Unable to sleep, I considered going to the Casa Marina, and then rejected the idea, certain that, at this late hour, the particular chica I favored would no longer be free. Besides, Yara was asleep in my bed, and while she would never have questioned my leaving the apartment in the small hours of the morning, the ten dollars payable to Doña Marina would probably have been money wasted, since I was no longer equal to the task of making love twice in as many days, let alone in the space of one evening. So I sat down and finished the book I was reading instead.

It was a book in English.

For some time now I’d been learning English, in an effort to persuade an Englishman named Robert Freeman to give me a job. Freeman worked for the British tobacco giant Gallaher, running a subsidiary company called J. Frankau, which had been the UK distributor for all Havana cigars since 1790. I had been cultivating Freeman in the hope that I might talk him into sending me back to Germany—at my own expense, I might add—to see if I couldn’t open up the new West German market. A covering letter of introduction and several boxes of samples would, I supposed, be enough to smooth the arrival of Carlos Hausner, an Argentine of German descent, back to Germany and enable me to blend in.

It wasn’t that I disliked Cuba. Far from it. I had left Argentina with a hundred thousand American dollars, and I lived very comfortably in Havana. But I yearned for somewhere without biting insects, and where people went to bed at a sensible time of night, and where none of the drinks was made of ice: I was tired of getting a freezing headache every time I went into a bar. Another reason I wanted to return to Germany was that my Argentine passport would not last forever. But once I was safely back in Germany, I could disappear. Again.

Going back to Berlin was out of the question, of course. For one thing, it was now landlocked in the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic; and, for another, the Berlin police were probably looking for me in connection with the murders of two women in Vienna, in 1949. Not that I had murdered them. I’ve done a lot of things in my life of which I’m less than proud, but I haven’t ever murdered a woman. Not unless you counted the Soviet woman I’d shot during the long, hot summer of 1941—one of an NKVD death squad who’d just murdered several thousand unarmed prisoners in their cells. I expect the Russians would have counted that as murder, which was another good reason to stay out of Berlin. Hamburg looked like a better bet. Hamburg was in the Federal Republic, and I didn’t know anyone in Hamburg. More important, no one there knew me.