Meanwhile, my life was good. I had what most Habaneros wanted: a large apartment on Malecón, a big American car, a woman to provide sex, and a woman to cook my meals. Sometimes it was the same woman who cooked the food and also provided the sex. But my Vedado apartment was only a few tantalizing blocks from the corner of Twenty-fifth Street, and long before Yara became my devoted housekeeper, I’d got into the habit of paying regular visits to Havana’s most famous and luxurious casa de putas.
I liked Yara, but it wasn’t anything more than that. She stayed when she felt like staying, not because I asked her but because she wanted to. I think Yara was a Negress, but it’s a little hard to be sure about things like that in Cuba. She was tall and slim and about twenty years younger than I with a face like a much-loved pony. She wasn’t a whore, because she didn’t take money for it. She only looked like a whore. Most of the women in Havana looked like whores. Most of the whores looked like your little sister. Yara wasn’t a whore, because she made a better living as a thief stealing from me. I didn’t mind that. It saved me from having to pay her. Besides, she stole only what she thought I could afford to lose, which, as it happened, was a lot less than guilt would have obliged me to pay her. Yara didn’t spit and she didn’t smoke cigars and she was a devotee of the Santería religion, which, it seemed to me, was a bit like voodoo. I liked that she prayed about me to some African gods. They had to work better than the ones I’d been praying to.
As soon as the rest of Havana was awake, I drove along to the Prado in my Chevrolet Styline. The Styline was probably the commonest car in Cuba and very possibly one of the largest. It took more metal to make a Styline than there was in Bethlehem Steel. I parked in front of the Gran Teatro. It was a neo-Baroque building with so many angels crowded onto its lavish exterior it was clear the architect must have thought being a playwright or an actor was more important than being an apostle. These days, anything is more important than being an apostle. Especially in Cuba.
I had arranged to meet Freeman in the smoking room at the nearby Partagas cigar factory, but I was early, so I went to the Hotel Inglaterra and ordered some breakfast on the terrace. There I encountered the usual cast of Havana characters, minus the prostitutes: it was still a little early for the prostitutes. There were American naval officers on furlough from the warship in the harbor, some matronly tourists, a few Chinese businessmen from the nearby Barrio Chino, a couple of underworld types wearing sharkskin suits and small Stetson hats, and a trio of government officials in pin-striped jackets, with faces as dark as tobacco leaves and even darker glasses. I ate an English breakfast and then crossed the busy, palm-shrouded Parque Central to visit my favorite shop in Havana.
Hobby Center, on the corner of Obispo and Berniz, sold model ships, toy cars, and, most important for my purposes, electric train sets. My own layout was a tabletop three-rail Dublo. It wasn’t anything on the scale of the train set I’d once seen in Hermann Goering’s house, but it gave me a lot of pleasure. In the shop I collected a new locomotive and tender I’d ordered from England. I got a lot of models from England, but there were several things on my layout I’d made myself in the workshop at home. Yara disliked the workshop almost as much as she feared the train set. To her there was something devilish about it. Nothing to do with the movement of the actual trains. She wasn’t entirely primitive. No, it was the fascination a train set held for a grown man that she held to be somehow hypnotic and devilish.
The shop was only a few meters from La Moderna Poesia. This was Havana’s largest bookstore, only it looked more like a concrete air-raid shelter. Safely inside, I chose a book of Montaigne’s essays in English, not because I had a burning desire to read Montaigne, whom I’d only vaguely heard of, but because I thought it looked improving. And almost anyone at the Casa Marina could have told me that I needed a bit of improving. At the very least, I thought I needed to start wearing my glasses more often. For a moment, I was convinced I was seeing things. There, in the bookshop, was someone I had last seen in another life, twenty years before.
It was Noreen Charalambides.
Except that she wasn’t Noreen Charalambides. Not any longer. No more than I was Bernhard Gunther. A long time ago she’d left her husband, Nick, and gone back to being Noreen Eisner, and as the author of more than ten successful novels and several celebrated plays, this was how the reading world now knew her. Under the fawning gaze of some oleaginous American tourist, Noreen was signing a book at the till where I was about to pay for Montaigne, which meant that she and I saw each other simultaneously. But for that I would probably have crept away. I would have crept away because I was living in Cuba under a false name, and the fewer people who knew about that, the better. Another reason was that I was hardly looking my best. I hadn’t looked my best since the spring of 1945. Noreen, on the other hand, looked much the same. There were a few flecks of gray in her brown hair and a line or two on her forehead, but she was still a beauty. She wore a nice sapphire brooch and a gold wristwatch. In her hand was a silver fountain pen, and over her arm was an expensive crocodile handbag.
When Noreen saw me she put her hand over her mouth, as if she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she had at that. The older I get, the easier it is to believe that my own past is someone else’s life and that I’m just a soul in limbo, or some kind of flying Dutchman figure doomed to sail the seas for all eternity.
I touched the brim of my hat just to check that my head was still working, and said, “Hello.” I spoke in English, too, which probably left her even more confused. Thinking she must have forgotten my name, I was on the point of removing my hat and thought better of it. Perhaps after all it was better she didn’t remember my name. Not until I’d told her the new one.
“Is it really you?” she whispered.
“Yes.” I had a lump in my throat as big as my fist.
“I thought you were probably dead. In fact, I was sure of it. I can’t believe it’s really you.”
“I have the same problem when I get up in the morning and limp toward the bathroom. It always feels like someone must have stolen my real body in the night and replaced it with my father’s.”
Noreen shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. She opened her handbag and took out a handkerchief that wouldn’t have dried the eyes of a mouse. “Perhaps you’re the answer to my prayer,” she said.
“Then it must have been a Santería prayer,” I said. “A prayer to a Catholic saint who’s really just a disguise for some kind of voodoo spirit. Or something worse.”
For a moment I held my tongue, wondering what ancient demons, what infernal powers would have claimed Bernie Gunther as one of theirs, and nominated him as the dark, mischievous answer to someone’s idle prayer.
I glanced around awkwardly. The fawning American tourist was an overweight lady of around sixty, wearing thin gloves and a summer hat with a veil that made her look like a beekeeper. She was watching Noreen and me carefully, like we were all in a theater. And when she wasn’t watching Noreen and me perform our touching little reunion scene, she was glancing at the signature in her book, as if she couldn’t quite believe that the author had inscribed it.
“Look,” I said, “we can’t talk here. The bar on the corner.”
“The Floridita?”
“Meet me there in five minutes.” Then I looked at the book clerk and said, “I’d like to charge this to my account. The name is Hausner. Carlos Hausner.” I spoke in Spanish, but I was sure Noreen understood. She always had been quick to understand what was going on. I shot her a look and nodded. She nodded back, as if to reassure me that my secret was safe. For now.