“Do you know something, Carlos?” he said as we went out of the smoking room. “You’re the first German I’ve spoken to since before the war.”
“Argentine-German,” I said, correcting him.
“Yes, of course. Not that I’ve anything against the Germans, you understand. We’re all on the same side now, aren’t we? Against the communists, and all that. You know, sometimes I wonder what to make of it all. What happened between our two countries. The war, I mean. The Nazis and Hitler. What do you think about it?”
“I try not to think about it at all,” I said. “But when I do, I think this: that for a short period of time the German language was a series of very large German words, formed from very small German thinking.”
Freeman chuckled and puffed his cigar at the same time. “Quite,” he said. “Oh, quite.”
“It’s the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God,” I added. “But it’s the fate of only a very few races that they’re sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.”
In the sales hall I passed a photograph of the British prime minister with a cigar in his mouth, and nodded. “I’ll tell you another thing. Hitler didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, and he was healthy right up until the day he shot himself.”
“Quite,” said Freeman. “Oh, quite.”
4
F
INCA VIGÍA WAS about twelve kilometers southeast of central Havana—a one-story Spanish colonial house set in a twenty-acre estate and boasting a fine view of the bay to the north. I parked next to a lemon Pontiac Chieftain convertible—the one with the chief’s head on the hood that glows when the headlights are switched on. There was something vaguely African about the white house and its situation, and as I climbed out of my car and glanced around at all the mango trees and enormous jacarandas, I thought I could almost have been visiting the home of some district high commissioner in Kenya.
This was an impression strongly enhanced by the interior. The house was a museum to Hemingway’s love of hunting. Each of the many large, airy rooms, including the master bedroom—but not the bathroom—contained the trophy heads of kudu, water buffalo, and ibex. Anything with horns, in fact. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found the head of the last unicorn in that house. Or maybe a couple of ex-wives. As well as these trophies, there were a great many books, even in the bathroom, and unlike in my own house, most of them looked as if they had been read. The tiled floors were largely uncarpeted, which must have been tough on the feet of the several cats who gave the impression of owning the place. There were very few pictures on the whitewashed walls, just a few bullfighting posters. Furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than elegance. In the living room the sofa and armchairs were covered with a flowery material that struck a discordant, feminine touch in the midst of all that masculine love of death. At the very center of the living room, like the twenty-four-carat diamond that was set into the floor of the entrance hall of Havana’s National Capitol Building, and which pinpoints zero for all distance measurements in Cuba, was a drinks table with more bottles than a beer truck.
Noreen poured us a couple of large bourbons, and we carried them out onto a long terrace, where she told me about her life since last I’d seen her. In return I described a version of my own—one that carefully left out my having been in the SS, not to mention my active service with a police battalion in the Ukraine. But I told her about how I’d been a private detective, and a regular cop again, and Erich Gruen and how he and the CIA had managed to frame me as a Nazi war criminal, and how I’d been obliged to seek the help of the Old Comrades to escape Europe and start a new life in Argentina.
“That’s how I ended up with a false name and an Argentine passport,” I explained, glibly. “I’d probably still be there but for the fact that the Perónists discovered I wasn’t really a Nazi at all.”
“But why come to Cuba?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The same reasons as everyone else, I suppose. The climate. The cigars. The women. The casinos. I play backgammon in some of the casinos.” I sipped the bourbon, enjoying the sweet and sour taste of the famous writer’s liquor.
“Ernest came because of the big-game fishing.”
I glanced around, looking for a fish, but there weren’t any.
“When he’s here, he spends most of his time at Cojimar. It’s a crummy little fishing village on the crust of a shoreline where he keeps his boat. Ernest loves fishing. But there’s a nice bar in Cojimar, and I have the sneaking suspicion he likes the bar more than he likes the boat. Or fishing, for that matter. On the whole, I suspect Ernest likes bars more than just about anything.”
“Cojimar. I used to go there a lot until I heard that the militia were using it for target practice. And that sometimes the targets were still breathing.”
