Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

I might have told anyone who was interested that while it was now widely believed that Nazi scientists had made soap from the corpses of murdered Jews, this had never actually happened. The practice of calling Jews “soap” had simply been a very unpleasant joke among members of the SS, and merely another way of dehumanizing-and sometimes threatening-their most numerous victims. Since human hair from concentration camp inmates had commonly been used on an industrial scale, describing Jews as “felt”-felt for clothes, roofing materials, carpeting, and in the German car industry-might have been a more accurate epithet.

But this wasn’t what people arriving for Max Reles’s funeral wanted to hear about.

Myself, I was little surprised when I was offered a yarmulke outside the gate of Guanabacoa. Not that I didn’t expect to cover my head at a Jewish funeral. I was already wearing a hat. What surprised me about being offered a yarmulke was the person handing them out. This was Szymon Woytak, the cadaverous Pole who owned the Nazi memorabilia store on Manrique. He was wearing a yarmulke himself, and I took this and his presence at the funeral to be a strong clue that he was also a Jew.

“Who’s minding the store?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I always close the shop for a couple of hours when I’m helping out my brother. He’s the rabbi reading kaddish for your friend Max Reles.”

“And who are you? The program seller?”

“I’m the cantor. I sing the Psalms and whatever else the deceased’s family requests.”

“How about the Horst Wessel song?”

Woytak smiled patiently and handed the person behind me a yarmulke. “Look,” he said, “everyone has to make a living, right?”

There was no family. Not unless you counted Havana’s Jewish mob. The chief mourners seemed to be the Lansky brothers; Meyer’s wife, Teddy; Moe Dalitz; Norman Rothman; Eddie Levinson; Morris Kleinman; and Sam Tucker. But there were plenty of Gentiles other than myself present: Santo Trafficante, Vincent Alo, Tom McGinty, and the Cellini brothers, to name just a few. What was interesting to me-and might have been of interest to the racial theorists of the Third Reich, such as Alfred Rosenberg-was how Jewish everyone looked when he was wearing a yarmulke.

Also present were several government officials and policemen, including Captain Sánchez. Batista did not attend the funeral of his former partner for fear of being assassinated. Or so Sánchez told me afterward.

Noreen and Dinah didn’t come, either. Not that I had expected them to come. Noreen didn’t come, for the simple reason that she had feared and detested Max Reles in equal measure. Dinah didn’t come, because she had already returned to the United States. Since this was exactly what Noreen had always wanted her daughter to do, I imagined she was now feeling too happy to come to a funeral. For all I knew, she had gone to the beach with López again. Which wasn’t any of my business. Or so I kept telling myself.

As the pallbearers carried the casket, haltingly, to the graveside, Captain Sánchez appeared at my elbow. We still weren’t friends, but I was beginning to like him.

“What’s the German opera where the murderer gets fingered by the victim?” he asked.

“Götterdämmerung,” I said. “The Twilight of the Gods.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe Reles will point him out to us.”

“I wonder how that would play out in court.”

“This is Cuba, my friend,” said Sánchez. “In this country, people still believe in Baron Samedi.” He lowered his voice. “And talking of the voodoo master of death, we have our own creature of the invisible world here with us today. He who escorts souls from the land of the living to the graveyard. Not to mention two of his most sinister avatars. The man in the beige uniform who looks like a younger General Franco? That’s Colonel Antonio Blanco Rico, head of the Cuban military intelligence service. Take my word for it, señor , that man has made more souls disappear in Cuba than any voodoo spirit. The man to his left is Colonel Mariano Faget, of the militia. During the war Faget was in charge of a counterespionage unit that successfully targeted several Nazi agents who were reporting on the movements of Cuban and American to German submarines.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were shot by firing squad.”

“Interesting. And the third man?”

“That’s Faget’s CIA liaison officer, Lieutenant José Castaño Quevedo. A very nasty piece of work.”

“And why are they here, exactly?”

“To pay their respects. It’s certain that from time to time the president would ask your friend Max to pay off these men by making sure they won in his casino. Actually, most of the time they don’t even have to take the trouble to gamble. They just go into the salon privé at the Saratoga, or for that matter any of the other casinos, collect several handfuls of chips, and cash them in. Of course, Señor Reles knew exactly how to look after men such as these. And it is certain they will have taken his death very personally. So they too are very interested in the progress of your inquiry.”

“They are?”

“For sure. You may not know it, but it’s not just Meyer Lansky you’re working for, it’s them, too.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

“You should be especially careful of Lieutenant Quevedo. He is very ambitious, and that’s a bad thing to be if you’re a policeman here in Cuba.”

“Aren’t you ambitious, Captain Sánchez?”

“I intend to be. But not right now. I will be ambitious after the election in October. Until I see who wins, I will be very happy to achieve very little in my career. Incidentally, the lieutenant has asked me to spy on you.”

“That seems rather presumptuous, you being a captain.”

“In Cuba, one’s rank is not an indicator of one’s importance. For example, the head of the National Police is General Canizares, but everyone knows that the power lies with Blanco Rico and with Colonel Piedra, the head of our Bureau of Investigation. Similarly, before he was president, Batista was the most powerful man in Cuba. Now that he is, he isn’t, if you follow me. These days, all power lies with the army and the police. Which is why Batista always thinks he is a target for assassination. In a sense, that is his job. To draw attention away from others. Sometimes it is best to appear to be what you are not. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Captain. That has been the story of my life.”

ACOUPLE OF DAYS LATER I was at the Tropicana watching the show while I waited to speak to the Cellini brothers. Bare flesh was the order of the day for the performers, and lots of it. They tried to make it seem more glamorous by wearing some thoughtfully placed sequins and triangles, but the result was much the same: it was bacon with cheese on top, however you cooked it. Most of the chorus boys looked as if they’d have been a lot happier wearing a cocktail dress. Most of the chorus girls didn’t look happy at all. All of them smiled, but the smiles on their rigid little faces had been molded on, back at the doll factory. Meanwhile they danced with all the joie de vivre of kids who knew that one fluffed pirouette or ill-timed lift would earn them a one-way ticket back to Matanzas or whatever crummy peasant town they came from.

On Truffin Avenue in the Havana suburb of Marianao, the Tropicana occupied the lushly landscaped gardens of a mansion-now demolished-formerly owned by the U.S. ambassador to Cuba. The mansion had been replaced by a building of striking modernity with five reinforced concrete semicircular vaults connecting a series of glass ceilings, which created the illusion of a semi-feral show staged under the stars and the trees. Next to this amphitheater, which seemed like something out of a pornographic science-fiction movie, was a smaller glass ceiling that housed a casino. And here there was even a salon privé with an armor-plated door, behind which government officials could gamble without fear of assassination.