e got back to our room without incident and with no more than a dozen words between the two of us. Chutsky’s lack of wordiness was proving to be a really charming personality trait, since the less he talked, the less I had to pretend I was interested, and it saved wear on my facial muscles. And in fact, the few words he did say were so pleasant and winning that I was almost ready to like him. “Lemme put this in the room,” he said, holding up the briefcase. “Then we’ll think about dinner.” Wise and welcome words; since I would not be out in the wonderful dark light of the moon tonight, dinner would be a very acceptable substitute.

We took the elevator up and strolled down the hall to the room, and when we got inside, Chutsky put the briefcase carefully on the bed and sat beside it, and it occurred to me that he had brought it with us to the rooftop bar for no reason I could see, and was now being rather careful of it. Since curiosity is one of my few flaws, I decided to indulge it and find out why.

“What’s so important about the maracas?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a single damn thing.”

“Then why are you carrying them all over Havana?”

He held the briefcase down with his hook and opened it with his hand. “Because,” he said, “they’re not maracas anymore.” And sliding his hand into the briefcase, he pulled out a very serious-looking automatic pistol. “Hey, presto,” he said.

I thought of Chutsky lugging the briefcase all over town to meet Ee-bangh, who then came in with an identical briefcase—both of which were shoved under the table while we all sat and listened to “Guantanamera.’

“You arranged to switch briefcases with your friend,” I said.

“Bingo.”

It does not rank among the smartest things I ever said, but I was surprised, and what came out of my mouth was, “But what’s it for?”

Chutsky gave me such a warm, tolerant, patronizing smile that I would gladly have turned the pistol on him and pulled the trigger. “It’s a pistol, buddy,” he said. “What do you think it’s for?”

“Um, self-defense?” I said.

“You do remember why we came here, right?” he said.

“To find Brandon Weiss,” I said.

“FIND him?” Chutsky demanded. “Is that what you’re telling yourself? We’re going to FIND him?” He shook his head. “We’re here to kill him, buddy. You need to get that straight in your head. We can’t just find him, we have to put him down. We’ve got to kill him. What’d you think we were going to do? Bring him home with us and give him to the zoo?”

“I guess I thought that sort of thing was frowned on here,” I said. “I mean, this isn’t Miami, you know.”

“It isn’t Disneyland, either,” he said, unnecessarily, I thought. “This isn’t a picnic, buddy. We’re here to kill this guy, and the sooner you get used to that idea the better.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“There ain’t no but,” he said. “We’re gonna kill him. I can see you have a problem with that.”

“Not at all,” I said.

He apparently didn’t hear me—either that or he was already launched into a preexisting lecture and couldn’t stop himself. “You can’t be squeamish about a little blood,” he went on. “It’s perfectly natural. We all grow up hearing that killing is wrong.”

It kind of depends on who, I thought, but did not say.

“But the rules are made by people who couldn’t win without ’em. And anyway, killing isn’t always wrong, buddy,” he said, and oddly enough he winked. “Sometimes it’s something you have to do. And sometimes, it’s somebody who deserves it. Because either a whole lot of other people will die if you don’t do it, or maybe it’s get him before he gets you. And in this case—it’s both, right?”

And although it was very odd to hear this rough version of my lifelong creed from my sister’s boyfriend, sitting on the bed in a hotel room in Havana, it once again made me appreciate Harry, both for being ahead of his time and also for being able to say all this in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was cheating at Solitaire. But I still couldn’t warm to the idea of using a gun. It just seemed wrong, like washing your socks in the baptismal font at church.

But Chutsky was apparently very pleased with himself. “Walther, nine-millimeter. Very nice weapons.” He nodded and reached into the briefcase again and pulled out a second pistol. “One for each of us,” he said. He flipped one of the guns to me and I caught it reflexively. “Think you can pull the trigger?”

I do know which end of a pistol to hold on to, whatever Chutsky might think. After all, I grew up in a cop’s house, and I worked with cops every day. I just didn’t like the things—they are so impersonal, and they lack real elegance. But he had thrown it at me as something of a challenge, and on top of everything else that had happened, I was not about to ignore it. So I ejected the clip, worked the action one time, and held it out in the firing position, just like Harry had taught me. “Very nice,” I said. “Would you like me to shoot the television?”

