“Hey,” she said, coolly.

I nodded back, but I’d already lost her attention.

“Can I have the car, Mom?”

“You’re not going out?”

“I won’t be late.”

“I don’t like you going out at night,” said Noreen. “Suppose you get stopped at an army checkpoint?”

“Do I look like a revolutionary?” asked Dinah.

“Sadly, no.”

“Well, then.”

“My daughter is nineteen, Carlos,” said Noreen. “But she behaves like she’s thirty.”

“Everything I know, I learned from you, mother dear.”

“Where are you going, anyway?”

“The Barracuda Club.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go there.”

“We’ve been through this before.” Dinah sighed. “Look, all my friends are going to be there.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Why can’t you mix with some friends of your own age?”

“Perhaps I would,” Dinah said pointedly, “if we weren’t exiled from our home in Los Angeles.”

“We’re not exiled,” insisted Noreen. “I just needed to get away from the States for a while.”

“I understand that. Of course I do. But please try to understand what it’s like for me. I want to go out and have some fun. Not sit around the dinner table and talk about politics with a lot of boring people.” Dinah glanced at me and flashed me a quick, apologetic smile. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Señor Gunther. From what Mother’s told me, I’m sure you’re a very interesting person. But most of Noreen’s friends are left-wing writers and lawyers. Intellectuals. And friends of Ernest’s who drink too much.”

I flinched a bit when she called me Gunther. It meant Noreen had already revealed my secret to her daughter. That irritated me.

Dinah put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it as if it were a fire-cracker.

“And I do wish you wouldn’t smoke,” said Noreen.

Dinah rolled her eyes and held out one gloved hand. “Keys.”

“On the desk, by the telephone.”

Dinah stalked off in a cloud of scent, cigarette smoke, and exasperation, like the ruthless bitch-beauty in one of her mother’s gothic-American plays. I hadn’t seen any of them onstage, only the movies that had been made of them. These were stories full of unscrupulous mothers, mad fathers, flighty wives, dishonest and sadistic sons, and drunken homosexual husbands-the kind of stories that almost made me glad I didn’t have a family myself. I lit a cigar and tried to contain my amusement.

Noreen poured us both another bourbon from a bottle of Old Forester she’d brought from the living room and helped herself to ice from a bucket fashioned from an elephant’s foot.

“Little bitch,” she said tonelessly. “She has a place at Brown University, and yet she still maintains this fucking fiction that she’s obliged to live here in Havana with me. I didn’t ask her to come. I haven’t written a damn thing since I got here. She sits around and plays records all day. I can’t work when someone plays records. Especially the kind of fucking records she listens to. Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. I ask you. God, I hate those smug bastards. And I can’t work at night when she’s out, because I’m worried something will happen to her.”

A second or two later the Pontiac Chieftain started up and moved off down the drive, with the hood’s Indian head scouting out the way forward in the encroaching darkness.

“You don’t want her here with you?”

Noreen gave me a narrow-eyed stare over the rim of her glass. “You used to be a little quicker on the uptake, Gunther. What happened? Something hit you on the head during the war?”

“Just the odd bit of shrapnel, now and then. I’d show you the scars, but I’d have to take my wig off.”

But she wasn’t ready to be amused again. Not yet. She lit a cigarette and flicked the match into the bushes. “If you had a nineteen-year-old daughter, would you want her to live in Havana?”

“That would depend on whether or not she had any good-looking friends.”

Noreen grimaced. “It’s precisely that kind of remark that made me think she’d be better off in Rhode Island. There are too many bad influences in Havana. Too much easy sex. Too much cheap booze.”

“That’s why I live here.”

“And she’s in with the wrong crowd,” continued Noreen, ignoring me. “As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I asked you here tonight.”

“And there I was, naively thinking that you asked me down here for purely sentimental reasons. You can still pack a punch, Noreen.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No?” I let that one go. I sniffed my drink for a moment, enjoying the combusted aroma. The bourbon smelled like the devil’s coffee cup. “Take it from me, angel, there are many worse places to live than Cuba. I know. I’ve tried living in them. Berlin after the war was no Ivy League dormitory, and neither was Vienna. Especially if you were a girl. Russian soldiers have got pimps and beach-boy gigolos beat for bad influences, Noreen. And that’s not anti-communist, right-wing propaganda, sweetheart, that’s the truth. And, speaking of that delicate subject, how much did you tell her about me?”

“Not much. Until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how much there was to tell. All you said to me this morning-and, by the way, you were speaking not directly to me, but to the book clerk in La Moderna Poesia -was that your name was Carlos Hausner. And why the hell did you pick Carlos as your nom de plume? Carlos is a name for a fat Mexican peasant in a John Wayne movie. No, I don’t see you as a Carlos at all. I expect that’s why I used your real name, Bernie-well, it just sort of slipped out when I was telling her about Berlin in 1934.”

“That’s unfortunate, given how much trouble I went to in order to get a new name. To be quite frank with you, if the authorities found out about me, Noreen, I could be deported back to Germany, which would be awkward, to say the least. Like I told you. There are people-Russian people-who’d probably like to hold a knot under my ear.”

She gave me a look that was full of suspicion. “Maybe that’s what you deserve.”

“Maybe.” I put my drink down on a glass table and weighed her remark in my mind for a moment. “Then again, in most cases it’s only in books that people get what’s coming to them. But if you really think that’s what I deserve, then perhaps I’ll be running along.”

I went into the house and then out again through the front door. She was standing by the railing on the terrace above the steps that led down to my car.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think you deserve it at all, okay? I was just teasing you. Please come back.”

I stood there and looked up at her without much pleasure. I was angry and I didn’t care that she knew it. And not just about the remark she’d made about me deserving to hang. I was angry with her and with myself that I’d not made it clearer that Bernie Gunther no longer existed, and that Carlos Hausner had taken his place.

“I was so excited to see you again, after all these years-” Her voice seemed to catch on something like a cashmere sweater snagging on a nail. “I’m sorry I let your secret out of the bag. I’ll speak to Dinah when she gets home and tell her to keep what I told her in confidence, okay? I’m afraid I didn’t think about the possible implications of telling her about you. But you see, she and I have been very close since Nick, her father, died. We always tell each other everything.”

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.