Havana Bay ar-4 Page 23

  "I'll be right back," she promised and slipped into a bedroom, which emitted a hint of sachet. She called through the door, "Talk to Sasha, he loves company."

  From its perch a canary seemed to examine Arkady for a tail. Arkady peeked into the kitchen. Samovar on an oilcloth, oilcloth on the table. Calendar with a nostalgically snowy scene. Salt in a bowl, paper napkins in a glass. A sparkling shetf of home-bottled jams, pickles and bean salad. He was back in the front room when she returned, ash-blond hair brushed into place, primped in record time.

  "I would offer you something, but my Cuban friends will be arriving soon. It makes them nervous to see strangers. I hope this won't take long. You understand."

  "Of course. It's about Sergei Pribluda. You said the first time we spoke that some women on the embassy staff speculated because of the improvement of his Spanish that he had become romantically involved with a Cuban."

  Olga Petrovna allowed herself a smile.» Sergei Ser-geevich's Spanish was never that good."

  "I suspect you're right, because he was so Russian. Russian to the core."

  "As I told you, a 'comrade' in the old sense of the word."

  "And the more I investigate, the more it's clear that if he did find a woman to admire that deeply, she only could have been as Russian as he was. Would you agree?"

  While Olga Petrovna maintained the same bland smile, something defiant appeared in her eyes.

  "I think so."

  "The attraction must have been inevitable," Arkady said.» Perhaps with reminiscences of home, a real Russian dinner and then, because an affair within the embassy is always discouraged, the necessity to plan liaisons that were either secret or seemed accidental. Fortunately, he lived well apart from other Russians, and she could always find a reason to be on the Malecon."

  "It's possible."

  "But she was seen by Cubans."

  There was a knock at the door. Olga Petrovna opened it a crack, whispered to someone and shut the door gently, returned to Arkady, asked for a cigarette and, when it was lit, sat and exhaled luxuriously. In a new voice, a voice with body, she said, "We didn't do anything wrong."

  "I'm not saying you did. I didn't come to Havana to ruin anyone's life."

  "I have no idea what Sergei was up to. He didn't say and I knew better than to ask. We appreciated each other, was all."

  "That was enough, I'm sure."

  "Then what do you want?"

  "I think that someone close to Pribluda, who cared for him, probably has a better photograph than what you showed me the first time."

  "That's all?"

  "Yes."

  She rose, went to her bedroom and returned a moment later with a color photograph of a tanned and happy Colonel Sergei Pribluda in swim shorts. With the warm Caribbean at his back, sand on his shoulders, and a grin as if he'd shed ten years. For Bias's purposes of identification the photograph was perfect.

  "I'm sorry, I would have given it to you before, but I was sure you would find another one and this is the only good one I have. Will I get it back?"

  "I'll ask." He slipped the picture into his pocket.» Did you ever ask Pribluda what he was doing in Havana? Did he ever mention anyone or anything to you?"

  "Men like Sergei perform special tasks. He would never say and it wasn't my place to pry."

  Said like a true believer, Arkady thought; he could see what a match Pribluda and Olga Petrovna had been.

  "You're the one who sent the message from the embassy to me in Moscow, aren't you? 'Sergei Sergeevich Pribluda is in trouble. You must come at once.' It was unsigned."

  "I was worried, and Sergei had spoken so respectfully of you."

  "How did you manage to send it? You must need authorization to send messages to Moscow."

  "Officially, but we're so understaffed. They rely on me to do more and more, and in some ways it's much easier to get things done. And I was right, wasn't I? He was in trouble."

  "Did you tell anyone else?"

  "Who would I tell? The only real Russian at the embassy was Sergei." Her eyes brimmed. She took a deep breath and glanced toward the door.» What Cubans don't understand is while we may not sing and dance as much as they do, we love just as passionately, don't we?"

  "Yes, we do."

  Certainly Osorio would never understand, Arkady thought. It was a relief to be away from the detective's steamy mix of revolutionary zeal and Santeria spirits, to be in a more solid world where post-Soviet romance blossomed over pickles and vodka, and motive could be measured in dollars and bones were left in the ground and murder made logical sense.

