Havana Bay

Arkady took Pribluda's photograph from under his coat and asked, "Who took this picture?"

  "Elmar."

  "Elmar who?"

  "Mostovoi," Mongo said as if there had been only one photographer in the group.

  Confession was always short-lived and always conditional, and both men knew it wasn't as if Arkady had the authority to question anyone. Just for the sake of a reaction, though, Arkady read the reverse of the picture. " 'The Havana Yacht Club.' Does that mean anything to you?"

  "No."

  "A joke?"

  "No."

  "A social club?"

  "No."

  "Do you know what's happening there tonight?"

  That was pressing too hard. The elusive Mongo backed into the street and broke into a gliding sort of trot, a one-man caravan, his headgear undulating with every step. He slid by a blue wall, pink wall, peach and the shadow of an alley seemed to reach out and swallow him up.

  Ofelia had not been at the embassy apartment since she had seen Rufo spread out on its floor. She remembered the building's blue walls and Egyptian decoration of lotuses and ankhs, that hint of the Nile. In the dusk even the car sitting on the porch had some of the silent grandeur of a sphinx in residence. Flecks of paint made a red skirt around the car. Salt pitted once proud chrome, windows were open to the elements, upholstery cracked and split and the hood ornament was missing, but hadn't the sphinx itself lost a nose? And although they sat on wooden blocks the wheels were caked in grease, a promise that someday this beast would cough and rise again.

  Ofelia was looking for Rufo's phone. Arkady had said that in Moscow a hustler like Rufo would have as likely stepped out of his house without a leg as without a cell phone. If this were a real investigation she could have taken a laundry list of names associated with Rufo to CubaCell and worked backward from their calls. Instead, she'd have to find the phone itself. It was somewhere. For killing someone with a knife, work that could get messy, Rufo had taken the precaution of changing shoes and wearing over his clothes a one-piece silvery running suit; Goretex let in the air, kept out the blood. Likewise, cell phones were delicate, dollars-only items, not something a careful man placed in harm's way. Rufo thought ahead, the trick was to think like him.

  The door knocker to the ground-floor apartment was answered by a white woman in a drab housedress and flamboyantly coiffed and hennaed hair. Half the women in Havana, it seemed to Ofelia, spent their lives getting ready for a party that never happened. In turn, the woman made a sour study of Ofelia's jinetera gear until presented with a PNR badge.

  "Figures," the woman said.

  "I'm here to see the murder scene upstairs. Do you have a key?"

  "No. You can't go in there anyway. That's Russian property, no one can go in. Who knows what they're doing?"

  "Show me."

  The woman led the way in slippers that snapped against the stairs. The lock on the apartment door was shiny and new even in the poor light of the hall. Ofelia remembered making a search of the sitting room, pulling out Fidel y Arte and other books, a sofa and sideboard, performing a more hurried look into the other rooms for fear that the confrontation between Luna and the Russian would get out of hand. There was a chance the phone was inside the embassy apartment, but not likely. She reached on tiptoe to the dark underside of the stairs above for any ledge that Rufo could have set the phone on. No.

  "You didn't find anything here?" Ofelia asked.

  "There's nothing to find. The Russians don't put anyone there for weeks at a time. Good riddance."

  As Ofelia went back down the stairs she let her hand trail on the risers above. She stepped out onto the porch with nothing but a dirty hand.

  "I told you," the woman said.

  "You were right." The woman was starting to remind Ofelia of her mother.

  "You're the second one."

  "Oh? Who else?"

  "A big negro from the Ministry of Interior. Really black. He looked everywhere. He had a phone, too. He called on it and didn't speak and just listened, but not to the phone, understand?"

  Naturally, Ofelia thought, because Luna was calling Rufo's number and was trying to hear it ring. That was the trouble with trying to hide a phone, sooner or later someone would call the number and the phone would announce itself.

  "Did he find anything?"

  "No. Don't you people work together? You're like everything else in this country. Everything has to be done twice, no?"

  Ofelia walked out to the middle of the street. It was a block of old town houses transformed by revolution, idealism followed by fatigue and lack of paint and plaster. One front yard a parking lot for bicycles, another an open-air beauty salon. Collapsing buildings but busy as a hive.