Noreen nodded. “I’ve heard that story. And I’m sure it’s true. I could believe almost anything about Fulgencio Batista. Just along from that beach he’s built a village of exclusive villas behind a wire fence, for all his top generals. I drove past it just the other day. They’re all pink. Not the generals—that would be too much to hope for. The villas.”
“Pink?”
“Yes. It looks like a holiday camp in a dream described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”
“He’s someone else I haven’t read. One of these days I’m going to have to learn how. It’s strange. I can buy any amount of books. But I’ve found it’s no substitute for reading them.”
Hearing footsteps on the terrace, I turned around and saw a pretty, young woman approaching. I stood up, and trying to wipe some of the wolf-man from my face, I smiled.
“Carlos, this is my daughter, Dinah.”
She was taller than her mother, and not just because of the stiletto heels on her feet. She wore a polka-dot halter dress that only just covered her knees and left most of her back and a bit beyond exposed, which made the little net gloves look unnecessary. Over her muscular, sunburned forearm was a mohair handbag that was the shape, size, and color of Karl Marx’s best beard. Her own hair was almost blond, but not quite, which suited her better, and all shallow layers and soft waves, and the string of pearls around her slender young neck must have been hung there as tribute from some admiring sea god. Certainly her figure was worth a whole basketful of golden apples. Her mouth was as full as a sail on an oceangoing schooner and lipsticked signal red by a skilled and steady hand that might have been school of Rubens. The eyes were large and blue and twinkling with an intelligence made to look more determined by her square and slightly dimpled chin. There are beautiful girls and there are beautiful girls who know it; Dinah Charalambides was a beautiful girl who knew how to solve a quadratic equation.
“Hey,” she said, coolly.
I nodded back, but I’d already lost her attention.
“Can I have the car, Mom?”
“You’re not going out?”
“I won’t be late.”
“I don’t like you going out at night,” said Noreen. “Suppose you get stopped at an army checkpoint?”
“Do I look like a revolutionary?” asked Dinah.
“Sadly, no.”
“Well, then.”
“My daughter is nineteen, Carlos,” said Noreen. “But she behaves like she’s thirty.”
“Everything I know, I learned from you, mother dear.”
“Where are you going, anyway?”
“The Barracuda Club.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go there.”
“We’ve been through this before.” Dinah sighed. “Look, all my friends are going to be there.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Why can’t you mix with some friends of your own age?”
“Perhaps I would,” Dinah said pointedly, “if we weren’t exiled from our home in Los Angeles.”
“We’re not exiled,” insisted Noreen. “I just needed to get away from the States for a while.”
“I understand that. Of course I do. But please try to understand what it’s like for me. I want to go out and have some fun. Not sit around the dinner table and talk about politics with a lot of boring people.” Dinah glanced at me and flashed me a quick, apologetic smile. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Señor Gunther. From what Mother’s told me, I’m sure you’re a very interesting person. But most of Noreen’s friends are left-wing writers and lawyers. Intellectuals. And friends of Ernest’s who drink too much.”
I flinched a bit when she called me Gunther. It meant Noreen had already revealed my secret to her daughter. That irritated me.
Dinah put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it as if it were a fire-cracker.
“And I do wish you wouldn’t smoke,” said Noreen.
Dinah rolled her eyes and held out one gloved hand. “Keys.”
“On the desk, by the telephone.”
Dinah stalked off in a cloud of scent, cigarette smoke, and exasperation, like the ruthless bitch-beauty in one of her mother’s gothic-American plays. I hadn’t seen any of them onstage, only the movies that had been made of them. These were stories full of unscrupulous mothers, mad fathers, flighty wives, dishonest and sadistic sons, and drunken homosexual husbands—the kind of stories that almost made me glad I didn’t have a family myself. I lit a cigar and tried to contain my amusement.
Noreen poured us both another bourbon from a bottle of Old Forester she’d brought from the living room and helped herself to ice from a bucket fashioned from an elephant’s foot.
