an electric chair for my liking so I moved again and sat down on the ice box, which had room for two thousand pounds of ice. I was trying to appear cool. If there had been any fish or any ice in the box I might even have climbed in beside them. Instead I took another bite from the bottle and did my best to keep a grip on the thin line holding my nerves. But it wasn't working. The Amis had a hook in my mouth and I felt like jumping thirty feet into the air just to try and get it out.
When the officer came back to the stern he was carrying a Colt. 45 automatic in his hand. It was cocked, too. It wasn't pointed at me, yet. It was just there to help make a point: that I hero was no room on the boat for negotiation.
'I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you both to accompany me back to Guantanamo, sir,' he said, politely, almost as if there wasn't a gun in his hand at all and like a true American.
I nodded slowly. 'May I ask why?'
'It will all be explained when we get to Gitmo,' he said.
'If you really think it's necessary.'
He waved two sailors to come aboard my boat, and it was just as well he did because both of them were between me and the machine gun when we heard a pistol shot from the forward compartment. I jumped up and then thought better of jumping any more.
'Watch him,' yelled the officer and went below to investigate, leaving me with two Colts pointed at my belly and the fifty-calibre pointed at my earlobe. I sat down again on the fisherman's chair, which creaked like a chainsaw as I leaned all the way back and stared up at the stars. You didn't need to be Madame Blavatsky to see that they weren't looking good. Not for Melba. And probably not for me.
As things turned out the stars weren't good for the American NCO either. He staggered up on deck looking like the ace of diamonds, or perhaps the ace of hearts. In the centre of his white shirt was a small red stain that grew larger the longer you looked at it. For a moment he swayed, drunkenly, and then he dropped heavily onto his backside. In a way he looked the way I was feeling now.
'I'm shot,' he said, redundantly.
CHAPTER TWO: CUBA, 1954
It was several hours later. The shot sailor had been taken to hospital in Guantanamo, Melba was cooling her high heels in a prison cell, and I had told my story, twice. I had two headaches and only one of them was in my skull. There were three of us in a humid office in the building of the US Navy masters-at-arms. Masters-at-arms were what the US Navy called the sailors who specialised in law enforcement and correctional custody. Policemen in sailor suits. The three who'd been listening to my story didn't seem to like it any better the second time. They shifted their largish backsides on their inadequate chairs, picked tiny bits of thread and fluff from their immaculate white uniforms and stared at their reflections in the toecaps of their shiny black shoes. It was like being interrogated by a union meeting of hospital porters.
The building was quiet except for the hum of the fluorescent lighting on the ceiling and the noise of a typewriter that was the size and colour of the USS Missouri; and every time I answered a question and the Navy cop hit the keys on that thing it was like the sound of someone – me probably – having his hair cut with a large pair of very sharp scissors.
Outside a small grilled window, the new day was coming up over the blue horizon like a trail of blood. This hardly augured well since, not unreasonably, it was already clear that the Amis suspected me of a much closer acquaintance with
Melba Marrero and her crimes – plural – than I'd admitted. Clearly, since I wasn't an American myself, and smelt strongly of rum, they found this relatively easy.
On a light blue Formica table covered with coffee-coloured cigarette burns lay a number of files and a couple of guns wearing tags on their trigger guards as if they might have been for sale. One of them was the little Beretta pocket pistol Melba used to shoot the petty officer, third class; and the other was a Colt automatic stolen from him several months earlier and used to murder Captain Balart outside the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. Alongside the files and the pistols was my blue and gold Argentinian passport, and from time to time the Navy cop in charge of my interrogation would pick this up and leaf through the pages as if he couldn't quite believe that anyone could go through life being the citizen of a country that wasn't the US of A. His name was Captain Mackay, and as well as his questions, there was his breath to contend with. Every time he pushed his squashed, bespectacled face toward mine I was enveloped in the sour aura of his tooth decay, and after a while I started to feel like something chewed up but only half digested deep inside his Yankee bowels.
Mackay said with ill-disguised contempt, 'This story of yours, that you never met her until a couple of days ago, it makes no sense. No sense at all. You say she was a chica you were involved with; that you asked her to come away on your boat for a few weeks, and that this accounts for the considerable sum of money you had with you.'
'That's correct.'
'And yet you say you know almost nothing about her.'
'At my age it's best not to ask too many questions when a pretty girl agrees to come away with you.'
Mackay smiled thinly. He was about thirty, too young to find much sympathy for an older man's interest in younger women. There was a wedding band on his fat finger and I imagined some wholesome girl with a permanent wave and a mixing bowl under her chubby arm waiting for him back home in some erector-set government housing on a bleak naval base.
'Shall I tell you what I think? I think you were headed for the Dominican Republic, to buy guns for the rebels. The boat, the money, the girl, it all adds up.'
'Oh, I can see you like the addition, Captain. But I'm a respectable businessman. I'm quite well off. I have a nice apartment in Havana. A job at a hotel casino. I'm hardly the type to work for the communists. And the girl? She's just a chica.'
'Maybe. But she murdered a Cuban policeman. Very nearly murdered one of mine.'
'Perhaps. But did you see me shoot anyone? I didn't even raise my voice. In my business girls – girls like Melba – they're one of the fringe benefits. What they get up to in their spare time is-' I paused for a moment, searching for the best phrase in English. 'Hardly my affair.'
'It is when she shoots an American on your boat.'
'I didn't even know she had a gun. If I'd known that I would have thrown it over the side. And maybe her, too. And if I had any idea that she was suspected of murdering a policeman I would never have invited Senorita Marrero to come away with me.'
'Let me tell you something about your girlfriend, Mister Hausner.' Mackay stifled a belch, but not nearly well enough for my comfort. He took off his glasses and breathed on them and somehow they didn't crack. 'Her real name is Maria Antonia Tapanes, and she was a prostitute at a casa in Caimanera, which is how she came to steal a side arm belonging to Petty Officer Marcus. That's why he recognised her when he saw her on your boat. We strongly suspect she was put up to the assassination of Captain Balart by the rebels. In fact, we're more or less sure of it.'
'I find that very hard to believe. She never once mentioned politics to me. She seemed more interested in having a good time than in having a revolution.'
The captain opened one of the files in front of him and pushed it towards me.
'It's more or less certain your little lady friend has been a communist and a rebel for quite a while now. You see, Maria Antonia Tapanes spent three months in the National Women's Prison at Guanajay for her part in the Easter Sunday conspiracy of April 1953. Then in July of last year her brother Juan Tapanes was killed in the assault on Moncada Barracks led by Fidel Castro. Killed or executed, it's not clear which. When Maria got out of prison and found her brother dead, she went to Caimanera and worked as a chica to get herself a weapon. That happens a lot. To be honest quite a few of our men use their weapons as currency for buying sex. Then they just report the weapon stolen. Anyway, the next time the weapon turns up it's been used to kill Captain Balart. There were witnesses, too. A woman answering Maria Tapanes's description shot him in the face. And then in the back of the head as he lay on the ground. Maybe he had it coming. Who knows? Who cares? What I do know is that PO
