Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I’ll send you a check. With interest.”

“Oh, stop it, for Pete’s sake. I don’t want your money. I’ve got plenty of money. But you might at least shut up for a minute and do me the courtesy of hearing me out before opening fire with both cannons. I figure you owe me that much. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“All right. I can’t promise to hear anything. But I’ll listen.”

Noreen shook her head. “You know, Gunther, it beats me how you ever survived the war. I’ve only just met you again, and already I want to shoot you.” She laughed scornfully. “You want to be careful, you know. This house has more guns than the Cuban militia. There are nights when I’ve sat here drinking with Hem, and he had a shotgun on his lap for taking potshots at the birds in the trees.”

“Sounds dangerous for the cats.”

“Not just the fucking cats.” Still laughing, she shook her head. “ People, too.”

“My head would look good in your bathroom.”

“What a horrid thought. You looking at me every time I took a bath.”

“I was thinking of your daughter.”

“That’s enough.” Noreen stood up abruptly. “Damn you, get out,” she said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

I went into the house again. “Wait,” she snapped. “Wait, please.”

I waited.

“Why are you such a hard-ass?”

“I guess I’m not used to human society,” I said.

“Please, listen. You could help her. You’re about the one person who can, I think. More than you know. I really don’t know who else to ask.”

“Is she in a jam?”

“Not exactly, no. At least, not yet. There’s a man, you see, whom she’s involved with. Who’s much older than her. I’m worried she’s going to end up like-like Gloria Grahame in that movie. The Big Heat . You know, where that sick bastard throws boiling hot coffee in her face.”

“Didn’t see it. Last film I saw was Peter Pan .”

We both turned around as a white Oldsmobile came up the drive. It had a sun visor and whitewall tires and sounded like the motor bus to Santiago.

“Damn,” said Noreen. “That’s Alfredo.”

The white Olds was followed by a two-door red Buick.

“And, it looks like, the rest of my guests.”

THERE WERE EIGHT OF US FOR DINNER. Dinner was prepared and served by Ramón, Hemingway’s Chinese cook, and René, his Negro butler, which only I seemed to find amusing. It certainly wasn’t because I had anything against the Chinese or Negroes. But it struck me as ironic that Noreen and her guests were all solemnly prepared to avow their communism while other men did all the work.

There was no denying what Cuba and its people had suffered, first at the hands of the Spanish, then the Americans, and then the Spanish again. But as bad as any of these perhaps had been the Cuban governments of Ramón Grau San Martín and now Fulgencio Batista. Formerly a sergeant in the Cuban army, F.B.-as most of the Europeans and Americans in Cuba called him-wasn’t much more than an American puppet. So long as he danced to Washington’s tune, American support seemed likely to continue, no matter how brutishly his regime behaved. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls the state-owned means of production was, or ever could be, the answer. And I said as much to Noreen’s left-leaning guests:

“I think communism’s a much greater evil to inflict upon this country than anything that could be conceived and administered by a minor despot like F.B. A small-time thug like him might inflict a few individual tragedies. Perhaps several. But it hardly begins to compare with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. They’ve been the manufacturers of national tragedies. I can’t speak for all the Iron Curtain countries. But I know Germany pretty well, and you can take it from me that the working classes of the GDR would love to change places with the oppressed peoples of Cuba.”

Guillermo Infante was a young student who had just been kicked out of the Havana University School of Journalism. He had also served a short sentence for writing something in a popular opposition magazine called Bohemia . This prompted me to point out that there were no opposition magazines in the Soviet Union, and that even the mildest criticism of the government would have earned him a very long sentence in some forgotten corner of Siberia. Montecristo cigar in hand, Infante proceeded to call me a “bourgeois reactionary” and several other phrases beloved of the Ivans and their acolytes that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Names that almost made me feel nostalgic for Russia, like some wet character in Chekhov.

I fought in my corner for a while, but when two earnest, unattractive women started to call me an “apologist for fascism,” I began to feel beleaguered. It can be fun being insulted by a good-looking woman if you look at it from the point of view that she’s bothered to notice you at all. But it’s no fun at all to be insulted by her two ugly sisters. Finding not much conversational assistance from Noreen, who had perhaps drunk a little too much to come to my aid, I went to the lavatory, and while I was there, decided to cut my evening’s losses and leave.

When I got back to my car, I found one of the other guests already there. He had come to offer an apology of sorts. His name was Alfredo López, and he was a lawyer-one of twenty-two lawyers, it seemed, who had defended the surviving rebels responsible for the attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953. Following the inevitable guilty verdict, the judge in the Santiago Palace of Justice had sentenced the rebels to what I considered to be fairly modest terms of imprisonment. Even the leader of the rebels, Fidel Castro Ruz, had been sentenced to just fifteen years. It was true, fifteen years was not exactly a light sentence, but for a man who had led an armed insurrection against a powerful dictator, it compared very well with a short walk to the guillotine at Plötzensee.

López was in his mid-thirties, good-looking in a grinning, swarthy sort of way, with piercing blue eyes, a thin mustache, and a rubber swimming cap of shiny black hair. He wore white linen trousers and a dark blue open-neck guayabera shirt that helped to hide the beginnings of a potbelly. He smoked long cigarillos that were the color and shape of his womanly fingers. He looked like a very large cat that had been handed the cream-colored keys of the Caribbean’s largest dairy.

“I am very sorry about that, my friend,” he said. “Lola and Carmen shouldn’t have been so rude. Putting politics ahead of simple politeness is unforgivable. Especially at the dinner table. If one cannot be civilized over a meal, what hope can there be for proper debate elsewhere?”

“Forget it. I’m thick-skinned enough not to care very much. Besides, I’ve never been all that interested in politics. Especially not interested in talking about them. It always seems to me that by browbeating others we hope to be able to convince ourselves.”

“Yes, there’s something in that, I think,” he allowed. “But you have to remember that Cubans are a very passionate people. Some of us are already convinced.”

“Are you? I wonder.”

“Take my word for it. There are many of us who are willing to sacrifice everything for freedom in Cuba. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what the tyrant’s name.”

“Perhaps I’ll have the chance to remind you of that one day, when your man is in charge of the tyranny.”

“Fidel? Oh, he’s not at all a bad fellow. Perhaps if you knew a little more about him, you might be a little more sympathetic to our cause.”