Havana Bay

  His smile sealed. As he pressed against the table his shirt opened to a gold chain, body heat, the smell of stale cologne. He whispered, "You know, you're even better looking than Teresa."

  At that moment Ofelia suffered the fantasy that Renko was with her and that he picked up the German the way he had picked up Luna and rammed the German into the wall.

  "The doctor will make a thorough examination," Ofelia said and left the room.

  The detective room wasn't as empty when she went back. The Sharon Stone poster was back on the wall, and Teresa looked sideways at the plainclothes detectives, Soto and Tey, sharply dressed men who bent over the paperwork on their desks and exchanged smirks. If Ofelia had any other place to question the girl she would have used it.

  Teresa announced, "Singa tu madre. I'm not saying anything against my friends."

  "Good girl," Soto said. "With the right friends you don't have to say nothing."

  "Osorio has confused sex and crime," said Tey. " She's against both."

  "It's been so long, right?" said Soto.

  "I'd be happy to help her remember," offered Tey.

  "You can't touch me," Teresa told Ofelia. " I don't have to tell you nothing."

  "Don't listen to them." Ofelia felt her neck get hot.

  "Don't listen to them? They're not on my ass, you are. You're the bitch, not them. I make ten times what you make. Why would I listen to you?"

  "Congratulations, I am putting you on the official list of whores. You will be examined by a doctor and sent out of Havana."

  "You can't."

  "It's done."

  But when she went into the hall with Dora, all Ofelia could think of were her own daughters and she didn't have the heart to order Teresa's name onto the register.

  "Tell her I did, though," she said. "And have the doctor look at her. And have the doctor examine our tourist all over and draw some blood and make it painful."

  "So what is the point of what we're doing if we let her go?" Dora was sick of sweeping streets.

  "I'm not after girls, I am after corrupt police."

  "Then you're after men, and in the PNR there are a couple of us and thousands of them. From the top down, everybody winks. They think you're a fanatic and you know what the real problem is? You're not."

  Ofelia returned to the Casa de Amor because although she might have lost Teresa it was just possible that Lohmann's Italian friend and his girl hadn't yet left the motel. This time, she decided, she would question them right in the room, not even go close to the station house. If that was against procedure, well, procedure guaranteed humiliation and failure. She didn't need Dora along, she didn't need anyone. This was on her own.

  When Ofelia was angry she took steps two at a time. The rooms were set back between dividers for privacy's sake and hanging on the doorknob of the unit next to Lohmann's was a plastic tag that said do not disturb.

  The two boys were playing their endless table tennis, but otherwise no one was around. Maybe she was in luck. Maybe she was stupid. She certainly wasn't going to be appreciated, not if the girl was anything like Teresa. What poor Cuban girl wouldn't think she was in heaven at a motel like this? Then shopping at a boutique for a swimsuit that would show off her cute bottom? Or trying on cat-eyed Ray-Bans or a Gucci scarf?

  She knocked on the door. "Housekeeping."

  The radio still played. The pool was a blue lens. The boys played, the sound popping off their paddles. A breeze tugged on the lazy fronds. Ofelia took a deep breath and caught the faint smells of barnyard and butcher. There was no answer to her knock.

  "Police," she said.

  The door was unlocked but blocked and she had to use all her strength to enter, and since someone had turned the air-conditioner off and the temperature was in the eighties, it was like gaining admission to an oven of ripe smells of blood and body waste. In opening the door she had rolled a body to the side, and she tried to pick her way across a floor covered with a fallen chair, emptied bureau drawers, clothes and sheets to the drapes on the other side. She drew them open and all the light in the world flooded in.

  The body she had stepped over was a naked male, a dark-haired European with arms, back, flanks and scalp slashed. Ofelia had once seen the body of a man who had fallen into the blades of a combine, been chewed and spat out, which was what this man looked like, except that the wounds' individual lengths and curves were the unmistakable work of a machete. Lying on the bed was a naked female, arms and legs splayed, her head twisted like a dummy's and half sliced off. Bed and carpet were dark red as if someone had poured blood by the pail. A corona of blood spattered the wall above the headboard. But there was no broken furniture, no bloody smears of struggle on the walls.

