This was an impression strongly enhanced by the interior. The house was a museum to Hemingway’s love of hunting. Each of the many large, airy rooms, including the master bedroom—but not the bathroom—contained the trophy heads of kudu, water buffalo, and ibex. Anything with horns, in fact. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found the head of the last unicorn in that house. Or maybe a couple of ex-wives. As well as these trophies, there were a great many books, even in the bathroom, and unlike in my own house, most of them looked as if they had been read. The tiled floors were largely uncarpeted, which must have been tough on the feet of the several cats who gave the impression of owning the place. There were very few pictures on the whitewashed walls, just a few bullfighting posters. Furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than elegance. In the living room the sofa and armchairs were covered with a flowery material that struck a discordant, feminine touch in the midst of all that masculine love of death. At the very center of the living room, like the twenty-four-carat diamond that was set into the floor of the entrance hall of Havana’s National Capitol Building, and which pinpoints zero for all distance measurements in Cuba, was a drinks table with more bottles than a beer truck.

Noreen poured us a couple of large bourbons, and we carried them out onto a long terrace, where she told me about her life since last I’d seen her. In return I described a version of my own—one that carefully left out my having been in the SS, not to mention my active service with a police battalion in the Ukraine. But I told her about how I’d been a private detective, and a regular cop again, and Erich Gruen and how he and the CIA had managed to frame me as a Nazi war criminal, and how I’d been obliged to seek the help of the Old Comrades to escape Europe and start a new life in Argentina.

“That’s how I ended up with a false name and an Argentine passport,” I explained, glibly. “I’d probably still be there but for the fact that the Perónists discovered I wasn’t really a Nazi at all.”

“But why come to Cuba?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The same reasons as everyone else, I suppose. The climate. The cigars. The women. The casinos. I play backgammon in some of the casinos.” I sipped the bourbon, enjoying the sweet and sour taste of the famous writer’s liquor.

“Ernest came because of the big-game fishing.”

I glanced around, looking for a fish, but there weren’t any.