Havana Bay

"No, the wound is perfectly round. Still, this sort of mess is typical of the 'crime of passion.' You did well to keep the hotel calm, and you were lucky to find the documents the way you did."

  Which was Blas's sly way of saying he knew she had been ill in the toilet. The doctor was at ease with death in a way she, it was becoming clear, never would be. A body that had been cut up was a flower in bloom, releasing a smell that lodged like beads of blood in the sinuses and a taste that coated the tongue. All the same, she had made a sketch and notes to hand over to whomever the Ministry of the Interior sent over; this was no longer a case of prostitution, and the ministry didn't generally leave violent crimes involving foreign visitors to mere detectives of the PNR.

  Blas said, "I'll examine the sexual aspect, too. She was a prostitute."

  Ofelia looked at the bed. For a girl with her head half sliced off Hedy looked remarkably serene, neatly edged in blood, sheets hardly rumpled. "The killer didn't have sex with her."

  "You kill a girl in bed, that's sexual to me."

  A little insight there, Ofelia thought.

  "I saw the female last night at a Santeria ceremony."

  "What is the matter with you? You have so much potential, why do you indulge in such mumbo jumbo?"

  "The girl was possessed."

  "Ridiculous."

  "You've never been possessed?"

  Blas wiped his pencil. "Of course not."

  "It happened to me once. They had to tell me later." The entire night had remained a blank to her.

  "Was this Italian at the ceremony?"

  "No."

  "Fine. Then she came somewhere else later and picked him up here. If I were you I wouldn't get into Santeria unless there is a very good reason. We are at a hotel that, wrongly or rightly, specializes in tourists. Should we tell everyone there are religious fanatics going from room to room killing people?"

  "What do you think the Russian will say?"

  "Renko? Why should he say anything?"

  "He was at the ceremony last night. He saw the girl."

  "He'll still say nothing because we won't tell him. Do you think the Russians would inform us of every murder?" Blas ran the waxy fingers of his gloved hand down the back of the Italian's legs, hamstrung so that the dead man had to drag them as he crawled. "Renko is not our colleague. We don't know really what he is. The fact that an investigator would come to Havana is a sign of something else going on. A better photograph of Pribluda is all I want from him."

  The photograph of Renko at the airport resided in her pocket. With all the confusion in the room there was still time to rediscover it.

  She asked, "Did Sergeant Luna ever show you a picture of Renko?"

  "No." Blas ran his hand up the dead man's arms. "Right-handed by the musculature. Lovely fingernails."

  A chevron of deep cuts down the dead man's back indicated that the attacker had stood over him and hacked right and left. Ofelia considered mentioning the two round bruises she'd found on Renko's arm, but it seemed somehow a breach of trust.

  "Perhaps we should reexamine the dead Russian. Is it possible he was struck by lightning? It did rain that week."

  "Only there was no lightning on the bay. I'm ahead of you. I checked the meteorological record for lightning and the body for burns. Don't worry about Renko." Blas pinched the arm for stiffness. "I have dealt with Russians. Every one, including women with whom I was intimate, was a spy. Each was the exact opposite of what he or she claimed to be." He tucked a smile into his beard, and at that moment looked to Ofelia like a man too fond of his memories. "What does Renko claim to be?"

  "A fool."

  "His case may be an exception."

  Blas turned the body onto its back. Loss of blood ended in stupefaction, and although his hair twisted in matted strips, the expression on the Italian's face was of someone yielding to sleep. Ofelia brushed hair from an oblong scab at the hairline.

  "It looks like he bumped his head a few days ago," Blas said. "The least of his problems now."

  "Who does he remind you of?"

  "No one."

  "How would you describe him?"

  Blas cocked his head like a carpenter delivering an estimate. "European, forty to fifty, medium height, hair black, eyes brown, high forehead, incipient widow's peak."

  "Renko?"

  "Now that you mention it."

  They had to shift the body from the door as an investigating team from the ministry arrived, led by Captain Arcos and Sergeant Luna. Arcos gawked at the body on the floor. Luna went to the foot of the bed and stared down at Hedy. His skin went gray, and as his lips spread he breathed through his teeth while Ofelia delivered her statement. She wanted to ask, Where is your ice pick? Instead she slipped away while Blas took over.

