Havana Bay ar-4 Page 24

  "Te gustan los pugilistas?" The driver punched the air.

  "Absolutely," Arkady said. Whatever they were.

  Fighters. Next door to Rufo's the open-air boxing arena of the Gimnasio Atares had come to life, and Arkady got a glimpse over a line pushing through the gate of a ring illuminated by a hanging rack of lights. Spectators chanted, blasted whistles, rang cowbells under a layered atmosphere of smoke and orbits of insects. It was between rounds, and in opposite corners two black boxers shining with sweat sat on stools while their trainers convened like great minds of science. As the gong rang and every head craned to the center of the ring, Arkady unlocked Rufo's door and slipped inside.

  There were some changes from his earlier visit. Bed, table and sink were in place. Rufo's Panama still hung on its hook, the photos of the boxing team still populated the wall and by the sofa was the same curious list of phone numbers for a man without a phone. The TV and VCR hadn't disappeared, nor the boxes of running shoes and cigars, but the minibar had disappeared.

  With an eye for other souvenirs from Panama, Arkady once more went through the closet and drawers, shoes and cigar boxes. The Rogaine came from a Panamanian pharmacy and a cardboard coaster came from a Panama City club, but he didn't find anything significant.

  It seemed possible to Arkady that a man who memorialized a visit to the Eiffel Tower might have taped a trip to Panama. He turned on the television, slid a cassette into the player and at once turned down the volume of hyperexcited Spanish as on the screen two fighters pummeled each other around a ring under the auspices of their national flags. The tape had the blotchy color of old East German film and the jerkiness of too few frames per second, but he could make out a young, lithe Rufo hammering an opponent and, a moment later, having his glove raised by a referee. The next fight on the tape featured Mongo, and it occurred to Arkady how boxers were basically drummers, each man trying to establish his rhythm as the beat: I am the drummer, you are the drum. A dozen tapes were of other international tournaments, and another half-dozen were instructional: proper ways to jump rope, work the bag, move without falling down.

  All the other tapes had glossy sleeves with pornographic pictures and titles in different languages. Bringing sex films to Cuba seemed to Arkady like bringing pictures of pearls to an oyster bed. A couple of French videotapes had been shot in Havana and featured couples romping on deserted beaches-no one he recognized. One tape tided Sucre Noir had been shot on a rainy day. It featured interracial couples sporting in a living room decorated with cinema posters. Arkady was interested in the decor because he realized that he had been in the same room. Down to the stacks of photo albums, collection of cast-bronze bells, ivory phalluses arrayed by size, he recognized the apartment of Mostovoi, the Russian embassy's photographer. On the wall between the posters were the same framed photographs of friends in Paris, London, waving from a boat. He paused the tape. There was one more photograph that hadn't been up when he'd visited Mostovoi, five men with rifles kneeling around what looked like a dead rhinoceros, too unfocused on the tape for him to make out faces. Big-game hunters in Africa, a Hemingway-style memento given center stage in Mostovoi's collection. Why would Mostovoi hide that?

  Someone was trying to unlock the door. Arkady turned off the VCR and listened to a key trying to force its way through the cylinder, followed by a low curse in a voice he recognized. Luna.

  Arkady could hear him thinking. The sergeant probably had the key Arkady had given to Osorio, which worked perfectly well on Arkady's apartment in Moscow. Luna wouldn't know that; all he'd know was that keys didn't stop working, and either the lock had been changed or this was the wrong key. He'd examine his other keys. No, this was the key the detective had given him. Maybe he hadn't had to use it before. On Arkady's first visit he had closed the door but not set the latch and anyone could have simply turned the knob to open it. Someone had, since some items were gone and the latch had been set by the time Arkady returned, although setting it didn't necessarily require a key, just pushing a button on the lock plate, and this might be the first time Luna actually had to try the key.

  For his part, Arkady became aware that the Gimnasio Atares was silent, the riot of whistles and bells over. Luna had been annoyed to see Arkady merely venture to the santero's. How unhappy would he be to find Arkady in Rufo's room?

