If the Dead Rise Not (42 page)

Most women have a vulnerability dial. They can turn it up pretty much whenever they want, and it works on men like catnip. Noreen was turning the dial now. First the catch in her voice and then a big, unsteady sigh. It was working, too, and she was operating only at level three or four. There was plenty of what makes the weaker sex seem like the weaker sex still in the tank. A moment later her shoulders dropped and she turned away. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t go.” Level five.

I stood on the step looking at my cigar and then down the long, winding drive that led onto the main road into San Francisco de Paula. Finca Vigía. It meant Lookout Farm, and it was well named, because there was a sort of tower to the left of the main building where someone might sit in a room on the top story and write a book and look out on the world below and think himself a sort of god. That was probably why people became writers in the first place. A cat came along and rubbed its gray body along my shins, as if it too were trying to persuade me to stay. On the other hand, it might just have been looking to get rid of a lot of unwanted cat hair on my best trousers. Another cat was sitting like an erect bedspring beside my car, ready to disrupt my departure if its feline colleague failed to do it first. Finca Vigía. Something told me to look out for myself and leave. That if I stayed I might end up like a character in someone’s stupid novel, without any will of my own. That one of them—Noreen or Hemingway—might make me do something I didn’t want to do.

“All right.” My voice sounded like an animal’s in the darkness. Or perhaps an orisha of the forest from the world of Santería.

I threw away the cigar and went back inside. Noreen met me halfway, which was generous, and we embraced fondly. Her body still felt good in my arms and reminded me of everything it was supposed to remind me of. Level six. She still knew how to affect me, that much was certain. She laid her head on my shoulder, but with her face turned away, and let me inhale her beauty for a while. We didn’t kiss. That wasn’t yet required. Not while we were still on level six. Not while her face was turned away. After a moment or two she broke away and sat down again.

“You said something about Dinah’s being in with the wrong crowd,” I said. “That it was one of the reasons you asked me here.”

“I’m sorry I put it so badly. That’s not like me. After all, I’m supposed to be good with words. But I do need your help. With Dinah.”

“It’s been a long time since I knew anything about nineteen-year-old girls, Noreen. And even then, what I knew was probably hopelessly wrong. Short of spanking her, I don’t see what I can do.”

“I wonder if that might work,” she said.

“I don’t think it would help her very much. Of course, there’s always the possibility I might enjoy it, which is another reason to pack her off to Rhode Island. But I agree with you. The Barracuda Club is no place for a nineteen-year-old girl. Although there are much worse places in Havana.”

“Oh, she’s been to them all, I can assure you. The Shanghai Theater. The Cabaret Kursaal. The Hotel Chic. And those are just the match-books I’ve found in her bedroom. It might be even worse than that.”

I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t get any worse than them. Even in Havana.” I fetched my drink off the glass table and poured it safely away in my mouth. “All right, she’s wild. If the movies are right, then most kids are these days. But at least they’re not beating up Jews. And I still don’t see what I can do about it.”

Noreen found the Old Forester and refilled my glass. “Well, maybe we can think of something. Together. Like in the old days, remember? In Berlin? If things had worked out differently, we might even have made a difference. If ever I’d written that article, we might even have put a stop to Hitler’s Olympiad.”

“I’m kind of glad you didn’t write it. If you had, I’d probably be dead.”

She nodded. “For a while, we made quite an investigative team, Gunther. You were my Galahad. My knight of heaven.”

“Sure. I remember your letter. I’d like to tell you I still had it, but the Americans reorganized my filing system when they bombed Berlin. You want my advice about Dinah? I reckon you should fix a lock on her door and put her under a nine o’clock curfew. That used to work back in Vienna. When the Four Powers were in charge of the city. Also, you might think about not lending her the car whenever she asks for it. If it was me wearing those heels she had on, I might think twice about walking nine miles into the center of Havana.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Me wearing high heels? Sure, I’m a regular at the Palette Club, although they know me better there as Rita. You know, it’s not a bad thing that children should frequently disobey their parents. Especially when you consider the mistakes the parents made. Especially when they’re as grown up as Dinah obviously is.”

