Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“All right. I’ll need a little time to organize everything. Why don’t you wait in here and watch the television while I go and set things up? Do you like baseball?”

“Not particularly. I can’t relate to it. In real life there are no third chances.”

Quevedo shook his head. “It’s a cop’s game. Believe me, I’ve thought about it. You see, when you hit something with a club, it changes everything.” Then he went out.

I picked up the magazine on the desk and got a little better acquainted with Ana Gloria Varona. She was a little bombshell type with a backside for cracking walnuts, and a large chest that was crying out for a child-sized sweater. When I had finished admiring her I tried to watch the baseball. But I figured it was one of those curious sports in which the history is obviously more important than the game. After a while I closed my eyes, which usually takes some doing in a police station.

Quevedo came back about twenty minutes later, alone and carrying a briefcase. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me expectantly. “Shall we go?”

I followed him downstairs.

Alfredo López was standing between two soldiers in the entrance hall, but only just. He was filthy and unshaven and had two black eyes, except that wasn’t the worst of it. Both his hands were freshly bandaged, which made the manacles on his wrists look pointless. Seeing me, he tried to smile, only the effort was probably too much for him and he almost fainted. The two soldiers grabbed him by the elbows and held him up like the accused at some sort of show trial.

I wanted to ask Quevedo about his hands and then changed my mind, anxious not to say or do anything that might prevent me from achieving what I had set out to do. But I had little doubt that López had been tortured.

Quevedo was still being pleasant. “Do you have a car?”

“It’s a gray Chevrolet Styline,” I said. “I’m parked just down the street. I’ll drive back here, and then you can follow me.”

Quevedo looked pleased. “Excellent. To El Calvario, you say?”

I nodded.

“Havana traffic being what it is, if we are separated, we shall meet at the local post office.”

“Very well.”

“One more thing.” The smile turned wintry. “If this is some kind of trap. If this has been an elaborate hoax to lure me out into the open and have me assassinated-”

“It’s not a trap,” I said.

“Then the first person to be shot will be our friend here.” He tapped the holster on his belt with meaning. “In any event, I shall shoot you both if the weapons cache is not where you say it is.”

“The weapons are there, all right,” I said. “And you’re not going to be assassinated, Lieutenant. People like you and me are never assassinated. We’re murdered, pure and simple. It’s the Batistas and Trumans and King Abdullahs of this world who get themselves assassinated. So take it easy. Relax. Because this is your lucky day. You’re about to do something that’ll make you a captain. So maybe you should ride that luck and buy a lottery ticket or a number on the bolita . If it comes to that, maybe we should both buy a number.”

It was probably just as well that I didn’t.

WITH ONE EYE on my rearview mirror and the army car tailing me, I drove east through the new tunnel underneath the Almendares River and then south through Santa Catalina and Vibora. Along the central divider of the boulevard, city gardeners were trimming trees into the shape of bells, only none of them was going off in my head. I was still telling myself that I could get away with making a deal with the devil. I’d done it before, after all, and with many worse devils than Lieutenant Quevedo. Heydrich, for one. Goering, for another. They didn’t come any more devilish than them. But no matter how smart you think you are, there’s always something unexpected that you have to be prepared for. I thought I was prepared for anything. Except the one thing that happened.

It got a little warmer. Warmer than on the north coast. And most of the houses here were owned by people with money. You could tell they were people with money because they were also people with big gates on their big houses. You could tell how much money a man had by the height of the white walls and the amount of iron on his black gates. A set of imposing gates was an advertisement for a ready supply of wealth for confiscation and redistribution. If the communists ever reached Havana, they wouldn’t have to look hard for the best people to steal money from. You didn’t have to be clever to be a communist. Not when the rich made it as easy as this.

When I reached Mantilla, I turned south on Managua, which was a poorer, more down-at-heel district, and followed the road until I came upon the main highway going west toward Santa María del Rosario. You could tell the neighborhood was poorer and more down-at-heel because children and goats wandered freely by the side of the road, and men were carrying machetes with which to work in the surrounding plantations.

When I saw the disused tennis court, and the dilapidated villa with the rusted gate, I held the steering wheel tight and rode the bump as I turned the Chevrolet off the road and through the trees. As I hit the brakes, the car bucked like a rodeo bull and made more dust than an exodus from Egypt. I switched off the engine and sat there doing nothing, my hands clasped behind my head, just in case the lieutenant was the nervous type. I hardly wanted to get shot reaching for my pocket humidor.

The army car pulled up behind me, and the two soldiers got out, followed by Quevedo. López stayed put in the rear seat. He wasn’t going anywhere. Except maybe the hospital. I leaned out of my window and, closing my eyes, pushed my face into the sun for a moment and listened to the engine block cool. When I opened them again the two soldiers had fetched shovels from the trunk of the car and were awaiting instructions. I pointed in front of us.

“See those three white rocks?” I said. “Dig in the center.”

I closed my eyes again momentarily, but this time I was praying that everything was going to work out the way I had hoped.

Quevedo came toward the Chevrolet. He was carrying his briefcase. He opened the front passenger door and slid in beside me. Then he wound down the window, but it wasn’t enough to spare me the smell of his pungent cologne. For a moment, we sat watching the two soldiers shoveling dirt, not saying anything at all.

“Mind if I turn on the radio?” I said, reaching for the knob.

“I think you’ll find I have more than enough conversation to keep your attention,” he said ominously. He took off his cap and rubbed his buzz-cut head. It sounded like someone polishing a shoe. Then he grinned, and there was humor in his grin, but I didn’t like the look of it. “Did I tell you I trained with the CIA, in Miami?”

We both knew that it wasn’t really a question. Few of his questions were. Most of the time they were meant to be unsettling, or he already knew the answers.

“Yes, I was there for six months, last summer. Have you ever been to Miami? It’s probably the least interesting place you could ever hope to see. It’s like Havana without a soul. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. And now that I’m back here, one of my functions is to liaise with the Agency’s chief of station here in Havana. As you can probably imagine, U.S. foreign policy is driven by a fear of communism. A justifiable fear, I might add, given the political loyalties of López and his friends on the Isle of Pines. So the Agency is planning to help us set up a new anti-communist intelligence bureau next year.”

“Just what the island needs,” I said. “More secret police. Tell me, how will the new anti-communist intelligence bureau differ from the current one?”