  The door jumped as a fist hit it. Arkady could feel Luna stare at the lock. Finally, feet turned away, accompanied by the sound of metal scraping stone. When Arkady cracked the door open, Luna was a block away under a streetlamp that had faded to brown. Two fighters in sweatsuits shuffled painfully out of the arena gate, followed by a trainer mopping his face with a towel. As they reached his door, Arkady slipped out in front of them, close enough to screen himself from Luna and merge his shadow with theirs all the way to the far corner. Focused on their own aches, the trio stumbled on. Arkady stopped and looked back.

  Luna was returning. The sound of metal was an empty cart with iron wheels that he pushed to the curb outside Rufo's. The captain was in plain clothes and this time, instead of relying on the niceties of a key, he jammed his ice pick into the latch, applied his shoulder and the door swung open. The captain seemed to know what he was after, carrying out the television, VCR and boxes of running shoes to the cart. He rolled the load away, the wheel's grinding reverberating on either side. Despite the dim lights, with the cart's slow pace and noise Luna was easy to follow.

  Somehow the sergeant was able to find more empty and desolate streets as he went, maneuvering the cart around mounds of broken stone, the sort of scene that made Havana appear an earthquake zone. Some warehouses had fallen in so long ago that palm trees leaned out the windows. The two men traveled about ten blocks before Luna stopped at the darkest intersection yet and let the cart stand while he positioned a board on the steps of a corner building, then muscled the cart up the makeshift ramp and through outward-opening double doors. Arkady heard the cart roll on stone and what sounded like the bleat of goats.

  He followed up the steps. Somehow power had been fed to the building because in the vaulted dark was the ember of a hanging bulb. Luna had moved out of sight to a deeper interior; Arkady heard the cart progressing through a hallway.

  He felt as if he had uncovered a Soviet mausoleum. There were the floor design of a hammer and sickle under the dirt, unlit sconces of red stars, busts of Marx and Lenin along the balcony, the difference being that instead of a sarcophagus in the middle of the floor there was a Lada with plates that read 060 016. Pribluda's car. And some lighter touches: at opposite ends of a counter of dark wood were two statues, black and white. The black figure looked too frail for the sugarcane she had cut, but the white was a Russian superman who had scooped the bounty of the sea-flounder, crab and octopus-in a single net. A tapping led Arkady to look up toward the mezzanine again. Between Marx and Lenin shone the gunslit eyes of goats. Dust stirred around the bulb. Although no one was visible in the car it shifted from side to side and not just as a trick of the feeble light.

  The keys to Pribluda's car had been in Arkady's possession since the autopsy. He opened the trunk and felt a mound of burlap sacks. The bottom sack was heavy and tied with a rope. Arkady untied the sack and pulled it off while the goats bleated. Osorio raised her head, too stiff to stand. As he lifted her the front doors of the lobby swung open and a goat bell rang. Luna had returned not from the hall but through the same door Arkady had just used and the sergeant carried not a bat but a machete. He said something in Spanish that pleased himself enormously.

  Osorio pressed her mouth to Arkady's ear.» My gun."

  He saw the Makarov in the car trunk. As Osorio hung on, he picked up the gun and cocked it.» Get out of the way."

  "No." Luna shook his head.» I don't think so." Arkady aimed over the sergeant's head and squeezed the trigger. He needn't have bothered, the hammer snapped on an empty breech. Luna pulled the lobby doors closed.» This is justice."

  Arkady put Osorio into the front passenger sea
t of the car and went around to the driver's side. Ladas were not known for their power, but they did start. In the coldest or warmest weather they started. Arkady turned on the engine and lights and, blinded, Luna stopped for a moment, then crossed the floor in two strides and brought the machete down on the car. Arkady reversed so that the blow landed on the hood, but Luna slapped the blade sideways and split the windshield into two caved-in sheets of safety glass. Unable to see, Arkady drove forward, hoping for a piece of the captain, only to hit the long counter head-on. The rear window crystallized as the machete swung through. Arkady backed up, cutting the wheel to sweep Luna away. The blade came straight down through the car roof, probed and vanished. Just when Arkady thought the Cuban was actually on the car, one headlight exploded. A ladder toppled, crushing Osorio's side of the car.

