The driver of the car slowly leaned out like a man falling asleep in the bath. For a moment I thought the steering wheel would check his exit, but the barge wallowed in the choppy, undulating sea, then came up again, tipping the dead man onto the tarpaulin like a dirty dish-cloth. It was Waxey, all right, and while he looked like a drowned man, it wasn’t the sea that had killed him. Nor was it loud music, although his ears, or what was left of them, were encrusted with what resembled dark red coral.

“Pity,” said Sánchez.

“I didn’t really know him,” I said.

“The car, I mean,” said Sánchez. “The Cadillac Eldorado is just about my favorite car in the world.” He shook his head in admiration. “Beautiful. I like the red. Red’s nice. But me, I think I’d have had a black one, with whitewall tires and a white hood. Black has much more class, I think.”

“Red seems to be the color of the moment,” I said.

“You mean his ears?”

“I wasn’t talking about his manicure.”

“A bullet in each ear, it looks like. That’s a message, right?”

“Like it was Cable and Wireless, Captain.”

“He heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear.”

“Flip the coin again. He didn’t hear something he was supposed to hear.”

“You mean like someone shooting his employer seven times in the adjoining room?”

I nodded.

“Think he was involved in the shooting?” he asked.

“Go ahead and ask him.”

“I guess we’ll never know for sure.” Sánchez took off his peaked cap and scratched his head. “Too bad,” he said.

“The car again?”

“That I couldn’t have interviewed him first.”

Chapter 17

17

JEWS HAD BEEN ARRIVING IN CUBA since the time of Columbus. Many who had been forbidden entry to the United States of America more recently than that had been given sanctuary by the Cubans, who, with reference to the Jews’ most common country of origin, called them polacos. Judging from the number of graves in the Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa, there were a lot more polacos in Cuba than might have been thought. The cemetery was on the road to Santa Fé, behind an impressive gated entrance. It wasn’t exactly the Mount of Olives, but the graves, all white marble, were set on a pleasant hill overlooking a mango plantation. There was even a small monument to the Jewish victims of the Second World War in which, it was said, several bars of soap had been buried as a symbolic reminder of their supposed fate.