The late 50s in Cuba were so rich with glamour and conflict it’s a wonder more stories haven’t been set there. Such a time, such a place, and all these elements in a long, slow collision: the sordid glory of casino culture, the last crest of old-school Hollywood splendor, the vicious florescence of the Italian and Jewish mafias, the worldly style of the Cubans themselves and the gathering rumble of the Revolution, all playing out in a gorgeous city. Is there more in the way of material than this? A great narrative, an elegant and charismatic cast, a setting as alluring as any in the world; but we have little to show for it, in English anyway, aside from a slight Graham Greene novel and a few scenes in “The Godfather, Part II.” And here is Mayra Montero, a Cuban woman now living in Puerto Rico, and “Dancing to ‘Almendra,’ ” her ninth novel, lovingly translated by Edith Grossman: a flawless little book with a deceptively light touch, that covers exactly those years.  Montero’s novel is narrated by a man named Joaquín Porrata, a 22-year-old reporter living in Havana during the last days of Batista, who shows up for work one morning and finds he’s been assigned the story of a hippopotamus that has escaped from the zoo and been shot to death. As it happens, that same night the mafia capo Umberto Anastasia was murdered in a hotel barber’s shop in New York City, and from a rather strange little zookeeper named Juan Bulgado (or Johnny Angel, or Johnny Lamb: in Havana even a zookeeper can dream), Porrata discovers that the two killings are related. Rebuffed by his boss, who wants to keep him on the entertainment beat, he takes his notes to a rival paper, which sends him first through the Cuban underworld, then to New York and then to the upstate town of Apalachin, where a mob summit has been interrupted by the police, though not quickly enough to spare Anastasia a death sentence from his peers. Along the way Porrata encounters a woman named Yolanda, a small-town refugee who ran away with the circus, where she lost her arm serving as the model in a magician’s sword-through-a-box trick. She’s rumored to have a lover of her own, Santo Trafficante — himself a Mafia boss and a very scary man. Nevertheless Porrata pursues her as he pursues the story, and winds up getting them both, though not without being roughed up a few times along the way. In fact, between the animals in the zoo and the mobsters running the casinos, the book gets very bloody.  The Apalachin meeting and the death of Anastasia are real events in the history of organized crime, the hippopotamus I don’t know about, but Porrata’s character is presumably invented: that noise you hear is the sound of fact and fiction rubbing together, and they make a remarkable music. Montero has been a newspaper reporter herself, and she brings to the story a reporter’s emphasis on narrative momentum and easy detail, while leaving behind a reporter’s reliance on boilerplate and cliché. Her writing is swift and agile; it dances like a tough kid in a good suit — well pressed but never boring, and never calling attention to the strength that lies behind it. Not a single sentence in the book stands out as being special or quotable, but none seem flat, either; they roll past you without ever knocking you over, and if you think that’s an easy feat to pull off, I’d ask you to reconsider. It isn’t often done.  And then the book divides and gets more interesting still. Yolanda starts telling her own story, in chapters interspersed with Porrata’s, and where his voice is full of callow bravado, hers is more romantic, musical and melancholy, though if anything it’s even more controlled. Her paragraphs murmur on for pages without a break, at times she drops conjunctions and slips into comma-splices, she’s confessing and she can’t stop herself. This, too, is a virtuosic turn, the more impressive for its understatement: it takes a perfect sense of pace, such that one event follows rhythmically upon the last, and the passing of time and its consequences fall neatly into sentences, without remainder or recourse to any larger structuring device. If it’s handled gracefully, as it is in “Dancing to ‘Almendra,’ ” you scarcely notice it: the book canters along, confident in the pure pleasure of its own momentum, and before you know it you’ve covered more ground than you would have thought possible. The nearest comparison I can think of, though it jumps back a few centuries and across the border between languages, is to some of the short stories of Heinrich von Kleist.  The long italicized sections of Yolanda’s story describe in some detail her youth, her carny life, the loss of her arm and her affair with Roderico, a leprous bisexual choreographer at the Tropicana. In paraphrase, it sounds like heavy weather, but in the book itself, leavened as it is with Porrata’s more boisterous story, and with the undeniably appealing backdrop of crime, revolution and money, it feels anything but forced. There’s a certain polysexuality at work here (Porrata’s sister, a fondly drawn but marginal figure, is a distinctly mannish teenage lesbian), an underlying rankness and humidity. Much of the book is summoned out of episodes of sensation: meals eaten, beds slept in, city lights and the smell of tobacco and perfume. The danzon for which the book is named appears and then vanishes again, as do several black-and-white movies, the injections of gold that Roderico takes to cure his disease and (the name itself is like an incantation) Idlewild airport. But Montero doesn’t lose sight of the story for a second. The book skips back and forth, between Porrata’s tale and Yolanda’s, between Cuba and New York, between a hard-boiled gangster story and a slightly Gothic love story, until in time they seem to merge into one voice, irrefutable but split between two characters, with two different histories and two different fates. It rises a little, and then emerges, suddenly and startlingly, out into the full sunlight of historical fact, as Porrata finds himself facing appointments with a pair of super-real characters: George Raft, who’s down in Havana in his capacity as part-owner and shill for the Capri hotel and casino, and Meyer Lansky, who, in that time and place, is God.  For myself, I am tired of gangster stories and wary of grotesques, impatient with impatient writing and uninterested in realism of any kind — not this novel’s obvious audience, but I devoured it with absolute delight, and I’m looking forward to reading it again, and to reading anything Montero might come up with next. It’s tempting to think in categories — it’s tempting to me, anyway: so sue me — but a good novel denies them, nimbly and without visible effort. This novel is great fun to read, and a paradoxical thing to contemplate. When I was done, I wasn’t sure if it was an especially well-written genre story, or a literary book based upon an especially raffish plot. Perhaps there’s no difference between the two, after all.  Jim Lewis’s most recent novel is “The King Is Dead.” He lives in Austin, Tex.
In Mayra Montero’s novel, set in the late 50s in Cuba, a reporter follows a lead connecting the murders of a hippopotamus and a mafia capo.