“The Saratoga in old Havana. Opposite the Capitolio? I own it.”
“Right. I get it. The hotel and entertainment business. The Saratoga. Sure, I know it.”
“Will you come? For old times’ sake.”
“You mean our old times, Max?”
“Sure, why not? All that stuff was over and done with twenty years ago. Twenty years. But it feels like a thousand. Just like you said. Come for lunch.”
I thought for a moment. I was going to the offices of Alfredo López in the Bacardi Building at eleven, and the Bacardi was just a few blocks from the Saratoga Hotel. Suddenly I was a man with two appointments in one day. Maybe I’d have to buy a diary soon. Maybe I’d have to get my hair and nails done. I was almost feeling relevant again, although in what sense I could ever be relevant, I wasn’t quite sure. Not yet, anyway.
I guessed it would take no time at all to return the briefcase with the gun and the pamphlets to Alfredo López. Lunch at the Saratoga sounded all right. Even if it was with Max Reles. The Saratoga was a good hotel. With an excellent restaurant. And lepers can’t be choosers in Havana. Especially lepers like me.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come around twelve.”
7
T
HE SARATOGA WAS at the south end of the Prado, and just across the street from the Capitolio. It was a fine-looking eight-story white colonial that reminded me of a hotel I’d once seen in Genoa. I went inside. It was just after one o’clock. The girl at the desk in the lobby directed me to the elevators and told me to go up to the eighth floor. I walked into a colonnaded courtyard, which brought to mind a monastery, and waited for the car. In the center of the courtyard was a fountain and the marble figure of a horse by the Cuban sculptress Rita Longa. I knew it was by her because the car took a while and because there was an easel next to the horse with some “useful information” about the artist. The information wasn’t particularly useful beyond what I had already worked out for myself, which was that Rita knew nothing about horses and very little about sculpture. And I was more interested in peering through a set of smoked-glass doors that led into the hotel’s gaming rooms. With their magnificent chandeliers, tall gilt mirrors, and marble floors, the gaming rooms evoked Belle Époque Paris. Somewhere classier than Havana, anyway. There were no slot machines, only roulette tables, blackjack, craps, poker, baccarat, and punto banco. Clearly no expense had been spared, and perhaps with some justification, the Saratoga’s casino described itself—on another easel inside the glass doors—as “the Monte Carlo of the Americas.”
Since dollar controls had only just started to be lifted, it seemed less than likely this claim would be put to the test anytime soon by any of the American salesmen and their wives who went gambling in Havana. Myself, I disliked nearly all forms of gambling ever since I had been obliged to drop a small fortune at a casino in Vienna, during the winter of 1947. Luckily the small fortune did not belong to me, but there was something about losing money—even other people’s money—that I didn’t like. It was one of the reasons that, when I gambled at all, I preferred to play backgammon. It’s a game that very few people play, which means you can never lose very much. And, besides, I was good at it.
I rode the car up to the eighth floor and the rooftop pool, which was the only one in Havana.
I say rooftop, but there was another, higher level set back from the pool terrace and, according to my new friend, Alfredo López, this was the exclusive penthouse where Max Reles lived in considerable luxury. The only way up there was to have a special key to the elevator—again, according to López. But glancing around the deserted pool terrace—the weather was too blowy for anyone to be sunbathing—I filled my idle mind with thoughts of how a man with a head for heights might climb up onto that penthouse terrace from the outside. Such a man would have had to clamber out onto the parapet encircling the pool, walk precariously around the corner, and then climb up on some scaffolding being used to repair the hotel’s neon sign that adorned the curved corner façade. There were some people who went on a rooftop and enjoyed the view; and there were others, like me, who remembered crime scenes and snipers and, above all, the war on the eastern front. In Minsk, a Red Army marksman had sat on the roof of the city’s only hotel for three whole days picking off German army officers before being nailed with an antitank gun. Such a man would have appreciated the rooftop terrace of the Saratoga.
Then again, Max Reles probably had that possibility covered. According to Alfredo López, Reles wasn’t the kind of man who took any chances with his personal security. He had too many friends to do something like that. Havana friends, that is. The kind who make enthusiastic understudies of deadly enemies.