“Perhaps if I gave you all the facts,” she said, “you might understand the problem.”

“You can try. But I’m not a detective anymore, Noreen.”

“But you were, weren’t you?” She smiled a cunning smile. “It was me who got you started. As a private detective. Or maybe you need reminding.”

“So that’s your angle.”

She curled her lip with displeasure. “I certainly didn’t mean it to be an angle, as you put it. Not in the least. But I’m a mother who’s running out of options here.”

“I’ll send you a check. With interest.”

“Oh, stop it, for Pete’s sake. I don’t want your money. I’ve got plenty of money. But you might at least shut up for a minute and do me the courtesy of hearing me out before opening fire with both cannons. I figure you owe me that much. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“All right. I can’t promise to hear anything. But I’ll listen.”

Noreen shook her head. “You know, Gunther, it beats me how you ever survived the war. I’ve only just met you again, and already I want to shoot you.” She laughed scornfully. “You want to be careful, you know. This house has more guns than the Cuban militia. There are nights when I’ve sat here drinking with Hem, and he had a shotgun on his lap for taking potshots at the birds in the trees.”

“Sounds dangerous for the cats.”

“Not just the fucking cats.” Still laughing, she shook her head. “ People, too.”

“My head would look good in your bathroom.”

“What a horrid thought. You looking at me every time I took a bath.”

“I was thinking of your daughter.”

“That’s enough.” Noreen stood up abruptly. “Damn you, get out,” she said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

I went into the house again. “Wait,” she snapped. “Wait, please.”

I waited.

“Why are you such a hard-ass?”

“I guess I’m not used to human society,” I said.

“Please, listen. You could help her. You’re about the one person who can, I think. More than you know. I really don’t know who else to ask.”

“Is she in a jam?”

“Not exactly, no. At least, not yet. There’s a man, you see, whom she’s involved with. Who’s much older than her. I’m worried she’s going to end up like—like Gloria Grahame in that movie.
The Big Heat
. You know, where that sick bastard throws boiling hot coffee in her face.”

“Didn’t see it. Last film I saw was
Peter Pan
.”

We both turned around as a white Oldsmobile came up the drive. It had a sun visor and whitewall tires and sounded like the motor bus to Santiago.

“Damn,” said Noreen. “That’s Alfredo.”

The white Olds was followed by a two-door red Buick.

“And, it looks like, the rest of my guests.”

 

 

T
HERE WERE EIGHT OF US FOR DINNER. Dinner was prepared and served by Ramón, Hemingway’s Chinese cook, and René, his Negro butler, which only I seemed to find amusing. It certainly wasn’t because I had anything against the Chinese or Negroes. But it struck me as ironic that Noreen and her guests were all solemnly prepared to avow their communism while other men did all the work.

There was no denying what Cuba and its people had suffered, first at the hands of the Spanish, then the Americans, and then the Spanish again. But as bad as any of these perhaps had been the Cuban governments of Ramón Grau San Martín and now Fulgencio Batista. Formerly a sergeant in the Cuban army, F.B.—as most of the Europeans and Americans in Cuba called him—wasn’t much more than an American puppet. So long as he danced to Washington’s tune, American support seemed likely to continue, no matter how brutishly his regime behaved. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls the state-owned means of production was, or ever could be, the answer. And I said as much to Noreen’s left-leaning guests:

“I think communism’s a much greater evil to inflict upon this country than anything that could be conceived and administered by a minor despot like F.B. A small-time thug like him might inflict a few individual tragedies. Perhaps several. But it hardly begins to compare with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. They’ve been the manufacturers of national tragedies. I can’t speak for all the Iron Curtain countries. But I know Germany pretty well, and you can take it from me that the working classes of the GDR would love to change places with the oppressed peoples of Cuba.”

