My route back home from the National took me right past the Casa Marina again. And this time I went in.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS BRIGHT but windy, and half the winter sea was crashing down on the Malecon, like a deluge sent by a God saddened at the wickedness of mankind. I woke early, thinking that I would have liked to sleep longer and probably would have done so, except for the fact that the phone was ringing. Suddenly everyone in Havana seemed to want to speak to me.
It was Captain Sanchez.
“How’s the great detective this morning?”
He sounded like he didn’t much like the idea of my playing the sleuth for Lansky. I wasn’t too happy about it myself.
“Still in bed,” I said. “I had a late night.”
“Interviewing suspects?”
I thought of the girls at the Casa Marina and the way Dona Marina, who also ran a chain of lingerie stores across Havana, liked it when you asked her girls lots of questions before deciding which one to take up to the third floor. “You could say that.”
“Think you’re going to find the killer today?”
“Probably not today,” I said. “Wrong kind of weather for it.”
“You’re right,” said Sanchez. “It’s a day for finding bodies, not the people who killed them. Suddenly we’ve got corpses all over Havana. There’s one in the harbor at the petrochemical works in Regla.”
“Am I an undertaker? Why tell me?”
“Because he was driving a car when he went into the water. Not just any car, mind you. This is a big red Cadillac Eldorado. A convertible.”
I closed my eyes for a second. Then I said, “Waxey.”
“We wouldn’t have found him at all but for the fact that a fishing boat dragging its anchor snagged the car’s bumper and pulled it up to the surface. I’m just on my way over to Regla now. I was thinking that maybe you’d like to come along.”
“Why not? It’s been a while since I went fishing.”
“Be outside your apartment building in fifteen minutes. We’ll drive over there together. On the way maybe I can pick up a few tips from you on how to be a detective.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that.”
“I was joking,” he said stiffly.
“Then you’re off to a great start, Captain. You’ll need a sense of humor if you’re going to be a good detective. That’s my first tip.”
Twenty minutes later we were driving south, east, and then north around the harbor, into Regla. It was a small industrial town that was easily identified from a distance by the plumes of smoke emanating from the petrochemical plant, although historically it was better known as a center of Santeria and as the place where Havana’s
Sanchez drove the large black police sedan like a fighting bull, charging red lights, braking at the last moment, or turning suddenly and without warning to the left or the right. By the time we skidded to a halt at the end of a long pier, I was ready to stick a sword in his muscular neck.
A small group of policemen and dockworkers had gathered to view the arrival of a barge and the drowned car it had taken from the fishing boat’s anchor and then hoisted on top of a large heap of coal. The car itself looked like a fantastic variety of sport fish, a red marlin-if there was such a thing-or a gigantic species of crustacean.
I followed Sanchez down a series of stone steps made slippery from the recent high tide, and as one of the men on the barge grabbed hold of a mooring ring, we jumped onto the moving deck.
The barge captain came forward and spoke to Sanchez, but I didn’t understand his very broad Cuban accent, which was not uncommon whenever I moved outside Havana. He was a bad- tempered sort with an expensive-looking cigar, which was the cleanest and most respectable thing about him. The rest of the crew stood around chewing gum and awaiting an order. Finally one came, and a crewman jumped down onto the coal mountain and drew a tarpaulin over it so that Sanchez and I might climb up to the car without becoming as dirty as he was. Sanchez and I clambered down onto the tarpaulin and picked our way up the shifting slope of coal to look over the car. The white hood-which was up-was dirty but largely intact. The front bumper where the fishing boat had hooked it was badly out of shape. The interior was more like an aquarium. But somehow the red Cadillac still managed to look like the handsomest car in Havana.
The crewman, still mindful of Sanchez’s well-pressed uniform, had gone ahead of us to open the driver door on the captain’s say-so. When the word came and the door opened, water flooded out of the car, soaking the crewman’s legs and amusing his chattering colleagues.
The driver of the car slowly leaned out like a man falling asleep in the bath. For a moment I thought the steering wheel would check his exit, but the barge wallowed in the choppy, undulating sea, then came up again, tipping the dead man onto the tarpaulin like a dirty dish-cloth. It was Waxey, all right, and while he looked like a drowned man, it wasn’t the sea that had killed him. Nor was it loud music, although his ears, or what was left of them, were encrusted with what resembled dark red coral.
“Pity,” said Sanchez.
“I didn’t really know him,” I said.
“The car, I mean,” said Sanchez. “The Cadillac Eldorado is just about my favorite car in the world.” He shook his head in admiration. “Beautiful. I like the red. Red’s nice. But me, I think I’d have had a black one, with whitewall tires and a white hood. Black has much more class, I think.”
“Red seems to be the color of the moment,” I said.
“You mean his ears?”
“I wasn’t talking about his manicure.”
“A bullet in each ear, it looks like. That’s a message, right?”
“Like it was Cable and Wireless, Captain.”
“He heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear.”
“Flip the coin again. He didn’t hear something he was supposed to hear.”
“You mean like someone shooting his employer seven times in the adjoining room?”
I nodded.
“Think he was involved in the shooting?” he asked.
“Go ahead and ask him.”
“I guess we’ll never know for sure.” Sanchez took off his peaked cap and scratched his head. “Too bad,” he said.
“The car again?”
“That I couldn’t have interviewed him first.”
JEWS HAD BEEN ARRIVING IN CUBA since the time of Columbus. Many who had been forbidden entry to the United States of America more recently than that had been given sanctuary by the Cubans, who, with reference to the Jews’ most common country of origin, called them
I might have told anyone who was interested that while it was now widely believed that Nazi scientists had made soap from the corpses of murdered Jews, this had never actually happened. The practice of calling Jews “soap” had simply been a very unpleasant joke among members of the SS, and merely another way of dehumanizing-and sometimes threatening-their most numerous victims. Since human hair from concentration camp inmates had commonly been used on an industrial scale, describing Jews as “felt”-felt for clothes, roofing materials, carpeting, and in the German car industry-might have been a more accurate epithet.
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.”
