Philip Kerr - The Shot

‘The Inglaterra,’ answered Tom.

The driver chuckled sadistically as if enjoying the prospect of the penny-pinching gringo’s discomfort.

‘Then, without doubt, you will be able to hear every word of the Prime Minister’s speech, whether you like it or not. With or without your window closed.’ The driver laughed again as he thought about this some more. ‘For your sake I hope he makes an early start.’ He was still laughing when he dropped Tom on Acrea del Louvre, where a crowd of local youths were smoking cheap cigars and admiring a 1957 Packard that was parked in front of the Inglaterra Hotel.

Tom checked in and asked for a quiet room. The desk clerk, a short, almost dwarfish man, with a goatee beard, considered the question with a weary politeness.

‘The quietest room I can give you is in the centre of the building,’ he said, hardly looking at Tom.

‘Okay, I’ll take that.’

‘But then, it has no window.’

Tom smiled patiently. Outside in the street it was touching ninety-five, with eighty-two per cent humidity.

‘How about a room that’s a little bit quiet but that also has a window?’ he said, handing the clerk a couple of pesos.

‘I think we can accommodate you very comfortably on the south side of the hotel,’ smiled the clerk, and waved the porter toward him.

Tom’s room, overlooking San Rafael, a busy pedestrian street, was cool and dark, at least until the porter threw open the shutters. Stepping out on to the little balcony, Tom looked down on the street with its many shops and bars and sighed loudly.

‘This is a quiet room?’

‘Quieter than the ones overlooking the park,’ said the porter, a high-yellow, coloured boy of about eighteen.

Tom stared at the exorbitantly baroque facade of the Gran Teatro opposite and signalled his defeat with a slow nod. At each of the building’s four corners was a tower, topped by a dark marble angel reaching gracefully on tiptoe for heaven, and through the open window opposite he could see a similarly hued dancer, standing beside a wall-bar and achieving much the same sort of pose.

Joining Tom on the balcony to collect his tip, the porter saw the girl and quickly noted Tom’s interest.

‘I know that girl,’ he said. ‘She’s a dancer.’

‘That much I guessed,’ said Tom, handing over a few centavos.

‘A proper dancer,’ insisted the boy. ‘Not like those horses in the chorus at the Tropicana.’

‘I kind of like those chorus girls,’ said Tom. But he continued to stare at the girl opposite.

‘I could introduce you to her, if you like.’

‘You? Know her?’

‘Sure,’ said the boy, flexing himself.

‘What’s your name, kid?’ he asked.

‘Jorge Montaro.’

‘And her’s is?’

‘Celia.’

‘Celia, huh?’ said Tom, liking the boy’s style. So far the boy hadn’t promised him the fuck of his life and Tom wondered how long he could keep this particular novelty in progress. ‘So what’s this Celia like?’

‘A very good family. A very respectable girl. An educated person, you know?’

Now he really was intrigued. This was true salesmanship. Tom smiled and handed over several banknotes. ‘I’d like to. Bring her up. Bring a bottle of rum, too.’

‘And for the lady? Some champagne perhaps?’

Tom started to laugh. ‘Get outta here. No, wait. One more thing, Jorge. Can you find me a firecracker?’

‘A firecracker?’

‘You know. A cherry bomb. As big as you can get.’

Jorge shrugged. ‘I think so.’

‘Only don’t tell anyone.’

Jorge frowned and shook his head as if he wouldn’t dream of such a thing, but Tom could see that he desperately wanted to ask why the American needed a firecracker.

‘It’s a surprise,’ said Tom, and waved Jorge out of the door.

Tom didn’t watch what took place in the dance studio opposite. Instead he closed the shutters and lay down on his bed. He strongly suspected that Jorge didn’t know the girl from Eve and that right now he was trying to set her up as his own jinitera . Assuming she needed the money — and nearly everyone in Cuba needed money: most of the American employers had left the island — then it was just possible that he might succeed. Necessity was both the mother and father of all invention in the new Cuba, and probably the aunt and uncle as well. But when it came to overcoming local shortages nothing more was necessary than American dollars. He just wished he could have heard Jorge’s pitch.

Opening the carton of king-size Chesterfields he had bought at the airport, Tom smoked a cigarette and found his thoughts turning to his own Cuban father, wondering if he was back in Cuba, or still in Miami somewhere. It was years since they had seen each other.

Following the Great War, which had left most of the baseball teams with an acute shortage of players, Roberto Casas had been brought from Cuba to Philadelphia, to play ball for the Phillies. Casas had been a promising left-hand pitcher until the loss of a thumb in a knife-fight had ended his career before it had hardly started. But not before Tom’s father had met and impregnated his mother, Mildred Jefferson, during the Phillies’ spring training in St Petersburg. They had never married — not least because Roberto already had a wife back in Santiago de Cuba — and Tom had been brought up mostly by his mother and his aunt. Yet somehow he’d seen a fair bit of his father during his childhood. It had been his father who had taught Tom shooting and Spanish, in that order. But since the Korean War, he’d seen nothing of the old man, and from what he had heard the guy was in and out of Cuba like cigar smoke. For all Tom knew, his father was dead. And maybe for all he cared, too. He hadn’t much use for a father any more. Nor for that matter a mother: on the few occasions he saw her, at the old people’s home in Intercession City, he wondered that he was related to her at all.

Tom awoke with a start, and sensed that there was someone outside his door. Hearing a knock he shook his head clear of sleep, sprang off the all-too-noisy bed and went to open the door. It was Jorge, with the rum and a broad smile. He walked into the room, and was followed, at a shy distance, by a beautiful negress.

‘This is Celia,’ said Jorge.

‘Hullo Celia. I’m Tom.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Tom.’

Celia, wearing a tight, sleeveless blue dress, matching high-heels, and smelling strongly of sweat and perfume, smiled pleasantly and walked over to the window where she threw open the shutters, stepped out on to the balcony and leaned forward on the rusting wrought-iron balustrade. Tom felt his heart beat loudly. She was the most beautiful woman. Watching her stare into the studio she had been conjured from he realised that the way she was standing reminded him of something. He tried to remember. Yes, there had been a picture by Salvador Dali, a print he had seen on some hood’s wall in Atlantic City. Quite a suggestive picture as he recalled it now. Something about a woman being fucked up the ass by her own chastity, he seemed to think.

Tom drew Jorge into the bathroom and handed him ten pesos, which was about a quarter of the Inglaterra room rate. Jorge pocketed the note and explained that he would return later with the firecracker. Then he left them alone. Tom sat down in the room’s solitary armchair and poured himself a drink. Celia turned and came back into the room, closing the shutters behind her. The sun painted a series of pale stripes across her light brown face so that she looked like a mulatto dancer, a santiaguero woman from Santiago.

Celia sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed it experimentally. ‘So you like the ballet, eh?’

Tom nodded. He had seen a ballet in New York once, when he’d been tailing a guy he’d agreed to kill, and hadn’t thought much of it, which was probably why he couldn’t remember the name of it.