“All right, listen up,” said Scheuer. “This is a stakeout. And we could be here for a while until Erich junior shows up. No one mentions the Company. Once again, there’s to be no Company names and no Company language. And nobody uses profanity. From now on, we’re members of an American Bible school. And the first thing we take out of this van is a box of Bibles. Okay. Let’s go and get this bastard.”

But as we entered the building and trooped up the stone stairs, I almost hoped that Erich Mielke wouldn’t come at all and that everything might stay the same as before. My heart was beating loudly now. Was it just the effort of climbing two flights of stairs with a box of Bibles in my arms, or something else? In my imagination I already saw the scene that lay ahead of us and felt a twinge of regret. I told myself that if only I’d remained in Cuba I would never have landed in the hands of the CIA and all of this might have been avoided. That even now I might have been reading a book in my apartment on Malecón, or enjoying the pleasures that were to be had in Omara’s body at the Casa Marina. Was Mr. Greene still there, juggling breasts? Sometimes we just don’t know when we’re well off. And for the first time in a long time I wondered about poor Melba Marrero, the little chica rebel who’d shot the sailor on my boat. Was she in an American prison? For her sake, I hoped so. Or was she back in Havana and at the mercy of the corrupt local police, as she had feared? In which case, she might very likely be dead.

What was I doing here?

“Why did you have to suggest Bibles?” Hamer grunted loudly as he put the box he’d been carrying down on the landing outside the first-floor apartment’s door. He looked at the door with obvious displeasure. “You sure about this place, Gunther? I’ve seen better-looking slums than this place.”

“Actually,” I said, “there’s a very nice view of the gasworks from the sitting room window.”

But in my imagination I saw only the CIA surrounding Mielke as he arrived to visit his father, and I heard only their snarling pleasure as they bundled him into the apartment, snapped some handcuffs on his wrists, hauled a canvas bag over his head, and tripped him onto the floor. Maybe they would kick and abuse him the same way I had been kicked and abused until something in me had broken, the way they had wanted it broken. And I realized that I had at last become the thing that I abhorred, that I had crossed an invisible line of decency and honor, that I was about to become the fascist I’d always detested.