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shot him in the face. And then in the back of the head as he lay on the ground. Maybe he had it coming. Who knows? Who cares? What I do know is that P.O. Marcus is lucky to be alive. If she’d used the Colt instead of that little Beretta, he’d be as dead as Captain Balart.”
    “Is he going to be all right?”
    “He’ll live.”
    “What will happen to her?”
    “We’ll have to hand her over to the police in Havana.”
    “I imagine that’s what she was worried about in the first place. Why she shot the petty officer. She must have panicked. You know what they’ll do to her, don’t you?”
    “That’s not my concern.”
    “Maybe it should be. Maybe that’s the problem you’ve got in Cuba. Maybe if you Americans paid a little more attention to the kind of people who are running this country—”
    “Maybe you ought to be a little more concerned about what happens to you.”
    This was the other officer who spoke now. I hadn’t been told his name. All I knew about him was that dandruff fell off the back of his head whenever he scratched it. All in all, he had rather a lot of dandruff. Even his eyelashes had tiny flakes of skin in them.
    “Just suppose I’m not,” I said. “Not anymore.”
    “Come again?” The man with the dandruff stopped scratching his head and inspected his fingernails before beaming a frown in my direction.
    “We’ve been over this all night,” I said. “You keep asking me the same questions and I keep giving you the same answers. I’ve told you my story. But you say you don’t believe it. And that’s fair enough. I can see the holes in it. You’re bored with it. I’m bored with it. We’re all bored with it, only I’m not about to cash my story in for another. What would be the point? If it sounded any better than the original, I’d have used it in the first place. So the fact now remains that I can’t see any point in telling you another. And since I don’t care to do that, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that I don’t really care whether or not you believe me, because it seems to me there’s nothing I can do that’ll convince you. One way or another, you’ve already made up your minds. That’s the way it is with cops. Believe me, I know, I used to be a cop myself. And since I no longer care whether or not you believe me, then it would be entirely fair for you to conclude that I don’t seem to give a damn what happens to me. Well, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but that’s for me to know and you to decide for yourselves, gentlemen.”
    The cop with the dandruff scratched some more, which made the room look like a snow scene in a little glass ball. He said, “You talk a lot, mister, for someone who doesn’t say very much.”
    “True, but it helps to keep the brass knuckles off my face.”
    “I doubt that,” said Captain Mackay. “I doubt that very much.”
    “I know. I’m not so pretty anymore. Only, that ought to make it easier for you to believe me. You’ve seen that girl. She was every sailor’s hard-on. I was grateful. What’s the expression you have in English? ‘You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’? And if it comes to that, then neither should you, Captain. You’ve got nothing on me and plenty on her. You know she shot the petty officer. It’s obvious. And it only starts to get complicated when you try to tie me in to some kind of rebel conspiracy. Me? I was looking forward to a nice vacation with lots of sex. I had plenty of money with me, because I was planning to buy myself a bigger boat, and there’s no law against that. Like I already told you, I have a good job. At the National Hotel. I have a nice apartment on the Malecón, in Havana. I drive a newish Chevy. Now, why would I give all that up for Karl Marx and Fidel Castro? You tell me that Melba, or María, or whatever her name is, that she’s a communist. I didn’t know that. Maybe I should have asked her, only I prefer talking dirty when I’m in bed, not politics. She