“How do I know?” I grinned at him. “I had one of these iron baubles myself once, in the Great War,” I said. “But you know, all of it’s fake. All of this. Everything in here.” I waved my hand at the shop. “And the creed that made all of these ridiculous objects? That, too, was just a cheap alloy meant to fool people. A stupid fake that shouldn’t have tricked anyone, except for the fact that people wanted to believe in it. Everyone knew it was a lie. Of course they did. But they wanted, desperately, to believe that it wasn’t. And they forgot to remember that just because Adolf Hitler liked kissing little children it didn’t mean he wasn’t a big, bad wolf. He was that, and much, much worse. That’s history for you, Señor Woytak. Real German history, not this—this ridiculous souvenir shop.”

I took Yara home and spent the rest of the day in my workshop feeling a little depressed. But it wasn’t because of anything I had seen in Szymon Woytak’s shop. That was just Havana. You could always buy anything in Havana, provided you had the money to pay for it. Anything and everything. It was something else getting me down. Something closer to home. Or at least the home of Ernest Hemingway.

Noreen’s daughter, Dinah.

I wanted to like her, but found I couldn’t. Not by a long way. Dinah struck me as willful and spoiled. The willfulness was okay. She’d probably grow out of it. Most people did. But she was going to need a pair of hard slaps to stop her from being such a spoiled brat. It was too bad that Nick and Noreen Charalambides had divorced when Dinah was still a child. Probably her young life had lacked a father’s discipline. Maybe that was the real reason Dinah was planning to marry a man more than twice her age. Lots of girls married father substitutes. Or maybe she was simply trying to get even with her mother for leaving her father. Lots of girls did that, too. Maybe it was both of these things. Or maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about, never having raised a child myself.

It was fortunate that I was in the workshop. “Maybe” is not a word you use in there. When you’re operating a lathe to cut a length of metal, “exactly” is a better word. I had the patience for metalworking. That was easy. Being a parent looked much more difficult.