Havana Bay ar-4 Read online

  "You've been on the ocean before?" Ofelia asked.

  "The Bering Sea. It's not the same thing."

  "You don't have to be sorry for me," she said abruptly.» The captain knows what he's doing."

  Which sounded hollow even to her, but Renko relented, "You're right." He was wrapped in his black coat, like a shipwrecked man happy with the only article he'd rescued. She felt a conspiracy of sorts between the two of them because he hadn't mentioned to Arcos and Luna the earlier visit to Pribluda's flat.

  "The captain doesn't usually investigate homicides, does he?"

  "No."

  "I remember newsreels of Castro's first trip to Russia. He was a dashing revolutionary hunting bear in a beret and green fatigues while our Kremlin Politburo stumbled through the snow after him like a pack of fat, old, love-smitten tarts. It was a romance meant to last forever. It's hard to believe that Russians are now hunted in Havana."

  "I think you are in a confused state. Your friend dies and now you are attacked. This could give you a very distorted view of Cuban life."

  "It could."

  "And be upsetting."

  "Certainly distracting."

  She didn't know what he could mean by that.

  "There were no other witnesses?"

  "No."

  "You answered the door and Rufo attacked you without warning."

  "That's right."

  "With two weapons?"

  "Yes."

  "That sounds implausible."

  "That's because you're a good detective. But do you know what I've found?"

  "What have you found?"

  "I have found from my own experience that-in the absence of other witnesses-a simple, resolutely maintained lie is wonderfully difficult to break."

  Chapter Four

  As soon as Arkady was alone in Pribluda's flat he went to the office and opened the computer, which immediately demanded the password. An access code that combined up to twelve letters and numbers was virtually unbreakable, but a code also had to be remembered, and this was where the humans Arkady knew tended to use their birthday or address. Arkady tried the names of the colonel's wife, son, saint (although Pribluda was an atheist, he had always enjoyed a bottle on his saint's name day), favorite writers (Sholokhov and Gorky), favorite teams (Dynamo and Central Army). Arkady tried 06111968 for the date of Pribluda's Party membership, a chemical C12H22011 for sugar, a homesick 55-45-37-37 for the coordinates (latitude and longitude, minutes and seconds) of Moscow. He tried words written and transposed into numbers (even though the correct order of the Russian alphabet was a matter of controversy heading into the twenty-first century). The computer fan would buzz for a moment, then purr along. He tried until he traded the glow of the machine for the dark of the balcony, where he took solace in the steady sweep of the lighthouse beam and the deep insomnia of the night.

  Arkady discovered he fostered a killer's calculation hat even if his story was implausible, the truth was no more plausible. He was also a little bemused by his own reaction to the attack. He had defended himself instinctively, the way a man about to dive resists being pushed.

  He had no idea why he had been attacked except that it had to do with his friend Pribluda. Not that Pribluda was a friend in the ordinary sense. They shared no tastes, interests, politics. In fact, truth be told, Pribluda was in many ways a terrible man.

  Arkady could imagine him now bringing out the vodka and saying, "Renko, old pal, you're fucked. You are in a crazy country, in a foreign land where you know nothing, including the language." Pribluda would hunch forward to touch glasses and grin that ghastly smile of his. He had the habit of loosening a button, a collar, a cuff with each glassful, as if drinking was serious work.» All you can be sure of is that you know nothing. No one will help you because of your brown eyes. Everyone who steps forward as a friend will be an enemy. Everyone who offers to help is hiding a knife behind his back. Cheers!" The colonel would make a grand gesture of throwing the vodka's cap into the sea. That was his idea of panache.» Do you appreciate logic?"

  "I love logic," Arkady might say.

  "This is logic: Rufo had no reason to kill you. Rufo tried to kill you. Ergo, someone sent Rufo. Ergo, that someone will send someone else."

  "A nice thought. Was that a present to take home?"

  Arkady would nod in the direction of the man-sized doll brooding in the corner. The way its shadow shifted when the breeze pushed the lamp was a bit unnerving.» Charming." He fished from his coat a piece of note-paper on which he had written Rufo's address and the house key he had lifted off the body before Luna arrived.