“Little bitch,” she said tonelessly. “She has a place at Brown University, and yet she still maintains this fucking fiction that she’s obliged to live here in Havana with me. I didn’t ask her to come. I haven’t written a damn thing since I got here. She sits around and plays records all day. I can’t work when someone plays records. Especially the kind of fucking records she listens to. Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. I ask you. God, I hate those smug bastards. And I can’t work at night when she’s out, because I’m worried something will happen to her.”
A second or two later the Pontiac Chieftain started up and moved off down the drive, with the hood’s Indian head scouting out the way forward in the encroaching darkness.
“You don’t want her here with you?”
Noreen gave me a narrow-eyed stare over the rim of her glass. “You used to be a little quicker on the uptake, Gunther. What happened? Something hit you on the head during the war?”
“Just the odd bit of shrapnel, now and then. I’d show you the scars, but I’d have to take my wig off.”
But she wasn’t ready to be amused again. Not yet. She lit a cigarette and flicked the match into the bushes. “If you had a nineteen-year-old daughter, would you want her to live in Havana?”
“That would depend on whether or not she had any good-looking friends.”
Noreen grimaced. “It’s precisely that kind of remark that made me think she’d be better off in Rhode Island. There are too many bad influences in Havana. Too much easy sex. Too much cheap booze.”
“That’s why I live here.”
“And she’s in with the wrong crowd,” continued Noreen, ignoring me. “As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I asked you here tonight.”
“And there I was, naively thinking that you asked me down here for purely sentimental reasons. You can still pack a punch, Noreen.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No?” I let that one go. I sniffed my drink for a moment, enjoying the combusted aroma. The bourbon smelled like the devil’s coffee cup. “Take it from me, angel, there are many worse places to live than Cuba. I know. I’ve tried living in them. Berlin after the war was no Ivy League dormitory, and neither was Vienna. Especially if you were a girl. Russian soldiers have got pimps and beach-boy gigolos beat for bad influences, Noreen. And that’s not anti-communist, right-wing propaganda, sweetheart, that’s the truth. And, speaking of that delicate subject, how much did you tell her about me?”
“Not much. Until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how much there was to tell. All you said to me this morning—and, by the way, you were speaking not directly to me, but to the book clerk in La Moderna Poesia—was that your name was Carlos Hausner. And why the hell did you pick Carlos as your nom de plume? Carlos is a name for a fat Mexican peasant in a John Wayne movie. No, I don’t see you as a Carlos at all. I expect that’s why I used your real name, Bernie—well, it just sort of slipped out when I was telling her about Berlin in 1934.”
“That’s unfortunate, given how much trouble I went to in order to get a new name. To be quite frank with you, if the authorities found out about me, Noreen, I could be deported back to Germany, which would be awkward, to say the least. Like I told you. There are people—Russian people—who’d probably like to hold a knot under my ear.”
She gave me a look that was full of suspicion. “Maybe that’s what you deserve.”
“Maybe.” I put my drink down on a glass table and weighed her remark in my mind for a moment. “Then again, in most cases it’s only in books that people get what’s coming to them. But if you really think that’s what I deserve, then perhaps I’ll be running along.”
I went into the house and then out again through the front door. She was standing by the railing on the terrace above the steps that led down to my car.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think you deserve it at all, okay? I was just teasing you. Please come back.”
I stood there and looked up at her without much pleasure. I was angry and I didn’t care that she knew it. And not just about the remark she’d made about me deserving to hang. I was angry with her and with myself that I’d not made it clearer that Bernie Gunther no longer existed, and that Carlos Hausner had taken his place.
“I was so excited to see you again, after all these years—” Her voice seemed to catch on something like a cashmere sweater snagging on a nail. “I’m sorry I let your secret out of the bag. I’ll speak to Dinah when she gets home and tell her to keep what I told her in confidence, okay? I’m afraid I didn’t think about the possible implications of telling her about you. But you see, she and I have been very close since Nick, her father, died. We always tell each other everything.”