Someone had been redecorating the walls. They looked as if Jackson Pollock had come in and actively expressed himself with a ceiling brush and a large pot of red paint. Only it wasn’t red paint that was splashed all over the office; it was blood, and lots of it. Max Reles was going to need a new chinchilla rug, too, except that it wasn’t going to be he who would go to a store to buy a replacement. He was never going to buy anything again—not even a funeral casket, which was what he now needed most. He lay on the floor, still in what seemed to be the same clothes he’d been in the night before, but the blue shirt now had some dark brown spots. He was staring at the cork-tiled ceiling with only one eye. The other eye appeared to be missing. From the look of him, two shots had hit him in the head, but there was a strong case for thinking that at least two or three more had ended up in his back and chest. It seemed like a real gangster-style murder, in that the gunman had done a very thorough job of making sure he was dead. And yet, apart from the police captain who had followed us into the office—more out of curiosity than anything else, it seemed—there were no police in there, no one taking photographs of the body, no one with a measuring tape, nothing of what might normally have been expected. Well, this was Cuba, after all, I told myself, where everything took just that little bit longer to get done, including, perhaps, the dispatching of forensic scientists to the scene of a homicide. Max Reles was already dead, so where was the hurry?

Waxey appeared behind us in the doorway of his dead master’s office. There were tears in his eyes, and in his encyclopedia-sized hand, a white handkerchief that looked as if it might have been tugged off one of the double beds. He sniffed for a moment and then blew his nose loudly, sounding like a passenger ship making port.

Meyer Lansky looked at him with irritation. “So where the hell were you when he got his brains blown out?” he said. “Where were you, Waxey?”

“I was right here,” whispered Waxey. “Like I always am. I thought the boss had gone to bed. After his phone call to F.B. He always had an early night after that. Regular as clockwork. First thing I knew about it was when I came in here at seven o’clock this morning and found him like this. Dead.”

He added the word “dead” as if there had been some doubt about that fact.

“He wasn’t shot with a BB gun, Waxey,” said Lansky. “Didn’t you hear nothing?”

Waxey shook his head, miserably. “Nothing. Like I said.”