On the trail of a lost masterpiece

On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a handful of them were Jews in flight from the Third Reich. After a dismal farrago of diplomatic obstruction, bare-faced corruption among local officials and the incitement by Nazi propaganda of anti-Semitic prejudice ‘even’ (as Leonardo Padura sorrowfully puts it) ‘among the open and happy Cubans’, only a score of refugees could disembark. The US refused entry to the rest. Their ship of despair sailed back to Europe.

Around this shaming episode, the genial gadfly of Cuban literature has built a digressive, eccentric but deeply absorbing novel: part-detective story, part-historical enquiry, part-reflection on the ‘sacred’ qualities of great art and human freedom. Best known for the ‘Havana Quartet’ of crime yarns, featuring his maverick investigator Mario Conde, Padura is a singular and admirable figure. Deaf to the siren call of exile, he has stayed put in his Havana neighbourhood of Mantilla to write novels that comprise a ribald, sensuous, offbeat chronicle of his nation as the revolutionary ideals of the Castro generation gave way to ‘a country falling apart in plain sight’. ‘Disillusioned and cynical’, its long-suffering folk can now feel both ‘freer and masters of themselves’: free to get rich, or go to hell just as they choose.

Now a freelance book-dealer (Havana’s mildewed private libraries abound in antiquarian gems), ex-Inspector Conde meets a ‘pony-tailed behemoth’ of an American artist called Elias Kaminsky in 2007. Elias’s father Daniel had come to Havana from Poland in the 1930s to join his leather-working Uncle Joseph (‘Pepe the Purseman’) in a ‘rowdy Jewish paradise’ of artisans and shopkeepers; most would quit Cuba when the revolution turned communist. Daniel’s doomed parents, we learn, arrived and departed on the ill-starred St Louis, but left behind an authentic Rembrandt — a study for a head of Christ.