Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

It was a book in English.

For some time now I’d been learning English, in an effort to persuade an Englishman named Robert Freeman to give me a job. Freeman worked for the British tobacco giant Gallaher, running a subsidiary company called J. Frankau, which had been the UK distributor for all Havana cigars since 1790. I had been cultivating Freeman in the hope that I might talk him into sending me back to Germany-at my own expense, I might add-to see if I couldn’t open up the new West German market. A covering letter of introduction and several boxes of samples would, I supposed, be enough to smooth the arrival of Carlos Hausner, an Argentine of German descent, back to Germany and enable me to blend in.

It wasn’t that I disliked Cuba. Far from it. I had left Argentina with a hundred thousand American dollars, and I lived very comfortably in Havana. But I yearned for somewhere without biting insects, and where people went to bed at a sensible time of night, and where none of the drinks was made of ice: I was tired of getting a freezing headache every time I went into a bar. Another reason I wanted to return to Germany was that my Argentine passport would not last forever. But once I was safely back in Germany, I could disappear. Again.

Going back to Berlin was out of the question, of course. For one thing, it was now landlocked in the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic; and, for another, the Berlin police were probably looking for me in connection with the murders of two women in Vienna, in 1949. Not that I had murdered them. I’ve done a lot of things in my life of which I’m less than proud, but I haven’t ever murdered a woman. Not unless you counted the Soviet woman I’d shot during the long, hot summer of 1941-one of an NKVD death squad who’d just murdered several thousand unarmed prisoners in their cells. I expect the Russians would have counted that as murder, which was another good reason to stay out of Berlin. Hamburg looked like a better bet. Hamburg was in the Federal Republic, and I didn’t know anyone in Hamburg. More important, no one there knew me.

Meanwhile, my life was good. I had what most Habaneros wanted: a large apartment on Malecón, a big American car, a woman to provide sex, and a woman to cook my meals. Sometimes it was the same woman who cooked the food and also provided the sex. But my Vedado apartment was only a few tantalizing blocks from the corner of Twenty-fifth Street, and long before Yara became my devoted housekeeper, I’d got into the habit of paying regular visits to Havana’s most famous and luxurious casa de putas .

I liked Yara, but it wasn’t anything more than that. She stayed when she felt like staying, not because I asked her but because she wanted to. I think Yara was a Negress, but it’s a little hard to be sure about things like that in Cuba. She was tall and slim and about twenty years younger than I with a face like a much-loved pony. She wasn’t a whore, because she didn’t take money for it. She only looked like a whore. Most of the women in Havana looked like whores. Most of the whores looked like your little sister. Yara wasn’t a whore, because she made a better living as a thief stealing from me. I didn’t mind that. It saved me from having to pay her. Besides, she stole only what she thought I could afford to lose, which, as it happened, was a lot less than guilt would have obliged me to pay her. Yara didn’t spit and she didn’t smoke cigars and she was a devotee of the Santería religion, which, it seemed to me, was a bit like voodoo. I liked that she prayed about me to some African gods. They had to work better than the ones I’d been praying to.

As soon as the rest of Havana was awake, I drove along to the Prado in my Chevrolet Styline. The Styline was probably the commonest car in Cuba and very possibly one of the largest. It took more metal to make a Styline than there was in Bethlehem Steel. I parked in front of the Gran Teatro. It was a neo-Baroque building with so many angels crowded onto its lavish exterior it was clear the architect must have thought being a playwright or an actor was more important than being an apostle. These days, anything is more important than being an apostle. Especially in Cuba.

I had arranged to meet Freeman in the smoking room at the nearby Partagas cigar factory, but I was early, so I went to the Hotel Inglaterra and ordered some breakfast on the terrace. There I encountered the usual cast of Havana characters, minus the prostitutes: it was still a little early for the prostitutes. There were American naval officers on furlough from the warship in the harbor, some matronly tourists, a few Chinese businessmen from the nearby Barrio Chino, a couple of underworld types wearing sharkskin suits and small Stetson hats, and a trio of government officials in pin-striped jackets, with faces as dark as tobacco leaves and even darker glasses. I ate an English breakfast and then crossed the busy, palm-shrouded Parque Central to visit my favorite shop in Havana.

Hobby Center, on the corner of Obispo and Berniz, sold model ships, toy cars, and, most important for my purposes, electric train sets. My own layout was a tabletop three-rail Dublo. It wasn’t anything on the scale of the train set I’d once seen in Hermann Goering’s house, but it gave me a lot of pleasure. In the shop I collected a new locomotive and tender I’d ordered from England. I got a lot of models from England, but there were several things on my layout I’d made myself in the workshop at home. Yara disliked the workshop almost as much as she feared the train set. To her there was something devilish about it. Nothing to do with the movement of the actual trains. She wasn’t entirely primitive. No, it was the fascination a train set held for a grown man that she held to be somehow hypnotic and devilish.

The shop was only a few meters from La Moderna Poesia. This was Havana’s largest bookstore, only it looked more like a concrete air-raid shelter. Safely inside, I chose a book of Montaigne’s essays in English, not because I had a burning desire to read Montaigne, whom I’d only vaguely heard of, but because I thought it looked improving. And almost anyone at the Casa Marina could have told me that I needed a bit of improving. At the very least, I thought I needed to start wearing my glasses more often. For a moment, I was convinced I was seeing things. There, in the bookshop, was someone I had last seen in another life, twenty years before.

It was Noreen Charalambides.

Except that she wasn’t Noreen Charalambides. Not any longer. No more than I was Bernhard Gunther. A long time ago she’d left her husband, Nick, and gone back to being Noreen Eisner, and as the author of more than ten successful novels and several celebrated plays, this was how the reading world now knew her. Under the fawning gaze of some oleaginous American tourist, Noreen was signing a book at the till where I was about to pay for Montaigne, which meant that she and I saw each other simultaneously. But for that I would probably have crept away. I would have crept away because I was living in Cuba under a false name, and the fewer people who knew about that, the better. Another reason was that I was hardly looking my best. I hadn’t looked my best since the spring of 1945. Noreen, on the other hand, looked much the same. There were a few flecks of gray in her brown hair and a line or two on her forehead, but she was still a beauty. She wore a nice sapphire brooch and a gold wristwatch. In her hand was a silver fountain pen, and over her arm was an expensive crocodile handbag.

When Noreen saw me she put her hand over her mouth, as if she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she had at that. The older I get, the easier it is to believe that my own past is someone else’s life and that I’m just a soul in limbo, or some kind of flying Dutchman figure doomed to sail the seas for all eternity.