Havana Bay ar-4 Read online

  "I have other cases, no?" She regarded Pribluda's computer.» This machine is on Cuban territory."

  "Ah, but the memory of this machine, that is purely Russian." Like a virtuoso of the keyboard, he exited the file, shut off the computer and, as screen and room went dark, said, "Useless without the code."

  "You don't have the authority, the language or background to investigate here."

  "I'd hardly call what I'm doing investigating. But then, you're not either."

  It was not easy to control her temper around this man. She opened the bag and brought out a screwdriver, screws and slide bolt. The screwdriver was hers, but it had taken her an hour at the flea market outside the Central Train Station to find the bolt and screws.

  "I brought you this for the door."

  "Thank you, that's very thoughtful. Let me pay."

  "A gift from the Cuban people." She thrust them into his hands.

  "I insist."

  "I insist more."

  "Then, thank you. I will sleep like a babe. Better than a babe, a bivalve."

  Whatever that meant, she thought.

  After screwing in the bolt and latch, Renko celebrated what he called his "heightened sense of security" by opening a bottle of Pribluda's rum and taking a tray of Pribluda's pickles, mushrooms and other Russian indi-gestibles on a tray out to the balcony. Sitting in an aluminum chair, she scanned the street for danger while he basked in a half-moon that balanced at the end of a silver path across the water. The beam from Morro Castle swept the air, and the occasional Lada rattled by like a drum set being delivered. Jineteras in all hues of spandex cruised the seawall. An old man sold carrots from a briefcase that Renko pointed out looked identical with Pribluda's plastic briefcase and Ofelia said was of Cuban manufacture. A neumdtico out for night fishing carried a huge, inflated inner tube, making his way like a two-legged snail bearing his shell. Bikers raced on the pavement, and she saw a boy swoop by a tourist and snatch the woman's handbag off her shoulder so neatly that she spun around searching the ground while he crossed the boulevard and darted up a side street. PNRs arrived to play out the drama, the tourist turned, disillusioned, to her hotel, and the equilibrium of the Malec6n reestablished itself. Night divers climbed up the rocks, flashlights in one hand and squid in the other. Small dogs fought over the carcasses of gulls. Men drank from paper bags. Couples tucked into the night shadows of the pillars of the wall.

  From the portal below came a slow country son, a poem by Guillen adapted to a six-stringed guitar.» Maria Belen, Maria Belen, Maria Belen, watching your hips roll and sway from Camaguey to Santiago, from Santiago to Camaguey"

  Renko lit a cigarette.» Actually, Sergeant Luna seems to have forgotten about me. He didn't seem the forgetful type. Good rum."

  "Cuba is known for its rum. Did you know the computer password the first time I brought you here?"

  "No."

  Ofelia hadn't thought so, which meant that he had found it since he had moved into the apartment, although she herself had looked everywhere when she dusted the place for prints. She controlled the impulse to glance back at the apartment and was aware of him watching her do just that.

  "I've been thinking. Maybe it would be safer if you went to the embassy and stayed there under guard."

  "Ruin my Caribbean vacation? Oh, no."

  Even in poor light she saw the scab and bandage at his hairline. She felt unaccountably responsible for his state of health and infuriated, as usual, by the way he twisted a conversation.

  "But you still claim that the sergeant attacked you? You think there is a conspiracy against you?"

  "Oh, no, that would be crazy. I would say, however, after Rufo and Luna, a hint of animosity."

  "Rufo is one thing," she maintained.» The accusation that an officer would attack you is an effort to paint Cuba a backward country."

  "Why? It could certainly happen in Russia. The Russian senate is full of Mafia. They regularly assault each other with clubs, chairs, guns."

  "Not in Cuba. I think you imagined Luna."

  "I imagined the sergeant wears Air Jordans?"

  "Then why hasn't he come back?"

  "I don't know. Maybe because of you."

  She wasn't sure how to take that.

  Renko said, "You told me Dr. Bias was honest, and if he said the heart muscle of the man you pulled from the bay shows signs of cardiac arrest, the doctor is telling the truth?"

  "If he says so."

