Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“Like that, huh?”

“I like the car. I guess you must be doing all right. What’s the ransom for a one-man motorcade like that?”

“Oh, about seven thousand dollars.”

“The labor rackets must be good in Cuba.”

“I’m out of that shit now. These days I’m in the hotel and entertainment business.”

“Seven thousand dollars is a lot of bed and breakfast.”

“That’s just your copper’s nose twitching.”

“It does that sometimes. But I don’t pay it any mind. These days I’m just a citizen.”

Reles grinned. “That covers a lot in Cuba. Especially at this house. There are citizens here who make Joseph Stalin look like Theodore Roosevelt.” While he spoke, Reles was looking coldly at Alfredo López, who nodded a farewell at me and then slowly drove away.

“You two know each other?” I asked.

“You could say that.”

Dinah interrupted us, speaking in English. “I didn’t know you spoke German, Max.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, honey.”

“I sure as hell won’t tell her anything,” I told him, in German. “Not that I’ll have to. I expect Noreen has done that already. You must be the bad crowd of people in Havana that she was telling me about. The one Dinah’s got herself involved with. I can’t say I blame her, Max. If she was my daughter I’d be worried myself.”

Reles smiled wryly. “I’m not like that anymore,” he said. “I’ve changed.”

“Small world.”

Another car came up the drive. It was getting to be like the front door at the National Hotel. Someone was driving Noreen’s Pontiac.

“No, really,” insisted Reles. “These days I’m a respectable businessman.”

The man driving the Pontiac stepped out of the car and silently got into the passenger seat of the car Reles had been driving. Suddenly the Cadillac looked very small. The man’s eyes were dark, and his face pale and puffy. He was wearing a loose white suit with big black buttons. His hair was curly and black and gray and plentiful, as if there had been a sale of wire wool at the dollar store on Obispo. He looked sad, perhaps because it was probably several minutes since he’d eaten anything. He looked like he ate a lot. Roadkill probably. He was smoking a cigar the size and shape of an armor-piercing shell, but in his mouth it was like a sty on an eyelid. You looked at him and thought of Pagliacci with two tenors in the part of Canio instead of one: a tenor down each trouser leg. He looked about as respectable as a roll of quarters in a boxing glove.

“Respectable, yeah.” I eyeballed the big man in the Cadillac. I let Reles see me doing it and said, “I suppose that ogre is really your bookkeeper.”

“Waxey? He’s a babke . A real sweet cake. Besides, I have some very big books.”

Dinah sighed and rolled her eyes like a petulant schoolgirl. “Max,” she complained, “it’s rude to carry on a conversation in German when you know I don’t speak the language.”

“I can’t understand that.” Reles spoke in English. “Really I can’t, when your mother speaks such excellent German.”

Dinah pulled a face. “Who wants to learn German? The Germans murdered ninety percent of the Jews in Europe. Nobody wants to learn German these days.” She looked at me and shrugged ruefully. “Sorry, but that’s how it is, I guess.”

“That’s okay. I’m sorry, too. It was my fault. For speaking German to Max, I mean. Not for the other thing. Although obviously I’m sorry for that, as well.”

“You krauts are going to be sorry for a long time.” Max laughed. “We Jews are going to make sure of that.”

“Very sorry. Believe me, I was only obeying orders.”

Dinah wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening, because it wasn’t something she was good at. Although, to be fair, Max had his nose in her ear and then his lips on her cheek, which could have distracted anyone who hadn’t had all their shots.

“Forgive me, honik ,” he murmured to her. “But you know it’s been twenty years since I saw this fershtinkiner .” He left off tasting her face for a moment and looked at me again. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“That she is, Max, that she is. What’s more, she has her whole life ahead of her, too. Unlike you and me.”

Reles bit his lip. I sort of fancied he’d preferred it to have been my neck. Then he smiled and wagged his finger at me. I smiled back, like it was a game of tennis we were playing. I was hitting the ball at him hard. Harder than he was used to, I imagined.