  She tried to imagine a reconstruction of the facts. The same street late at night. Arkady upstairs, Rufo outside in his freshly donned running suit, improvising on the run because no one had expected the arrival of a Russian investigator. Perhaps even placing one last call before he went into the house and up the steps to what he assumed would be the Russian's doom. Between the two corners of the block, where was the most likely place for Rufo to put, just for a few minutes, his precious phone?

  Ofelia remembered Maria, the police car and Rufo's cigars. She returned to the porch.

  "Whose car is this?"

  "My husband's. He went to get some windows for the car, and the next thing I know I got a letter from Miami. I'm keeping the car till he gets back."

  "Chevrolet?"

  "'57, the best year. I used to get in and pretend Ruperto and I were driving to Playa del Este, a nice cruise to the beach. I haven't done that for a long time."

  "Car windows are hard to find."

  "Car windows are impossible to find."

  The upholstery was more a rat's nest than seats. From her bag Ofelia took a pair of surgical gloves. "Do you mind?"

  "Mind what?"

  With gloves on, Ofelia reached through the open window and opened the glove compartment. Within was a wooden cigar box with a broken Montecristo seal of crossed swords. Inside the box were ten aluminum cigar tubes and an Ericson cell phone set on vibrate instead of ring.

  Ofelia heard a click and looked through the car at a man taking her picture from the sidewalk. He was a large, middle-aged man with a camera bag over a shoulder and the sort of vest with many pockets that photographers wore, all topped by an artistic beret.

  "I'm sorry," he said, "you just looked beautiful in that old wreck of a car. Do you mind? Most women don't mind if I photograph them – in fact, they rather like it. The light is awful but you looked so perfect. Do you think we could talk?"

  Ofelia put the phone in the cigar box and the box and gloves in her bag before she straightened out. "What about?"

  "About life, about romance, about everything." Despite his size he made a show of coming shyly through the gate. His Spanish was fluent, with a Russian accent. "Arkady sent me. Even so, I'm a great admirer of Cuban women."

  • • •

  Arkady didn't set anything on fire at the Sierra Maestra and didn't knock on Mostovoi's door. Instead he inserted the credit card into the jamb the moment he arrived and hit the door with a grunt that took the breath out of a watching toddler. Inside, Arkady looked to see whether the "greatest demolition team in Africa" was still the centerpiece of the wall. It was.

  On his first visit he had gone to pains to make sure Mostovoi wouldn't notice that he'd had any guests. This time Arkady didn't care. Where there was one photograph of the Havana Yacht Club there were bound to be more, because a man who documented his greatest moments didn't destroy his pictures when the wrong company came – he just put them out of sight.

  Arkady took off his coat to work. He emptied shoe boxes and suitcases, spilled book and kitchen shelves, upended files and drawers, pulled the refrigerator from the wall and tipped over chairs until he had discovered more photographs, pornography that was not so sporty and not so sweet, and videotapes of sex and leather. But everybody had a side business,
everyone had a second job. All Arkady really produced was the sweat on his face.

  He visited the bathroom to wash up. The walls were tiled and the medicine-cabinet mirror was half silvered, half black. Inside the cabinet were a couple of nostrums, hair elixirs and recreational amounts of amyl nitrate and amphetamines. As he dried his hands he noticed that the shower curtain was closed. People with small bathrooms usually kept their curtains drawn for the illusion of space or a childish fear of what was on the other side. Since that was an anxiety Arkady freely admitted to, he pulled the curtain wide.

  Floating in the tub in ten centimeters of water were four black-and-white photographs not of nubile sports or foreign travels but of the dead Italian and Hedy. Blood showed as black and the carpet and sheets were soaked and striped. The Italian looked almost gilled from machete wounds. Arkady didn't know him, but he did recognize Hedy even if her head balanced precariously on her shoulders. At first Arkady thought that Mostovoi had gotten hold of police photographs, but of course these pictures had just been developed and none of the usual evidence markers had been laid, no shoe tips of detectives trying to stay out of the camera's way, and the darkness of the shadows themselves suggested that no other source of illumination had been on. The photographer had worked alone in a dark room the night before Ofelia arrived, and real skill must have been required just to estimate the focus. He'd only chanced four shots or only developed four from a roll. A single shot of the Italian as he dragged himself, still alive, toward the door. More thought had gone into the pictures of Hedy. A low shot from between her legs up to her head. A second that framed her head between deflated breasts. A third just of Hedy's face, surprise still fresh in her eyes. The man with the camera had been unable to resist marking the moment, thrusting his tubular white wrist and hand into the sheen of her curls to improve the pose.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  * * *

