A Farewell to Paradise by Harlan Wolff

Author:Harlan Wolff [Wolff, Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646335770
Publisher: Bangkok Ink
Published: 2019-07-11T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

“A chatterbox is a treasure for a spy.”

– Russian Proverb

Carl waited until the following afternoon to call the dancer. He figured that with Bomba being open until four in the morning, he wouldn’t get anything out of her until after lunch, and he was right because when he called her at two, she didn’t answer. She finally picked up the phone just before four o’clock.

“Hello, oh, it’s you,” she mumbled, still half asleep, “we meet in Castro’s,” and then she hung up.

Castro’s was a Cuban pub, recently opened, and not far from the hotel, so Carl walked there. The walls were covered in black and white pictures of Cuban revolutionaries. The waitresses wore the green uniform of the revolution, and in the toilets, they played Fidel’s speeches loudly through speakers. The special of the day was the Che Guevara burger, and mojitos served in giant jugs. Castro’s was a popular theme pub with one purpose, to get young people fucked up on rum, but Carl wasn’t young, so he ordered a cup of coffee, and then another because the dancer was late. He should have known it would take an hour for her to get dressed and put her face on.

The dancer came through the door and spotted Carl sitting alone. She looked more relaxed than the night before, except for a bruise on her left cheek that even her heavy make-up couldn’t hide. “What happened to you?” he asked her as she sat down.

“After you leave, Sergey very angry,” she told him.

“Which one was Sergey? The one on the floor?”

“No, on floor was Ivan, he sick when he wake up, throw-up on floor. Sergey is other one.”

“Does Sergey hit you a lot?” Carl asked, and she just shrugged her shoulders. The waitress came to the table, and the dancer ordered orange juice and the Havana salad.

When the waitress was out of earshot, the dancer leaned across the table, “Now, may ask who you are?”

“It was my baby that Nadia was carrying,” he told her.

She squinted her eyes and studied him for a while.

“You not her type,” she told him.

“What is her type?” Carl asked.

“Very stupid and rich,” she told him. “You are rich?”

“Not really.”

“Hmmm, and you really private-eye, like in movies?”

“How could you know that,” Carl asked her.

“Nadia tell me,” and the dancer smiled at him, “but she say you have horrible beard.”

“I shaved it off the morning she died, she never saw me without it though. We weren’t on speaking terms the day she was killed.”

“Why, what you do to her?”

“I am not sure I did anything. Some days she would be angry at me for no obvious reason.”

“That just a Russian thing, too many cold winters,” the dancer told him offhandedly.

“But she wasn’t Russian, was she? Nadia was Serbian.”

“She tell you that?”

“No, somebody else did.”

“Better to be Russian, in this she was right, hard to get job for Serbian. And she have bad uncle, better she forget Serbia.”

“She told you about her uncle?”

“Sure, we sleep with customers together, nothing to hide between us.

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