  "Let's say I do believe him. What I don't believe is that a healthy man has a heart attack for no reason. If he was out on the water and hit by lightning, that would be a different matter. Shouldn't Bias examine the body for signs of a bolt?"

  "Anything else?" She meant to be sarcastic.

  "You could find who Rufo talked to between the time he let me off and when he came back to kill me. Check his telephone records."

  "Rufo didn't have a telephone."

  "He had a cell phone when he picked me up at the airport."

  "He didn't when I searched him. In any case, there is no investigation."

  The Cuban guitar was the sweetest guitar on earth, with notes that flickered the way light dappled the water. She watched him light another cigarette from the ember of the first.

  "Have you ever stopped smoking?"

  "Certainly." He inhaled.» But I know a doctor who says the optimum time to start smoking is in a person's forties, when a person can really use nicotine's effect to focus the mind and forestall senility. He says it generally takes about twenty years for the consequences-cancer, coronary problems, emphysema-to develop, and then you are ready to go anyway. Of course, he's a Russian doctor."

  Although she regarded it as a filthy habit, Ofelia heard herself say, "There were times I wished I smoked.

  My mother smokes cigars and watches Mexican telenovelas and shouts to the characters, 'Don't believe her, don't believe that bitch!'"

  "Really?"

  "My mother is light-skinned from a family of tobacco growers, and even though she married a black cane cutter, my father, she always maintains the cultural superiority of tobacco workers. 'When they roll cigars in the factory, there's someone reading aloud the great stories. Madame Bovary, Don Quixote. You think in the middle of the cane field there's someone reading Madame Bovary? "

  "I imagine not."

  Ofelia opened her bag, laid the Makarov on her knees and placed a necklace of white and yellow beads around her neck.

  "Very pretty," Renko said.

  Bias would have disapproved. Yellow was for Oshun, the goddess of fresh water and sweet things, the color of honey and gold and Oshun's mulata glow. Ofelia was comfortable wearing it around the Russian because he was ignorant.

  "Just beads," she said.» Does the music bother you?"

  A song lingered in the arcade under the balcony. Havana being so crowded, there was a problem of privacy. Sometimes lovers chose the dark of the Male-con portal to consummate what they couldn't find room for anywhere else. The song said, "Eros, blind man, let me show you the way. I crave your strong hands, your body hot as flames, spreading me like the petals of a rose."

  "No," Arkady said.

  "You don't understand any Spanish?"

  "Honey and absinthe pour from your veins, into my burning furrow and making me insane." Along with the song came murmuring and rustling from below. Couples on the seawall moved closer.

  "Not a word."

  "You know," Ofelia said, "there are differences between rumba, mambo, son, songo, salsa."

  "I'm sure."

  "But everything is based on drums, for dancing."

  "Well, I'm not much of a dancer."

  Not everyone had to be a dancer, Ofelia thought. Not that she found him attractive. As her mother would say, will he live through the day? Ofelia's first husband, Humberto, was black as a domino, a baseball player, a fantastic dancer. The second, a musician, was the sort everyone called chino, not only because he was such a handsome mix but because everybody liked him. He play
ed bongos, which demanded an outgoing personality. Until he finally went out completely. But an even better dancer than Humberto. Her mother despised them both and simply called them Primero and Segundo, leaving lots of room for additions. Compared with them, wrapped in his black coat in spite of the heat, Renko looked like an invalid.

  "That's how spirits communicate," she explained.» They're in the drums. Unless you dance the spirits can't come out."

  "Like they came out for Hedy?"

  "Yes."

  "Then it's safer not to dance."

  "Then you're already dead."

  "Good point. Abakua is a version of Santeria?"

  "They couldn't be more different. Santeria is from Nigeria, Abakua is from the Congo." It was like confusing Germany and Sicily.

  "Bias said they used to run smuggling."