  The Casa de Amor had emptied. At the sight of PNR Ladas and an IML forensics van with scales of justice painted on the door the Casa's guests returned just long enough to grab their overnight bags and run. At the bottom of the stairs Ofelia found a hose and washed first the soles of her shoes and then her face and hands.

  The criminal laboratory of the Ministry of the Interior was in the Antiguo Hotel Via Blanca, a nineteenth-century brownstone palace erected in an erroneous burst of Spain's imperial confidence just before the first Cuban Revolution. A somber Iberian mood still resided in the building's dark walls and narrow windows.

  While Blas's Instituto de Medicina Legal carried out autopsies the laboratories of Minint analyzed drugs and arson, ballistics and explosives, fingerprints, documents and currency. The work was done for the PNR, but the uniform was military fatigues.

  "Fidel loves uniforms," her mother always claimed. "Put someone in uniform and you've created an idiot who watches his neighbors and says, 'How did he get that dollar? How did she get those chickens?'" Her mother would laugh so hard she'd have to waddle to the water closet. " 'Socialismo o Muerte?' Please inform Fidel it's not 'either-or.'"

  In the evidence room, weapons were labeled and kept on shelving that on the underside still bore stencils of the FBI. The rifles were farmers' shotguns; anything military was recirculated back to the army or militia. Enough machetes to clear a cane field, axes and knives and homemade curiosities: a mortar barrel made from bamboo, sugarcane shaved into spears. On opposite shelves lay incidental evidence: bagged clothes, envelopes of rings and earrings, centavos in jars, shoes, sandals, a freshly tagged black swimming flipper and an inner tube.

  Someone had rinsed the flipper, and when Ofelia held it to the light she saw the faintest charring inside the strap, which could have been her imagination or Renko's influence. She replaced the flipper carefully, as if putting off a question.

  She went to the records room, where a haze of paper dander hung under fluorescent lights. The two working computers at the table were being used, but in a carrel behind stacks of volumes tied with faded ribbon she found a third, where she pulled up the file on her friend Maria.

  Maria Luz Romero Holmes, age: 22, address: Vapor 224, Vedado, La Habana, charged with solicitation outside that address. Jose Romero Gomez, 22, same address, charged with assault. There was more: marital and educational status, employment, and the statement of the witness.

  I was walking up Vapor to the university when this woman (indicating Maria Romero) came out her door and asked the time. Then she asked where I was going and placed her hand on my member. I said, to the university. When she tried to arouse me I said no, I wasn't interested, I didn't have the time. That's' when she began screaming and this man (indicating José Romero) rushed out of the house, cursing and swinging a lead pipe at me. I defended myself until the police came along.

  Signed,

  Rufo Pinero Perez

  It was Rufo Pinero's name that had prodded her memory. A former boxer innocently headed to the university. For a lecture on poetry? Ofelia wondered. Nuclear science?

  The police photograph of Maria showed her wet with tears but defiant. In his photograph her husband's eyes were dark slits, his nose split, his jaw
swollen large as a gourd.

  The statement of the witness is corroborated by this arresting officer, who was also threatened and assaulted by the Romero couple in the course of his duty.

  Signed,

  Sergeant Facundo Luna, PNR

  Ofelia remembered how Maria had said a plastic sheet had been placed over the rear seat of the police car because Luna knew he would be transporting people covered in blood, and how Rufo had taken cigars out of the police car's glove compartment, cigars he had put in beforehand so they wouldn't be damaged during the scuffle. Luna and Rufo planned ahead.

