Outside a small grilled window, the new day was coming up over the blue horizon like a trail of blood. This hardly augured well, since, not unreasonably, it was already clear that the Amis suspected me of a much closer acquaintance with Melba Marrero and her crimes—plural—than I’d admitted. Clearly, since I wasn’t an American myself, and smelled strongly of rum, they found this relatively easy.

On a light blue Formica table covered with coffee-colored cigarette burns lay a number of files and a couple of guns wearing tags on their trigger guards as if they might have been for sale. One of them was the little Beretta pocket pistol Melba had used to shoot the petty officer, third class; and the other was a Colt automatic stolen from him several months earlier and used to murder Captain Balart outside the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. Alongside the files and the pistols was my blue and gold Argentinean passport, and from time to time the Navy cop in charge of my interrogation would pick this up and leaf through the pages as if he couldn’t quite believe that anyone could go through life being the citizen of a country that wasn’t the United States. His name was Captain Mackay, and as well as his questions there was his breath to contend with. Every time he pushed his squashed, bespectacled face toward mine I was enveloped in the sour aura of his tooth decay, and after a while I started to feel like something chewed up but only half digested deep inside his Yankee bowels.

Mackay said with ill-disguised contempt, “This story of yours, that you never met her until a couple of days ago, it makes no sense. No sense at all. You say she was a chica you were involved with; that you asked her to come away on your boat for a few weeks, and that this accounts for the considerable sum of money you had with you.”

“That’s correct.”

“And yet you say you know almost nothing about her.”

“At my age, it’s best not to ask too many questions when a pretty girl agrees to come away with you.”

Mackay smiled thinly. He was about thirty, too young to find much sympathy for an older man’s interest in younger women. There was a wedding band on his fat finger, and I imagined some wholesome girl with a permanent wave and a mixing bowl under her chubby arm waiting for him back home in some Erector Set government housing on a bleak naval base.

“Shall I tell you what I think? I think you were headed for the Dominican Republic to buy guns for the rebels. The boat, the money, the girl, it all adds up.”