Philip Kerr - The Shot

‘Some,’ he said.

‘Like what, for instance?’

‘Tosca,’ he said finally.

‘ Tosca is an opera,’ she said. ‘By Puccini.’ She folded her arms and shrugged. ‘Not that it matters. There’s not much of either happening in Cuba right now. But I try to stay in shape.’

‘I know. I saw you.’ It occurred to Tom that maybe he was supposed to see her; that the whole thing was meant to look like his idea, when it was actually a regular jinitero thing going between Celia and Jorge. Not that he really cared much either way. ‘You’re in pretty good shape, I’d say,’ he said, toasting her with the Havana Club he was drinking.

‘I’m putting on weight.’

‘A man likes a little meat on the bone.’

‘It gives him something to chew on, eh?’

‘Makes for better eating, yeah.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I live on coffee, and cigarettes.’

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘No thanks. They put bacteria in it, you know? To give it flavour.’

Tom scrutinised his glass and then drained it.

‘It works,’ he said. ‘How would you like to come out to dinner with me, tonight?’

‘Sounds good.’

‘As a matter of fact, I’d welcome your company tomorrow as well.’

‘Wednesday’s always a quiet day for me.’

‘Naturally, I’ll pay you to keep me company. How does fifty dollars sound? Twenty-five in advance.’ Tom took out his dollar clip and thumbed five bills into her hand. He knew he was paying way over the local rate but he wanted to ensure the girl’s loyalty, and perhaps even her silence.

‘It’s generous.’ But Celia still handled the notes with some suspicion before putting them in her purse. ‘Very generous.’ She threw the purse on to the bed and before he could stop her she had stood up and hauled the dress over her head to reveal her nakedness.

Tom felt his chest tighten. Her body was even more magnificent than he had supposed. But this was not what he wanted. At least not right now. Tom didn’t much care to pay for sex. Which was why he didn’t mind paying too much, in the hope that it would help her to forget about money. If he did go to bed with her he needed it to feel a little less business-like, and a little more because she wanted to. A delusion of course, and an expensive one — he knew that. But what else was having money good for if not to indulge in a few expensive delusions now and again? He picked up her dress and handed it to her.

‘Have you got an evening dress?’

‘When the evening’s worth it, sure.’

‘Meet me back here at seven.’

‘Is something the matter?’ Celia looked puzzled. ‘I thought—’

Tom smiled and shook his head. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘And you needn’t think I’m a maricón . I’m not. I’m as hard for you as the holy cross, sweetheart. But right now it’s just the boat I need, not the whole fishing trip.’

The last time he had been in Cuba, almost four years before, he’d murdered a man. As it happened he would have murdered three if he’d had the chance. Back in October 1956 he had been contracted to kill Colonel Antonio Blanco Rico, the chief of military intelligence, as he and his wife left a Havana night-club. Tom had waited on a rooftop across the street and shot him through the heart. But when he tried to collect the balance of his fee, his clients — two senior officers in the Cuban military police — had tried to kill him, and Tom had barely escaped with his own life. The two officers, General Canizares and Colonel Miguel Zayas, had used Rico’s assassination as a pretext for an attack on the Haitian embassy, where a number of Cuban opposition leaders had sought political asylum. A gun-battle had ensued during which General Canizares had been killed, leaving Tom with just the one score to settle.

Months after the revolution he had learned that Zayas had escaped being tried as a Batistiano and the inevitable firing squad that resulted from such a charge, and was now working as head of security at the Hotel Nacional in Vedado, the largely middle-class suburb of Havana where the university and most of the formerly Mafia-run hotels were situated. And when Celia showed up at the Inglaterra wearing a beautiful sequinned black cocktail dress, it was to the Nacional that Tom told their taxi-driver to take them.

He did not wear a tuxedo. In Havana those days were gone. People dressed down or got trouble. A woman could still wear more or less what she wanted, but only a man who was a fool wore evening dress. So like other Cubans who were out on the town, Tom wore a white short-sleeved shirt outside his pants, guayabera-style . This helped him to blend in, and to conceal a Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight inside the waistband of his beige linen pants. Tom was expecting the evening to end with a bang. And then maybe, if he and Celia got along, the whimper, too.

Heading west along the Maleçon, with the seafront to their right, it wasn’t long before they were among the cream-coloured villas and high-rise hotels of Vedado. The suburb always reminded Tom of South Beach in Miami, just as the Nacional with its distinctive twin towers and Italianate facade always put him in mind of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Until Castro, Cuba had always looked like Florida’s backyard.

Like the nearby Riviera Hotel and the Hilton — now renamed the Habana Libre — the Nacional had been seized by the revolutionary government just three months before. But back in 1956 the Nacional’s casino had been operated by Meyer Lansky. Further up the road, the Capri had been run by Santos Trafficante and fronted by none other than movie tough-guy George Raft. The following year, Lansky had opened the Riviera at a cost of fourteen million dollars. Then Castro turned up. Some of the mob-run casinos in hotels like the Deauville, the Sevilla-Biltmore and the Commodoro had been destroyed by rioters celebrating day one of the revolution; the rest, allowed to remain open, but forbidden to gamblers, had just drifted into a limbo of desuetude before they closed as well.

The extraordinary thing was that the mob had taken so long to put out a contract on Castro, thought Tom as the taxi drew up outside the Nacional. There were often times when he considered organised crime was hardly deserving of the title.

Apart from the absence of an operating casino, inside the Nacional was much as he remembered it. And they still served the best daiquiris on the island. He and Celia drank several, which put both of them in a good mood for an excellent dinner of Morro crab, roast pork with rice and beans, and fried sweet bananas on the side. As soon as they had ordered candied papaya for dessert Tom excused himself and went out of the dining room.

It took only a moment or two to use the phone in the Spanish-tiled lobby and check that Zayas was in the hotel. Tom recognised the former policeman’s lisping Oriente accent the minute he came to the phone. It is hard to forget the voice of a man who has done his best to destroy you. Giving his best imitation of a native Cuban, Tom told Zayas that he had Luis Rodriguez, the Minister of the Interior, calling from the Habana Libre — from where members of the revolutionary government conducted their affairs of state — and asked him to hold on for a minute while the minister came to the phone. From the lobby Tom had a good view of the Nacional’s telephone operator, and it required only a glance as he passed the switchboard to see that his call had been connected to suite 919 on the penthouse floor.

Tom went along the corridor to the self-service elevator and rode up to the seventh floor. When the elevator had gone down again he walked along to the service stairs to climb the last two floors. This gave him time to take out the .38 from under his shirt. Hammerless, so as not to catch on clothing, weighing only twelve ounces, and with a three-and-a-half-inch barrel, the Airweight was the assassin’s preferred choice of revolver. It fired just five shots, but each with sufficient stopping power that it hardly needed six. Tom thumbed off the safety and, peering out of the stairwell, looked out on to the ninth floor, but there was no one in sight. Suite 919 was almost immediately opposite the service elevator up to the roof terrace. Tom listened at the door and, hearing only the sound of a television set, knocked quietly.