“Save it for the bad guy,” Chutsky said. “If you think you can do it.”

I tossed the gun on the bed beside him. “Is that really your plan?” I asked him. “We wait for Weiss to check into the hotel and then play O.K. Corral with him? In the lobby, or at breakfast?”

Chutsky shook his head sadly, as if he had tried and failed to teach me how to tie my shoes. “Buddy, we don’t know when this guy is going to turn up, and we don’t know what he’s going to do. He may even spot us first.” He raised both eyebrows at me, as if to say, Ha—didn’t think of that, did you?

“So we shoot him wherever we find him?”

“The thing is, to just be ready, whatever happens,” he said. “Ideally, we get him off someplace quiet and do it. But at least we’re ready.” He patted the briefcase with his hook. “Iván brought us a couple of other things, just in case, too.”

“Like land mines?” I said. “Maybe a flame thrower?”

“Some electronic stuff,” he said. “State-of-the-art stuff. For surveillance. We can track him, find him, listen in on him—with this stuff we can hear him fart from a mile away.”

I really did want to get into the spirit of things here, but it was very hard to show any interest in Weiss’s digestive process, and I hoped it wasn’t absolutely essential for Chutsky’s plan. In any case, his entire James Bond approach was making me uncomfortable. It may be very wrong of me, but I began to appreciate just how lucky I had been so far in life. I had managed very well with only a few shiny blades and a hunger—nothing state-of-the-art, no vague plots, no huddling in foreign hotel rooms awash with uncertainty and firepower. Just happy, carefree, relaxing carnage. Certainly, it seemed primitive and even slapdash in the face of all this high-tech steel-nerved preparation, but it was at least honest and wholesome labor. None of this waiting around spitting testosterone and polishing bullets. Chutsky was taking all the fun out of my life’s work.

Still, I had asked for his help, and now I was stuck with it. So there was really nothing to do but put the best possible face on things and get on with it. “It’s all very nice,” I said, with an encouraging smile that did not even fool me. “When do we start?”

Chutsky snorted and put the guns back in the briefcase. He held it up to me, dangling it from his hook. “When he gets here,” he said. “Put this in the closet for now.”

I took the briefcase from him and carried it to the closet. But as I reached to open the door I heard a faint rustling of wings somewhere in the distance and I froze. What is it? I asked silently. There was a slight inaudible twitch, a raising of awareness, but no more.

So I reached into the briefcase and got my ridiculous gun, holding it at the ready as I reached for the closet’s doorknob. I opened the door—and for a moment I could do nothing but stare into the unlit space and wait for an answering darkness to spread protective wings over me. It was an impossible, surreal, dream-time image—but after staring at it for what seemed like an awfully long time, I had to believe it was true.

It was Rogelio, Chutsky’s friend from the front desk, who was going to tell us when Weiss checked in. But it certainly didn’t look like he was going to tell us much of anything, unless we listened to him through a Ouija board. Because if appearances were any guide at all, judging by the belt so tightly wrapped around his neck and the way his tongue and eyes bulged out, Rogelio was extremely dead.

“What is it, buddy?” Chutsky said.

“I think Weiss has already checked in,” I said.

Chutsky lumbered up from the bed and over to the closet. He stared for a moment and then said, “Shit.” He reached his hand in and felt for a pulse—rather unnecessarily, I thought, but I suppose there’s a protocol for these things. He felt no pulse, of course, and mumbled, “Fucking shit.” I didn’t see how repetition would help, but of course he was the expert, so I just watched as he slid a hand into each of Rogelio’s pockets in turn. “His passkey,” he said. He put that into his pocket. He turned out the usual junk—keys, a handkerchief, a comb, some money. He looked carefully at the cash for a moment. “Canadian twenty here,” he said. “Like somebody tipped him for something, huh?”

“You mean Weiss?” I said.

He shrugged. “How many homicidal Canadians you know?”

It was a fair question. Since the NHL season had ended a few months ago, I could only think of one—Weiss.

Chutsky pulled an envelope out of Rogelio’s jacket pocket. “Bingo,” he said. “Mr. B. Weiss, room 865.” He handed the envelope to me. “I’m guessing it’s complimentary drink tickets. Open it up.”

