Thank you. And perhaps you’d be kind enough to let Señor Reles know that I’m on my way up to see him now.”
“Yes, of course.”
I handed him four hundred pesos. “Ten percent of the table stakes. I believe that’s normal.”
The manager shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. Thank you for beating him. For a long time now I’ve been hoping that someone could humiliate that pig. And from the look of things, you must have beat him good.”
I nodded.
“Perhaps, after you have finished your meeting with Señor Reles, you could come to my office. I should like to buy you a drink to celebrate your victory.”
12
STILL CARRYING BEN SIEGEL’S BACKGAMMON SET, I caught the elevator car up to the eighth floor and the hotel pool terrace, where I found Waxey and another elevator car already waiting for me. Max’s bodyguard was a little friendlier this time, but not so as you’d have noticed unless you were a lip-reader. For a big man he had a very quiet voice, and it was only later on I discovered that Waxey’s vocal cords had been damaged as a result of being shot in the throat. “Sorry,” he whispered. “But I gotta frisk you before you go upstairs.”
I put down the case and lifted my arms and looked past him while he went about his job. In the distance, the Barrio Chino was lit up like a Christmas tree.
“What’s in the case?” he asked.
“Ben Siegel’s backgammon set. It was a gift from Max. Only he didn’t tell me the correct combination for the locks. He said it was six-six-six. Which would seem appropriate if it was. Only it’s not.”
Waxey nodded and stood back. He was wearing loose black slacks and a gray guayabera that matched the color of his hair. When his jacket was off I could see his bare arms, and I got a better idea of his probable strength. His forearms were like bowling pins. The loose shirt was probably supposed to conceal the holstered weapon on the back of his hip, except that the hem had got caught under the polished-wood grip of a .38 Colt Detective Special—probably the finest snubbie ever made.
He reached down into his trouser pocket and took out a key on a silver chain, stuck it into the elevator panel, and turned it. He didn’t have to press any other button. The car went straight up. The doors opened again. “They’re on the terrace,” Waxey said.
I smelled them first. The powerful scent of a small forest fire: several large Havana cigars. Then I heard them: loud American voices, raucous male laughter, relentless profanity, the odd Yiddish and Italian word or phrase, more raucous laughter. I came past the detritus of a card game in the living room: a big table covered with chips and empty glasses. Now that the card game was over, they were all out on the little pool terrace: men in sharp suits with blunt faces, but maybe not so tough anymore. Some of them wore glasses and sports coats with neat handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. All of them looked exactly like what they claimed to be: businessmen, hoteliers, club owners, restaurateurs. And perhaps only a policeman or FBI agent would have recognized these men for what they really were—all of them with reputations earned on the streets of Chicago, Boston, Miami, and New York during the Volstead years. The minute I walked onto that terrace, I knew I was among the big beasts of Havana’s underworld—the high-profile Mafia bosses Senator Estes Kefauver was so keen to talk
to. I’d watched some of the Senate committee testimonies on the newsreels. The hearings had made household names out of a lot of the bosses, including the little man with the big nose and neat, dark hair. He was wearing a brown sports coat with an open shirt. It was Meyer Lansky.
“Oh, here he is,” said Reles. His voice was a little louder than usual, but he was a model of sartorial rectitude. He wore gray flannel trousers, neat brown shoes with Oxford toe caps, a blue button-down shirt, a blue silk cravat, and a cashmere navy blue blazer. He looked like the membership secretary of the Havana Yacht Club.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the guy I was telling you about. This is Bernie Gunther. This is the guy who’s going to be my new general manager.”
Like always, I flinched at the sound of my own name, put down the attaché case, and took Max’s hand.
“Relax, will you?” he said. “There’s not one of us here that doesn’t have as much fucking history as you do, Bernie. Maybe more. Nearly all of the guys here have seen the inside of a prison cell at one time or another. Including myself.” He chuckled the old Max Reles chuckle. “You didn’t know that, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Like I say, we all of us got plenty of fucking history. Bernie, say hello to Meyer Lansky; his brother, Jake; Moe Dalitz; Norman Rothman; Morris Kleinman; and Eddie Levinson. I bet you didn’t know there were so many heebs on this island. Naturally, we’re the brains of the outfit. For everything else we got wops and micks. So say hello to Santo Trafficante, Vincent Alo, Tom McGinty, Sam Tucker, the Cellini brothers, and Wilbur Clark.”
“Hello,” I said.
Havana’s underworld stared back at me with modest enthusiasm.
“It must have been some card game,” I observed.
“Waxey, get Bernie a drink. What are you drinking, Bernie?”
“A beer’s fine.”
“Some of us play gin, some of us play poker,” said Max. “Some of us don’t know a game of cards from a sorting office in a post office, but the important thing is that we meet and we talk, in the spirit of healthy competition. Like Jesus and the fucking disciples. You ever read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Bernie?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Smith talks about something he calls the ‘invisible hand.’ He said that in a free market, an individual pursuing his self-interest tends to promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called ‘the invisible hand.’ ” He shrugged. “What we do. That’s all it is. An invisible hand. And we’ve been doing it for years.”
“That we have,” growled Lansky.
Reles chuckled. “Meyer thinks he’s the clever one, on account of how he reads a lot.” He wagged his finger at Lansky. “But I read, too, Meyer. I read, too.”
“Reading. It’s a Jew thing,” said Alo. He was a tall man with a long, sharp nose that might have made me think he was one of the Jews; but he was one of the Italians.
“And they wonder why the Jews do well,” said a man with an easy grin and a nose like a speed bag. This man was Moe Dalitz.
“I read two books in my life,” said one of the micks. “Hoyle on gambling, and the Cadillac handbook.”
Waxey returned with my beer. It was cold and dark, like his eyes.
