Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“So how come you know so much about this stuff?”

“During the war, I was in German military intelligence,” I said. “And for a short while afterward I was in a Soviet POW camp. If I’m cagey about my name, it’s because I killed a couple of Ivans while making my escape from a train bound for a uranium mine in the Urals. I doubt I’d have come back from there. Very few German POWs have ever come back from the Soviet Union. They ever catch up with me, I’m soap on a rope, Mr. Lansky.”

“I figured it was something like that.” Lansky shook his head and glanced down at the dead body. “Someone should cover him up.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Lansky,” I said. “Not yet. It’s just possible that Captain Sánchez will get wise to the proper procedures here.”

“Don’t you worry none about him,” said Lansky. “He gives you any trouble, I’ll call his boss and have him lay off. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. Come on. Let’s get out of this room. I can’t bear to be here any longer. Max was like a second brother to me. I knew him since I was fifteen years old in Brownsville. He was the smartest kid I ever knew. With the proper education Max could have been anything he wanted. Maybe even the president of the United States.”

We went into the living room. Sánchez was there with Waxey and Dalitz. The gun was lying in a plastic bag, on the table where Max and I had eaten lunch less than forty hours before.

“So what happens now?” asked Waxey.

“We bury him,” said Meyer Lansky. “Like a good Jew. That’s what Max would have wanted. When the cops have finished with the body, we got three days to make the arrangements and everything.”

“Leave it to me,” said Jake. “It’d be an honor.”

“Someone ought to tell that girl of his,” said Dalitz.

“Dinah,” whispered Waxey. “Her name is Dinah. They were going to get married. With a rabbi and the whole broken wineglass, everything. She’s Jewish, too, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Dalitz.

“She’ll be all right,” said Meyer Lansky. “Someone ought to tell her, sure, but she’ll be all right. The young always are. Nineteen years old, she’s got her whole life ahead of her. God rest Max’s soul, I thought she was too young for him, but what do I know? You can’t blame a guy for wanting a little piece of happiness. For a guy like Max, Dinah was as good as it gets. But you’re right, Moe, someone ought to tell her.”

“Tell me what? Has something happened? Where’s Max? Why are the police here?”

It was Dinah.

“Well, isn’t anyone going to say anything? Is Max all right? Is he sick? God damn it, what the hell is happening here?”

Then she saw the gun on the table. I suppose she must have guessed the rest, because she started to scream, loudly. It was a sound that could have raised the dead.

But not this time.

WAXEY DROVE DINAH BACK to Finca Vigía in the red Cadillac Eldorado. Under the circumstances, perhaps it ought to have been me who took her home. I might have been able to offer Noreen some support in dealing with her daughter’s grief. But Waxey was eager to get out from under Meyer Lansky’s shrewd, searching eye, as if he felt the Jewish gangster suspected him of some involvement in the murder of Max Reles. Besides, it was much more likely that I’d only have been in the way. I wasn’t much of a shoulder to cry on. Not anymore. Not since the war, when so many German women had, of necessity, learned to cry by themselves.

Grief: I no longer had the patience for it. What did it matter if you grieved for people when they died? It certainly couldn’t bring them back. And they weren’t even particularly grateful for your grief. The living always get over the dead. That’s what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they’d only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when I felt equal to the task of driving down to the Hemingway house to offer my sympathies. Despite the fact that Max’s death had done me out of a salary worth twenty-thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t sorry he was dead. But for Dinah’s sake I was willing to pretend.

The Pontiac wasn’t there, just a white Oldsmobile with a sun visor I seemed to recognize.

Ramón admitted me to the house, and I found Dinah in her room. She was seated in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, watched closely by a glum-looking water buffalo. The buffalo reminded me of myself, and it was perhaps easy to see why he was looking glum: Dinah’s suitcase was open on her bed. It was packed neatly with her clothes, as if she were preparing to leave the country. On a table by the arm of her chair were a drink and a hardwood ashtray. Her eyes were red, but she seemed to be all cried out.

“I came to see how you are,” I said.

“As you can see,” she said, calmly.

“Going somewhere?”

“So you were a detective.”

I smiled. “That’s what Max used to say. When he wanted to needle me.”

“And did it?”

“At the time, yes, it did. But there’s not much that gets to me now. I’m rather more impervious these days.”

“Well, that’s a lot more than Max can say.”

I let that one go.

“What would you say if I told you that my mother killed him?” she said.

“I’d say that it might be best to keep a wild thought like that to yourself. Not all of Max’s friends are as forgetful as me.”

“But I saw the gun,” she said. “The murder weapon. In the penthouse at the Saratoga. It was my mother’s gun. The one Ernest gave her.”

“It’s a common enough gun,” I said. “I saw plenty of guns like that during the war.”

“Her gun is missing,” said Dinah. “I already looked for it.”

I was shaking my head. “Do you remember the other day? When you said you thought she was suicidal? I took the gun away just in case she decided to use it on herself. I should have mentioned it at the time. I’m sorry.”

“You’re lying,” she said.

She was right, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “No, I’m not,” I said. “The gun is missing, and so is she.”

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation for why she’s not here.”

“Which is that she murdered him. She did it. Or Alfredo López. That’s his car out there. Neither of them liked Max. One time Noreen as good as told me that she wanted to kill him. To stop me from marrying him.”

“Just how much do you really know about your late boyfriend?”

“I know he wasn’t exactly a saint, if that’s what you mean. He never professed to be.” She flushed. “What are you driving at?”

“Just this: Max was a very long way from being a saint. You won’t like this, but you’re going to hear it anyway. Max Reles was a gangster. During Prohibition he was a ruthless bootlegger. Max’s brother, Abe, was a hit man for the mob before someone tossed him out of a hotel window.”

“I’m not listening to this.”

Dinah shook her head and stood up, but I pushed her back down onto the chair again.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “You’re listening to it because somehow you’ve never heard it before. Or if you did, then maybe you just buried your head in the sand like some stupid ostrich. You’re going to listen to it because it’s the truth. Every damned word. Max Reles was into every dirty racket that there is. More recently he was part of an organized crime syndicate started in the 1930s by Charlie Luciano and Meyer Lansky. He stayed in business because he didn’t mind murdering his rivals.”

“Shut up,” she said. “It’s not true.”

“He told me himself that he and his brother murdered two men, the Shapiro brothers, in 1933. One of them he buried alive. After Prohibition ended, he went into labor racketeering. Some of it was in Berlin, which was where I first met him. While he was there, he murdered a German businessman called Rubusch who refused to be intimidated by him. I myself witnessed him murder two other people. One of them was a prostitute, Dora, with whom he had been conducting a relationship. He shot her in the head and dumped her body in a lake. She was still breathing when she hit the water.”