  The sight of chicken thawing in a plastic bag seemed to bring Olga Petrovna back to earth. She heaved a bosomy sigh, twisted out her cigarette in an ashtray and in a minute became a businesswoman again, checking a mirror for the proper image of a sweetly gray grandmother.

  On the way out Arkady passed a file of people waiting on the steps. From the top of the stairs, Olga Petrovna had a second thought.

  "Or, maybe I've been here too long," she said, "maybe I'm turning Cuban."

  Chapter Twenty

  Ofelia parked the DeSoto near the docks for fear of blowing a tire. Havana had been the staging area for the treasure fleets of the Spanish empire. Over time silver and gold were replaced by American automobiles, which were replaced by Russian oil. All of this was handled in the warehouses of a barrio called Atares, and when the Soviet Union collapsed parts of Atares, like a half-empty vein, did too. One decrepit warehouse dragged down its neighbor, which destabilized a third and spewed steel and timbers into the street until they looked like a city that had undergone a siege, stone pulverized in heaps, garlands of twisted steel, not to mention the potholes and shit and doorways heady with the reek of urine. Ofelia had done invasion training in Atares and remembered how convincing it was to carry make-believe wounded across a landscape of collapse. It was no place you'd want to drive into.

  The single building standing on its corner was the Centre Russo-Cubano. The center had served as a hotel and social meeting place for Soviet ships' officers in port and was designed like a three-story ship's deckhouse in cement with porthole-style windows and a red Soviet flag of glass set into the house at bridge height, although at this point the ship seemed to have sailed through bad weather and run aground, rubble piled around the steps, iron railings ripped off. Ofelia was surprised the doors opened as easily as they did.

  Inside, faint rays of light fell from the windows into a lobby. A curved reception desk of Cuban mahogany was flanked by a girl in black marble cutting a brass sheaf of cane and, on the other end, a bronze sailor hauling a net. The cane cutter was barefoot, work clothes molded to her body. The sailor bore heroic Slavic features, and his net overflowed with fish. Russo-Cubano, indeed! Cubans had never been allowed in, this had been strictly Russians only. All the signs, reception, buffet, director, were in Russian. Through the dust Ofelia made out a floor mosaic of a hammer and sickle on a barely discernible pattern of blue waves. The only sign of recent life was in the middle of the lobby where a dull red ray of light reached down from the glass flag to a Lada with Russian diplomatic plates.

  The sound of clicking drew her eyes up to a lightbulb hanging on a cord, to busts of Marti, Marx and Lenin decorating a mezzanine balcony and finally to a goat moving along the balcony rail. The goat stared down with disdain. Nothing but a goat could have climbed the stairs, blocked as they were by the ripped-out and abandoned cage of the elevator. No great loss, Ofelia thought. Since power outages began, people didn't trust elevators anyway. An extension ladder reached from the lobby to the balcony. More goats appeared.

  At the steering wheel of the Lada sat a black man, his head twisted toward her, staring. When he didn't answer her or get out she pulled her gun and opened the door. Out sagged a rag doll, Chango, with a half-formed face and glass eyes, dressed in pants and shirt, a red bandanna around his head. She looked into the car. Red candles were burned down to waxy tears on the dash. From the rearview mirror hung a she
ll necklace and a rosary. The sound of a bell drew her attention back to the balcony, where a Judas goat pushed its way to the forefront of the other goats and stretched its neck to stare down. As a group they stiffened and, in a clatter of hoofs, scattered not at the sight of her, she realized, but someone else behind her.

  Ofelia wasn't so much aware of being hit as plunging to the floor and then waking in a burlap sack, blind as a rabbit bagged for market. She'd lost her gun and a large hand wrapped tight around her throat as a suggestion not to scream. When the fingers relaxed, the sweet, milky scent of coconut burst into her mouth.

  Sometimes, not knowing was better than knowing. Isabel's long-awaited E-mail from Moscow glowed on Pribluda's screen.

