Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I’d like that.” I took the notepad and wrote out my own address and phone number. “Here,” I said. “Just in case you think I’m going to run out on you.”

“It’s good to see you again, Gunther.”

“You too, Noreen.”

I went to the door and glanced back at the people in the Floridita Bar. No one was listening to the band or even intending to listen. Not while there was drinking to be done. The barman was making daiquiris like they were on special offer, about a dozen at a time. From everything I’d heard and read about Ernest Hemingway, that was the way he liked drinking them, too.

IBOUGHT SOME PETIT ROBUSTOS in the cigar factory shop and took them into the smoking room, where a number of men, including Robert Freeman, inhabited an almost infernal world of swirling smoke and igniting matches and glowing tobacco embers. Every time I went into that room, the smell reminded me of the library at the Adlon Hotel, and for a moment I could almost see poor Louis Adlon standing in front of me with a favorite Upmann in his white gloved fingers.

Freeman was a large, bluff man who looked more South American than British. He spoke good Spanish for an Englishman-about as good as my own-which perhaps was hardly surprising given his family history: his great-grandfather, James Freeman, had started selling Cuban cigars as long ago as 1839. He listened politely to the details of my proposal and then told me of his own plans to expand the family business:

“Until recently I owned a cigar factory in Jamaica. But, like the Jamaicans themselves, the product is inconsistent, so I’ve sold that and decided to concentrate on selling Cuban cigars in Britain. I have plans to buy a couple of other companies that will give me about twenty percent of the British market. But the German market. I don’t know. Is there such a thing? You tell me, old boy.”

I told him about Germany’s membership in the European Coal and Steel Community and how the country, benefiting from the currency reform of 1948, had seen the fastest growth of any nation in European history. I told him how industrial production had increased by thirty-five percent and how agricultural production had already surpassed prewar levels. It’s amazing these days how much real information you can get from a German newspaper.

“The question is not,” I said, “ can you afford to try to gain a share of the West German market, but can you afford not to try.”

Freeman looked impressed. I was impressed myself. It made a pleasant change to be discussing an export market instead of a pathologist’s report.

And yet all I could think about was Noreen Eisner and seeing her again after such a long time. Twenty years! It seemed almost miraculous after all that we had been through-she, driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War, and me in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In truth, I had no romantic intentions toward her. Twenty years was too long for any feelings to have survived. Besides, our affair had lasted only a few weeks. But I did hope that she and I might become friends again. I didn’t have many friends in Havana, and I was looking forward to sharing a few memories with someone in whose company I might be myself again. My real self, instead of the person I was supposed to be. It was four years since I’d done anything as straightforward as that. And I wondered what a man like Robert Freeman would have said if I’d told him about Bernie Gunther’s life. Probably he’d have swallowed his cigar. As it was, we parted amicably with his declaring that we should meet again, just as soon as he had bought the two competing companies, which would give him the rights to sell the brands Montecristo and Ramon Allones.

“Do you know something, Carlos?” he said as we went out of the smoking room. “You’re the first German I’ve spoken to since before the war.”

“Argentine-German,” I said, correcting him.

“Yes, of course. Not that I’ve anything against the Germans, you understand. We’re all on the same side now, aren’t we? Against the communists, and all that. You know, sometimes I wonder what to make of it all. What happened between our two countries. The war, I mean. The Nazis and Hitler. What do you think about it?”

“I try not to think about it at all,” I said. “But when I do, I think this: that for a short period of time the German language was a series of very large German words, formed from very small German thinking.”

Freeman chuckled and puffed his cigar at the same time. “Quite,” he said. “Oh, quite.”

“It’s the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God,” I added. “But it’s the fate of only a very few races that they’re sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.”

In the sales hall I passed a photograph of the British prime minister with a cigar in his mouth, and nodded. “I’ll tell you another thing. Hitler didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, and he was healthy right up until the day he shot himself.”

“Quite,” said Freeman. “Oh, quite.”

FINCA VIGÍA WAS about twelve kilometers southeast of central Havana-a one-story Spanish colonial house set in a twenty-acre estate and boasting a fine view of the bay to the north. I parked next to a lemon Pontiac Chieftain convertible-the one with the chief’s head on the hood that glows when the headlights are switched on. There was something vaguely African about the white house and its situation, and as I climbed out of my car and glanced around at all the mango trees and enormous jacarandas, I thought I could almost have been visiting the home of some district high commissioner in Kenya.

This was an impression strongly enhanced by the interior. The house was a museum to Hemingway’s love of hunting. Each of the many large, airy rooms, including the master bedroom-but not the bathroom-contained the trophy heads of kudu, water buffalo, and ibex. Anything with horns, in fact. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found the head of the last unicorn in that house. Or maybe a couple of ex-wives. As well as these trophies, there were a great many books, even in the bathroom, and unlike in my own house, most of them looked as if they had been read. The tiled floors were largely uncarpeted, which must have been tough on the feet of the several cats who gave the impression of owning the place. There were very few pictures on the whitewashed walls, just a few bullfighting posters. Furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than elegance. In the living room the sofa and armchairs were covered with a flowery material that struck a discordant, feminine touch in the midst of all that masculine love of death. At the very center of the living room, like the twenty-four-carat diamond that was set into the floor of the entrance hall of Havana’s National Capitol Building, and which pinpoints zero for all distance measurements in Cuba, was a drinks table with more bottles than a beer truck.

Noreen poured us a couple of large bourbons, and we carried them out onto a long terrace, where she told me about her life since last I’d seen her. In return I described a version of my own-one that carefully left out my having been in the SS, not to mention my active service with a police battalion in the Ukraine. But I told her about how I’d been a private detective, and a regular cop again, and Erich Gruen and how he and the CIA had managed to frame me as a Nazi war criminal, and how I’d been obliged to seek the help of the Old Comrades to escape Europe and start a new life in Argentina.

“That’s how I ended up with a false name and an Argentine passport,” I explained, glibly. “I’d probably still be there but for the fact that the Perónists discovered I wasn’t really a Nazi at all.”