Guillermo Infante was a young student who had just been kicked out of the Havana University School of Journalism. He had also served a short sentence for writing something in a popular opposition magazine called
Bohemia
. This prompted me to point out that there were no opposition magazines in the Soviet Union, and that even the mildest criticism of the government would have earned him a very long sentence in some forgotten corner of Siberia. Montecristo cigar in hand, Infante proceeded to call me a “bourgeois reactionary” and several other phrases beloved of the Ivans and their acolytes that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Names that almost made me feel nostalgic for Russia, like some wet character in Chekhov.

I fought in my corner for a while, but when two earnest, unattractive women started to call me an “apologist for fascism,” I began to feel beleaguered. It can be fun being insulted by a good-looking woman if you look at it from the point of view that she’s bothered to notice you at all. But it’s no fun at all to be insulted by her two ugly sisters. Finding not much conversational assistance from Noreen, who had perhaps drunk a little too much to come to my aid, I went to the lavatory, and while I was there, decided to cut my evening’s losses and leave.

When I got back to my car, I found one of the other guests already there. He had come to offer an apology of sorts. His name was Alfredo López, and he was a lawyer—one of twenty-two lawyers, it seemed, who had defended the surviving rebels responsible for the attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953. Following the inevitable guilty verdict, the judge in the Santiago Palace of Justice had sentenced the rebels to what I considered to be fairly modest terms of imprisonment. Even the leader of the rebels, Fidel Castro Ruz, had been sentenced to just fifteen years. It was true, fifteen years was not exactly a light sentence, but for a man who had led an armed insurrection against a powerful dictator, it compared very well with a short walk to the guillotine at Plötzensee.

López was in his mid-thirties, good-looking in a grinning, swarthy sort of way, with piercing blue eyes, a thin mustache, and a rubber swimming cap of shiny black hair. He wore white linen trousers and a dark blue open-neck guayabera shirt that helped to hide the beginnings of a potbelly. He smoked long cigarillos that were the color and shape of his womanly fingers. He looked like a very large cat that had been handed the cream-colored keys of the Caribbean’s largest dairy.

“I am very sorry about that, my friend,” he said. “Lola and Carmen shouldn’t have been so rude. Putting politics ahead of simple politeness is unforgivable. Especially at the dinner table. If one cannot be civilized over a meal, what hope can there be for proper debate elsewhere?”

“Forget it. I’m thick-skinned enough not to care very much. Besides, I’ve never been all that interested in politics. Especially not interested in talking about them. It always seems to me that by browbeating others we hope to be able to convince ourselves.”

“Yes, there’s something in that, I think,” he allowed. “But you have to remember that Cubans are a very passionate people. Some of us are already convinced.”

“Are you? I wonder.”

“Take my word for it. There are many of us who are willing to sacrifice everything for freedom in Cuba. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what the tyrant’s name.”

“Perhaps I’ll have the chance to remind you of that one day, when your man is in charge of the tyranny.”

“Fidel? Oh, he’s not at all a bad fellow. Perhaps if you knew a little more about him, you might be a little more sympathetic to our cause.”

“I doubt it. Today’s freedom fighters are tomorrow’s dictators.”

“No, really. Castro’s very different. He’s not out for himself.”

“Did he tell you that? Or have you actually seen his bank statement?”

“No, but I’ve seen this.”

López opened the door of his car and fetched a briefcase from which he took a small, pamphlet-sized booklet. He had dozens more in the briefcase. As well as a large automatic pistol. I supposed he kept it handy for the occasions when proper, civilized political debate just wasn’t working. He held out the booklet in both his hands, as if it were something precious, like an auctioneer’s assistant showing a rare object to a roomful of potential buyers. On the front of the pamphlet was the picture of a rather stout-looking young man, not unlike López himself, with a thin mustache and hooded dark eyes. The man on the pamphlet looked more like a bandleader than the revolutionary I had read about in the newspapers.

“This is a copy of the statement Fidel Castro made at his trial last November,” said López.