  She thought she knew what had happened at the Casa de Amor. Blas had suggested a crime of passion, a Cuban boyfriend who killed the Italian and the Cuban girl in a fit of uncontrollable anger. But what Ofelia saw in her mind was Franco Mossa and Hedy drinking in the dark, dancing to the radio, laughing. It wasn't likely Hedy spoke much Italian, but how much did she need? She retired to the bathroom, emerged undressed, a busty honey-colored girl. She slipped into bed, and as he took his turn in the bathroom she slipped right out again and opened the balcony door for a friend. The Italian turned off the bathroom light and, half blind, walked into the darkened bedroom. Hedy couldn't have seen much. She'd have heard the sucking sound of the ice pick as it was pulled from the Italian's neck, though. What had Hedy thought they were up to? Extortion was the usual game with tourists. She would have been silent and surprised when the machete whistled out of the dark and cut her head half off her shoulders. The killer must have been as bloody as a slaughterhouse wall when he was done. The question was, Why the photograph of the Russian? Who had carried it, Hedy or her friend? Was there a moment when he turned on the bathroom light and saw to his own surprise that he had butchered an Italian named Franco, not a Russian named Renko? Since she was on the machine already, she ran a search for other connections between Rufo Pinero and Facundo Luna. Besides Maria's case, two files showed up. Four years earlier a group of criminals had gathered to distribute drugs under the pretense of organizing a political opposition. When members of the community became aware of this plan, they burst into the ringleader's house and demanded he surrender the drugs. In a scuffle provoked by the ringleader and his family, two patriots who had to defend themselves were Rufo Pinero and Facundo Luna. More recently a cell of so-called democrats had staged a rally with the true intent of releasing infectious diseases, only to be physically barred by vigilant citizens, including the alert Luna and Pinero.

  Ofelia felt that Cubans should be allowed to fight their enemies because the gangsters in Miami would stop at nothing: assassination, bombing, propaganda. For Cuba to even exist took vigilance. However, the role of Rufo and Facundo in these cases made Ofelia uneasy. She turned off the computer half wishing she hadn't turned it on in the first place.

  On her way out, she discovered the officers who had been working at the table were gone. Sitting alone was Sergeant Luna. She was surprised he had left the Casa de Amor already. His arms were crossed, stretching his shirt across his chest. His face hung in the shadow of his cap as he worked his jaw from side to side. His chair was turned, half blocking the way to the door.

  Suddenly she was back in Hershey, in the cattle fields where the egrets came from their roosts along the river. The birds were as white as shavings of soap, and as they crossed the carbon-black smoke that lifted from the chimneys of the sugar mill her anxiety was for the egrets' purity. Nevertheless they would float in and stalk the cattle fields, impervious to dirt. She was so busy watching them that she didn't notice that the bull had been let into the field, and the person who had led the bull in hadn't seen her. The bull saw her, though.

  The bull was the largest animal she'd ever seen. Milky white with downward twisting horns, creamy curls between the horns, shoulders bloated with muscle, a pink sac down to his knees, eyes red with the indolent torpor of a violent king. Not dumb, however, not in this situation. Because he ruled. And he waited for her to make her move.

  But something distracted it. Ofelia turned her head and saw a figure in black that had jumped the fence and was waving and hopping from foot to foot. It was the town priest, a pale man who had always seemed so sad. His cassock flapped around him as he laughed and goaded the bull, ran in a circle around it and threw clods until it charged. Lifting his cassock, the priest took the longest strides Ofelia had ever seen. He dived over the fence ahead of the bull, which drove a deep-rooted post half over and went on savaging the wood in frustration while Ofelia raced to the part of the fence nearest her. She remembered her first gulp of air from the safety of the other side and how she didn't stop running until she was home.

  Luna said, "Captain Arcos asked if you gave us all the evidence you found in the motel?"

  "Yes."

  Luna shifted so that his bulk blocked her even more and let his thick arm hang slack.

  "Everything?"

  "Yes."

  "You told us everything you know about this?"

  "Yes."

  The sergeant looked toward the carrel.

  "What were you looking for?"

  "Nothing."

  "Maybe something I can help you with?"

  "No."

  The sergeant didn't move. He made her press by his arm as if it were a line that would define just where she stood.

  Chapter Seventeen

  * * *

  Arkady's route to Chinatown passed by the aquarium stillness of deserted department stores, a perfumeria window with nothing to display but a can of mosquito repellent, the staff of a jewelry store with elbows glued to empty cases, but around the corner of Calle Rayo, life: red lanterns, a roasted whole pig, fried plantain and fried batter, mounds of oranges, lemons, coral peppers, black tubers cut to white flesh, green tomatoes in papery cowls, avocados and tropical fruit for which Arkady had no name, although he understood by the dollar signs that this market in the very center of Central Havana was for private vendors. Flies spun dizzily in sweet smells of ripening pineapple and banana. Salsa from a hanging radio vied with tapes of wistful Cantonese five-tone scale and customers with obscured but still-discernible Chinese features drilled vendors with Cuban Spanish. At a corner stall a butcher chopped a cow skull open, and a cotton-candy vendor with her hair festooned in blue, sugary wisps that rose from a tub read Arkady's note and pointed to a walk-up with the sign KARATE CUBANO.

