Havana Bay ar-4 Page 32

  More figures slipped out of the back rows of the reviewing stand; Arkady recognized them all from the paladar Angola. The front rows appeared mesmerized by swirling skirts, the insinuating pace of the drums booming from speakers, echoing off the clubhouse. Change's head listed heavily to the bearded man on his right.» This Side to Enemy," Arkady thought. No doubt the man's uniform fit as badly as it did in part because of an armored vest, which would stop a small-caliber bullet but not a shaped charge of dynamite. No shards or ball bearings, Arkady guessed. They didn't want a general slaughter, just an effective circle of impact, and who more expert with explosions than Erasmo?

  He swung the glasses and found Ofelia and Mostovoi going in a completely different direction, working their way far from the stage and along the sand to a white wall that separated the grounds of the Havana Yacht Club from the neighboring beach. Arkady saw Mostovoi check his watch.

  "It's La Concha, the old casino," Mostovoi said.» I consider it one of the most romantic settings in Havana. I've shot here daytime, nighttime, it's got that exotic feel that women love."

  He ran his hand up a column. For all the police and military presence on the other side of the beach wall, Ofelia and Mostovoi had this area entirely to themselves. It was now the social center for a catering union, but she remembered that before the Revolution it had been not only a casino but a Moorish fantasy, with a minaret, date palms and orange trees, tiled roof. Ofelia and the Russian stood in the long shadow of a colonnade of horseshoe arches. The fact that she had followed Mostovoi didn't mean she trusted him. For all his assurances there was a shiftiness about him. His beret shifted, his hair shifted and his eyes seemed to be over everything, especially her. She wouldn't have spent a minute with him except for the fact that he claimed to know where Arkady wanted to meet her.

  "First one place, then another? Why would he come here?"

  "You'll have to ask him that. Do you mind if I take a picture of you?"

  "Now?"

  "While we're waiting. I think that Cuban women are nature's children. The eyes, the warm color, a lushness that can be almost too overripe at times. Not you, though."

  "Where and when exactly is Arkady coming?"

  "Right here. Who can say exactly when with Renko?" Mostovoi unzipped his bag for a camera and a flash unit that he tightened into the camera shoe. The unit made a warm-up whine.

  "No pictures." Ofelia wanted to keep eyes adjusted to the night sky, the arc of sand, the dark of the water. The last thing she needed was a flash.» You keep looking at your watch."

  "For Arkady."

  The white light blinded her. She was unprepared because Mostovoi shot without raising the camera and she saw nothing but a fixed image of flash unit's faceted lens and the photographer's smirk until she blinked her way back to normal.

  "If you do that again," she said, "I will break your camera.”

  "Sorry, I couldn't resist."

  "Was that a signal?" Arkady noticed that with the flash from the casino Walls eased the throttle forward, bringing the Gavilan even closer to the beach. Why wasn't the patrol boat at the dock responding?

  Walls said, "When my friend John O'Brien plans something the z's are dotted and the t's are crossed."

  "Thank you, George. The devil, as they say, is in the details. Speaking of whom …"

  Ahead in the water was a neumdtico with a hand shielding a candle. As Walls slowed the boat to idle again, the neumdtico snuffed the flame with his fingers, spun his tube and paddled backward to the stern of the Gavilan, where Walls helped him on board and tied the tube to a transom cleat. Luna stood dripping in the cockpit. Wet, he had the dank look of a body disinterred and he stared at Arkady with anticipation.

  "Now you'll know what it feels like," Luna promised.

  "What feels like?"

  "I'm sorry, Arkady," O'Brien said.» It's time to give up the coat now. In fact, everything. You can do it yourself or we can do it for you."

  While Walls took the coat and the rest of Arkady's clothing, too, Luna went below to change clothes, a modesty that surprised Arkady. The sergeant reappeared in uniform swollen with a menace kept in thin control, and Arkady wondered how he had ever managed to throw Luna into a wall. He was, himself, past lifting weights or fattening up. Then it was Arkady's turn to put on Luna's sodden shorts and shirt. Up to the point of pulling on flippers Arkady considered himself relatively safe because they were so difficult to put on the feet of a dead man. With the flippers on he felt both unsafe and ridiculous. Still, a patrol boat had to be coming.