  Ofelia was starting to learn how Renko hid behind the most innocent expressions ready to pounce. She wasn't going to get into the fact there were two Abak-uas, a public one with sincere devotees who could be university professors or Party members and a secret criminal Abakua that had risen from its grave. This second Abakua was, needless to say, for men only and had a thieves' morality. Murder of an outsider was allowed, while informing on another Abakua was the ultimate sin. And Cubans believed the Abakua could reach anywhere. Ofelia knew an informer who got himself assigned to a post in Finland to escape Havana. He died falling through the ice and people said, "Abakua!" The police had not penetrated the Abakua. In fact, more police-black and white-were becoming members. Anyway, the last thing she needed was this sort of conversation with a Russian.

  "We don't have to talk about it," Arkady said.

  "It was the way you asked."

  "I sounded smug? It's just my ignorance. I apologize."

  "We will not talk about religions."

  "God knows."

  From the radio in the portal rose the deep beat of a drum that Ofelia knew had to be a tall iya with a dark red center on the skin, accompanied by the grinding rhythm of a belly-shaped gourd. A single horn insinuated itself, the way a man asked a woman to dance.

  "Anyway, it's not a bad thing to be possessed," Ofelia said.

  "Well, I have an unimaginative Russian mind, I don't think it's going to happen to me. What is it like?"

  "Theoretically?" She watched him for the slightest hint of condescension.

  "Theoretically."

  "As a child, you must have spread your arms and put your head back and danced in the rain. You are drenched and clean and dizzy. If you are possessed, it's like that."

  "Afterward?"

  "Your mind still spins."

  An abwe, the poor man's triangle, joined in from below. It was nothing more than a hoe blade played with a stick of iron, but an abwe could sound like the ticking in the mind when a man's strong hand reached around your waist. As the saxophone tried to wrap around it, the gourd trembled, the drum stopped and started like a heart. These were the snares set for silly girls who lingered in shadows. Not Ofelia. She visualized a clear mind.

  She looked toward his arm, the one she had found the bruises on.» You're sounding better. You were not in a healthy mood when you came here."

  "I am now. I'm curious about Pribluda and Rufo and Luna. I have a new purpose in life, so to speak."

  "But why did you want to hurt yourself?"

  She half expected contemptuous dismissal, but Renko said, "You have it backwards."

  Ofelia sensed the next question so strongly she asked before she checked herself, "Did you lose someone? Not here. In Moscow?"

  "I lose people all the time." He lit one cigarette from the other.» Most boats that go on the rocks really don't intend to go there. It's not a mood, it's just exhaustion. Exhaustion from self-pity." He added, "You're with someone and for some reason with them you feel more alive, on another level. Taste has taste and color has color. You both think the same thing at the same time and you're doubly alive. And if you manage to lose them in some gruesomely irrevocable way, then strange things happen. You wander around looking for a car to hit you so you won't have to go home in the evening. So this incident with Rufo is interesting to me because I don't mind a car hitting me, but I do mind a driver trying to hit me. A fine distinction, but there you are."

  In the night Ofelia awoke to find lovers gone, the moon becalmed. In the very lack of breeze she detected a faint scent, a perfume she traced to Renko's soft black coat, to the sleeve of a man who claimed he'd never been possessed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Osorio left before dawn, and as soon as she was gone Arkady expected Luna to climb up the front of the building or crawl through the air shaft. It wasn't so much that Arkady didn't trust Osorio as that he didn't understand her. Why she would spend the night in a metal chair with the island's least popular Russian was a mystery to him, unless she was working with Luna and only insinuating herself into the apartment. If that was the case, all the locks in the world wouldn't help.

  By eight o'clock the Malecon stretched like a floodlit stage. Boys crouched in the blue shadow of the seawall to spool loose fishing line. Men opened cases of homemade hooks and weights for sale. Bikes rolled by with a father on the pedals, a boy on the handlebars, mother and baby on a plank over the rear wheel, an entire family rolling by. Still no Sergeant Luna.

  Arkady went downstairs, but instead of going out on the street he knocked on Erasmo's door, deliberately pounding out of rhythm with the music from the garage's radio until Tico answered and let him into Erasmo's private area with the cut-down bed and table.

  "Erasmo's not here." Tico was in his coveralls, with an inner tube over his shoulder and a Tropicola can in his hand.

  Arkady shouted over the radio.» You speak Russian."