  "What I think you should do," Pribluda would steamroll on, "is lock yourself with a gun and oranges, bread and water in a room at the embassy, maybe a bucket for personal needs, and don't open the door until you go to the airport."

  In his mind, Arkady asked, "Spending a week in Havana hiding in a room, wouldn't that be a little perverse?"

  "No. Killing Rufo when you were going to kill yourself, that's perverse."

  Arkady went down the hall to the office and returned with a map of the city that he spread under a lamp.

  "You're leaving?" Pribluda was always horrified when Arkady quit before the bottom of the bottle.

  Arkady searched for a street called Esperanza and wrote down Rufo's address on a piece of paper. He thought, I'm not just going to sit and wait. I also have your car key. If you want to help, tell me where the car is. Or give me your code.

  Pribluda's ghost, insulted, disappeared. Arkady, on the other hand, was wide awake.

  Stepping onto the street in a foreign city in the middle of the night was diving into a dark pool without knowing how deep the water was. An arcade of columns ran the length of the block, and he didn't emerge into faint, gassy light until he reached the lamp at the corner. He continued along the boulevard because its long curve against the sea simplified the problem of orientation.

  Although he listened for the stir of a car or a footfall, all he heard was his own echo and the surge of the ocean on the other side of empty traffic lanes. On the way he passed a mural of Castro painted up the side of a three-story building. The figure appeared to be a giant walking through his city, his head obscured in the dark above streetlamp level, wearing his characteristic military fatigues, legs in mid-stride, right hand tossing a salute toward an unseen someone vowing "A Sus Ordenes, Comandante!" Well, Arkady thought, the Coman-dante and he made a strange pair of insomniacs, a furtive Russian and a sleepless giant on patrol.

  Six blocks on was a dark hotel front and a taxi, the driver's head cradled on the steering wheel. Arkady shook the man and, when one eye squinted open, held up Rufo's address and a five-dollar bill.

  Arkady sat up front as the taxi flew like a bat through the blackout, the driver yawning the entire way as if nothing short of a collision was worth waking up for, slowing only when mounds of urban rubble loomed in the headlights. Rufo's address was stenciled on the front of a low, windowless house on a narrow street. The cab fumbled away while, with Rufo's lighter, Arkady found the right key; when he had taken the house key off the dead man before calling the PNR Arkady noticed how like his own house key Rufo's was, a Russian design with a star stamped on the grip, no doubt a souvenir of socialist commerce. It did occur to him that if Detective Osorio had tried to enter with the keys he had left on Rufo she was frustrated and annoyed.

  The door opened to a room narrow enough to make claustrophobia creep up his back. He walked the lighter flame between an unmade daybed and a low table with a ceramic ashtray-and-nude and a stack of TV and stereo, tape deck and VCR. A minibar looked ripped out of a hotel suite. A pedestal sink was lined with minoxidil, vitamins and aspirin. An armoire held, besides clothes, boxes of Nike and New Balance running shoes, cigar boxes, a library of videotapes and copies of Windows '95, a regular emporium. He opened a door to glimpse a filthy toilet, ducked back into the room and moved more slowly. Tacked to the walls were newspaper articles headlined gran exito de equipo
cubano and, over a photo of a young world-beating Rufo raising his boxing gloves, pinero triunfa en ussr! Framed pictures showed groups of men in team jackets in Red Square, at Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower. Arkady turned the photos and copied names he found on the back. Names and numbers were also scribbled on the wall by the bed.

  Daysi 32-2007

  Susy 30-4031

  Vi. Aflt. 2300

  Kid Choc. 5/1

  Vi. HYC 2200 Angola

  The only sense Arkady could make of the list was that he had been the visitor arriving on Aeroflot at 2300 hours, eleven at night, and that there seemed to be another visitor from Angola due at almost the same late hour. Anyway, the list was a lot of phone numbers for a room with no phone or phone jack. Arkady remembered that Rufo had had a cell phone when they met at the airport, although when Arkady had searched Rufo's body later, the phone was gone.

