Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“Nothing is more important,” said Meyer Lansky.

“How’d he kill himself, anyway?” asked Vincent Alo.

“He opened his veins in a hot tub,” I said. “Roman style.”

“I guess that makes a change from doggy style,” said Alo.

Meyer Lansky winced. It was plain he didn’t much like that kind of joke. “Yes, but why?” he asked. “Why kill himself? With all due respect to you, Bernie, he’d got away with the murder, hadn’t he? More or less. So why do himself in? His secret was safe.”

I shrugged. “I spoke to some people at the Palette Club. The whole point of the club is that some of the girls are real and some are cut-jobs. The club’s shtick is that you can’t tell the difference. It seems that in the beginning Irving Goldstein might have had the same problem. That the girl he thought he fell in love with was in fact a man. When he discovered the truth, he tried to live with it, which is when Max found out about it. Some of the people at the Palette think that the shame finally got to him. I think that maybe he planned to kill himself, but before he did, he decided to get even with Max.”

“Who knows what’s in the mind of a guy like that?” said Alo. “Confused, or what?”

Meyer Lansky nodded. “All right. I’ll buy it. You’ve done a good job, Gunther. A nice quick result with no one offended. I couldn’t have ordered it better if I was in La Zaragozana.”

This was the name of a famous restaurant in Old Havana.

“Jimmy? Get this man his money. He earned it.”

Vincent Alo said, “Sure, Meyer,” and went out of the suite.

“You know, Gunther,” said Lansky, “next year, things are really going to take off for us here in Havana. We got this sweet new law coming. The Hotel Law. All new hotels are going to be granted tax-exempt status, which means there’s going to be more money to be made on this island than anyone ever dreamed of. I’m planning a new casino hotel myself, which is going to be the biggest in the world, outside of Las Vegas. The Riviera. And I could use a man like you in a place like that. Until then, I’d like you to come over to the Montmartre and work for me there. You can do the same thing you were going to do at the Saratoga.”

“I’ll certainly give it some thought, Mr. Lansky.”

“Vincent’s going to run the Saratoga now.”

Vincent Alo had returned to the balcony. He was holding out a gambler’s chip bag for high rollers. He smiled, but his blue eyes remained without emotion. It was easy to see how he’d earned his nickname, Jimmy Blue Eyes. His eyes were as blue as the sea on the other side of the Malecón, and just as cold.

“That doesn’t look like twenty thousand dollars,” I said.

“Looks can be deceptive,” said Alo. He loosened the neck of the drawstring bag and took out a purple thousand-dollar plaque. “There are nineteen more like this one in the bag. You take this to the cash desk at the Montmartre, and they’ll give you your money. Simple as that, my kraut friend.”

The neoclassical Montmartre on P Street and Twenty-third was just a short walk from the National. Formerly a dog track, it occupied a whole block and was the only casino in Havana open twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t even lunchtime, and the Montmartre was already doing a brisk business. At that early hour, most of the gamblers were Chinese. But they usually are, at any hour of the day. And they couldn’t have looked less interested in the evening’s big Midnight in Paris stage show being announced on the casino’s public-address system.

For me, on the other hand, Europe already seemed a little nearer and more attractive as I walked away from the cash window with forty pictures of President William McKinley. And the only reason I hadn’t turned Lansky’s offer of a full-time job down flat was that I hardly wanted to tell him I was leaving the country. That might have made him suspicious. Instead I was hoping to deposit my money with the rest of what I’d saved in the Royal Bank of Canada and then, armed with my new credentials, leave Cuba as soon as possible.

I felt a spring in my step as I went back through the gates of the National Hotel to get the car I was planning to give Yara as my leaving-her present. I hadn’t felt quite so optimistic about my prospects since being reunited with my late wife Kirsten in Vienna, during September of 1947. So optimistic that I felt I might even go see Captain Sánchez and discover if there wasn’t something I could do for Noreen Eisner and Alfredo López after all.

At the end of the day, optimism is nothing more than a naive and i ll-informed hope.

THE CAPITOLIO WAS BUILT in the style of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., by the dictator Machado, but it was too big for an island the size of Cuba. It would have been too big for an island the size of Australia. Inside the rotunda was a seventeen-meter-high statue of Jupiter, which looked a lot like an Academy Award, and certainly most of the tourists who visited the Capitolio seemed to think it was a good picture. Now that I was planning to leave Cuba I was thinking I might have to take a few photographs of my own. So that I could remind myself of what I was missing when I was living in Bonn and going to bed at nine o’clock at night. What else is there to do in Bonn at nine o’clock at night? If Beethoven had lived in Havana-especially if he’d lived around the corner from the Casa Marina-it’s almost certain he’d have been lucky to write just one string quartet, let alone sixteen of them. But you could live all your life in Bonn and not even notice that you were deaf.

The police station on Zulueta was a few minutes’ walk from the Capitolio, but I didn’t mind the walk. Only a few months before, outside the police station in Vedado, a Havana University professor had been killed by a car bomb when rebels had mistaken his 1952 black Hudson for an identical model driven by the deputy head of the Cuban Bureau of Investigations. Ever since, I had been careful never to leave my Chevrolet Styleline outside a police station.

The station itself was an old colonial building with a peeling white stucco facade and louvered green shutters on the windows. A Cuban flag hung limply over the square portico like a brightly decorated beach towel that had fallen from one of the upper-floor windows. On the outside, the drains didn’t smell so good. On the inside, you barely noticed it as long as you didn’t breathe in.

Sánchez was on the second floor, in an office overlooking a small park. There was a flag on a pole in the corner, and on the wall, a picture of Batista facing a cabinet full of rifles in case the parade-ground patriotism of the flag and the picture didn’t pay off. There was a small, cheap wooden desk and a lot of space around it if you had a tapeworm. The walls and ceiling were dust-bowl beige, and the brown linoleum on the warped floor resembled the shell of a dead tortoise. An expensive rosewood humidor that belonged on a presidential sideboard sat on the desk like a Fabergé egg in a plastic picnic set.

“You know, it was quite a stroke of luck, me finding that drawing,” said Sánchez.

“There’s an element of luck in most police work.”

“Not to mention your murderer being dead already.”

“Any objections?”

“How could there be? You solve the case and at the same time you take the loose ends and make a bow. Now, that’s what I call detective work. Yes indeed, I can see why Lansky thought you were the man for the case. A real Nero Wolfe.”

“You say all that like you think I chalked him up for it, like a tailor.”

“Now you’re being cruel. I’ve never been to a tailor in my life. Not on my salary. I own a nice linen guayabera, and that’s about it. For anything more formal I usually wear my best uniform.”