All I knew about Bonn was that it was the birthplace of Beethoven, and before the war that it had been the home of Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. When Berlin ceased being the capital of anything except the cold war, and West Germany needed a new capital, Adenauer had, very conveniently for himself, chosen the quiet little town where he had lived quietly throughout the years of the Third Reich. As it happened, I’d been to Bonn. Just once. By mistake. But before 1949 few people had ever heard of Bonn, let alone known where it was, and even today it was jokingly known as “the federal village.” Bonn was small, Bonn was insignificant, and Bonn was above all things a backwater, and I wondered why I hadn’t considered living there before. For a man like me, intent on living a life of complete anonymity, it seemed perfect.

Quickly I told Freeman that Bonn was fine by me and that I would begin to make travel arrangements to go there as soon as possible. And Freeman told me he would go about drawing up my all-important business credentials.

I was going home. After almost five years of exile, I was going back to Germany. With money in my pocket. I could hardly believe my luck.

There was that, and the events of the previous evening, at an apartment in Vedado.

As soon as I was washed and dressed, I drove to the National and went up to that big, spacious suite on the executive floor to inform the Lansky brothers that I had “solved” the Reles case. Not that you could ever have really called it a case. Public-relations exercise might have been a more accurate way of describing my investigation, provided your idea of a public was all of the mobbed-up casinos and hotels in Havana.

“You mean you’ve got a name?” Meyer’s voice had the deep-fried, rich tone of an Indian chief in a western. Jeff Chandler, maybe. The little man had the same sort of inscrutable face, too. Certainly the nose was exactly the same.

As before, we sat on the balcony with the same ocean view, except that now I could see the ocean as well as hear and smell it. I was going to miss the grating roar of that ocean.