“I thought maybe you’d changed your mind,” Max said, emerging from a doorway that led along to the elevators. “That you weren’t going to show up.” His tone was reproachful and a little puzzled, as if he were annoyed that he couldn’t work out any good reason why I might have been late for our lunch.
“I’m sorry. I got a little held up. You see, last night I told López about that roadblock on the road north out of San Francisco de Paula.”
“What the hell did you do that for?”
“He had a briefcase full of rebel pamphlets, and I don’t know why, but I agreed to take them for him and then deliver them back to him this morning. There was a police truck outside the Bacardi Building when I arrived, and I had to wait until it was gone.”
“You shouldn’t get involved with a man like that,” said Reles. “Really, you shouldn’t. That shit’s dangerous. You want to keep away from the politics on this island.”
“You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t. And I don’t know why I said I’d do it. Probably I’d drunk too much. I do a lot of that. There’s nothing much else to do in Cuba except drink too much.”
“That figures. Everyone at that damn house drinks too much.”
“But I said I’d do it, and when I say I’ll do something, I generally see it through. I was always kind of stupid like that.”
“True.” Max Reles grinned. “Very true. Did he say anything about me? López.”
“Only that you and he used to be business associates.”
“That’s almost true. Let me tell you about our pal Fredo. F.B.’s brother-in-law is a man named Roberto Miranda. Miranda owns every one of the
traganiqueles
in Havana. You know, the slot machines. You want some in your place, then you rent them from him. Plus he gets fifty percent of the take. Which, let me tell you, can be a lot in a Havana casino. Anyway, Fredo López used to come and empty the slots for me at the Saratoga. I thought that having a lawyer do it was the best way of preventing any dishonesty. But very early on I discovered that only a quarter of the money was going to Miranda. The rest López was skimming to help feed the families of those men who attacked the Moncada Barracks last year. For a while I turned a blind eye to it. He knew that I was turning a blind eye to it, too. I figured, to hedge my bets with the rebels. But then Miranda figured out that he was being cheated and, wouldn’t you know it, he blamed yours truly. Which left me with a choice. Keep the slots, but get rid of López, and risk being made a target by the rebels. Or get rid of the slots and put up with Miranda’s displeasure. I chose to get rid of the slots. And as a result of that, once a week I now have to go through my books with F.B. himself on account of the fact that he owns a substantial stake in this place. The whole thing cost me a lot of fucking money and inconvenience. And the way I see it, that bastard Fredo López is a very lucky fuck. Lucky to be alive, that is.”
“You’re right, Max. You have changed. The old Max Reles would have stuck an ice pick in his ear.”
He grinned at the memory of his former self. “Wouldn’t I just? Wouldn’t I? Things were more straightforward then. I’d have killed him without a second thought.” He shrugged. “But this is Cuba, and we try to do things a little differently here. I figured that maybe, when he thought about it, the little prick would realize it. And act like he’s just a little grateful. But not a bit of it. He goes behind my back and pours poison in Noreen’s ear about me when I’m trying to build some bridges with her because of my relationship with Dinah.”
“So you were giving money to Batista
and
the rebels,” I said.
“Indirectly,” he said. “Frankly, I give them a snowball’s chance in hell, but you never know with these bastards.”
“But you do give them a chance.”
“Before the incident with the slots, I saw something interesting. One day I was looking out of a downstairs window of the hotel, not thinking anything in particular, like you do sometimes, and I saw this young Habañero who was walking along the street outside—just a kid, you know. And as I watched him pass by my Cadillac I saw him kick the fender.”
“That cute little ragtop? Where was the ogre?”
“Waxey? He’s not nearly quick enough on his toes to have stood half a chance of catching this fucking kid. Anyway, it bothered me. Not the mark on the car. That was nothing really. No, it was something else. I thought about it a lot, see? At first I thought the kid did it to amuse his girlfriend. Then I thought maybe he had something against Cadillacs. Finally it hit me, Bernie. I realized it wasn’t fucking Cadillacs he didn’t like. It was Americans. Which made me think about this revolution. I mean, like most people, I thought it was all over after last July. After Moncada Barracks, you know? But, seeing that fucking kid kick my car, I thought that maybe it isn’t over at all. And maybe they hate Americans as much as they hate Batista. In which case, if they ever get rid of him, they might get rid of us, too.”
