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.”
18
A
COUPLE 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.
I wasn’t interested in any of that any more than I was interested in the show, or listening to the band. Mostly I just watched the ash on the end of my cigar or the faces of the suckers at the other tables: women with bare shoulders and too much makeup, and men with Vaselined hair, clip-on ties, and Cricketeer suits. A couple of times the showgirls came parading around the tables just so that you could get a closer look at their costumes and wonder how something so small could keep a girl decent. My eyes were still brimful of wonder when, to my surprise, I saw Noreen Eisner coming through the club in my direction. And, sidestepping a girl who was all breasts and feathers, she sat down opposite me.
Noreen was probably the one woman at the Tropicana who wasn’t displaying either some cleavage or the whole toy shop. She wore a two-piece lavender-colored suit with tailored pockets, high shoes, and a couple of strings of pearls. The band was too loud for her to say anything or for me to hear it, and until the number finished, we just sat looking at each other dumbly and tapping our fingers impatiently on the table. It gave me plenty of time to wonder what was so urgent that she had driven all the way from Finca Vigía. I certainly didn’t think her being there was a coincidence. I supposed she had gone to my apartment first, and Yara had told her where I was. Maybe Yara would have let off some steam about how I hadn’t allowed her to come with me to the Tropicana, which meant that Noreen’s arrival wouldn’t have helped persuade her that my visit to the nightclub was for the strictly business reasons I had claimed. There probably would be some kind of scene when I got home.
I hoped Noreen was there to tell me what I wanted to hear. Certainly she looked grave enough. And sober, too. Which made a change. She was carrying a navy blue beaded evening bag with a petit-point floral chintz decoration. Opening the silver metal clasp, she took out a pack of Old Gold and lit one with a pearl gray lacquer cigarette lighter with little rhinestones on it, the only thing about her that was at all in keeping with the Tropicana.
Like most bands in Havana, this one took a while longer than was tolerable. I didn’t own a gun in Cuba, but if I had, I might have enjoyed using a set of maracas or a conga drum for a little target practice—really, any Latin American instrument, as long as it was actually in use at the time. Finally I could stand it no longer. I stood up and, taking Noreen’s hand, led her out.
In the foyer, she said, “This is where you spend your spare time, is it?” Out of habit she spoke German to me. “So much for Montaigne.”
“As a matter of fact, he already wrote an essay about this place and the custom of wearing clothes. Or not wearing them. If we were born with the need for wearing petticoats and trousers, nature, he says, would no doubt have equipped us with a thicker skin to withstand the rigors of the seasons. On the whole, I think he’s pretty good. Gets it right most of the time. About the only thing that man doesn’t explain is why you came all the way over here to see me. I’ve got my own ideas about that.”
“Let’s take a walk in the garden,” she said, quietly.
We went outside. The Tropicana’s garden was a jungle paradise of royal palms and towering mamoncillo trees. According to Caribbean wisdom, girls learn the art of kissing by eating the sweet flesh of the mamoncillo fruit. Somehow I had the feeling that kissing me was the last thing on Noreen’s mind.
In the center of the sweeping driveway was a large marble fountain that had once graced the entrance of the National Hotel. The fountain was a round basin surrounded by eight life-sized naked nymphs. It was rumored that the Tropicana’s owners had paid thirty thousand pesos for the fountain, but it reminded me of one of those Berlin culture schools once run by Adolf Koch at Lake Motzen for overweight German matrons who liked to throw medicine balls at each other in the nude. And, in spite of what Montaigne has to say about the matter, it made me glad that mankind had invented the needle and thread.
“So,” I said, “what did you want to tell me?”
“This isn’t easy for me to say.”
“You’re a writer. You’ll think of something.”
She puffed silently on her cigarette, considered this idea for a moment, and then shrugged, as if she’d thought of a way, after all. Her voice was soft. In the moonlight she looked as lovely as ever. Seeing her, I was filled with a dull ache of longing, as if the scent of the mamoncillo’s greenish-white flowers contained some sort of magical juice that made fools like me fall in love with queens like her.
“Dinah’s gone back to the States,” she said, still not quite coming to the point. “But you knew about that, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “Is this about Dinah?”
“I’m worried about her, Bernie.”
I shook my head. “She’s left the island. She’s going to Brown. I don’t see what you could possibly have to worry about. I mean, isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Oh, sure. No, it’s the way she suddenly changed her mind. About everything.”
“Max Reles was murdered. I think that might have had something to do with her decision.”
“Those gangsters he associated with. You know some of them, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have any idea who killed Max yet?”
“None at all.”
“Good.” She threw away her cigarette and quickly lit another. “You’ll probably think me crazy. But you see, it crossed my mind that, perhaps, Dinah might have had something to do with his murder.”
“What makes you say that?”
“For one thing, my gun—the one Ernest gave me—it’s gone. It was a Russian revolver. I had it lying around the house somewhere, and now I can’t find it. Fredo—Alfredo López? My lawyer friend has a friend in the police who told him that Reles had been shot with a Russian revolver. It sort of made me wonder. If Dinah could have done it.”
I was shaking my head. I hardly liked to tell her that Dinah had suspected that her own mother might be the murderer.
“There’s all that, and there’s the fact that she seemed to get over it so quickly. Like she wasn’t in love with him at all. I mean, didn’t it make any of those Mafia guys suspicious that she wasn’t at the funeral? Like she didn’t care?”
“I think people thought she was probably too upset to go.”
“That’s my point, Bernie. She wasn’t. And this is why I’m worried. If the Mafia comes around to the opinion that she did have something to do with Max’s murder, then maybe they’ll do something about it. Maybe they’ll send someone after her.”
“I don’t think it works like that, Noreen. Right now all they’re really concerned about is the possibility that Max Reles was killed by one of their own. You see, if it turns out that one of the other hotel and casino owners was behind the killing, then there could be a gang war. That would be very bad for business. Which is the last thing they want. Besides, it’s me they’ve asked to help find out who killed Max.”