I peeled back the flap and pulled out two oblongs of cardboard. Sure enough: two complimentary drinks at the Cabaret Parisien, the hotel’s famous cabaret. “How did you guess?” I said.

Chutsky straightened up from his ghoulish search. I fucked up,” he said. “When I told Rogelio it was Weiss’s birthday, all he could think was to make the hotel look good, and maybe pick up a tip.” He held up the Canadian twenty dollar bill. “This is a month’s pay,” he said. “You can’t blame him.” He shrugged. “So I fucked up, and he’s dead. And our ass is deep in the shit.”

Even though he had clearly not thought through that image, I got his point. Weiss knew we were here, we had no idea where he was or what he was up to, and we had a very embarrassing corpse in the closet.

“All right,” I said, and for once I was glad to have his experience to lean on—which was assuming, of course, that he had experience at fucking up and finding strangled bodies in his closet, but he was certainly more knowledgeable about it than I was. “So what do we do?”

Chutsky frowned. “First, we have to check his room. He’s probably run for it, but we’d look really stupid if we didn’t check.” He nodded at the envelope in my hand. “We know his room number, and he doesn’t necessarily know that we know. And if he is there—then we have to, what’d you call it, play O.K. Corral on his ass.”

“And if he’s not there?” I said, because I, too, had the feeling that Rogelio was a farewell gift and Weiss was already sprinting for the horizon.

“If he’s not in his room,” Chutsky said, “and even if he IS in his room and we take him out—either way, I’m sorry to say it, buddy, but our vacation is over.” He nodded at Rogelio. “Sooner or later they find this, and then it’s big trouble. We gotta get the hell out of Dodge.”

“But what about Weiss?” I said. “What if he’s already gone?”

Chutsky shook his head. “He’s got to run for his life, too,” he said. “He knows we’re after him, and when they find Rogelio’s body, somebody will remember them together—I think he’s already gone, heading for the hills. But just in case, we gotta check his room. And then beat feet out of Cuba, muy rápido.“

I had been terribly afraid he would have some high-tech plan for getting rid of Rogelio’s body, like dipping it in laser solution in the bathtub, so I was very relieved to hear that for once he was speaking sound common sense. I had seen almost nothing of Havana except the inside of a hotel room and the bottom of a mojito glass, but it was clearly time to head for home and work on Plan B. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Chutsky nodded. “Good man,” he said. “Grab your pistol.”

I took the cold and clunky thing and shoved it into the waistband of my pants, pulling the awful green jacket over it, and as Chutsky closed the closet door I headed for the hallway.

“Put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door,” he said. An excellent idea, proving that I was right about his experience. At this point it would be very awkward to have a maid come in to wash the coat hangars. I hung the sign on the doorknob and Chutsky followed me out of the room and down the hallway to the stairs.

It was very, very strange to feel myself stalking something in the brightly lit hall, no moon churning through the sky over my shoulder, no bright blade gleaming with anticipation, and no happy hiss from the dark back seat as the Passenger prepared to take the wheel; nothing at all except the lump-thump of Chutsky’s feet, the real one and the metal one alternating, and the sound of our breathing as we found the fire door and climbed up the stairs to the eighth floor. Room 865, just as I had guessed, overlooked the front of the hotel, a perfect spot for Weiss to place his camera. We stood outside the door quietly while Chutsky held his pistol with his hook and fumbled out Rogelio’s passkey. He handed it to me, nodded at the door, and whispered, “One. Two—three.” I shoved the key in, turned the doorknob, and stepped back as Chutsky rushed into the room with his gun held high, and I followed along behind, self-consciously holding my pistol at the ready, too.

I covered Chutsky as he kicked open the bathroom door, then the closet, and then relaxed, tucking the pistol back into his pants. “And there it is,” he said, looking at the table by the window. A large fruit basket sat there, which I thought was a little ironic, considering what Weiss was known to do with them. I went over and looked; happily, there were no entrails or fingers inside. Just some mangoes, papayas, and so on, and a card that said, Feliz Navidad. Hotel Nacional. A somewhat standard message; nothing at all out of the ordinary. Just enough to get Rogelio killed.

We looked through the drawers and under the bed, but there was nothing at all there. Aside from the fruit basket, the room was as empty as the inside of Dexter on the shelf marked soul.

Weiss was gone.