  "I speak Russian." Tico sounded as if he'd just realized it. He was the same age as his friend Erasmo, but time seemed to have left his hair dark and thick as fur, no wrinkles or lines of care to mark his smooth, trusting visage, a boy's face on a middle-aged man.

  "Do you mind if I go out through the garage?"

  "I don't mind. You can go but you can't come back. The garage is closed."

  Arkady pushed through the beaded curtain. Tico told the truth. The doors of the garage were closed, the Jeeps inside parked bumper to bumper.

  Tico said, "The garage is closed because Erasmo doesn't want me selling any cars while he's gone."

  "I won't bother you, I just want to go out the back way." And avoid any eyes out front, Arkady thought.

  "Erasmo's with the Chinese. He's with the Chinese."

  "He is? What Chinese?"

  "The dead Chinese. But he'll be there all day and I'm not supposed to sell any cars. He said, 'Radio silence!' I'm not supposed to talk to anyone."

  "Where are the dead Chinese?"

  "Radio silence!"

  "Ah."

  "I wasn't supposed to answer the door."

  "No, you were being polite." Arkady dug a pencil from his coat and spread a piece of paper over a hood.» Can you write it?"

  "I can write as well as anyone."

  "Don't tell me, but write where I can find Erasmo and the Chinese."

  "They're dead, that's a clue."

  "Good." As Tico bent over the paper and printed in block letters, Arkady threw in, on the off-chance, "Do you know where Mongo is?"

  "No."

  "Do you know what happened to Sergei?"

  "No." Tico returned the pencil with an anxious expression.» Are you going to see Erasmo now? If you see him right away he'll know it was me."

  "Not right away."

  Tico brightened.» Where are you going?"

  "The Havana Yacht Club."

  "Where is that?"

  Arkady held up a map.» In the past."

  He went out the garage doors and walked the back street half a dozen blocks before returning to the Male-con. The boulevard had become familiar in a matter of days, the coughing of trucks, boys casting nets from the seawall, scruffy dogs chewing on a flattened carcass of a
gull. A PNR at a corner gave all his attention to a bicycle cart weighted with teenage girls. No Luna at all.

  In Arkady's hand was Sergei Pribluda's forty-year-old Texaco map, a foldout map that located the Presidential Palace and American embassy, Cuban-American Jockey Club and racetrack, Woolworth's and Biltmore Country Club of a vanished Havana. Not that the city wasn't still surreal. Houses on the Malecon were fantasies: Greek pediments on Moorish columns and crumbling walls with fleurs-de-lis in faded pinks and blues. Venice had merely the threat of sinking. Havana looked sunken and raised.

  What surprised Arkady was how much Havana was the same as on a forty-year-old map. He walked by the colossal Hotel Nacional and the angled glass tower of the Hotel Riviera, both "popular with vacationing Americans" according to the key of the map. Neumdti-cos rilled inner tubes with air at a former Texaco gas station "with Fire Chief service!"

  It took Arkady ninety minutes to walk the Malecon, cross the Almendares River with its small boatyards and sewer stench, and stroll westward the length of Mira-mar, past Erasmo's family house and the steps where Mongo disappeared. He could have taken a taxi at any point, and he knew by now that half the cars on the road were happy to be flagged down to earn a few American dollars. He didn't want to drive into the past, he wanted to sink into it step by step.

  At Miramar's very end he approached a traffic circle with an at-one-time Texaco station, a stadium that had been the Havana greyhound track and, according to Pribluda's map, the Havana Yacht Club.

  It wasn't the sort of place people just stumbled onto. There were no other pedestrians. Cars hurtled around the circle and spun away. Only someone looking for it would have noticed a driveway curving along a screen of royal palms and around a lawn to a classical mansion in white with heavy columns, twin grand staircases and broad colonnades. Over it lay the ghostly silence of a colonial governor's palace abandoned in a coup, occupants decamped, the first signs of decay visible in the split reflection of a broken window and a red tile missing from the hip of the roof. Carved above the pediment of a central porch was the design of a ship's wheel on a pennant. In the entire scene there was no movement at all except for the sway of palm fronds. It was easy to imagine Havana's social elite posing on the steps because he'd already seen it, in the photograph of Erasmo's family.