“You almost make it sound like I’m doing something noble. It isn’t that way at all.”

“What way is it?”

“I don’t want to be the coin in anyone’s pocket. I had enough of that during the war. I prefer to roll around on my own. But that’s just part of the reason. Spying is dangerous. It’s especially dangerous when there’s a good chance of being caught. But I daresay you know that by now.”

“What did Marina tell you about me?”

“All she needed to. I kind of stopped listening after she said that you shot a cop. That pretty much brings the curtain down on the movie. My movie, anyway.”

“You speak like you don’t approve.”

“Cops are the same as anyone else,” I said. “Some good and some bad. I was a cop like that myself once. A long time ago.”

“I did it for the Revolution,” she said.

“I didn’t imagine you did it for a coconut.”

“He was a bastard and he had it coming, and I did it for—”

“I know, you did it for the Revolution.”

“Don’t you think Cuba needs a revolution?”

“I won’t deny that things could be better. But every revolution smokes well before it turns to ash. Yours will be like all the others that went before. I guarantee it.”

Melba was shaking her pretty head, but warming to my subject, I kept on going: “Because when someone talks about building a better society, you can bet he’s planning to use a couple of sticks of dynamite.”

After that she remained silent and so did I.

We stopped for a while in Santa Clara. About 180 miles east of Havana, it was a picturesque, unremarkable little town with a central park faced by several old buildings and hotels. Melba went off by herself. I sat outside the Central Hotel and had lunch on my own, which suited me fine. When she reappeared, we set off again.

In the early evening we reached Camagüey, which was full of triangular houses and large earthenware jars filled with flowers. I didn’t know why and it never occurred to me to ask. Parallel to the highway, a goods train moving in the opposite direction was loaded with timber cut from the region’s many forests.

“We’re stopping here,” I announced.

“Surely it would be better to keep going.”

“Can you drive?”

“No.”

“Neither can I. Not anymore. I’m beat. It’s another two hundred miles to Santiago, and if we don’t stop soon we’ll both wake up in the morgue.”

Near a brewery—one of the few on the island—we passed a police car, which got me thinking again about Melba and the crime she had committed.

“If you shot a cop, then they must want you bad,” I said.