“Later on I showed the drawing to Lansky and told him it was prima facie evidence that it had probably been Goldstein who murdered Max Reles. And Lansky agreed. He agreed because he wanted to agree, because any other result would have been bad for business. More importantly, it left me in the clear. So. There it is. You can relax. It certainly wasn’t your daughter that killed him. It was me.”

“I don’t know how I could ever have suspected her,” said Noreen. “What kind of mother am I?”

“Don’t even think about it.” I smiled wryly. “As a matter of fact, when she saw the murder weapon at the penthouse, she recognized it straightaway and later on she told me she thought it might have been you who killed Max. It was all I could do to convince her that the gun was a common one in Cuba. Even though it isn’t. That’s the first Russian weapon I’ve ever seen in Cuba. Of course, I could have told her the truth, but when she announced that she was going back to America, I couldn’t see the point. I mean, if I’d told her that, I might have had to tell her everything else. I mean, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Her to leave Havana, and go to college?”

“And that’s why you killed him,” she said.

I nodded. “You were quite right. You couldn’t let her stay with a man like that. He was going to take her somewhere they could smoke opium, and God only knows what else. I killed him because of what she might have become if she’d actually married him.”

“And because of what Fredo told you when you went to his office in the Bacardi Building.”

“He told you about that?”

“On the way to the hospital. That’s why you helped him, isn’t it? Because he told you that Dinah is your daughter.”

“I was waiting to hear you say it, Noreen. And now you have, I guess I can mention it. Is it true?”

“It’s a little late to be asking that, isn’t it? In view of what happened to Max.”

“I could say much the same thing to you, Noreen. Is it true?”

“Yes. It’s true. I’m sorry. I should have told you, but that would have meant telling Dinah that Nick wasn’t her father; and until he died, she’d always had a much better relationship with him than with me. It felt like I’d have been taking that away from Dinah at a time when I most needed to exercise some influence over her, do you see? If I’d told her, I don’t know what the result might have been. When it happened-I mean, in 1935, when she was born-I thought about writing to you. Several times. But each time I thought about it, I saw how good Nick was with her, and I simply couldn’t do it. He always thought Dinah was his daughter. But a woman always knows these things. As the months and then the years went by, it seemed less and less relevant. Eventually the war came, and that appeared to end for good any idea of telling you that you had a daughter. I wouldn’t have known where to write. When I saw you again, in the bookstore, I couldn’t believe it. And naturally I thought about telling you that same evening. But you made a rather tasteless remark that left me thinking you might be another of Havana’s bad influences. You seemed so hard-bitten and cynical I hardly recognized you.”

“I know the feeling. These days I hardly recognize myself. Or even worse, I recognize my own father. I look in the mirror and see him staring back at me with amused contempt for my own previous failure to understand that I am and always would be exactly like him. If not him exactly. But you were quite right not to tell her I’m her father. Max Reles wasn’t the only man Dinah couldn’t be around. It’s me, too. I know that. And I don’t intend to try and see her and establish some kind of relationship with her. It’s rather late in the day for that, I think. So you can rest assured on that count. It’s enough for me to know that I have a daughter and to have met her. All thanks to Alfredo López.”

“As I said, I didn’t know he’d told you until we went to the hospital just now. Lawyers aren’t supposed to tell strangers about their clients’ affairs, are they?”

“After I pulled his nuts out of the fire with those pamphlets, he figured he owed me and that I was the kind of father who might be able to help her somehow. That’s what he told me, anyhow.”

“He was right. I’m glad he did.” She hugged me closer. “And you did help her. I’d have killed Max myself if I’d been able.”

“We all do what we can do.”

“And this is why you went to SIM headquarters and persuaded them to let Fredo go. Because you thought you wanted to pay Fredo back.”

“What he said. It gave me some kind of hope that my life hasn’t entirely been wasted.”

“But how? How did you persuade them to let him go?”

“A while ago I stumbled across a weapons cache on the road to Santa María del Rosario. I traded it for his life.”

“Nothing else?”

“What else could there be?”

“I don’t know how to begin to thank you,” she said.

“You go back to writing books, and I’ll go back to playing backgammon and smoking cigars. From the look of things, you’re getting ready to move into that new house of yours. I hear Hemingway will soon be back here again.”

“Yes, he’ll be here in June. Hem’s lucky to be alive after what happened. He was seriously injured in two consecutive plane crashes. He then got himself badly burned in a bushfire. By rights, the man should be dead. Some American newspapers even published his obituary.”

“So he’s risen from the dead. It’s not all of us who can say as much.”

Later on, I went out to my car, and in the shifting dark I thought I saw the figure of the dead gardener, standing beside the well where he’d drowned. Maybe the house was haunted, after all. And if the house wasn’t haunted, I know I was, and probably always would be. Some of us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer than that. Years, perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again, like Ernest Hemingway. If the dead rise not, then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body shall we live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps, if the dead could rise and be incorruptible, and I could be changed forever in the blinking of an eye, then dying might just be worth the trouble of getting killed, or killing myself.

Back in Havana, I went to the Casa Marina and spent the night with a couple of willing girls. They didn’t make me feel any less alone. All they did was help me to pass the time. What little of it we have.

Philip Kerr is a British author born in Edinburgh. He studied at the University of Birmingham and worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer. He has written for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard and the New Statesman. Kerr has published eleven novels under his full name and a children's series, Children of the Lamp, under the name P.B. Kerr. He is married to novelist Jane Thynne.