  On a hook hung an elegant, ivory-colored straw hat with "Made in Panama" and the initials RPP stamped on the sweatband. He searched the bureau, felt under the pillow and mattress, flipped through videos that all seemed to be boxing films or porn for more personal labels. The minibar held airline nuts and healthful bottles of Evian. There was no sign of any visit by Luna or Osorio, no fingerprint dust of burned palm fronds,

  Most important, he found no reason for Rufo to try to kill him. Rufo had put some planning into the attack. The running suit made sense for the same reason painters wore coveralls, and he felt that the same thought had registered with Osorio. But why bother killing someone who would be gone from the scene in a matter of hours? Was Rufo after something or was it simply open season on Russians in Havana?

  As he stepped outside, the light of dawn showed next to the apartment a scarred wall in bullfight red that said gimnasio atares. At the curb in a PNR sedan was Detective Osorio. She fixed her eyes on Arkady long enough to make him squirm before she put out her hand.» The key."

  "Sorry." Arkady fished in his pocket and gave her the key to his apartment in Moscow. He could always break into his own home if need be.

  "Get in the car," Osorio said.» I would like to lock you into a cell but Dr. Bias wants to talk to you."

  With his trimmed beard and whiff of carbolic soap, Dr. Bias was the Pluto of a personal, genial underworld, welcoming Arkady back to the Institute de Medicina Legal and praising Osorio.

  "Our Ofelia is very intelligent. If Hamlet had an Ofelia half as smart he would have solved the murder of his father the king in short order. Of course, they wouldn't have had much of a play." Two young women in snug IML T-shirts walked by in the corridor; the doctor's eyes approved.» We were trained by the FBI in Washington and Quantico until the Revolution, then by the Russians and Germans. But I like to think we have our own style. Your problem, Renko, is that you have no confidence in us. I noticed that the first time you were here."

  "Is that it?" Arkady asked.

  He thought his problem was that Rufo had tried to kill him, but the director seemed to have a bigger picture. They walked by a glass case with two head shots of men with slack mouths and closed eyes.

  "Missing persons and unidentified dead. For the public to see." Bias picked up his thread.» When you think of Cuba you think of a Caribbean island, a place like Haiti, a country like Nicaragua. When we say, for example, we have identified a body as a Russian, you wonder how good is that identification, how qualified are these people who are telling me to accept this body and take it home? When you see a body retrieved from the water the way dogs play with bones, you question how careful the police work is. That is why you stole Rufo's key and went to his room on your own. I go to international conferences all the time and I meet people who don't know Cuba and have the same misgivings. So, let me tell you something about myself. I have a medical degree from the University of Havana with a specialty in pathology. I have studied at the Superior School of Investigation in Volgograd, in Leipzig and Berlin. Last year I lectured at Interpol conferences in Toronto and Mexico City. So, you have not been dropped off the end of the earth. Some enemies of Cuba want to isolate us, but we are not isolated. The international aspect of crime does not allow us to be isolated. I will not allow it."

  They passed a handcuffed man in a chair. He lifted a face of old scars and fresh bruises.

  "Waiting for his psychological evaluation," Bias explained.» We have other experts in forensic biology, dentistry, toxicology, immunology. A Russian might find this hard to believe. You used to be the teacher and we used to be the students. Now we are the teachers in Africa, Central America, Asia. Our Ofelia"-Bias nodded to Osorio, who had been gliding along modestly- "has taught in Vietnam. There is no ignorance here. I will not allow it. As a result, I am pleased to say that Havana has the lowest rate of unsolved homicides of any capital city in the world. So when I say who a body is, that's who he is. But Detective Osorio tells me that you are again hesitant about the identification of Colonel Pribluda."

  "He is reacting to the attack on himself," she said.

  "My reaction has probably been colored by that," Arkady conceded.» Or finding Pribluda dead. Or jet lag." '

  Bias said, "You have a week more here. You will adjust. It was very enterprising of you to go to Rufo's. Ofelia said you might. She's intuitive, I think."

  "I think so, too," Arkady said.

  "If what you say is true, Rufo inadvertently killed himself by his own hand during a brief, violent struggle?"

  "Accidental suicide."

  "Very much so. But that does not answer the question of why Rufo attacked you. I find this very troubling."

  "Between us, I'm troubled too."

