“Like I said, he had his reasons. But if you want me to speculate, Captain, I suppose he liked it that I kept my mouth shut for twenty years. That I kept my word to him. That I wasn’t afraid to tell him to go and fuck himself.”

“And maybe you were not afraid to kill him, either.”

I smiled and shook my head.

“No, hear me out,” said the captain. “Max Reles has lived in Havana for many years. He is a law-abiding, taxpaying, upstanding citizen. He’s a friend of the president. Then one day he meets you, someone he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Two or three days later, he’s murdered. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“When you put it like that, I wonder why the hell you don’t arrest me. It would certainly save you the time and trouble of conducting a proper murder investigation with forensic evidence and witnesses who saw me do the shooting. The usual stuff. Run me down to the station, why don’t you? Maybe you can strong-arm a confession out of me before you finish your shift. I can’t imagine it would be the first time you’ve done something like that.”

“You mustn’t believe everything you read in Bohemia, señor.”

“No?”

“Do you really think we torture suspects?”

“Mostly I don’t give the matter any thought at all, Captain. But maybe I’ll go and visit some prisoners on the Isle of Pines and see what they have to say about it and then get back to you. It’ll make a change from picking my feet at home.”

But Sánchez wasn’t listening. He was looking at the revolver one of his men was presenting to him on a towel, like a crown of laurel or wild olive. I heard the man say that the gun had been found in a laundry basket on the eighth floor. There was a red star on the handle. And it certainly looked like the murder weapon. For one thing, it was wearing a silencer.

“It looks like Señor Hausner was right, wouldn’t you say, Captain?” said Meyer Lansky.

Sánchez and the cop turned and went into the living room.

“And not a moment too soon,” I told Lansky. “That stupid cop liked me for it.”

“Didn’t he just? Me, I liked you for the way you spoke to him. It reminded me of me. I suppose that was the murder weapon.”

“I’d bet the hard way on it. That’s a seven-shot Nagant. My guess is they’ll dig seven out of Max’s body and the walls.”

“A Nagant? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Designed by a Belgian. But the red star on the handle means that one’s Russian made,” I said.

“Russian, huh? Are you telling me Max was killed by communists?”