“It’s more or less certain your little lady friend has been a communist and a rebel for quite a while now. You see, María Antonia Tapanes spent three months in the National Women’s Prison at Guanajay for her part in the Easter Sunday conspiracy of April 1953. Then, in July of last year, her brother Juan Tapanes was killed in the assault on Moncada Barracks led by Fidel Castro. Killed or executed, it’s not clear which. When María got out of prison and found her brother dead, she went to Caimanera and worked as a chica to get herself a weapon. That happens a lot. To be honest, quite a few of our men use their weapons as currency for buying sex. Then they just report the weapon stolen. Anyway, the next time the weapon turns up it’s been used to kill Captain Balart. There were witnesses, too. A woman answering María Tapanes’s description shot him in the face. And then in the back of the head as he lay on the ground. Maybe he had it coming. Who knows? Who cares? What I do know is that P.O. Marcus is lucky to be alive. If she’d used the Colt instead of that little Beretta, he’d be as dead as Captain Balart.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

“He’ll live.”

“What will happen to her?”

“We’ll have to hand her over to the police in Havana.”

“I imagine that’s what she was worried about in the first place. Why she shot the petty officer. She must have panicked. You know what they’ll do to her, don’t you?”

“That’s not my concern.”

“Maybe it should be. Maybe that’s the problem you’ve got in Cuba. Maybe if you Americans paid a little more attention to the kind of people who are running this country—”

“Maybe you ought to be a little more concerned about what happens to you.”

This was the other officer who spoke now. I hadn’t been told his name. All I knew about him was that dandruff fell off the back of his head whenever he scratched it. All in all, he had rather a lot of dandruff. Even his eyelashes had tiny flakes of skin in them.

“Just suppose I’m not,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Come again?” The man with the dandruff stopped scratching his head and inspected his fingernails before beaming a frown in my direction.