  By eight o'clock the Marina Hemingway had the social hum of a small village at night. Younger crew, an international set with stringy blond hair, spread out in front of the market or carried bags from the ice bunker. From the far end came the amplified pulse of a disco, glitter and sound reflected in the canals. Overhead an edge of the moon burned through the electric haze of the marina. He didn't see Ofelia but she tended to be fanatically good to her word.

  The Alabama Baron was gone, replaced by a launch so new it smelled of plastic. Already ensconced in its cabin was a jinetera mixing rum and Coke. Ahead, George Washington Walls and John O'Brien were having beers in the cockpit of the Gavilan, firebrand and financier at their ease. The new lead from the power box snaked smoothly down to the water and up the dark flank of the seaplane tender.

  "You're here." Walls looked up at Arkady.

  "Right on time, too," O'Brien said. "Wonderful. Back into your cashmere coat, I see. Join us."

  "I have a plane to catch. You said we were going to talk about Pribluda."

  "A plane to catch?" O'Brien said. " That is sad. This means you are turning down the chance to be part of our endeavor? I have always counted myself as fairly persuasive. Apparently with you I've failed."

  "The man is a disappointment," Walls said. "That's what Isabel says."

  "Arkady, I was hoping to persuade you because I sincerely thought it was for your own good. I had looked forward to working with you. Come on, have a drink for God's sake. We'll have an Irish good-bye. Your plane's at midnight?"

  "Yes."

  Walls said, "You've got hours."

  Arkady stepped out of the light and down into the boat, settling against a cockpit cushion. Instantly a cold can of beer was in his hand. At night the boat seemed to ride even lower, the polished mahogany dark as the water.

  O'Brien said, "You're taking back the body of your friend Pribluda? That means you've positively identified him?"

  "No."

  "Because you don't need to anymore, you already know."

  "I think so."

  "Well, that's a comfort. Your decision to go is final? What we can do" – O'Brien tapped Arkady's knee – "is give you a return ticket. Take a week in Moscow, in that miserable ice chest you call home, and if you change your mind come back. Is that fair?"

  "More than fair, but I think I've made up my mind."

  "Why?" Walls asked.

  O'Brien said, "Because he found what he came for, I suppose. Is that it, Arkady?"

  "Pretty much."

  "To a single-minded man." O'Brien raised his beer. "To the man in the coat."

  The beer was good, far better than Russian. On the dock a line of jineteras slipped quietly as mice toward the disco, lamplight haloing their hair. It was Saturday night, after all. The salsa accelerated. Walls balanced on the captain's chair in a black pullover that reminded Arkady of the sleek young radical who had stepped out of a plane with a gun and a burning flag. O'Brien wore his black jumpsuit. Pirate colors. He unwrapped a cigar and turned its tip over a flame, drawing it in. The boats in their slips sighed as a ripple of water lifted them.

  O'Brien said, "You know what happened to Pribluda, but you don't know why? And I'm the only one who hasn't had a say?"

  "You say a lot, but it's different every time."

  "Then I won't tell you, I'll show you. See that sea-bag?"

  Although the cabin was dark, Arkady saw one end of a canvas bag in the light at the bottom of the steps.

  "Sergei's," Walls said.

  Arkady was nearest. He put down the beer and went down the cabin stairs. As he picked up the bag the door shut and locked behind him. The inboard engine started in the space ahead, producing a reverberation like being inside a double bass. Overhead, feet nimbly stepped fore and aft, releasing lines and gathering fenders. The Gavilan backed, swung and eased forward. As the boat passed the disco, laughter and strobe lights flickered on the curtains. Canal echo dropped behind, and Arkady heard Walls talking on the radio. Arkady beat on the door more for form than conviction; a boat as classic as this was built of hardwood. He moved around a galley table to an engine-room door that was locked as well. He pulled aside a porthole curtain just in time to see the guardia dock slide by with no sign yet that Ofelia had raised an alarm. Past the dock the brass bow of the Gavilan sliced its way so smoothly Arkady felt no more than the faintest rise and fall, headed directly to sea by the evenness of wave slap.