  Holding the binoculars by the strap, O'Brien returned them to Arkady.» See how it ends."

  Onstage, a melee of golden dancers moved to a quickening pace. Daughters of Oshun, Arkady thought. Well, he'd learned that much. It wouldn't be a detonation set by a timer, he thought, because there were too many variables in public events. The back two rows of the stands had thinned out. Erasmo backed his wheelchair from the stage. An ecstasy in rays of sweat flew from the dancers. Change leaned. By the side of the stage a dozen men looked at their watches. In the front row, the leader himself and Chango seemed to look straight through the frenzy of the dancers. How the dancers could turn faster Arkady didn't know, but they did, their golden skirts spread and spinning at the runaway pace of the congas. He braced for the flare of explosion.

  Instead, plainclothes men started to appear. They came in pairs, quietly taking away the man in aviator glasses, Bias and, one by one, the other men Arkady recognized from the paladar. Each man reacted with the same sequence of surprise, bafflement and resignation. Their military training showed. No one ran or called out at the moment of his arrest. Arkady looked for Erasmo being wheeled away. Instead, Erasmo seemed to be in charge of this new phase. Hardly anyone else in the audience seemed to notice, fixed as they were on blurred hands on drums and the golden skirts of sensuous Yemayas, every eye transfixed except for the old man in too much uniform in the front row. He dropped his head by small degrees until Arkady realized that under the bill of his cap the nation's leader was checking his own watch.

  "He knew," Arkady said.» He knew about the plot."

  "Much better," O'Brien said.» He helped start it. He does it every few years to weed out malcontents. The same as he did with Isabel's father. The Comandante didn't last this long by waiting for a conspiracy to come for him."

  "Erasmo helped, too?"

  "In spite of himself, Erasmo is a Cuban patriot."

  "You took care of the details?"

  "More than mere details."

  "The talk about the Havana Yacht Club?"

  "All true to a degree. The fact is, Arkady, revolutions are chancy things, you never know how they're going to turn out. I prefer to bet with the house, whoever the house is. The glasses?" He took the binoculars from Arkady by the strap and lowered them into a plastic Ziploc bag, which he placed in the seabag that was supposedly Pribluda's.» There's nothing trickier than an assassination, especially an assassination that's not supposed to succeed. You have to keep the means and trigger of destruction in your own hands. And you have to undermine the conspirators in the public eye. These are highly regarded men, military heroes. It helps paint them black if the man who actually tries to set off the blast isn't Cuban at all but a generally unpopular figure as, say, a Russian. A dead Russian, to be precise."

  Walls and O'Brien weren't just waiting to explain how brilliant they were, Arkady knew. There was more to come. Luna opened a cockpit bench to take out a speargun. He placed the butt against his hip, cocked the power bands and slid into the muzzle a shaft with a spearhead with folded wings for barbs. No patrol boat, Arkady understood, was on the way.

  "Why would anyone connect me to the blast?"

  Walls held up another Ziploc bag so that Arkady could see inside a television remote control.» Remember the monitor you turned on for John at the Riviera? We modified the remote, it's a radio transmitter now, but it still has your fingerprints. Then, people saw the doll in Pribluda's apartment while
you were there. We may have lost Sergei, but John said you were so bright you'd serve even better."

  O'Brien answered his cell phone. Arkady hadn't heard a ring. After a word of satisfaction, O'Brien folded the phone up.

  Luna fished in the pockets of Arkady's coat and found the snapshot of Pribluda, Mongo and Erasmo.» Fuck your Havana Yacht Club."

  He tore the picture into pieces that he threw onto the water. He kicked the inner tube off the transom after the bits of paper.

  "Get in."

  Standing at the carved doors of the old gambling hall, Ofelia caught the button tones and soft fluorescence of Mostovoi's cell phone. The call was over in a second.

  "Who did you call?"

  "Friends. Have you ever posed?"

  "What friends?"

  "At the embassy. I explained that I was helping somebody, which I certainly am trying to do. I meant it about posing."

  "For what?"

  "Something different."

