Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I doubt it. Today’s freedom fighters are tomorrow’s dictators.”

“No, really. Castro’s very different. He’s not out for himself.”

“Did he tell you that? Or have you actually seen his bank statement?”

“No, but I’ve seen this.”

López opened the door of his car and fetched a briefcase from which he took a small, pamphlet-sized booklet. He had dozens more in the briefcase. As well as a large automatic pistol. I supposed he kept it handy for the occasions when proper, civilized political debate just wasn’t working. He held out the booklet in both his hands, as if it were something precious, like an auctioneer’s assistant showing a rare object to a roomful of potential buyers. On the front of the pamphlet was the picture of a rather stout-looking young man, not unlike López himself, with a thin mustache and hooded dark eyes. The man on the pamphlet looked more like a bandleader than the revolutionary I had read about in the newspapers.

“This is a copy of the statement Fidel Castro made at his trial last November,” said López.

“The tyranny allowed him the opportunity to speak, then,” I said, pointedly. “As I recall, Judge Roland Freisler-Raving Roland, they used to call him-he just screamed abuse at the men who had tried to blow up Hitler. Before sending them to the gallows. Oddly enough, I don’t remember any of them writing a pamphlet, either.”

López ignored me. “It’s called History Will Absolve Me . And we’ve only just finished printing it. So you can have the honor of being one of the first to read it. In the coming months, we’re planning to distribute this pamphlet all over the city. Please, señor . At least read it, eh? If only because the man who wrote it is currently languishing in the Model Prison of the Isle of Pines.”

“Hitler wrote a rather longer book, in Landsberg Prison, in 1928. I didn’t read that one, either.”

“Don’t joke about this, please. Fidel is a friend to the people.”

“So am I. Cats and dogs seem to like me, too. But I don’t expect them to put me in charge of the government.”

“Promise me you’ll at least look at it.”

“All right,” I said, taking it, keen to get rid of him. “If it means that much to you, I’ll read it. Just don’t ask me questions about it afterward. I’d hate to forget anything that might lose me the chance to gain a share of a collective farm. Or the opportunity to denounce someone for sabotaging the five-year plan.”

I climbed back into my car and quickly drove away, hardly satisfied at the way the evening had turned out. At the bottom of the drive, I wound down the window and tossed Castro’s stupid pamphlet into the bushes before turning onto the main road north, to San Miguel del Padrón. I had a different plan in mind than the Cuban rebel leader, although it did involve the girls at the Casa Marina: from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs. That was the sort of Cuban Marxian dialectic with which I was in complete sympathy.

It was just as well that I had thrown away Castro’s pamphlet, because in front of the gas station around the next bend in the highway was a military roadblock. An armed militiaman flagged me down and ordered me to step out of the car. With my hands in the air, I meekly stood at the side of the road, while two other soldiers searched me and then my car under the steady gaze of the rest of the platoon and their boyish officer. I didn’t even look at him. My eyes were fixed on the two bodies lying facedown on the grass shoulder with most of their brains spilling out from under their hairlines.

FOR A MOMENT it was June 1941, and I was back with my reserve police battalion, the 316th, on the road to Smolensk, at a place called Goloby, in the Ukraine, holstering my pistol. I was the officer in charge of a firing squad that had just executed a security unit of NKVD. This particular unit had recently finished murdering three thousand Ukrainian prisoners in the cells of the NKVD Prison at Lutsk, when our panzer wagons caught up with them. We shot them all. All thirty of them. Over the years I had tried to justify this execution to myself, but without much success. And many were the times when I woke up thinking about those twenty-eight men and two women. The majority of whom just happened to be Jews. Two of them I’d shot myself, delivering the so-called coup de grâce. But there was no grace in it. You could tell yourself it was war. You could even tell yourself that the people of Lutsk had begged us to go after the unit that had murdered their relatives. You could tell yourself that a bullet in the head was a quick, merciful death compared to what these people had meted out to their prisoners-most of them burned to death when the NKVD deliberately set fire to the prison. But it still felt like murder.

AND WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING at the two bodies lying by the side of the road I was watching the police van parked a few meters away, and the several, frightened-looking occupants of its brightly lit interior. Their faces were bruised and bloodied and full of fear. It was like staring into a tank full of lobsters. You had the impression that at any moment one of them might be taken out and killed, like the two on the grass shoulder. Then the officer checked my identity card and asked me several questions in a nasal, cartoonish voice that might have made me smile had the situation seemed less lethal. A few minutes later, I was free to proceed with my journey back to Vedado.

I drove on for about half a kilometer and then stopped at a little pink stone café by the roadside, where I asked the owner if I might use the telephone, thinking to call Finca Vigía and warn Noreen-and, in particular, Alfredo López-about the roadblock. It wasn’t that I liked the lawyer so much. I never yet met a lawyer I didn’t want to slap. But I didn’t think he deserved a bullet in the back of the head-which, almost certainly, was what would happen to him if the militia found him in possession of those pamphlets and a pistol. Nobody deserved that kind of ignominious fate. Not even the NKVD.

The café owner was bald and clean-shaven, with thick lips and a broken nose. The man told me the phone had been out of order for days and blamed it on pequeños rebeldes who liked to demonstrate their devotion to the revolution by shooting their catapultas at the ceramic conductors on the telephone poles. If I wanted to warn López, it wasn’t going to be by telephone.

Experience told me that the militia seldom allowed anyone to drive back through a roadblock. They would assume, rightly, that I intended to warn someone. I would have to find another route back to Finca Vigía-one that took me through the little side streets and avenues of San Francisco de Paula. But it was not an area I knew well, especially in the dark.

“Do you know Finca Vigía-the American writer’s house?” I asked the café owner.

“Of course. Everyone knows the house of Ernesto Hemingway.”

“How would a man get there who didn’t want to drive down the main road, south to Cotorro?” I held up a five-peso note to help him think.

The café owner grinned. “Do you perhaps mean a man who didn’t want to drive through the roadblock near the gas station?”

I nodded.

“Keep your money, señor . I would not take money from a man who merely wished to avoid our beloved militia.” He led me out of the café.

“Such a man as yourself would drive north, past the gas station in Diezmero, and turn left onto Varona. Then go across the river in Mantilla. At the junction he would go south, on Managua, and follow the road until he came upon the main highway going west toward Santa María del Rosario. At which point you would cross the main road north again and find Finca Vigía from there.”