“He told me himself that he and his brother murdered two men, the Shapiro brothers, in 1933. One of them he buried alive. After Prohibition ended, he went into labor racketeering. Some of it was in Berlin, which was where I first met him. While he was there, he murdered a German businessman called Rubusch who refused to be intimidated by him. I myself witnessed him murder two other people. One of them was a prostitute, Dora, with whom he had been conducting a relationship. He shot her in the head and dumped her body in a lake. She was still breathing when she hit the water.”

“Get out,” she snapped. “Get out of here.”

“And maybe your mother already told you about the man he murdered on a passenger ship between New York and Hamburg.”

“I didn’t believe her, and I don’t believe you now.”

“Sure you do. You believe all of it. Because you’re not stupid, Dinah. You’ve always known what kind of a man he was. Maybe you liked that. Maybe it gave you a cheap little thrill to be near someone like that. It can happen like that sometimes. There’s a fascination all of us feel for the kind of people who inhabit the shadows. Maybe that’s it, I don’t know, and I really don’t care. But if you didn’t know Max Reles was a gangster, then you certainly suspected as much. Strongly suspected, because of the company he kept. Meyer and Jake Lansky. Santo Trafficante. Norman Rothman. Vincent Alo. Every one a gangster. With Lansky the most notorious gangster of them all. Just four years ago Lansky was facing a congressional committee investigating organized crime in the United States. So was Max. That’s why they came to Cuba.

“I know of six people that Max has murdered, but I’m certain there are plenty more. People who crossed him. People who owed him money. People who were just inconveniently in his way. He’d have killed me, too, but I had something on him. Something he couldn’t afford to let be known. Max was shot. But his own weapon of choice was an ice pick, with which he stabbed people in the ear. That’s the kind of man he was, Dinah. A rotten, murdering gangster. One of many rotten, murdering gangsters who run the hotels and casinos here in Havana, any one of whom probably had his own very good reasons for wanting Max Reles out of the way.

“So keep your stupid mouth shut about your mother. I’m telling you now that she had nothing to do with it. You keep your mouth shut, or she’ll wind up dead on account of you. You, too, if you happen to get in the way. You don’t tell anyone what you told me. Got that?”

Dinah nodded, sullenly.

I pointed at the glass by her arm. “You drinking that?”