Reles grinned. “That covers a lot in Cuba. Especially at this house. There are citizens here who make Joseph Stalin look like Theodore Roosevelt.” While he spoke, Reles was looking coldly at Alfredo López, who nodded a farewell at me and then slowly drove away.

“You two know each other?” I asked.

“You could say that.”

Dinah interrupted us, speaking in English. “I didn’t know you spoke German, Max.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, honey.”

“I sure as hell won’t tell her anything,” I told him, in German. “Not that I’ll have to. I expect Noreen has done that already. You must be the bad crowd of people in Havana that she was telling me about. The one Dinah’s got herself involved with. I can’t say I blame her, Max. If she was my daughter I’d be worried myself.”

Reles smiled wryly. “I’m not like that anymore,” he said. “I’ve changed.”

“Small world.”

Another car came up the drive. It was getting to be like the front door at the National Hotel. Someone was driving Noreen’s Pontiac.

“No, really,” insisted Reles. “These days I’m a respectable businessman.”

The man driving the Pontiac stepped out of the car and silently got into the passenger seat of the car Reles had been driving. Suddenly the Cadillac looked very small. The man’s eyes were dark, and his face pale and puffy. He was wearing a loose white suit with big black buttons. His hair was curly and black and gray and plentiful, as if there had been a sale of wire wool at the dollar store on Obispo. He looked sad, perhaps because it was probably several minutes since he’d eaten anything. He looked like he ate a lot. Roadkill probably. He was smoking a cigar the size and shape of an armor-piercing shell, but in his mouth it was like a sty on an eyelid. You looked at him and thought of Pagliacci with two tenors in the part of Canio instead of one: a tenor down each trouser leg. He looked about as respectable as a roll of quarters in a boxing glove.

“Respectable, yeah.” I eyeballed the big man in the Cadillac. I let Reles see me doing it and said, “I suppose that ogre is really your bookkeeper.”

“Waxey? He’s a babke. A real sweet cake. Besides, I have some very big books.”

Dinah sighed and rolled her eyes like a petulant schoolgirl. “Max,” she complained, “it’s rude to carry on a conversation in German when you know I don’t speak the language.”

“I can’t understand that.” Reles spoke in English. “Really I can’t, when your mother speaks such excellent German.”