  Her attention was half on Mostovoi talking to her in the dark interior of the hall and half on the pale strand of the beach. Music played on the other side of the beach wall. A rumba for Yemaya.

  "How different?"

  "I mean very different."

  She couldn't tell what was in the room, but its large space magnified sound, and she heard Mostovoi swallow in a way she found unpleasant. All she could see of him was the oily eye of his camera and she talked mainly to keep track of him.

  "What was in this room?"

  He slipped sideways from the moonlight at the door.

  "What was here? It was the main casino. Chandeliers from Italy, tiles from Spain. Roulette tables, craps, blackjack. It was a different world."

  "Well, no one's here now."

  "I know what you mean. You think maybe Renko went to the plane?"

  Would Arkady do that? she wondered. Slip away without a word? It was one of the things men did best. They didn't need planes, they just disappeared. Her mother could count them: Primero, Segundo and now Tercero. Bias would deliver Pribluda's body to the airport. Arkady still might wander in like a beachcomber or stroll down the portal of arches that framed the sea, but it was more likely with every minute that he had accomplished the classic retreat, the exit with no good-bye. She felt profoundly stupid.

  "I could see you in any number of poses," Mostovoi said.

  But she thought about Arkady's black coat and decided, no, his problem was that he abandoned no one. One way or another, he was going to come.

  "There in the moonlight," Mostovoi said, "is perfect."

  Ofelia heard the shutter of his camera click, although the flash failed. She heard two more rapid clicks before she realized they weren't from a shutter but from a hammer on the empty breech of a gun. She tried to dig her own gun out of her straw bag, but it was under Rufo's phone. The hammer clicked again. When Ofelia found her own gun, it was tangled with straw. She fired one wild round that exploded the bottom of the bag. Something crushed the plaster wall by her ear. She dropped to her back and held her gun with both hands more deliberately. Her second shot through the bag lit Mostovoi, a flash of him swinging his gun down like a club. The third tunneled into his mouth.

  Arkady floated in the tube on a short rope from the stern of the Gavilan. The Caribbean was warm, the net a hammock, the rubber tube actually cushy, but he felt as if he were looking up from the bottom of a well at O'Brien, Walls with the gun and Luna with the spear-gun. They blocked the stars. Arkady would have liked to think at least he was stalling. No, they were only waiting, having outthought and outmuscled him all the way. One stunning accomplishment: he not only found out how Pribluda was duped but got to be the dupe too. Finally a neumdtico himself.

  Their heads lifted at the sound of gunshots.

  Walls said, "The son of a bitch was supposed to use a silencer."

  "And why three shots?" asked O'Brien.

  A cell-phone tone came from Luna's shirt pocket. He flipped the phone open and answered. As he listened he turned toward the beach.

  "Who is it?" Walls said.

  "It's her, the detective." O'Brien followed Luna's eyes' turn to the casino; it really was wonderful to see how quickly the man calculated, Arkady thought.» She got Mostovoi's phone. Or Rufo's, and she's using the memory." O'Brien told Luna, "Hang up."

  Luna raised the speargun for quiet and pressed the phone tight against his ear.

  "Take the phone from him," O'Brien told Walls.

  Luna pointed the spear at Arkady.» She says he never harmed Hedy. You told me he came looking for me. What she says is he wasn't after me at all."

  "How does she know?" Walls said.

  "The night someone killed Hedy, she says he was with her."

  "She's lying," Walls said.» They sleep together."

  "That's why I believe her. I know her and she knows me. Who hurt my Hedy?"

  "Do you believe this?" O'Brien appealed to Arkady as one sane man to another.» George, will you please take his fucking phone away?"

  "Your stupid Hedy," Walls told Luna, "was a whore."

  The speargun jumped and a steel shaft with a line of white nylon stuck out of Walk's stomach. When he looked down blood under pressure sprayed his face.

  "George," O'Brien said.

  Walls sat down on the gunwale, raised his gun and shot Luna, who took a single backward step before moving forward. As Walls tried for another clear shot the two men fell over the side.

