He reached down into his trouser pocket and took out a key on a silver chain, stuck it into the elevator panel, and turned it. He didn’t have to press any other button. The car went straight up. The doors opened again. “They’re on the terrace,” Waxey said.
I smelled them first. The powerful scent of a small forest fire: several large Havana cigars. Then I heard them: loud American voices, raucous male laughter, relentless profanity, the odd Yiddish and Italian word or phrase, more raucous laughter. I came past the detritus of a card game in the living room: a big table covered with chips and empty glasses. Now that the card game was over, they were all out on the little pool terrace: men in sharp suits with blunt faces, but maybe not so tough anymore. Some of them wore glasses and sports coats with neat handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. All of them looked exactly like what they claimed to be: businessmen, hoteliers, club owners, restaurateurs. And perhaps only a policeman or FBI agent would have recognized these men for what they really were—all of them with reputations earned on the streets of Chicago, Boston, Miami, and New York during the Volstead years. The minute I walked onto that terrace, I knew I was among the big beasts of Havana’s underworld—the high-profile Mafia bosses Senator Estes Kefauver was so keen to talk to. I’d watched some of the Senate committee testimonies on the newsreels. The hearings had made household names out of a lot of the bosses, including the little man with the big nose and neat, dark hair. He was wearing a brown sports coat with an open shirt. It was Meyer Lansky.
“Oh, here he is,” said Reles. His voice was a little louder than usual, but he was a model of sartorial rectitude. He wore gray flannel trousers, neat brown shoes with Oxford toe caps, a blue button-down shirt, a blue silk cravat, and a cashmere navy blue blazer. He looked like the membership secretary of the Havana Yacht Club.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the guy I was telling you about. This is Bernie Gunther. This is the guy who’s going to be my new general manager.”
Like always, I flinched at the sound of my own name, put down the attaché case, and took Max’s hand.
“Relax, will you?” he said. “There’s not one of us here that doesn’t have as much fucking history as you do, Bernie. Maybe more. Nearly all of the guys here have seen the inside of a prison cell at one time or another. Including myself.” He chuckled the old Max Reles chuckle. “You didn’t know that, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Like I say, we all of us got plenty of fucking history. Bernie, say hello to Meyer Lansky; his brother, Jake; Moe Dalitz; Norman Rothman; Morris Kleinman; and Eddie Levinson. I bet you didn’t know there were so many heebs on this island. Naturally, we’re the brains of the outfit. For everything else we got wops and micks. So say hello to Santo Trafficante, Vincent Alo, Tom McGinty, Sam Tucker, the Cellini brothers, and Wilbur Clark.”
“Hello,” I said.
Havana’s underworld stared back at me with modest enthusiasm.
“It must have been some card game,” I observed.
“Waxey, get Bernie a drink. What are you drinking, Bernie?”
“A beer’s fine.”
“Some of us play gin, some of us play poker,” said Max. “Some of us don’t know a game of cards from a sorting office in a post office, but the important thing is that we meet and we talk, in the spirit of healthy competition. Like Jesus and the fucking disciples. You ever read Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, Bernie?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Smith talks about something he calls the ‘invisible hand.’ He said that in a free market, an individual pursuing his self-interest tends to promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called ‘the invisible hand.’ ” He shrugged. “What we do. That’s all it is. An invisible hand. And we’ve been doing it for years.”
“That we have,” growled Lansky.
Reles chuckled. “Meyer thinks he’s the clever one, on account of how he reads a lot.” He wagged his finger at Lansky. “But I read, too, Meyer. I read, too.”
“Reading. It’s a Jew thing,” said Alo. He was a tall man with a long, sharp nose that might have made me think he was one of the Jews; but he was one of the Italians.
“And they wonder why the Jews do well,” said a man with an easy grin and a nose like a speed bag. This man was Moe Dalitz.
“I read two books in my life,” said one of the micks. “Hoyle on gambling, and the Cadillac handbook.”
Waxey returned with my beer. It was cold and dark, like his eyes.
“F.B.’s thinking of resurrecting his old rural education program,” said Lansky. “Sounds like some of you guys should try to get in on it. You could use a bit of education.”