  To be first at an undisturbed homicide, Dr. Blas always lectured, was a gift. If you were not a willing investigator, if you could not take advantage of the unique opportunity of being first on the scene, if you were not able to engage sensorially and intelligently, if your eyes or your mind closed even a little to the fading, ineffable shadow of a murderer, then you should not open the door. You should raise children, drive a bus, roll tobacco leaves, anything but steal that gift from men and women with the discipline and stomach for the job.

  Both bodies were hard with rigor mortis, thirty-six hours dead at least in Havana heat. The man's wounds looked defensive, administered while he crawled across the floor. If he was conscious enough to do that, why hadn't he cried out? Who had died first? Blood outlined the girl's legs. The hair of her head and pubis were the same honey color, and although her face was angled into the pillow, Ofelia recognized her as a smudged version of Hedy, the beautiful girl who had been possessed and danced through coals.

  Having done as much as she could without rubber gloves, Ofelia went to the bathroom, stepping around blood scuffs on the floor, and threw up in the toilet bowl. When she flushed the water swirled and backed up, a rising gorge of vomit on pink water. Before it overflowed she thrust her hand into the toilet throat as far as she could reach and freed a blood-soaked ball of toilet paper from the trap. Between dry heaves she laid what she found on a towel: a wadded Italian passport for a Franco Leo Mossa, 43, of Milan, and Cuban papers for a Hedy Dolores Infante, 25, of Havana. Also half of a photograph torn badly. The picture must have been taken on impulse at an airport curb amid a blur of taxis and suitcases and harried Russian faces. The subject was Renko, wearing a rueful smile and his black coat. Ofelia didn't know why, but her instinct was to put the photograph in her pocket before she staggered out to the bedroom, to the fresh air of the oceanside balcony and a view of neumáticos plying the sea.

  Chapter Sixteen

  * * *

  A pair of Chihuahuas led Arkady down the path, rolling soulful eyes at him, prancing around a poinsettia here, sniffing a headstone there, like a pair of tiny landlords until they led him under the hanging pods of a tamarind tree where three Chinese, stripped to the waist, were scrubbing a marble lid they had lifted off a sarcophagus. Erasmo perched inside the tomb with a sack of tools.

  "There aren't a lot of jobs where having no legs is an advantage," Erasmo said. "Working in a coffin happens to be one. You don't look happy."

  Arkady said, "I've just come from the Havana Yacht Club. You told me the Havana Yacht Club was a joke, just a few fishermen, you, Mongo and Pribluda. But the picture was taken at the Yacht Club and you never mentioned that the club actually existed."

  Erasmo frowned, dug his hand into his beard and scratched. "It does and it doesn't. The building is there, the beach is there, but it's hardly a club anymore. It's complicated."

  "Like Cuba?"

  "Like you. Why didn't you tell me you killed Rufo Pinero? I had to hear it on the street."

  "It was an accident."

  "An accident?"

  "Of a sort."

  "Yes, that's like saying Russian roulette is a game of a sort. So we do the same things in different ways. Anyway, I didn't lie to you. We did call ourselves the Havana Yacht Club as a joke
. It was funny at the time."

  "Some club. Pribluda may be dead, Mongo may be missing and you may be the last living member."

  "I admit, it's not funny when you say it."

  "Unless there are others. Are there any other members you haven't told me about?"

  "No."

  "Rufo?"

  "No."

  "Luna?"

  "No. The three of us, that's all. You know, you're pissing me off and you're making my friends very uneasy."

  The Chinese followed the conversation with an anxiety matched by their lack of comprehension. Erasmo coolly introduced Arkady to them, brothers named Liu with spiky black hair and cigarettes gripped between their teeth. Arkady took in the cemetery's quiet anarchy, a marble cross leaning on a Buddhist altar, tablets inscribed with Chinese characters and wrapped in morning glory, headstone photographs of the departed that peered through scummy ovals of glass. A nice place to die, Arkady thought, quiet, cool, picturesque.

  "So this is the ChineseCemetery?"