  Arkady began climbing out of the tube. On deck O'Brien had pulled the second speargun from the cockpit bench and was trying to insert the spear and pull back the two stiff elastic power bands, not an easy task at the best of times, worse standing amid loose spear cable and blood on the deck. But as Arkady came up over the transom O'Brien managed to notch one band and pull the gun's trigger, and Arkady found himself on his back in the water, a spear through his forearm and the spearhead lodged shallowly in his chest, the spear's force spent on his arm. Spear cable led back to O'Brien, who had one tasseled shoe on the transom and was already, Arkady could tell, calculating ten or eleven moves ahead. With his free hand Arkady yanked the cable. O'Brien dropped the speargun overboard, but the line that tangled around his ankle stretched him over the polished mahogany. Arkady pulled with both hands and O'Brien slid all the way over the stern and in.

  O'Brien shouted, "I can't swim!"

  The Gavilan was low-slung enough for O'Brien to try to claw his way back on, but Arkady towed him by the line away from the boat. O'Brien turned to the inner tube, but his splashing chased the tube more than it closed the distance. The speargun floated, but not enough to hold up a man.

  The spear tip's wings had spread outside the muscle of Arkady's chest. He closed them under the spear's sliding collar and drew the shaft from the arm while it I was numb. With his good arm he swam underwater. The sea was a cave around a quarter-moon with glints of fish. On the other side of the boat Walls and Luna I still struggled, trying to climb over each other to the surface. Bubbles streaked from Walls's gun. Luna had wrapped the spear line around the other man's neck. Arkady came up for air and made his way back around the stern of the Gavilan. No more than a meter away the top of O'Brien's head bobbed in the water.

  The patrol boat hadn't moved, although Arkady saw lights along the casino beach. The Yacht Club was still bright.

  He could haul himself onto the Gavilan, but at this point Arkady was happy to rest, watch the stars swarm overhead and float on a blackness that held him up.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Snow fell again in April, enough to dust the streets and spiral in confusion around the intersections. Trucks hunched along the embankment road with lights on, a winter habit dying as hard as winter itself.

  Arkady had left the prosecutor's office and walked down to the embankment hoping to find fresher air along the river, but there really was no escaping the pollution, the usual pall mixed with snow into a sharp, urban brew. Streetlamps were on and pools of light swayed overhead, tugged this way and that by
the wind. Buildings along this stretch of Frunzenskaya were an institutional yellow, etchings of themselves behind lines of snow. The river, choked with water and ice, ground against stone walls.

  He'd gone a block before he realized that a man in a wheelchair was catching up with him at a determined pace. Not an easy task in such weather, he thought, with the wheels of the chair slipping on the slick pavement and detouring around the bodies in bedrolls who had taken up residence along the embankment. Arkady had stepped aside for the chair to pass when he saw who it was.

  "Spring in the Arctic." Erasmo was packed into a parka, ski cap, damp leather gloves. He brushed snow off his beard and watched his breath with disgust.

  "How can you stand it?"

  "You keep moving."

  Erasmo looked massive in the parka and vibrantly healthy as only Cubans could in Moscow. When he offered his hand, Arkady waited until it dropped.

  "What are you doing here?" Arkady asked.

  "Renegotiating the sugar contract."

  "Of course."

  "Don't be that way," Erasmo said.» I'm in Moscow for one day. I called your office, and they said this was the route you were most likely to take. Please."

  "Come on, then, I'll give you the Russian perspective." Arkady went at a slower pace while Erasmo rolled at his side.» '98 Jaguar, a banker who flies dollars out of Moscow in a Gulfstream jet. '91 Mercedes, a deputy minister or lesser mafioso. That homeless man under the streetlamp, well, he may be harmless or he might be an intelligence officer, you never know."

  "Of course I was," Erasmo said.» Where else would we let a Russian spy live except over a spy of our own? It's elemental. I tried to warn you off at the graveyard. At the restaurant I told you to drop it. After you found Mongo you could have stopped."

  "No."

  "There's never any reasoning with you, no middle ground. How is the arm?"

  "Nothing broken, thank you. It's my Cuban tattoo."

  "I almost didn't recognize you. Here you are in a parka like me. What happened to the wonderful coat?"

  "It is a wonderful coat, but I decided I was wearing it out. I still wear it on special occasions."