  Arkady peeled off enough windshield to see. The falling ladder had grazed the bulb, and as the light swung, goats, stairs, statues swayed from side to side. He backed into a column hard enough to rock the balcony, shot forward and aimed at Luna, silhouetted by crystals on his shoulders. Missed him, but as the hanging bulb flared to life Arkady saw an electric highway of glass leading to the doors and followed. As the doors burst open, the Lada landed askew on the steps, righted itself and shouldered through debris. The left-front fender was crushed, and left turns seemed to be impossible. He drove toward the streetlamp, and when he was a block beyond he looked back through the gaping rear window to see Luna running after. Arkady pushed the car as fast as it could go until the sergeant was out of sight.

  At last the streets ended at docks and the deep black and trailing lights of the harbor. Air blew through the windshield and windows and safety glass sparkled on their laps. The Lada limped over railroad tracks and finally swung into an alley, scaring the spangly green eyes of a cat caught in the headlight, and lurched to a stop.

  A black hand swung around Arkady's seat and hit him in the chest. He grabbed its wrist and twisted in his seat to the figure of Change. The man-sized doll had been riding in the back of the car, still wearing its red bandanna, still holding its walking stick in its other hand, its dark expression the glower of a kidnap victim. Ofelia aimed the Makarov, loaded or not, at the doll.

  "Dios mio." She let the gun drop.

  "Exactly." Arkady got out of the car on weak legs.

  He counted the gashes in the roof and sides of the car. The front was crushed, headlights empty sockets.

  "If it were a boat it would sink," he said.» It will get you to a doctor."

  "No," Ofelia said.

  "To the police."

  "To say what? That I've refused orders from the police? That I hid evidence? That I'm helping a Russian instead?"

  "It doesn't sound so good when you put it that way. Then what? Luna will only follow us to Pribluda's."

  "I know where to go."

  Considering that Ofelia made the arrangements in the middle of the night, she didn't do badly. A switch from the Lada, Change and all, to her DeSoto and then to a room at the Rosita, a love motel on the Playa del Este just fifteen miles outside the city and a block from the beach. All the Rosita's units were free-standing white stucco cottages from the fifties with air-conditioning and kitchenette, television and potted plants, clean sheets and towels at a price only the most successful jineteras could afford.

  The first thing Ofelia did once they were inside was to shower the burlap and shag off her body. Wrapped in a towel, she asked him to pick nuggets of glass from her hair. He'd expected her curls to be stiffer, but they were as soft as water and his fingers never looked more thick and clumsy. Between the wings of her shoulder blades the skin was rubbed raw and seamed with grains of glass. She didn't flinch. In the bathroom mirror he saw her eyes on him and the natural kohl of their lids.

  She said, "You were right about the photograph Pribluda took of you. I found it when I dusted his rooms for prints just as you said. I was the one who gave it to Luna."

  "Well, I never told you that what Luna wanted from me was the photograph that Pribluda called the Havana Yacht Club. We're even."

  "Claro, we're both liars. Look at us."

  He saw an unlikely pair, a woman smooth as soap-stone with a ragged man.

  "What was Luna saying when he came back?" he asked.

  "He said Rufo's television was warm, so he knew you were there. Why didn't you think of that?"

  "Actually, I did."

  "You followed him anyway?"

  Arkady wondered, "Are you possible to please?"

  She said, "Yes."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  She was a dark sprite, except that in bed she was a woman. Her breasts were small, tipped in purple, her stomach sleek down to a triangle of sable. He laid his mouth on hers, and it was so long since he had been with a woman that it was like learning to eat again. Especially when the taste was different, heady and strong, as if she were coated in sugary liqueur.

  He was helpless in his own greed, working his way through the exquisite unfolding as Ofelia, his new measure, drew him in. There was something convulsive in this feast for the starving, who had taken the vow of hunger.

