Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

Later on I had a bath and put on a good suit. Before I went out I bowed my head for a few moments in front of the Santería shrine Yara had built in her room. It was really just a doll’s house covered with white lace and candles. But on each floor of the doll’s house were little animals, crucifixes, nuts, shells, and black-faced figurines in white dresses. There were also several pictures of the Virgin Mary and one picture of a woman with a knife through her tongue. Yara told me this was to stop gossip about her and me, but I hadn’t a clue about what any of the other stuff meant. With the possible exception of the Virgin Mary. I don’t know why I bowed my head to her shrine. I could say that I wanted to believe in something, but in my heart of hearts, I knew Yara’s souvenir shop was just another stupid lie. Just like Nazism.

On my way to the door I picked up Ben Siegel’s backgammon set, and then Yara took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes as if searching for some effect that her peculiar shrine had worked in my soul. Always supposing I had such a thing as that. And, finding something, she took a step back and crossed herself several times.

“You look like the Lord Eleggua,” she said. “He is the owner of the crossroads. And who guards the home against all dangers. He is always justified in all that he does. And it is he who knows what nobody else knows and who always acts according to his perfect judgment.” She took off the necklace she was wearing and tucked this into the breast pocket of my jacket. “For good luck in your game,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “But it is only a game.”

“Not this time,” she said. “Not for you. Not for you, master.”

IPARKED MY CAR ON ZULUETA, in sight of the local police station, and walked back to the Saratoga, where there were already plenty of taxis and cars, including a couple of the black Cadillac Seventy-fives, which were beloved to all senior government officials.

I walked through the hotel and into the monastery courtyard, where a series of lights was turning the water in the fountain into several pastel shades of color and left the marble horse looking somewhat bemused-as if it hardly dared to take a drink of the exotic-looking water for fear that it might be poisoned. It was, I reflected, a perfect metaphor for the experience of being in a Havana casino.

A doorman dressed like a wealthy French impressionist opened the door for me, and I entered the casino. It was early, but the place was busy, like a bus station during rush hour, only with chandeliers, and noisy with the clack of chips and dice, the tap-running-into-a-steel-sink sound of metal balls rolling around wooden roulette wheels, the squeals of winners, the groans of losers, the clink of glasses, and always the clear, unexcited, declarative voices of the croupiers jostling the bets and calling the cards and the numbers.

I glanced around and noticed that some local celebrities were already in the place: Desi Arnaz the musician, Celia Cruz the singer, George Raft the movie actor, and Major Esteban Ventura-one of the most feared police officials in Havana. Gamblers in white tuxedoes drifted about, shuffling plaques and prevaricating about where their luck might lie that night: on the roulette wheel or at the craps table. Glamorous women with high hairdos and plunging necklines patrolled the edges of the room like cheetahs trying to identify the weakest men to hunt and bring down. One stalked toward me, but I flicked her off with a toss of my head.

I spotted what looked like the casino manager. I figured he was the one with the folded arms and the tennis umpire’s eyes; also, he wasn’t smoking or holding chips. Like most Habañeros, he wore a schoolboy’s doodle of a mustache and more grease on his head than a Cuban hamburger. He caught my eye and then my nod, unfolded his arms, and walked my way.

“Can I help you, señor ?”

“My name is Carlos Hausner,” I said. “I have a meeting upstairs with Señor Reles just before eleven tonight. But before then I’m supposed to meet Señor García, to play backgammon.”

Some of the grease off the manager’s hair must have been on his fingertips, because he started to wring his hands like Pontius Pilate. “Señor García is already here,” he said, leading the way. “Señor Reles asked me to find you both a quiet corner in our lounge. Between the salon privé and the main gaming room. I shall endeavor to make sure you are not disturbed.”

We went over to a spot next to a palm tree. García was seated on a fancy French dining chair facing the room. There was a gilt, marble-topped table in front of him on which a backgammon set had already been laid out. Behind him, on the canary-yellow wall, was a Fragonard-style mural of a naked odalisque lying with her hand on the lap of a rather bored-looking man wearing a red turban. Considering where her hand was, you’d have thought he might have looked more interested. García’s ownership of the Shanghai made it seem like an entirely appropriate spot to have chosen for our game.

The Shanghai on Zanja was Havana’s most obscene and, as a result, most notorious and popular burlesque house. Even with 750 seats, there was always a long line of excited men outside the place-mostly juvenile American sailors-waiting to pay $1.25 to get in and see a show that made anything I had seen in Weimar Berlin look tame. Tame and, by comparison, rather tasteful, too. There was nothing in the least bit tasteful about the show at the Shanghai. Mostly this was thanks to the presence on the bill of a tall mulatto called Superman whose erect member was as big as a cattle prod and which he used to rather similar effect. The climax of the show involved the mulatto outraging a succession of innocent-looking blondes to the vociferous encouragement of Uncle Sam. It wasn’t a place to take a liberal-minded satyr, let alone a nineteen-year-old girl.

García stood up politely, but I disliked him on sight in the same way I would have disliked a pimp or, for that matter, a gorilla in a tuxedo, which is what he looked like. He moved with the economy of a robot, his thick arms held stiffly at his sides until, equally stiffly, one of them came my way, extending a hand the size and color of a falconer’s glove. The bald head, with its enormous ears and thick lips, might have been looted from some Egyptian archaeological site-if not the Valley of the Kings, then perhaps the gully of the slimy-looking satraps. I felt the strength in his hand before he took it away and slipped it into the pocket of his tuxedo. The hand came out with a bundle of money, which he tossed onto the table beside the board.

“A cash game would be best, don’t you agree?” he said.

“Sure,” I said, and laid the envelope of money Reles had given me earlier beside García’s. “But we can settle up at the end of the evening, surely. Or do you want to do it at the end of every game?”

“At the end of the evening is fine,” he said.

“In which case,” I said, pocketing my envelope, “there’s no real need for this, now that we both know the other is carrying a substantial amount of cash.”

He nodded and took back the bundle of money. “I have to leave for a while at around eleven,” he said. “I have to be back to supervise the door at the Shanghai for the eleven-thirty show.”

“And what about the nine-thirty show?” I asked. “Or does that just run itself?”

“You know my theater?”

He made it sound like the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The voice was what I expected: too many cigars and not enough exercise. A wallowing hippo’s voice. Muddy and full of yellowing teeth and gas. Dangerous, too, probably.

“I know it,” I said.

“But I can always come back afterward,” he said. “To give you a chance to win back your money.”