Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I know. They told me.”

“The army?”

“It certainly wasn’t the Red Cross that did it.”

She was wearing navy blue slacks and a matching bouclé cardigan. The slacks weren’t particularly slack in the only place it counted, and the cardigan seemed to be short a couple of little plaited leather buttons on the lower slopes of her bosom. Her hand sported a sapphire that was the bigger sister of the two in her earlobes. The shoes were dark brown leather, as were the belt around her waist and the handbag she had tossed onto an armchair. Noreen had always been good at matching things. It was only me that seemed to clash with the rest of her. She looked awkward and ill at ease.

“Thanks,” she said. “For what you did.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“No. And I think I can understand why. But thank you anyway. I’m sure it’s the most courageous thing I’ve heard of since I came to Cuba.”

“Don’t tell me that. I feel bad enough already.”

She shook her head. “Why? I don’t understand you at all.”

“Because it makes me sound like what I’m not. In spite of what you once thought, angel, I was never cut out to be a hero. If I was anything like the person you think I am, I wouldn’t have lasted half as long as I have. I’d be dead in some Ukrainian field, or forgotten forever in some stinking Russian prison camp. Not to mention what happened before all that, in those comparatively innocent times when people thought the Nazis were the last word in true evil. You tell yourself you can put aside your principles and make a pact with the devil just to keep out of trouble and remain alive. But you do it often enough, and it gets so that you’ve forgotten what those principles were. I used to think I could stand apart from it all. That I could somehow inhabit a nasty, rotten world and not become like that myself. But I found out that you can’t. Not if you want to see another year. Well, I’m still alive. I’m still alive because, if the truth be told, I’m just as bad as the rest of them. I’m alive because other people are dead, and some of them were killed by me. That’s not courage. That’s just this.” I pointed at the antelope head on the wall. “He understands what I’m talking about even if you don’t. The law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.”

Noreen shook her head. “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re talking nonsense. That was war. It was kill or be killed. That’s what war is. And it was ten years ago. Lots of men feel the way you do about what they did in the war. You’re being much too hard on yourself.” She took hold of me and put her head on my chest. “I won’t let you say those things about yourself, Bernie. You’re a good man. I know it.”

She looked up at me, wanting me to kiss her. I stood there, letting her hold me tight. I didn’t pull away or push her off. I didn’t kiss her, either. Although I badly wanted to. Instead I grinned at her, tauntingly.

“What about Fredo?”

“Let’s not talk about him right now. I’ve been stupid, Bernie. I can see that now. I should have been honest with you from the beginning. You’re not really a killer.” She hesitated. Her eyes were filling with tears. “Are you?”

“I love you, Noreen. Even after all these years. I didn’t know it myself until quite recently. I love you, but I can’t lie to you. A man who really wanted to have you would do that, I think. Lie to you, I mean. He’d say anything to get you back at all costs. I’m certain of it. Well, I can’t do it. There has to be someone in this world you can tell the truth to.”

I took hold of her elbows and looked her squarely in the eye.

“I’ve read your books, angel. I know what kind of a person you are. It’s all there, between the covers, hidden under the surface like an ice-berg. You’re a decent person, Noreen. Well, I’m not. I’m a killer. And I’m not just talking about the war. As a matter of fact, I killed someone only last week, and it certainly wasn’t a case of kill or be killed. I killed a man because he had it coming and because I was afraid of what he might do. But mostly I killed him because I wanted to kill him.

“It wasn’t Dinah who killed Max Reles, angel. It wasn’t even any of his Mafia friends in the casino, either. It was me. I killed him. I shot Max Reles.”

AS YOU KNOW, Reles had offered me a job at the Saratoga, and I’d accepted it, but only with the intention of finding an opportunity to kill him. How to do this looked more difficult. Max was heavily protected. He lived in a penthouse at the Saratoga that could only be accessed by a key-operated elevator. And the elevator doors in the penthouse were watched closely by Max’s bodyguard, Waxey, who searched everyone going into the penthouse.

“But I had the idea how I might do it almost as soon as I saw the type of revolver that your friend Hemingway had given you. The Nagant. I came across that type of pistol a lot during the war. It was the standard-issue sidearm for all Russian army and police officers, and with one important modification-a Bramit silencer-it was the execution weapon of choice for the Russian special services. Between January 1942 and February 1944 I worked for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau investigating both Allied and German atrocities. One of the crimes we investigated was the Katyn? Forest massacre. This would have been in April 1943, after an Army Group intelligence staff officer had found a mass grave containing the bodies of four thousand Poles some twenty kilometers west of Smolensk. All of the men were officers of the Polish army and had been executed with a single shot in the back of the head by NKVD death squads. And all using the same type of revolver: the Nagant.

“The Russians were devious and methodical in the way they had gone about things. The way they are about everything. Sorry, but that’s just the truth. It would have been impossible to execute four thousand men unless certain precautions were first taken to conceal the sound of these executions from those who were yet to die. Otherwise they’d have rioted and overrun their captors. So the murders themselves took place at night, in windowless cells that had been sound-insulated with several mattresses, and using silenced Nagant revolvers. One of these silencers came into my possession during the investigation, and I was able to study its design and to test a silenced weapon on a firing range. Which meant that as soon as I saw your revolver I knew that I could manufacture a Bramit silencer in my metal shop at home.

“My next problem was this: How was I going to get into the penthouse carrying the revolver? It so happened that Max had given me a gift-a custom-made backgammon set in an attaché case that contained all the checkers and the dice and the dice cups. But there was also room for a revolver and its newly made silencer. And I thought there was little chance of Waxey searching it, especially as the case had combination locks.

“Max had told me that he used to play cards once a week with some of the Havana underworld. He also told me that the game always ended at eleven-thirty, exactly fifteen minutes before he retired to his office and took a phone call from the president, who owns a piece of the Saratoga. He asked me to come along, and when I went, I took with me the attaché case containing the silenced revolver, and placed it on his pool terrace. When I left the penthouse with everyone else at eleven-thirty, I went back down to the casino and waited a few minutes. It was Chinese New Year, the night when they set off a lot of fireworks at the Barrio Chino. It’s pretty deafening, of course. Especially on the rooftop of the Saratoga.

“Anyway, because of the fireworks I figured Reles would finish his call with the president early. And as soon as I had let the casino manager see me back in the casino after going up to the penthouse for the first time, I returned to the eighth floor. Which was as far as I could go, of course, without an elevator key.