“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 Santería and as the place where Havana’s corridas had been fought until Spain lost control of the island.

Sánchez 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 Sánchez 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 Sánchez, 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 Sánchez and I might climb up to the car without becoming as dirty as he was. Sánchez 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 Sánchez’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 Sánchez.

“I didn’t really know him,” I said.

“The car, I mean,” said Sánchez. “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.” Sánchez took off his peaked cap and scratched his head. “Too bad,” he said.

“The car again?”

“That I couldn’t have interviewed him first.”

17

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 polacos. Judging from the number of graves in the Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa, there were a lot more polacos in Cuba than might have been thought. The cemetery was on the road to Santa Fé, behind an impressive gated entrance. It wasn’t exactly the Mount of Olives, but the graves, all white marble, were set on a pleasant hill overlooking a mango plantation. There was even a small monument to the Jewish victims of the Second World War in which, it was said, several bars of soap had been buried as a symbolic reminder of their supposed fate.

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.”

“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.