  He would have said he cared for people, wished them well and did his best by them, but he had been dead. She would raise Lazarus and close her legs around him so as not to let him go. She kissed his forehead, lips, the bruises on the inside of his arm as if each kiss healed. She was hard and lithe and soft and certainly more artful and vocal than he was. This seemed to be allowed in Cuba.

  Outside, he heard the ocean say, This is the wave that will sweep away the sand, topple the buildings and flood the streets. This is the wave. This is the wave.

  On the bed Arkady arranged Pribluda's photograph of the "Havana Yacht Club," the AzuPanama documents, his chronology of Pribluda's last day, list of dates and phone numbers from Rufo's wall. While Ofelia sorted through them Arkady took in a cement floor painted blue, pink walls with paper cupids, plastic roses in ice buckets and an air-conditioner that gasped like an Ilyushin taking off. They had placed Change in a corner chair, the doll's head resting heavily against a kitchen counter, hand balanced on his stick.

  "If these documents are real," Ofelia said, "entonces, I can see why a Russian would think AzuPanama is more an instrument of the Cuban Ministry of Sugar than a genuine Panamanian corporation."

  "It would seem that way."

  Arkady told her about O'Brien and the Mexican truck parts, the American boots and the real Havana Yacht Club.

  "He's a charmer, an intriguer, he goes from one story to another. It's like being led down a path."

  "I'm sure it is."

  He was distracted by the fact that all she wore was his coat and a glimpse of yellow beads. He hadn't noticed when she had put on the necklace. The coat was huge on her, and the sight was like rinding a photograph of one woman in a frame that had always held a picture of another. Every second that it clung to her, it was exchanging auras of scent and heat and memory.

  Ofelia knew. It was not totally true, but the charge could be made that once she had detected his grief she had suspected his loss, and once she had observed the tenderness with which he treated his coat and discovered the faint history of perfume on its sleeve, from that moment on she was determined to wear the coat herself. Why? Because here was a man who had loved a woman so deeply he was willing to follow her right into death.

  Or it might be he was just the melancholy sort-in short, a Russian. But it had to be said that when she was in the trunk of the car, trussed, bagged and barely breathing, the one person she thought might save her was this man she hadn't even met a week before. Muevete! Ofelia told herself. Get your clothes on and run. Instead, she said, "In Panama almost anything can happen. O'Brien's bank is in the Colon Free Trade Zone of Panama where everything happens. Still, he has been a friend to Cuba and I don't see what sugar has to do with the Havana Yacht Club or Hedy or Sergeant Luna."

  "Neither do I, but you don't try to kill a man who is leaving in a week unless whatever i
s going to happen will happen soon. Then, of course, everything will be perfectly clear."

  In his disheveled way, in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, long fingers cupping a cigarette, he was Ofelia's picture of a Russian musician. A musician sitting by a bus stalled on the side of the road somewhere in the Urals.» Let me get this right. You're saying that Rufo, Hedy, Luna, everything that has happened so far is to cover up a crime that took place not in the past but hasn't even taken place yet? How are we going to find that?"

  "Think of it as a challenge. The biggest advantage a detective usually has is that he knows what the crime is, that's his starting point. But we're two professional investigators. Between the Russian Method and the Cuban Method let's see if we can stop something before it happens."

  "Okay. For the sake of argument, somebody's planning something and we don't know what. But you force their hand when you come here with a picture of Pribluda with his friends, the two car mechanics, at the old Havana Yacht Club, which, incidentally, since the Revolution, is the Casa Cultural de Trabajadores de Construction, but that aside, Rufo tries to kill you for this picture. It would have been much easier to ignore you, so we will give some weight to that. Second, you force someone's hand again when you visit the Havana Yacht Club and Walls and O'Brien come out to take you off the dock and offer you some sort of employment, which, by the way, is too ridiculous to consider. Again it would have been easier to pay you no attention at all. Third, Luna beats you with a bat, but he doesn't try to kill you, maybe because he can't find that picture. Meanwhile, is anyone trying to kill you over AzuPanama? No. Trying to put the smallest hole in you over AzuPanama? No. Forget about AzuPanama, it's all about this picture," she said and stabbed it with her finger.