  Arkady had come in a rush. He had gone from the ChineseCemetery to Pribluda's flat and from there to Chinatown because his mind was finally functioning.

  Abuelita, the eyes of the CDR, had said that on Thursday afternoons Pribluda left the Malecón with his ugly plastic Cuban briefcase. The girl Carmen had claimed that Thursdays were when Uncle Sergei practiced karate. According to his own spreadsheet, Thursday was the day of Pribluda's unexplained hundred-dollar expenditure. Didn't it all fit together? Wasn't it possible that every Thursday, carrying in a common Cuban briefcase not a black belt but an envelope stuffed with money, the spy Sergei Pribluda had met his "Chinese contact" at a karate dojo in Havana's Chinatown? Most likely the colonel kept a sweatsuit or karate gear in a dojo locker, reason enough for him to stop in the changing room, where, as Arkady imagined it, not a word to the contact had to be said, not if he had a similar briefcase. The two briefcases could be switched in a moment, and the anonymous contact would be headed down the stairs before Pribluda untied his shoes to practice those deadly kicks he showed to Carmen. The entire business would be swift, silent and professional. Arkady had the briefcase and this was Thursday.

  The only problem was that when Arkady ran gasping up the stairs the door where the dojo was supposed to be now read evita – el salon nuevo de belleza. Inside, two women wearing masks of blue mud reposed in barber chairs even as workmen bolted a third chair to the floor. Arkady retreated to the market and went through the process with the same piece of paper and received the same misinformation.

  At a Chinese restaurant where no one was Chinese and egg rolls came with a dab of ketchup Arkady found a waiter who spoke
enough English to say that there were no more dojos in Chinatown, although there were maybe twenty in the city. Four more days. He should call Pribluda's son in case the boy wanted to meet the plane, assuming the boy could leave his pizza ovens for a few hours. Then Arkady had no plans. He had run out. He had the clear eye of a man who had no plans at all.

  Well, there was the picture of Pribluda he was supposed to be finding, but for a moment Arkady had thought he'd caught sight of Pribluda's ghost slipping between bright mounds of exotic fruit. The walls of the restaurant were bordello red and had the usual picture of Che Guevara looking so much like Christ in a beret it was unearthly. Arkady had noticed simply while walking through the streets and passing open windows that people hung more portraits of Che than of Fidel, although Che's very martyrdom seemed to validate Fidel. But martyrs had the advantage of staying romantically young, whereas Fidel, the survivor, came framed in two ages: the passionate revolutionary with index finger stabbing each oratorical point and the graybeard lost in haunted reflection.

  Arkady felt haunted by stupidity. It had been exciting for a moment to believe in his revived powers of deduction, like finding an old steam engine in a derelict factory and thinking that a match held under the boiler would bring the pistons back to life. No churning pistons here, he thought. Thank God, Detective Osorio hadn't been around to witness the fiasco.

  On his way from the restaurant he pushed through the market and skirted a group of boys pummeling one another outside a theater. It was a shabby corner cinema painted Chinese red with pagoda-style eaves and a poster that showed a karate master in midair. The title of the film was in Chinese and Spanish, and in parentheses at the bottom of the poster in English, "Fists of Fear!". Arkady remembered the ticket stub in Pribluda's pants. That was what Carmen had been trying to ask him, not "Did you see? Fists of fear!" but "Did you see Fists of Fear!?' He joined the line at the box office, paid four pesos for a ticket and climbed the red steps into the dark.

  The interior was aromatic of cigarettes, joss sticks, beer. The seats were bald and taped. Arkady sat in the last row, the better to see the rest of the audience, rows of heads that bobbed and howled appreciatively for a film that had already started and seemed to involve a studious young monk defending his sister from Hong Kong gangsters. The dialogue was Chinese with subtitles in another form of Chinese, not even Spanish; the laughing of the actors was hideous, and every kick sounded like a melon being split. Arkady had barely stood the briefcase on his lap before he was joined in the next seat by a small, sharp-nosed man with glasses and a similar briefcase.