He named the place Kuba, which is what the natives—who appeared to greet him from beyond the green jungle drapery—said it was called. And what the Germans, fond of the letter K, still call it. The Admiral napped in a hammock strung between a palm and a paw-paw, tired after such a long journey, lulled by the syncopated crash of waves and the sultry and healthful air, happy in his own genius and exactly where he wanted to be. True beauty and the unknown are alike, in having no precedents. You recognize them when you see them, if you have such a gift of seeing. Numeric calculations are no match for life’s unrest. Far superior is knowing the world is a pear, a violin, a breast. By such poetic and razor precision, the Admiral mapped an unmappable world.

“A nothing. A stranger who left me here when I was thirteen.” She and her mother had ducked into the Tokio from the blinding sun of midday Havana. It was so dark inside the club that Rachel K could barely see. They waited at the Pam-Pam Room bar until a manager appeared from a back office, trailing Cigar smoke. He breathed audibly and in his labored breath she understood that he’d taken her on. That was ten years ago. She’d been at the Tokio so long now that it was a kind of mother. It gave her life a shape. Other girls passed through, regarded cabaret dancing as momentary and sordid, always hoping for some politician or businessman to rescue them. Because the Tokio gave her life a shape and never sent her fretting over imagined alternatives, Rachel K was free in a way the other girls weren’t. She had longings as well, but they weren’t an illness to be cured. They were part of who she was, and it was these very longings that reinforced the deeper reconciliation to her situation.

An executive of the United Fruit Company, a Mr. something Stites—she couldn’t remember his first name and simply called him “you”—took her east to Oriente in his private plane. She’d been hesitant to go. He seemed like a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot. “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they hedgehopped over green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres. Those are our boats, anchored off shore there. You see them?” Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all, she decided. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire. They landed at company headquarters and she ran through a canopy of banana groves near the airport, trees with long, flat leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas, a strange purple flower dangling off the end of each cluster. She put her hand around a banana stalk. “They’re full of water, pure water,” the executive said. It felt like a chilled human limb with a cold pulse.

Marcel bequeathed his aunt Leonie’s couch to a bordello, and whenever he visited the place, to tease Rachel of my Lord (but never buy her services), it unnerved him to see tarts flopped on its pink crushed velvet cushions, even if there was maybe nothing more perfect and appropriate than pink velvet plush flattening under a whore’s ass. De la Mazière was different. It didn’t matter to him whether he reclined on plush furniture in the lobby of the Ritz or in a squalid St. Denis cathouse. Ate his steak at Maxim’s or at a colonial outpost in Djibouti, a backwater of salt factories and scorching temperatures on the bacterial mouth of the Red Sea. Properly seared steak is everywhere the same. A traitor satisfies his tastes, gets his high- and his low-grade pleasures wherever he can. In Havana, de la Mazière found occupied Paris all over again. Amidst its nude and adorned girls, morphine slushees and luxury hotel suites, he sensed a vague but unshakeable dread darkening the reverie and lawlessness. Despite the city’s obvious, surreal wealth, he sniffed wretched poverty. Tall and neon-pulsing casinos staking the heart of a metropolis ringed in desperation: miles and miles of neighborhoods with no electricity, no running water, and smokily typhoid trash fires. It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes. A sultrier climate and starrier nights, purple-mouthed girls, a cinema palace with a retractable roof. They even had Obelisk and Olympia books on Calle Belga, and obsolete French pornography—not sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but displayed at the bookstalls, their pages riffling in the damp ocean breeze.

Rachel K was leading President Prio, “Handsome,” she called him, as if it were his name, through the Pam-Pam Room to his own VIP booth. He was not, in truth, so handsome, but he was president and vain. She and Handsome passed the mysterious Frenchman’s table. A Frenchman who might have been, in fact, quite handsome. He seemed confident, amused, self-contained. A perfect loner. He’d been coming back, and each evening he was there, his presence distracted her, like he knew that she knew that he was watching her, though pretending not to, and his gaze colored her every movement. Just walking through the room, she was performing for an audience of one attentive Frenchman. It was strange, like he was whispering something and she could hear it even if she couldn’t translate into language what he said. She sensed a tacit agreement between them, that they would continue for some time with this ritual of him watching her and pretending not to, whispering a silent message more voluminous, airy and complex than language could transmit. She felt sure it was better to draw out the spell than risk breaking it prematurely. And anyway, she was with Handsome, her favorite of the revolving door of presidents. They sat together in a private booth, and he gave her an opal pendant and a silk dress with a secret pocket. She kissed his mustache and let him practice his soliloquies on her.

All men at the Tokio asked this. What do you like? It was part of the tête-à-tête of her profession, but what the men wanted was a limited variety of set responses: I like pleasing you. I like squirming on your lap. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But she figured that the Frenchman, with his bemused half-smile, was too clever to want such an obvious put-on. He seemed to understand flirtation—real flirtation, and not a bluntly performed simulation of it. She suspected that if she said “I like squirming on your lap,” he’d surely laugh his head off, and at her expense.

“I like those few days of the year when it’s cold here, at the end of hurricane season,” she said. “It’s cold enough you need a sweater. And at night, blankets. But I don’t fall asleep with blankets over me. I leave them down at the end of the bed and make myself fall asleep uncovered. When I wake up later in the night, freezing cold, I reach down and pull up all the blankets.”