  Dear Sergei Sergeevich, what a pleasure to hear from you and what a surprise! I should have written you long ago and told you how sorry I was to hear of the passing of Maria Ivanova, who was always so kind to everyone. You were blessed to have such a wife. I remember the day we came in off an assignment and were so cold we couldn't speak. We had to point at the frostbite on each other's nose. She made practically a banya in the bathroom with herbs and birches and steaming water and a cold bottle of vodka. She saved our lives that day. All the best people are gone, it's true. And now there you are in the tropics and I am still here but not much more than a librarian. But busy, every day someone wants to declassify this or that. Last week I had a visit from a lawyer of a Western news organization demanding I open the most sensitive archives of the KGB as if they were nothing more than a family album. Is nothing sacred? I say that with tongue in cheek but also seriously. We can no longer simply say, "Those who know, know." Those days are gone. However, promises made must be promises kept, that is my watchword. Where society and historical truth are served by disclosure, where traitors will not be lionized or honorable reputations destroyed, where innocent people who thought they were doing their duty in often hazardous circumstances are not victimized by new standards then, yes! I am the first man to drag facts to the sunlight.

  Which brings me to this inquiry of yours about a former leader of the Cuban Communist Party, Lazaro Lindo. In particular, you ask whether Lindo was involved in a so-called Party conspiracy against the Cuban state. As I remember, Castro claimed that a circle within the CCP, feeling that he had led his countrymen down a path of adventurism, was conspiring with the USSR against him. True or not, the consequences were severe: strained relations between the Cuban and Soviet states, arrest and imprisonment of some of the most devoted Cuban Party members, Lindo among them. Naturally, this was and remains a most sensitive matter. What you ask for is documentation that.no such conspiracy existed or that, if it did, Lindo was not part of it. I understand this might allow his daughter to gain permission to travel. Unfortunately, I cannot satisfy you. But it was a wonderful surprise to hear from an old friend.

  By the by, the entire country is a cheese full of maggots these days. You're well out of it.

  Roman Petrovich Rozov

  Senior Archivist Federal Intelligence Service

  Rozov@RRFISarch.org

  Arkady printed the letter out to give Isabel, but it was clear that Rozov, Pribluda's old comrade-in-arms, as good as admitted both the plot and Lindo's part in it, and although Arkady didn't know Isabel well or even like her, he dreaded passing the letter on because he had recognized the desperation in the kiss she had given him the night before. Why kiss him otherwise?

  The kiss angered him because it was a parody of real desire, her hard mouth clinging to him until he pushed her away. All the same, he asked himself, would a Cuban have rejected her? Would any warm-blooded man?

  The other answer he dreaded was in the photograph he had extracted from Olga Petrovna, the picture that could conclusively identify the body in the morgue as Sergei Pribluda, yes or no. It was revealing how relieved he was that Bias had not been at the laboratory. Arkady had left the photograph rather than wait for the doctor to learn for a certainty that Pribluda was the body in the drawer.

  Arkady folded the printout from Moscow to slip under Isabel's door.

  How many sorts of coward could a man be?

  She was inside a car trunk in a sack, arms tied at elbow level, more burlap sacking piled on top of her. Ofelia threatened and reasoned, but whoever put her in closed the lid and never said a word. A car door shut without the sagging of someone getting in. Steps walked away. White or black, she hadn't seen, but an inner part of her had registered his scent, the sound of his breathing, his speed and size, and she knew it was Luna.

  She shouted until her throat was raw, but the sacks stuffed on top muffled her and she doubted she was heard more then ten steps away, let alone from the street. She decided to wait until she heard someone, although she didn't feel even the reverberation of a car passing the Centro Russo-Cubano. Well, who would drive there? She could as well have been at the bottom of the bay.

  With every breath, sacking clung to her face, hemp and coconut shag filled her nose and mouth, and she became aware that with all the bags over her she'd already consumed most of the trunk's available oxygen. She'd never thought of herself as having an unusual fear of tight spaces. Now it took all her concentration not to hyperventilate and waste what air was left. She felt her gun under her but outside the sack, a particularly embarrassing tease. At least she didn't yet need to empty her bladder; she thanked God for small favors.

  Irrelevant items came to mind. Whether the trunk was clean. What sort of dinner her mother was cooking for Muriel and Marisol. Something with rice. She started tasting tears as well as sweat.

  Ofelia thought about the statue of the girl gathering cane. The hair was wrong, long and flowing instead of wiry, but the face was right, especially the eyes anxiously twisting up, surprised.

