Philip Kerr: If the Dead Rise Not

“I know the feeling. These days I hardly recognize myself. Or even worse, I recognize my own father. I look in the mirror and see him staring back at me with amused contempt for my own previous failure to understand that I am and always would be exactly like him. If not him exactly. But you were quite right not to tell her I’m her father. Max Reles wasn’t the only man Dinah couldn’t be around. It’s me, too. I know that. And I don’t intend to try and see her and establish some kind of relationship with her. It’s rather late in the day for that, I think. So you can rest assured on that count. It’s enough for me to know that I have a daughter and to have met her. All thanks to Alfredo López.”

“As I said, I didn’t know he’d told you until we went to the hospital just now. Lawyers aren’t supposed to tell strangers about their clients’ affairs, are they?”

“After I pulled his nuts out of the fire with those pamphlets, he figured he owed me and that I was the kind of father who might be able to help her somehow. That’s what he told me, anyhow.”

“He was right. I’m glad he did.” She hugged me closer. “And you did help her. I’d have killed Max myself if I’d been able.”

“We all do what we can do.”

“And this is why you went to SIM headquarters and persuaded them to let Fredo go. Because you thought you wanted to pay Fredo back.”

“What he said. It gave me some kind of hope that my life hasn’t entirely been wasted.”

“But how? How did you persuade them to let him go?”

“A while ago I stumbled across a weapons cache on the road to Santa María del Rosario. I traded it for his life.”

“Nothing else?”

“What else could there be?”

“I don’t know how to begin to thank you,” she said.

“You go back to writing books, and I’ll go back to playing backgammon and smoking cigars. From the look of things, you’re getting ready to move into that new house of yours. I hear Hemingway will soon be back here again.”

“Yes, he’ll be here in June. Hem’s lucky to be alive after what happened. He was seriously injured in two consecutive plane crashes. He then got himself badly burned in a bushfire. By rights, the man should be dead. Some American newspapers even published his obituary.”

“So he’s risen from the dead. It’s not all of us who can say as much.”

Later on, I went out to my car, and in the shifting dark I thought I saw the figure of the dead gardener, standing beside the well where he’d drowned. Maybe the house was haunted, after all. And if the house wasn’t haunted, I know I was, and probably always would be. Some of us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer than that. Years, perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again, like Ernest Hemingway. If the dead rise not, then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body shall we live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps, if the dead could rise and be incorruptible, and I could be changed forever in the blinking of an eye, then dying might just be worth the trouble of getting killed, or killing myself.

Back in Havana, I went to the Casa Marina and spent the night with a couple of willing girls. They didn’t make me feel any less alone. All they did was help me to pass the time. What little of it we have.

Philip Kerr is a British author born in Edinburgh. He studied at the University of Birmingham and worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer. He has written for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard and the New Statesman. Kerr has published eleven novels under his full name and a children's series, Children of the Lamp, under the name P.B. Kerr. He is married to novelist Jane Thynne.