The band started to play, and I groaned. It was the kind of band that made you feel seasick as they swayed one way and then the other. One of the men played a witch doctor’s flute, and another tapped a monotonous cowbell that left you feeling sorry for cows. Their sung harmonies were like a freight locomotive’s horn. The girl yelled solos and played guitar. I never yet saw a guitar that I didn’t want to use to drive a nail into a piece of wood. Or into the head of the idiot strumming it.

“Now I really do have to go,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like music?”

“Not since I came to Cuba.” I finished my drink and glanced at my watch again. “Look,” I said, “my meeting’s only going to take an hour or so. Why don’t we meet for lunch?”

“I can’t. I have to get back. I have people coming to dinner tonight and there are things I have to get for the cook. I’d love you to come if you could.”

“All right. I will.”

“It’s the Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula.” Noreen opened her bag, took out a notepad, and scribbled down an address and telephone number. “Why don’t you come early—say, around five o’clock. Before the rest of my guests arrive. We’ll catch up then.”

“I’d like that.” I took the notepad and wrote out my own address and phone number. “Here,” I said. “Just in case you think I’m going to run out on you.”

“It’s good to see you again, Gunther.”

“You too, Noreen.”

I went to the door and glanced back at the people in the Floridita Bar. No one was listening to the band or even intending to listen. Not while there was drinking to be done. The barman was making daiquiris like they were on special offer, about a dozen at a time. From everything I’d heard and read about Ernest Hemingway, that was the way he liked drinking them, too.

Chapter 3

3

I BOUGHT SOME PETIT ROBUSTOS in the cigar factory shop and took them into the smoking room, where a number of men, including Robert Freeman, inhabited an almost infernal world of swirling smoke and igniting matches and glowing tobacco embers. Every time I went into that room, the smell reminded me of the library at the Adlon Hotel, and for a moment I could almost see poor Louis Adlon standing in front of me with a favorite Upmann in his white gloved fingers.