I was fresh out of insightful incidents of my own, so I stayed silent. Besides, I didn’t have a particularly warm opinion of Americans myself. They weren’t as bad as the Russians or the French, but then
they
didn’t expect to be liked and
they
didn’t much care when they weren’t. Americans were different: even after they’d dropped a couple of atom bombs on the Japs, they still wanted to be liked. Which struck me as just a little naive. So I stayed silent and, almost like two old friends, together we enjoyed the view from the rooftop for a while. It was a great view. Beneath us were the treetops of Campo de Marte, and to the right, like an enormous wedding cake, was the Capitol Building. Behind that you could see the Partagas cigar factory and the Barrio Chino. I could see as far south as the American warship in the harbor, and west as far as the rooftops of Miramar, but only with my glasses on. The glasses made me look older, of course. Older than Max Reles. Then again, he probably had some glasses of his own somewhere and just didn’t want to let me see him wearing them.
He was trying, without success, to light a large cigar in the stiffening rooftop breeze. One of the parasols, which were all closed, blew over, which seemed to irritate him.
“I always say,” he said, “that the best way to see Havana is from the rooftop of a good hotel.” He gave up with the cigar. “The National has a view, but it’s just the fucking sea or the rooftops of Vedado, and in my humble opinion, that view doesn’t begin to compare with this one.”
“I agree.” For the moment I was through needling him. I was just beginning to have my reasons for that.
“Of course, it does get a bit windy up here sometimes, and when I catch up with the sonofabitch who persuaded me to buy all these fucking parasols, I’m going to give him a lesson in what it’s like when the wind catches one of these things and carries it over the side.” He grinned in a way that made me think he meant every word of it.
“It’s a great view,” I said.
“Isn’t it? You know, I’ll bet Hedda Adlon would have given her eye-teeth for a view like this one.”
I nodded, hardly wanting to tell him that the Adlon’s rooftop had afforded the hotel patrons with one of the best views in Berlin. I’d watched the Reichstag burning from that particular hotel rooftop. And you don’t get much better views than that.
“What ever happened to her, anyway?”
“Hedda used to say that a good hotelier always hopes for the best, but expects the worst. The worst is what happened. She and Louis kept the hotel going all through the war. Somehow it always escaped the bombing. Maybe someone in the RAF had stayed there once. But then, during the Battle for Berlin, the Ivans subjected the city to a barrage that destroyed almost everything that hadn’t been destroyed by the RAF. The hotel caught fire and was all but destroyed. Hedda and Louis retreated to their country estate near Potsdam and waited. When the Ivans turned up, they looted the house, and mistaking Louis for an escaping German general, they put him in front of a firing squad and shot him. Hedda was raped, many times, like most of the women in Berlin. I don’t know what happened to her after that.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Reles. “What a story. Pity. I liked them both a lot. Jesus, I didn’t know.”
He sighed and made another attempt to light his cigar, and this time he succeeded. “You know, it’s funny you turning up like this, Gunther.”
“I told you before, Max. It’s Hausner now. Carlos Hausner.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. You and me, we don’t have to worry about that shit. This island’s got more aliases than a filing cabinet in the FBI. If you ever get any problems with the militia about your passport, your visa, anything like that, you come to me. I can fix it.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Like I was saying, it’s funny you turning up like this. You see, the Adlon’s one of the reasons I got into the hotel business here in Havana. I loved that hotel. I wanted to own a classy place like the Adlon here, in old Havana, instead of in Vedado like Lansky and all those other connected guys. I always had the idea that this is the kind of place Hedda would have picked herself, don’t you agree?”
“Maybe. Why not? I was just the house peeper, so what do I know? But she used to say that a good hotel is like a car. What it looks like is only half as important as how it drives: how fast it can go and if the brakes work all right and if it’s comfortable are what really matters. Everything else is just bullshit.”