“That’s not such an exclusive club.”

“I don’t doubt it. Your mother’s a beautiful woman. Everything you got, you got from her, I guess.” I nodded. “What you were saying. About her being suicidal. I’ll look in on her before I go.”

I quickly went away from her and back to the house before I said anything nasty. Which was what I felt like saying.

At the rear of the house, the French doors were open and just an antelope was on guard, so I went inside and took a squint in Noreen’s bedroom. She was sleeping, naked on the top sheet, and I stood there looking for all of a minute. Two naked women in one afternoon. It was like going to the Casa Marina except for the fact that now I realized I was in love with Noreen again. Or maybe they were the same feelings I’d always had and, perhaps, I’d just forgotten where I’d buried them. I don’t know, but in spite of what I’d told Dinah, there were plenty of feelings I could have tossed Noreen’s way if she’d been awake. And probably I’d have meant a few of them, too.

Her thighs yawned open, and courtesy obliged me to look away, which was when I noticed the gun on the bookshelves next to some photographs and a jar containing a frog preserved in formaldehyde. It looked like any old frog. But it wasn’t just any old gun. It might have been designed and produced by a Belgian who had given the revolver his name, but the Nagant had been the standard-issue sidearm for all Russian officers in the Red Army and NKVD. It was an odd, heavy weapon to have found in that house. I picked it up, curious to find myself reacquainted with it. This one had an embossed red star on the handle, which seemed to put its origins beyond any doubt.

“That’s her gun,” said Dinah.

I looked around as she came into the bedroom and drew the sheet across her mother. “Not exactly a ladies’ gun,” I said.

“You’re telling me.”

Then she went into the bathroom.

“I’ll leave my number on the desk by the telephone,” I called after her. “You can give me a ring if you really think she’s serious about harming herself. It doesn’t matter what time.”

I buttoned my jacket and walked out of the bedroom. Momentarily I caught sight of Dinah sitting on the lavatory and, hearing the sound of her peeing, I hurried on through to the study.

“I don’t think she meant it,” said Dinah. “She says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”

“We all do.”

There was a three-drawer wooden desk covered with carved animals and different-sized shotgun cartridges and rifle bullets that someone had stood on their ends like so many lethal lipsticks. I found a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled out my telephone number in large writing so that it wouldn’t be missed. Unlike me. And then I left.

I drove home and spent the rest of the day and half the night in my little workshop. While I worked I thought about Noreen and Max Reles and Dinah. Nobody called me on the phone. But there was nothing unusual about that.

HAVANA’S CHINESE QUARTER-the Barrio Chino-was the largest in Latin America, and since it was Chinese New Year the streets off Zanja and Cuchillo were decorated with paper lanterns and given over to open-air markets and lion-dance troupes. At the intersection of Amistad and Dragones was a gateway as big as the Forbidden City. Later that evening, it would be the center of a tremendous fireworks barrage, which was the climax of the celebrations.

Yara loved any kind of noisy parade, and this was the reason why, unusually, I had chosen to take her out for the afternoon. The streets of Chinatown were full of laundries, noodle houses, dried-goods shops, herbalists, acupuncturists, sex clubs, opium dens, and brothels. But above all, the streets were full of people. Chinese people, mostly. So many that you wondered where they had been hiding themselves.

I bought Yara some small gifts-fruit and candies-which delighted her. In return she insisted on buying me a cup of macerated medicinal liquor at a traditional medicine market, which, she assured me, would make me very virile; and it was only after drinking it that I found out that it contained wolfberry, iguana, and ginseng. It was the iguana ingredient I objected to, and for several minutes after drinking this horrible beverage I was convinced I had been poisoned. So much so that I was firmly of the opinion that I must be hallucinating when, right on the edge of Chinatown, on the corner of Manrique and Simón Bolívar, I came across a shop I had never seen before. Not even in Buenos Aires, where the existence of such a business might, perhaps, more easily have been explained. It was a shop selling Nazi memorabilia.

After a moment or two I realized Yara had seen the shop, too, and, leaving her on the street, I went inside, as curious to know what kind of person might sell this kind of stuff as I was about who might buy it.

Inside the shop were glass cases containing Luger pistols, Walther P-38s, Iron Crosses, Nazi Party armbands, Gestapo identity tokens, and SS daggers. Several copies of Der Stürmer newspapers were laid out in cellophane, like freshly laundered shirts. A mannequin was wearing the dress uniform of an SS captain, which somehow seemed only appropriate. Behind a counter and between two Nazi banners stood a youngish man with a black beard who couldn’t have looked less German. He was tall and thin and cadaverous, like someone from a painting by El Greco.

“Looking for something in particular?” he asked me.

“An Iron Cross, perhaps,” I told him. I asked to see an Iron Cross not because I was interested in it but because I was interested in him.

He opened one the glass cases and laid the medal on the counter as if it had been a ladies’ diamond brooch, or a handsome watch.

I looked at it for a while, turning it over in my fingers.

“What do you think of it?” he asked.

“It’s a fake,” I said. “And not a very good fake. And another thing: the cross belt on the SS captain’s uniform is over the wrong shoulder. A fake is one thing. But an elementary mistake like that is something else.”

“You know about this stuff?”

“I thought it was illegal in Cuba,” I answered, hardly answering at all.

“The law forbids only the promotion of Nazi ideology,” he said. “Selling historic mementos is permitted.”

“Who buys this stuff?”

“Americans, mostly. A lot of sailors. Then there are also tourists who saw military service in Europe and want to obtain the souvenir they never managed to get when they were over there. Mostly it’s SS stuff they want. I guess there’s a certain gruesome fascination with the SS, for obvious reasons. I could sell any amount of SS stuff. For example, SS daggers are very popular as paper knives. Of course, collecting this sort of memorabilia doesn’t mean you sympathize with Nazism, or condone what happened. It happened, and it’s a part of history, and I don’t see anything wrong with being interested in that, to the extent of owning something that’s an almost living part of that history. How could I see anything wrong with it? I mean, I’m Polish. My name’s Szymon Woytak.”

He held out his hand, and I took it limply and without much enthusiasm for him or his peculiar trade. Through the shop window I could see a troupe of Chinese dancers. They’d removed their lion heads and paused for a cigarette, as if hardly aware of the evil spirits that dwelled within, otherwise they might have come through the door. Woytak picked up the Iron Cross I had asked to see. “How can you tell it’s a fake?” he asked, examining it closely.

“Simple. The fakes are made from one piece of metal. The originals were made of at least three pieces and soldered together. Another way to tell is to get a magnet and see if the cross really is made of iron. Fakes are made from a cheap alloy.”