The Shanghai on Zanja was Havana’s most obscene and, as a result, most notorious and popular burlesque house. Even with 750 seats, there was always a long line of excited men outside the place—mostly juvenile American sailors—waiting to pay $1.25 to get in and see a show that made anything I had seen in Weimar Berlin look tame. Tame and, by comparison, rather tasteful, too. There was nothing in the least bit tasteful about the show at the Shanghai. Mostly this was thanks to the presence on the bill of a tall mulatto called Superman whose erect member was as big as a cattle prod and which he used to rather similar effect. The climax of the show involved the mulatto outraging a succession of innocent-looking blondes to the vociferous encouragement of Uncle Sam. It wasn’t a place to take a liberal-minded satyr, let alone a nineteen-year-old girl.

García stood up politely, but I disliked him on sight in the same way I would have disliked a pimp or, for that matter, a gorilla in a tuxedo, which is what he looked like. He moved with the economy of a robot, his thick arms held stiffly at his sides until, equally stiffly, one of them came my way, extending a hand the size and color of a falconer’s glove. The bald head, with its enormous ears and thick lips, might have been looted from some Egyptian archaeological site—if not the Valley of the Kings, then perhaps the gully of the slimy-looking satraps. I felt the strength in his hand before he took it away and slipped it into the pocket of his tuxedo. The hand came out with a bundle of money, which he tossed onto the table beside the board.

“A cash game would be best, don’t you agree?” he said.

“Sure,” I said, and laid the envelope of money Reles had given me earlier beside García’s. “But we can settle up at the end of the evening, surely. Or do you want to do it at the end of every game?”

“At the end of the evening is fine,” he said.

“In which case,” I said, pocketing my envelope, “there’s no real need for this, now that we both know the other is carrying a substantial amount of cash.”

He nodded and took back the bundle of money. “I have to leave for a while at around eleven,” he said. “I have to be back to supervise the door at the Shanghai for the eleven-thirty show.”

“And what about the nine-thirty show?” I asked. “Or does that just run itself?”

“You know my theater?”

He made it sound like the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The voice was what I expected: too many cigars and not enough exercise. A wallowing hippo’s voice. Muddy and full of yellowing teeth and gas. Dangerous, too, probably.

“I know it,” I said.