“Little bitch,” she said tonelessly. “She has a place at Brown University, and yet she still maintains this fucking fiction that she’s obliged to live here in Havana with me. I didn’t ask her to come. I haven’t written a damn thing since I got here. She sits around and plays records all day. I can’t work when someone plays records. Especially the kind of fucking records she listens to. Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. I ask you. God, I hate those smug bastards. And I can’t work at night when she’s out, because I’m worried something will happen to her.”

A second or two later the Pontiac Chieftain started up and moved off down the drive, with the hood’s Indian head scouting out the way forward in the encroaching darkness.

“You don’t want her here with you?”

Noreen gave me a narrow-eyed stare over the rim of her glass. “You used to be a little quicker on the uptake, Gunther. What happened? Something hit you on the head during the war?”

“Just the odd bit of shrapnel, now and then. I’d show you the scars, but I’d have to take my wig off.”

But she wasn’t ready to be amused again. Not yet. She lit a cigarette and flicked the match into the bushes. “If you had a nineteen-year-old daughter, would you want her to live in Havana?”

“That would depend on whether or not she had any good-looking friends.”

Noreen grimaced. “It’s precisely that kind of remark that made me think she’d be better off in Rhode Island. There are too many bad influences in Havana. Too much easy sex. Too much cheap booze.”

“That’s why I live here.”

“And she’s in with the wrong crowd,” continued Noreen, ignoring me. “As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I asked you here tonight.”

“And there I was, naively thinking that you asked me down here for purely sentimental reasons. You can still pack a punch, Noreen.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No?” I let that one go. I sniffed my drink for a moment, enjoying the combusted aroma. The bourbon smelled like the devil’s coffee cup. “Take it from me, angel, there are many worse places to live than Cuba. I know. I’ve tried living in them. Berlin after the war was no Ivy League dormitory, and neither was Vienna. Especially if you were a girl. Russian soldiers have got pimps and beach-boy gigolos beat for bad influences, Noreen. And that’s not anti-communist, right-wing propaganda, sweetheart, that’s the truth. And, speaking of that delicate subject, how much did you tell her about me?”