Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I don’t think she meant it,” said Dinah. “She says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”

“We all do.”

There was a three-drawer wooden desk covered with carved animals and different-sized shotgun cartridges and rifle bullets that someone had stood on their ends like so many lethal lipsticks. I found a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled out my telephone number in large writing so that it wouldn’t be missed. Unlike me. And then I left.

I drove home and spent the rest of the day and half the night in my little workshop. While I worked I thought about Noreen and Max Reles and Dinah. Nobody called me on the phone. But there was nothing unusual about that.

HAVANA’S CHINESE QUARTER-the Barrio Chino-was the largest in Latin America, and since it was Chinese New Year the streets off Zanja and Cuchillo were decorated with paper lanterns and given over to open-air markets and lion-dance troupes. At the intersection of Amistad and Dragones was a gateway as big as the Forbidden City. Later that evening, it would be the center of a tremendous fireworks barrage, which was the climax of the celebrations.

Yara loved any kind of noisy parade, and this was the reason why, unusually, I had chosen to take her out for the afternoon. The streets of Chinatown were full of laundries, noodle houses, dried-goods shops, herbalists, acupuncturists, sex clubs, opium dens, and brothels. But above all, the streets were full of people. Chinese people, mostly. So many that you wondered where they had been hiding themselves.

I bought Yara some small gifts-fruit and candies-which delighted her. In return she insisted on buying me a cup of macerated medicinal liquor at a traditional medicine market, which, she assured me, would make me very virile; and it was only after drinking it that I found out that it contained wolfberry, iguana, and ginseng. It was the iguana ingredient I objected to, and for several minutes after drinking this horrible beverage I was convinced I had been poisoned. So much so that I was firmly of the opinion that I must be hallucinating when, right on the edge of Chinatown, on the corner of Manrique and Simón Bolívar, I came across a shop I had never seen before. Not even in Buenos Aires, where the existence of such a business might, perhaps, more easily have been explained. It was a shop selling Nazi memorabilia.

After a moment or two I realized Yara had seen the shop, too, and, leaving her on the street, I went inside, as curious to know what kind of person might sell this kind of stuff as I was about who might buy it.

Inside the shop were glass cases containing Luger pistols, Walther P-38s, Iron Crosses, Nazi Party armbands, Gestapo identity tokens, and SS daggers. Several copies of Der Stürmer newspapers were laid out in cellophane, like freshly laundered shirts. A mannequin was wearing the dress uniform of an SS captain, which somehow seemed only appropriate. Behind a counter and between two Nazi banners stood a youngish man with a black beard who couldn’t have looked less German. He was tall and thin and cadaverous, like someone from a painting by El Greco.

“Looking for something in particular?” he asked me.

“An Iron Cross, perhaps,” I told him. I asked to see an Iron Cross not because I was interested in it but because I was interested in him.

He opened one the glass cases and laid the medal on the counter as if it had been a ladies’ diamond brooch, or a handsome watch.

I looked at it for a while, turning it over in my fingers.

“What do you think of it?” he asked.

“It’s a fake,” I said. “And not a very good fake. And another thing: the cross belt on the SS captain’s uniform is over the wrong shoulder. A fake is one thing. But an elementary mistake like that is something else.”

“You know about this stuff?”

“I thought it was illegal in Cuba,” I answered, hardly answering at all.

“The law forbids only the promotion of Nazi ideology,” he said. “Selling historic mementos is permitted.”

“Who buys this stuff?”

“Americans, mostly. A lot of sailors. Then there are also tourists who saw military service in Europe and want to obtain the souvenir they never managed to get when they were over there. Mostly it’s SS stuff they want. I guess there’s a certain gruesome fascination with the SS, for obvious reasons. I could sell any amount of SS stuff. For example, SS daggers are very popular as paper knives. Of course, collecting this sort of memorabilia doesn’t mean you sympathize with Nazism, or condone what happened. It happened, and it’s a part of history, and I don’t see anything wrong with being interested in that, to the extent of owning something that’s an almost living part of that history. How could I see anything wrong with it? I mean, I’m Polish. My name’s Szymon Woytak.”

He held out his hand, and I took it limply and without much enthusiasm for him or his peculiar trade. Through the shop window I could see a troupe of Chinese dancers. They’d removed their lion heads and paused for a cigarette, as if hardly aware of the evil spirits that dwelled within, otherwise they might have come through the door. Woytak picked up the Iron Cross I had asked to see. “How can you tell it’s a fake?” he asked, examining it closely.

“Simple. The fakes are made from one piece of metal. The originals were made of at least three pieces and soldered together. Another way to tell is to get a magnet and see if the cross really is made of iron. Fakes are made from a cheap alloy.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do I know?” I grinned at him. “I had one of these iron baubles myself once, in the Great War,” I said. “But you know, all of it’s fake. All of this. Everything in here.” I waved my hand at the shop. “And the creed that made all of these ridiculous objects? That, too, was just a cheap alloy meant to fool people. A stupid fake that shouldn’t have tricked anyone, except for the fact that people wanted to believe in it. Everyone knew it was a lie. Of course they did. But they wanted, desperately, to believe that it wasn’t. And they forgot to remember that just because Adolf Hitler liked kissing little children it didn’t mean he wasn’t a big, bad wolf. He was that, and much, much worse. That’s history for you, Señor Woytak. Real German history, not this-this ridiculous souvenir shop.”

I took Yara home and spent the rest of the day in my workshop feeling a little depressed. But it wasn’t because of anything I had seen in Szymon Woytak’s shop. That was just Havana. You could always buy anything in Havana, provided you had the money to pay for it. Anything and everything. It was something else getting me down. Something closer to home. Or at least the home of Ernest Hemingway.

Noreen’s daughter, Dinah.

I wanted to like her, but found I couldn’t. Not by a long way. Dinah struck me as willful and spoiled. The willfulness was okay. She’d probably grow out of it. Most people did. But she was going to need a pair of hard slaps to stop her from being such a spoiled brat. It was too bad that Nick and Noreen Charalambides had divorced when Dinah was still a child. Probably her young life had lacked a father’s discipline. Maybe that was the real reason Dinah was planning to marry a man more than twice her age. Lots of girls married father substitutes. Or maybe she was simply trying to get even with her mother for leaving her father. Lots of girls did that, too. Maybe it was both of these things. Or maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about, never having raised a child myself.

It was fortunate that I was in the workshop. “Maybe” is not a word you use in there. When you’re operating a lathe to cut a length of metal, “exactly” is a better word. I had the patience for metalworking. That was easy. Being a parent looked much more difficult.