  "Yes, it is," Erasmo said. "I told the Lius you were an expert on fighting crime. That's why you're so angry. It makes them feel much better."

  "There's a lot of crime in a cemetery?"

  "In this one, yes."

  Now that Arkady noticed, many of the tombs were cracked and reinforced with cement seams and steel bands. Some of the disrepair had occurred over time and under the pressure of spreading roots, but there were also signs of vandalism, marble replaced by cinder blocks or a padlock on a vault's brass door, probably not to keep the dead in, Arkady realized.

  "Cubans don't like the Chinese?"

  "Cubans love the Chinese, that's the problem. And some Cubans need lucky bones."

  "For what?"

  "Ceremonies. If they want money they dig up the bones of a banker, if they want to get well they dig up the bones of a doctor."

  "That makes sense."

  "Unfortunately for the Chinese, their bones are supposed to be the luckiest. So this is where certain people come with their crowbars and shovels, which is very upsetting to Chinese families that revere their ancestors. Dead or alive, they want granddad in one piece. Little did I know that demolition expertise would prove so useful in civilian life. How did you know where to find me?"

  "Tico maintained radio silence but I got him to write it out." Arkady looked down at the coffin, where Erasmo had laid a drill, bell, welder's goggles and surgical mask on a towel. From an athletic bag Erasmo took a vial of something fine-grained and black. "Gunpowder?"

  "Just a touch. Life would be boring without it." Taking a break, the brothers Liu sliced up a papaya and sat down between tombstones to eat. The Chihuahuas curled up with the lions. Was this the "Chinese contact" that Pribluda had been talking about, a place to come for lucky bones?

  The problem was that he seemed to be going in reverse, knowing less all the time rather than more. He didn't know how or where Pribluda died, let alone why. The circle of Pribluda's acquaintances constantly expanded, but none of them had anything to do with the price of sugar, supposedly what the colonel had been investigating. Arkady had never before encountered such a variety of pristinely unrelated people and events: men in inner tubes, Americans on the run, a madman from Oriente, a ballerina, now Chinese bones and Chihuahuas. The truth was, Arkady thought, that apart from grave-robbing there was no suggestion of any crime at all, except for the attacks on him, and that was an error in timing; all they'd had to do was wait. Now? His head was clearing, the bruises on his legs had passed from blue to hopeful green, and the very shapelessness of evidence was interesting. He needed it to be interesting because while he was engaged he was like a man walking on deep black water. He needed to keep going.

  Erasmo pulled the mask over his nose and goggles over his eyes before lifting a can with a plastic lid.

  "More gunpowder?" Arkady asked.

  "A different explosive." Erasmo lifted the lid and shut it at once, as if taking a peek at plutonium. "Ground habaneros, the hottest chilies on earth. I defused all sorts of bombs in Africa. Bombs that looked like doorknobs, alarm clocks, toilet seats, toy planes, dolls. You have to be creative." He upended the empty can between his thighs and drilled through its bottom. Erasmo poured in gunpowder and tamped it down.

  "In your room I saw some pictures of you with..." Arkady tried out the gesture of the make-believe beard for the Name That Could Not Be Uttered just to feel Cuban.

  "Fidel," Erasmo said warily.

  "And another officer in glasses."

  "Our commander in Angola."

  "You won a lot of military decorations."

  "The ribbons? Oh, yes. Well, what would I rather have, the ribbons or my legs? I'll let you guess. I used to be so proud. Fidel said we would go to Africa and I saluted and said, 'At your orders, Comandante!' I didn't know he would be giving orders after we got there. Fidel was here in Havana looking at a map of Angola. We were in hills and rivers that didn't exist on Fidel's map, but it didn't matter, he gave orders to set up our forces wherever his finger landed. Sometimes we had to ignore him. When he found out he was furious. There was one little village, a speck that must have been on his map. He said we had to take it and use it as a battalion command post. We said it was just a couple of huts, a garage and a well. We could go around it and come back whenever we wanted, but Fidel said that unless the village was taken in twenty-four hours every battalion officer would be charged with treason. So, Tico and Luna and a boy named Richard and I went in to clear the way. Maybe this is a boring story?"