“Still the same awkward bastard,” he said, shaking his head. The big face on the front of it had always been square and pugnacious, but now it was tanned and leathery, and there was a scar on his cheek as big as a luggage label. I wondered what Dinah could see in a man like him. “Still the same old Gunther.”

“Now, there you and Noreen seem to be in agreement,” I said. “You’re right, of course. I am an awkward old bastard. And getting worse all the time. Mind you, it’s the old part that really pisses down my trouser leg. The fascination I once felt at the contemplation of my own physical excellence is now matched by the horror I find in the evidence of my own advancing middle age. My belly, bowlegs, thinning hair, shortsightedness, and receding gums. By anyone’s reckoning, I’m past it. Still there is one consolation, I suppose: I’m not as old as you, Max.”

Reles kept on grinning, only this time he had to take a breath to keep on doing it. Then he shook his head and looked at Dinah and said, “Jesus Christ, will you listen to this guy? In front of you he insults me to my face.” He let out a laugh of amazement. “Isn’t he beautiful? That’s what I like about this bum. Nobody has ever talked to me the way this guy talks to me. I love that about him.”

“I don’t know, Max,” she said. “Sometimes you’re a very weird kind of guy.”

“You should listen to her, Max,” I said. “She’s not just beautiful. She’s very smart, too.”

“Enough already,” said Reles. “You know, let’s you and me talk again. Come and see me tomorrow.”

I stared at him politely.

“Come and see me at my hotel.” He put his hands together, like he was praying. “Please.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Saratoga in old Havana. Opposite the Capitolio? I own it.”

“Right. I get it. The hotel and entertainment business. The Saratoga. Sure, I know it.”

“Will you come? For old times’ sake.”

“You mean our old times, Max?”

“Sure, why not? All that stuff was over and done with twenty years ago. Twenty years. But it feels like a thousand. Just like you said. Come for lunch.”

I thought for a moment. I was going to the offices of Alfredo López in the Bacardi Building at eleven, and the Bacardi was just a few blocks from the Saratoga Hotel. Suddenly I was a man with two appointments in one day. Maybe I’d have to buy a diary soon. Maybe I’d have to get my hair and nails done. I was almost feeling relevant again, although in what sense I could ever be relevant, I wasn’t quite sure. Not yet, anyway.

I guessed it would take no time at all to return the briefcase with the gun and the pamphlets to Alfredo López. Lunch at the Saratoga sounded all right. Even if it was with Max Reles. The Saratoga was a good hotel. With an excellent restaurant. And lepers can’t be choosers in Havana. Especially lepers like me.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come around twelve.”

THE SARATOGA WAS at the south end of the Prado, and just across the street from the Capitolio. It was a fine-looking eight-story white colonial that reminded me of a hotel I’d once seen in Genoa. I went inside. It was just after one o’clock. The girl at the desk in the lobby directed me to the elevators and told me to go up to the eighth floor. I walked into a colonnaded courtyard, which brought to mind a monastery, and waited for the car. In the center of the courtyard was a fountain and the marble figure of a horse by the Cuban sculptress Rita Longa. I knew it was by her because the car took a while and because there was an easel next to the horse with some “useful information” about the artist. The information wasn’t particularly useful beyond what I had already worked out for myself, which was that Rita knew nothing about horses and very little about sculpture. And I was more interested in peering through a set of smoked-glass doors that led into the hotel’s gaming rooms. With their magnificent chandeliers, tall gilt mirrors, and marble floors, the gaming rooms evoked Belle Époque Paris. Somewhere classier than Havana, anyway. There were no slot machines, only roulette tables, blackjack, craps, poker, baccarat, and punto banco. Clearly no expense had been spared, and perhaps with some justification, the Saratoga’s casino described itself-on another easel inside the glass doors-as “the Monte Carlo of the Americas.”