  Depend on the Russians. There was no spare tire and the nut and bolt that usually held one down dug painfully into her back. She squirmed, trying to hook the bolt on the rope that pinioned her arms, but it was like twisting in a shroud.

  He was more depressed by the possible identification of Pribluda's body than he would have expected. Originally he had refused the body simply to goad the Cubans into some sort of investigation, but now he found there was also part of him that at a more basic level irrationally and against all the evidence refused to accept the colonel's death. How could anyone so tough and ugly die? The man was a brute, and yet Arkady felt like a one-man funeral cortege, perhaps for selfish reasons. Sergei Pribluda was the person on earth he knew best and, in the colonel's way, one of Arkady's last connections to Irina.

  When she had been wrapped in white on a gurney, her hair brushed, her eyes meditatively shut, her mouth relaxed into a smile, the doctor reassured him it was normal to think that a loved one was still breathing. The cool chilled his sweat. He recalled Pushkin's lines how the lover … counts the slow hours, vainly trying To hurry them: he cannot wait. The clock strikes ten: he's off, he's flying, And suddenly he's at the gate.

  This was the gate that would never open. He would return again and again, race and pant like a schoolboy, strain to see her breathe one more time and the gate would stay barred.

  Did people die of love? Arkady knew a man on a factory ship in the Bering Sea, a killer, who had fallen in love with a woman, a whore who died at sea. He erased himself from the face of the earth by stripping off his clothes and plunging through the ice. The shock of the water on bare skin must have been incredible, but the man was immensely strong and kept swimming away, away, away from the light. For murderers, senators, whores and good wives, love proved to be not the lamp at the ship's bow but the ship itself, and when the light was gone a person had no place to go but down.

  Although Arkady was no expert in love he was an expert in death, and he knew the possibility of a relatively painless death for the diver. What killed expert swimmers practicing underwater laps in pools was not a strangling on water but the soft oblivion of oxygen deprivation. At the end they no more than gently stirred, even if in the last lit cell in their brain they
were still stroking powerfully ahead, from the depths of her throat for the edification of new admirers. The image of herself naked on a steel table for the doctor's examination was bad enough, but she'd seen other bodies after a day or two in a warm car trunk, and the recollection was enough to make her saw the rope against the tip of the bolt whether it cut her or not.

  She tried to think of music that would lend a vigorous rhythm to work to, but all that came to mind was a famous lullaby by Merceditas called "Drume Negrita" that whispered, "Go to sleep, my little black girl. If you sleep I'll bring you a new cradle and for your new cradle I'll bring a new bell. You are my favorite, my pearl, my beloved girl, so don't cry no more," though strangely enough the voice Ofelia heard was her mother's.

  Ofelia prayed. There was a panoply of spirits and saints that might help her if they only knew. Sweet Yemaya, who saved men from drowning. Meek Santa Barbara, who changed in an instant to Change wreathed in lightning. Ofelia's patron, though, had always been Oshun, not that Oshun had particularly helped in the past if husbands were anything to go by. However, the gods picked you more than you picked them, and Oshun was the useless god of love. Ofelia saw herself sometimes as a little dark boulder in the middle of a river of useless love. What she needed was a sharp knife. Unless she got out of the car trunk soon, she would asphyxiate and Bias would be tweezering hemp threads

  Floating in the dark above his bed the halo of the ceiling fixture put Arkady in mind of Rufo's white hat of woven straw, made in Panama with Rufo's gilded initials on the sweatband, which didn't mean anything to Arkady at the time because he hadn't connected it to AzuPanama S.A. Now he had to wonder what else he had seen in Rufo's room and not understood. The fact that neither Luna nor Osorio had come for Rufo's key suggested that they still hadn't tried the key Arkady had surrendered, and it was even possible that no one had been in the room since.

  Was Luna waiting? Was Luna coming? Since the odds were even, Arkady slipped on his overcoat, his protective shadow, emptied the envelope of meager evidence into a pocket and went down to the street. He walked a block until he flagged a car. Arkady didn't remember Rufo's address, but he recalled the fading words on the wall next door and asked for the Gimnasio Atares.