“F.B.’s thinking of resurrecting his old rural education program,” said Lansky. “Sounds like some of you guys should try to get in on it. You could use a bit of education.”
“Is that the same one he ran in thirty-six?” said his brother, Jake.
Meyer Lansky nodded. “Only he’s worried that some of the kids he’s teaching to read, that they’re going to be tomorrow’s rebels. Like this last lot that’s now doing a stretch on the Isle of Pines.”
“He’s right to worry,” said Alo. “They get weaned on communism, some of these bastards.”
“Then again,” said Lansky, “when the economy of this country takes off, really takes off, then we’re going to need educated people to work in our hotels. To be tomorrow’s croupiers. You gotta be smart to be a croupier. Math smart. You read much, Bernie?”
“More and more,” I admitted. “And for me it’s like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.”
Max Reles was looking at his wristwatch. “Talking of books, it’s time I threw you guys out. I got my call with F.B. To go through the books.”
“How does that work?” asked someone. “On the telephone.”
Reles shrugged. “I read out the numbers, and he writes them down. We both know that one day he’s gonna check, so why the fuck would I cheat him?”
Lansky nodded. “That is definitely verboten.”
We moved off the terrace toward the elevators. As I stepped into one of the cars, Reles took my arm and said, “Start work tomorrow. Come around ten and I’ll show you around.”
“All right.”
I went back down to the casino. I felt a certain amount of awe at the company I was keeping these days. I felt like I’d just been up to the Berghof for an audience with Hitler and the other Nazi leaders.
13
WHEN I RETURNED TO THE SARATOGA the following morning at ten o’clock, as arranged, a very different scene presented itself. There were police everywhere—outside the main entrance of the hotel and in the lobby. When I asked the receptionist to announce my arrival to Max Reles, she told me that no one was being allowed up to the penthouse except the hotel owners and the police.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said the receptionist. “They won’t tell us anything. But there’s a rumor that one of the hotel guests has been murdered by the rebels.”
I turned and walked back to the front door and met the diminutive figure of Meyer Lansky.
“You leaving?” he asked. “Why?”
“They won’t let me upstairs,” I said.
“Come with me.”
I followed Lansky to the elevator car, where a policeman was about to prevent our using it, until his officer recognized the gangster and saluted. Inside the car, Lansky produced a key from his pocket—one like Waxey’s—and used it to take us up to the penthouse. I noticed that his hand was shaking.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
Lansky shook his head.
The elevator doors parted to reveal yet more police, and in the living room we found a captain of militia, Waxey, Jake Lansky, and Moe Dalitz.
“Is it true?” Meyer Lansky asked his brother.
Jake Lansky was a little taller and more coarse-featured than his brother. He had thick, bottle-glass spectacles and eyebrows like a pair of mating badgers. He wore a cream-colored suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. His face had laugh lines, only he wasn’t using them right now. He nodded gravely. “It’s true.”
“Where?”
“In his office.”
I followed the two Lanskys into the office of Max Reles. A uniformed police captain brought up the rear.
Someone had been redecorating the walls. They looked as if Jackson Pollock had come in and actively expressed himself with a ceiling brush and a large pot of red paint. Only it wasn’t red paint that was splashed all over the office; it was blood, and lots of it. Max Reles was going to need a new chinchilla rug, too, except that it wasn’t going to be he who would go to a store to buy a replacement. He was never going to buy anything again—not even a funeral casket, which was what he now needed most. He lay on the floor, still in what seemed to be the same clothes he’d been in the night before, but the blue shirt now had some dark brown spots. He was staring at the cork-tiled ceiling with only one eye. The other eye appeared to be missing. From the look of him, two shots had hit him in the head, but there was a strong case for thinking that at least two or three more had ended up in his back and chest. It seemed like a real gangster-style murder, in that the gunman had done a very thorough job of making sure he was dead. And yet, apart from the police captain who had followed us into the office—more out of curiosity than anything else
, it seemed—there were no police in there, no one taking photographs of the body, no one with a measuring tape, nothing of what might normally have been expected. Well, this was Cuba, after all, I told myself, where everything took just that little bit longer to get done, including, perhaps, the dispatching of forensic scientists to the scene of a homicide. Max Reles was already dead, so where was the hurry?
Waxey appeared behind us in the doorway of his dead master’s office. There were tears in his eyes, and in his encyclopedia-sized hand, a white handkerchief that looked as if it might have been tugged off one of the double beds. He sniffed for a moment and then blew his nose loudly, sounding like a passenger ship making port.
Meyer Lansky looked at him with irritation. “So where the hell were you when he got his brains blown out?” he said. “Where were you, Waxey?”
“I was right here,” whispered Waxey. “Like I always am. I thought the boss had gone to bed. After his phone call to F.B. He always had an early night after that. Regular as clockwork. First thing I knew about it was when I came in here at seven o’clock this morning and found him like this. Dead.”
He added the word “dead” as if there had been some doubt about that fact.
“He wasn’t shot with a BB gun, Waxey,” said Lansky. “Didn’t you hear nothing?”
Waxey shook his head, miserably. “Nothing. Like I said.”
The police captain finished lighting a little cigarillo and said, “It’s possible Señor Reles was shot during last night’s fireworks,” he said.
“For Chinese New Year? That would certainly have covered up the sound of any gunshots.”
He was a smallish, handsome, clean-shaven man. His neat olive-green uniform seemed to complement the light brown color of his smooth face. He spoke English with only a trace of a Spanish accent. And all the time he was speaking he leaned casually on the doorjamb, as if doing nothing more pressing than offering a halfhearted solution for fixing a broken-down car. Almost as if he didn’t really care who had murdered Max Reles. And perhaps he didn’t. Even in Batista’s militia there were plenty of people who didn’t much care for the presence of American gangsters in Cuba.