“Is that the same one he ran in thirty-six?” said his brother, Jake.
Meyer Lansky nodded. “Only he’s worried that some of the kids he’s teaching to read, that they’re going to be tomorrow’s rebels. Like this last lot that’s now doing a stretch on the Isle of Pines.”
“He’s right to worry,” said Alo. “They get weaned on communism, some of these bastards.”
“Then again,” said Lansky, “when the economy of this country takes off, really takes off, then we’re going to need educated people to work in our hotels. To be tomorrow’s croupiers. You gotta be smart to be a croupier. Math smart. You read much, Bernie?”
“More and more,” I admitted. “And for me it’s like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.”
Max Reles was looking at his wristwatch. “Talking of books, it’s time I threw you guys out. I got my call with F.B. To go through the books.”
“How does that work?” asked someone. “On the telephone.”
Reles shrugged. “I read out the numbers, and he writes them down. We both know that one day he’s gonna check, so why the fuck would I cheat him?”
Lansky nodded. “That is definitely
verboten
.”
We moved off the terrace toward the elevators. As I stepped into one of the cars, Reles took my arm and said, “Start work tomorrow. Come around ten and I’ll show you around.”
“All right.”
I went back down to the casino. I felt a certain amount of awe at the company I was keeping these days. I felt like I’d just been up to the Berghof for an audience with Hitler and the other Nazi leaders.
13
W
HEN I RETURNED TO THE SARATOGA the following morning at ten o’clock, as arranged, a very different scene presented itself. There were police everywhere—outside the main entrance of the hotel and in the lobby. When I asked the receptionist to announce my arrival to Max Reles, she told me that no one was being allowed up to the penthouse except the hotel owners and the police.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said the receptionist. “They won’t tell us anything. But there’s a rumor that one of the hotel guests has been murdered by the rebels.”
I turned and walked back to the front door and met the diminutive figure of Meyer Lansky.
“You leaving?” he asked. “Why?”
“They won’t let me upstairs,” I said.
“Come with me.”
I followed Lansky to the elevator car, where a policeman was about to prevent our using it, until his officer recognized the gangster and saluted. Inside the car, Lansky produced a key from his pocket—one like Waxey’s—and used it to take us up to the penthouse. I noticed that his hand was shaking.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
Lansky shook his head.
The elevator doors parted to reveal yet more police, and in the living room we found a captain of militia, Waxey, Jake Lansky, and Moe Dalitz.
“Is it true?” Meyer Lansky asked his brother.
Jake Lansky was a little taller and more coarse-featured than his brother. He had thick, bottle-glass spectacles and eyebrows like a pair of mating badgers. He wore a cream-colored suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. His face had laugh lines, only he wasn’t using them right now. He nodded gravely. “It’s true.”
“Where?”
“In his office.”
I followed the two Lanskys into the office of Max Reles. A uniformed police captain brought up the rear.
Someone had been redecorating the walls. They looked as if Jackson Pollock had come in and actively expressed himself with a ceiling brush and a large pot of red paint. Only it wasn’t red paint that was splashed all over the office; it was blood, and lots of it. Max Reles was going to need a new chinchilla rug, too, except that it wasn’t going to be he who would go to a store to buy a replacement. He was never going to buy anything again—not even a funeral casket, which was what he now needed most. He lay on the floor, still in what seemed to be the same clothes he’d been in the night before, but the blue shirt now had some dark brown spots. He was staring at the cork-tiled ceiling with only one eye. The other eye appeared to be missing. From the look of him, two shots had hit him in the head, but there was a strong case for thinking that at least two or three more had ended up in his back and chest. It seemed like a real gangster-style murder, in that the gunman had done a very thorough job of making sure he was dead. And yet, apart from the police captain who had followed us into the office—more out of curiosity than anything else, it seemed—there were no police in there, no one taking photographs of the body, no one with a measuring tape, nothing of what might normally have been expected. Well, this was Cuba, after all, I told myself, where everything took just that little bit longer to get done, including, perhaps, the dispatching of forensic scientists to the scene of a homicide. Max Reles was already dead, so where was the hurry?