  "No."

  "Very well. The village was strung like a Christmas tree. Little plastic mines to pop through your foot. Bouncing Betties to cut you off at the waist. Claymores with trip wires to something as insignificant as an empty can you'd kick out of your way. There was a car in the garage, not with the key, that would have been too obvious. A '54 Ford station wagon with real wooden panels. You can't imagine how valuable a vehicle was in country like that. But just stepping into the garage meant digging up a whole daisy chain of little mines. Then to look underneath the car first with a mirror and then on your back. To pop the hood with a wire from a distance, to inspect the engine and make sure every wire's automotive, open the glove compartment, the trunk, power windows, seats, hubcaps. It was in beautiful condition. We cleared everyone else out of the garage so I could cross the wires. It started right off. It ran out of gas right away, but the battery was good and everything seemed fine until Richard kicked a tire. That was one place I hadn't looked, in the tire." Erasmo pushed a cardboard disk over the gunpowder.

  "That was the end of Richard. Plus, the bumper flew off spinning like a helicopter rotor and caught Tico. We radioed for the ambulance. On the way it hit a hole where we had dug out a mine and drove right into the minefield. Somehow it didn't touch a mine but that's where the ambulance was stuck while Tico was bleeding to death until Luna picked him up and ran right through the mines to the ambulance. And that's how we liberated a pisshole in Angola on special orders from the Comandante."

  "And how Tico became careful about tires."

  "He's very careful about tires."

  Erasmo dropped the can and Arkady retrieved it.

  "Can I help?"

  "No, thanks," Erasmo said. "Do you know the largest minefield in the world? The American base here at Guantanamo, thanks to the U.S. Marines and, especially, our Russian friends, who designed our side of the minefield and then took the plans home. No more help, please." He opened the can of chilies and poured them into the larger can. "Aha! When a grave robber opens this, there will be a deadly cloud awaiting him. Coughing, crying, sneezing, temporary blindness is, I think, a very humane way of dealing with grave robbers. Así, a Cuban solution to a Cuban problem."

  "Luna saving Tico is a different picture of the sergeant."

  "No, it's not. It's just the other side. People here have two sides, what you see and the opposite."

  "It's complicated?"

  "It's real. You don't understand. Cuba was
something. We had idealism, and we stood up to the most powerful, most vindictive country on earth. Fidel was great. But Cuba isn't a big enough country for him, and the rest of us can't be heroes forever. Stop asking questions, Arkady. For your own sake, go home."

  The Lius looked up expectantly; they may not have understood the words but they could tell when a conversation had wound to an end. The Chihuahuas blinked their marble-sized eyes, then tore after a lizard. They chased it up a bougainvillea vine to the peak of a waist-high pagoda and when the youngest Liu laughed and performed a karate kick, Arkady was reminded of something else.

  "Are there any martial arts dojos in Havana?"

  Erasmo said, "Chinatown."

  You had to block things out, Ofelia thought. She ignored the technicians collecting their small evidence first – clots, hairs, night bag, glasses, bottles of Havana Club – working their way up to plastic bags for bed-sheets and clothes. She paid no attention to the photographers working around the female sprawled in bed like a Naked Maja. All her focus was on Dr. Blas. His hands in waxy rubber gloves, he bent over the body by the door to show her why, although the male was painted in his own blood and the track on the carpet showed his agonizing, futile progress to the door, the dying man didn't cry for help.

  "The radio was on. People who take these rooms, as you told me, tend to make noise, and who knows how much alcohol they consumed? His carotid and peroneal arteries were both cut – however, he was alive enough to try to cover up while he was hacked by the machete. He was alive enough to make it to the door, probably after his assailant left. But he never called out. Why? It wasn't because of the radio." With the tip of a pencil he probed a dark spot under the dead man's Adam's apple and slid the pencil halfway in. "A hole in the trachea. With a hole in your windpipe you cannot say a word. There is no such wound on the neck of the female, she had her throat cut pure and simple. But the first blow to the male, I am sure, was this puncture."

  "Not made by a machete."