  Bias stopped at the head of a stairway from which rose a sour coolness like the odor of spoiled milk.» The nature of the attack with a knife and a syringe is so peculiar. There was an embalming syringe stolen here yesterday, although I don't understand when Rufo could have taken it. You were with him the whole time, weren't you?"

  "I went to the rest room once. He could have taken it then."

  "Yes, you're right. Well, it was probably that syringe, although I don't understand why a murderer would choose to use it when he already had a better weapon. Do you?"

  Arkady gave the matter some thought.» Did Rufo have any record of violence?"

  "I know the opinion of Captain Arcos in this matter, but I have to be honest. Better to say that Rufo had a record of not being caught. He was a jinetero, a hustler. The kind who hangs around tourists and finds someone a girl, changes their money, gets them cigars. Supposedly very successful with German and Swedish women, secretaries on vacation. May I be direct?"

  "Please."

  "It is said that he would advertise to foreign women that he had a pinga like a locomotive."

  "What is a pinga?" Arkady asked.

  "Well, I'm no psychiatrist, but a man who has a pinga like a locomotive doesn't use a syringe to kill someone."

  "More likely a machete," Osorio spoke up.

  "You can't see many of those. How many people would have machetes in the city?"

  "Every Cuban has a machete," Bias said.» I have three in my own closet."

  "I have one," Osorio said.

  Arkady stood corrected.

  Bias asked, "You can't shed any light on this syringe?"

  "No."

  "Understand I am not a detective, I am not the PNR, I am only a forensic pathologist, but I was trained by my Russian instructors of long ago to think in an analytical fashion. I believe we are not so different, so I will show you something to build your confidence in us. And you may even learn something from us."

  "Such as?"

  Bias rubbed his hands like a host with a program.» We will start where you came in."

  The morgue had six drawers, a freezer and a glass-faced cooler, all with broken handles beaded with condensation. Bias said, "The refrigerators still work. We had an American pilot from the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He crashed and died, and for nineteen years the CIA said they never heard of him. Finally his family came and got him. B
ut he was in good condition in his own humidor right here. We called him the Cigar."

  Bias rolled out a drawer. Inside, the purple body identified as Pribluda was rearranged: skull, jaw and right foot between the legs, a plastic sack of organs where the head should be. Left open, the stomach cavity released a zoo-like bouquet that made Arkady's eyes smart, and the whole body had been placed in a zinc tub to keep the liquefying flesh from overflowing. Arkady lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. That was reason to smoke right there. So far, Arkady's confidence was not rising.

  "We did have funding promised from our Russian friends for a new refrigeration system. You can understand how important refrigeration is in Havana. Then the Russians said we had to buy it." Bias turned his head this way and that to study the corpse.» Are you aware of any characteristics of Pribluda that are different from this body?"

  "No, but I think that after a week in the water and having body parts switched, most people look alike."

  "I was instructed by Captain Arcos not to perform biopsies. However, I think I am still the director here and so I did. The brain and organs show no evidence of drugs or toxins. That is not conclusive because the body was in the water such a long time, but there was another aspect. The heart muscle displayed definite signs of necrosis, which is a strong indicator of heart attack."

  "A heart attack while floating in the water?"

  "A heart attack after a lifetime of eating and drinking like a Russian, an attack so massive and so quick he had no time even to thrash, which was why all the fishing gear was still on board. Did you know that life expectancy is twenty years less in Russia than in Cuba? I will give you samples of the tissue. Show them to any doctor in Moscow and they will say the same."

  "Have you ever seen neumaticos die of a heart attack before?"

  "No, mostly shark attacks. But this is the first time I've heard of a Russian neumdtico."

  "Don't you think that's worth an investigation?"

  "You must understand our situation. We have no crime scene and no witnesses, which makes an investigation very discouraging, very expensive. And no crime. Worse, he's Russian and the embassy refuses to cooperate. They say no one worked with Pribluda, no one knew him and that he was merely an innocent student of the sugar industry. For us even to visit the embassy requires a diplomatic note. All the same we asked for a photograph of Pribluda, and since we didn't receive that, we have matched him and the body to the best possible certainty. There is nothing more we can do. We must consider him identified and you must take him home. We will have no more 'cigars' here."