  Along Fifth Avenue were the first signs of a major event: brigada trucks of huddled Interior troops parked in the night dark of side streets, motorcycle policemen in white helmets and spurred boots straddling their bikes, K9 units sniffing the crowd that filed up the driveway of the Construction Union House, the former Havana Yacht Club. Ofelia's PNR badge didn't work, but Mostovoi somehow produced a pass that let them through. There were telltale signs that the Noche Folklorica was a more important event than she had expected. A feature of national security was that no one ever knew which of his residences the Comandante would sleep in, let alone what functions he would attend. However, when he did appear certain precautions were always taken. Tracks led on the lawn to seven armored Mercedes, an ambulance, a radio command truck, a media van, two dog vans, a circle of soldiers and a cordon of men in shirts and windbreakers holding newspapers folded over cell phones and radios and standing around for no apparent purpose until a guest deviated from the driveway. The house's two grand stairways met at a central porch. From there, under the molding of a ship's wheel on a pennant, soldiers scanned the crowd, although this was not, to Ofelia, a group that was likely to get out of hand. Some officially approved Santeria priests were on hand, but mostly she saw stiff ministry and military types and their spouses following the designated route around the mansion to the oceanfront side. The occasional man was patted down or a woman stopped to have her purse searched, but Mostovoi and Ofelia were waved through, and despite his camera bag the photographer pushed so quickly through the crowd she could barely keep up.

  "Why would Arkady want to meet here?" Ofelia demanded. "How would he even get in?"

  "He's be
en here before," Mostovoi said. " He gets around."

  The Noche Folklorica was an event Arkady had asked about, Ofelia knew. If he had changed his mind about talking to O'Brien and Walls, that was just as well. She saw the colors of dancers sequestered behind spiky palms: blue for Yemaya, yellow for Oshun. Spaced along the beach were soldiers. Tied to the end of the dock was a black patrol boat. All the light and all the sound was concentrated on an outdoor stage facing the water.

  The Noche Folklorica had already begun, and from the clubhouse balconies men in plain clothes scanned the crowd. Most people stood on the patio around the stage, but there was also a reviewing stand with five tiers of special guests. She knew only the figure in the middle of the front row, a man with a flat, nearly Greek profile set in wiry gray hair and beard, the face that was the second sun of her lifetime. Beside him was an empty chair.

  • • •

  The doors opened and O'Brien peeked through to say, "Come on. It's too lovely a night to miss."

  Arkady marched up. This far out the cockpit sat under a canopy of stars. Walls steered parallel to the shore, running at dead slow. Besides his cigar O'Brien also held, casually but not negligently, a pistol with a barrel extended by a silencer. The marina had passed from sight, but approaching on the Miramar shore was a far brighter nexus of excitement and music. Arkady recognized the Havana Yacht Club brilliant in floodlights. On the patio leading down to the beach a crowd surrounded a stage and reviewing stand.

  Along with floodlights the Yacht Club displayed the colored lights of carnival, although the club's twin docks were empty and only a black patrol boat had tied up to enjoy the spectacle. As the Gavilan drew closer Walls slipped forward to snap covers over the running lights and John O'Brien dropped his cigar into the water.

  "Quite a show." He handed Arkady a set of heavy binoculars. "Now your trip to Cuba is complete."

  The glasses were 20x Zeiss with a matte metal body, and through them the scene at the Yacht Club meters leaped into view. Spectators filled two levels of the patio. A troupe of women in yellow scarves and skirts ascended the stage while a band filled the time with a percussive rhythm, whistles, bells clearly audible even from the Gavilan. Arkady zoomed in on the reviewing stand, on a tall man with aviator glasses, Erasmo's friend, the same man who had raised a toast to the Havana Yacht Club at the Angola paladar the night before. Arkady ran the glasses along the other seated guests. In the front row's places of honor were an empty chair and a man with a gray beard who looked as if he had been big once but had since shrunk into a stiff green shell of ironed fatigues. He had the abstracted expression of an old man regarding a thousand grandchildren whose names he could no longer keep track of.