Waxey appeared behind us in the doorway of his dead master’s office. There were tears in his eyes, and in his encyclopedia-sized hand, a white handkerchief that looked as if it might have been tugged off one of the double beds. He sniffed for a moment and then blew his nose loudly, sounding like a passenger ship making port.
Meyer Lansky looked at him with irritation. “So where the hell were you when he got his brains blown out?” he said. “Where were you, Waxey?”
“I was right here,” whispered Waxey. “Like I always am. I thought the boss had gone to bed. After his phone call to F.B. He always had an early night after that. Regular as clockwork. First thing I knew about it was when I came in here at seven o’clock this morning and found him like this. Dead.”
He added the word “dead” as if there had been some doubt about that fact.
“He wasn’t shot with a BB gun, Waxey,” said Lansky. “Didn’t you hear nothing?”
Waxey shook his head, miserably. “Nothing. Like I said.”
The police captain finished lighting a little cigarillo and said, “It’s possible Señor Reles was shot during last night’s fireworks,” he said.
“For Chinese New Year? That would certainly have covered up the sound of any gunshots.”
He was a smallish, handsome, clean-shaven man. His neat olive-green uniform seemed to complement the light brown color of his smooth face. He spoke English with only a trace of a Spanish accent. And all the time he was speaking he leaned casually on the doorjamb, as if doing nothing more pressing than offering a halfhearted solution for fixing a broken-down car. Almost as if he didn’t really care who had murdered Max Reles. And perhaps he didn’t. Even in Batista’s militia there were plenty of people who didn’t much care for the presence of American gangsters in Cuba.
“The fireworks started at midnight,” continued the captain. “They lasted approximately thirty minutes.” He moved through the open sliding glass door and out onto the terrace. “My guess is that during the noise, which was considerable, the assassin shot Señor Reles from out here on the terrace.”
We followed the captain outside.
“Possibly he climbed up from the eighth floor using the scaffolding erected around the hotel sign.”
Meyer Lansky glanced over the wall. “That’s a hell of a climb,” he murmured. “What do you think, Jake?”
Jake Lansky nodded. “The captain is right. The killer had to come up here. Either that or he had a key, in which case he would have to have gotten past Waxey. Which doesn’t seem likely.”
“Not likely,” said his brother. “But all the same, it is possible.”
Waxey shook his head. “No fucking way,” he said. Suddenly his normally whispering voice sounded angry.
“Maybe you were asleep,” said the police captain.
Waxey looked very indignant at this suggestion, which was enough to have Jake Lansky stand between him and the police captain and try to defuse a situation that threatened to get ugly. Anything involving Waxey would have threatened that much.
With one hand placed firmly on Waxey’s chest, Jake Lansky said, “I should introduce you, Meyer. This is Captain Sánchez. He’s from the police station around the corner on Zulueta. Captain Sánchez, this is my brother, Meyer. And this”—he looked at me—“this is . . .” He hesitated for a moment, as though trying to remember not my real name—I could see that he knew what that was—but my false one.
“Carlos Hausner,” I said.
Captain Sánchez nodded and then addressed all of his remarks to Meyer Lansky. “I spoke to His Excellency the president just a few minutes ago,” he said. “First of all, he wishes me to express his sympathies to you, Señor Lansky. For the terrible loss of your friend. He also wishes me to reassure you that the Havana police will do everything in its power to catch the perpetrator of this heinous crime.”
“Thank you,” said Lansky.
“His Excellency tells me he spoke with Señor Reles on the telephone last night, as was his custom every Wednesday evening. The call commenced at exactly eleven forty-five p.m. and terminated at eleven fifty-five. Which would also seem to suggest that the time of death was during the fireworks, between twelve and twelve-thirty. In fact, I am convinced of it. Let me show you why.”
He held out a mangled-looking bullet in the palm of his hand.
“This is a bullet that I dug out of the wall in the study. It looks like a thirty-eight-caliber round. A thirty-eight would be a lot of gun to keep quiet at any time. But during the fireworks, six shots might easily be fired without anyone hearing.”