Havana Bay (19 page)

In the entire harbor the only craft in motion was
the Casablanca ferry approaching its Havana landing. The windows of the ferry burst into flame, and then, as the sun slid off, faces of morning commuters squinted
through the glass. Churning through backwash the boat
rubbed against a pier fendered in tires, and the instant
a gangway was laid passengers emerged, some equipped
with briefcases for a day at the office, others pushing
bikes laden with sacks of coconuts and bananas, by a
sign that asked
distinguished users
not to bring
firearms on board and into the warming, yellowing day.

A countersurge of new riders pushed onto the boat,
carrying Arkady and Osorio with them. The interior
was set at pre-swelter, seats along the sides, bike riders to the rear, bars to hang from crisscrossing the ceiling. Arkady's coat drew stares. He didn't care.

"Do you love boats as much as I do?"

"No," Osorio said.

"Sailboats, fishing boats, rowboats?"

"No."

"Maybe it's a male characteristic. I think the appeal
is the apparent irresponsibility of boats, the sense of
floating anywhere, while the opposite is true. You have
to work like a dog to keep from sinking." Osorio gave him no response.» What is it? What's bothering you?"

"It is contrary to revolutionary law for a tourist to
rent rooms. Abuelita should have reported him. He was
hiding among the people because he was a spy."

"If it's any comfort, I doubt that Pribluda ever passed
as a Cuban. He wanted a view of the water. I can understand that."

The more Arkady saw of the harbor the more
impressed he was by both its size and inactivity, a
panorama of torpor: Havana's docks and cargo offices
on one side and on the other Casablanca's verdant bluff with a pink weather station and a white statue of Christ.
On the inner bay Arkady saw a few isolated freighters, a
motionless herd of cargo cranes and the raw torch and
smoke of refineries. Heading to sea was a black Cuban
torpedo boat of humpback Russian design with auto
matic cannon on the rear deck. He noticed Osorio
studying his head.

"How do I look?"

"Ripe. Your embassy should lock you up."

"I'm safe with you."

"The only reason I'm with you is because you want
to go to Casablanca and you don't speak a word of
Spanish.
Viejo,
I have other things to do."

"Well, I'm certainly enjoying myself."

The village of Casablanca looked as if it had started at
the top of its hill at Christ's feet and then rolled down
to the water's edge, piling shanties of cinder block and
sheet steel on top of more dignified colonial houses.
Scarlet bougainvillea tumbled over walls and the air
warmed with the sticky smell of jasmine. From the ferry
landing, Arkady and Osorio climbed up to a depot for
trolleys equipped with cow catchers for rural duty. They walked a main street with shutters closed against the
morning heat, including the closed door and boarded-
up windows of a tiny PNR station, and down the
remains of a circular stairway to a park of weeds, a
cement curb, a panorama of the bay and the tar-black
water and pilings, refuse and cans where the
neumatico
had been found three days before.

The scene was different in the daytime, without klieg
lights, a crowd, music and Captain Arcos shouting
urgent misdirections. The sun picked out the details of
a waterfront row of elegant houses so gutted they looked
like Greek temples gone to ruin, and defined just how flimsy was the dock that reached over the water to a
half-dozen fishing boats. The craft all had long poles raised like antennae and "Casablanca" bravely painted
on the stern in case they set out for the larger world.

"This is where he ended up, not where he started. There's nothing to find," Osorio said.

The dock disappeared behind a barricade to a shack
Arkady hadn't noticed at all on his first visit. He went
around to a back gate that opened to a yard that could have been on Devil's Island. An indiscriminate variety
of wrecks and boats with patchwork hulls sat hauled up
amid sleeping cats. A dog barked from a deck. Two
men stripped to the waist straightened a propeller shaft while at their feet hens scratched for corn. Here was
self-reliance, a boatyard that could run .up a stout little
vessel out of flotsam and supply eggs, besides. The two
men kept their faces turned away, but maybe that was
the effect of Osorio's cast-iron glare, Arkady thought.
The Noah of this yard emerged from the dark of the
shack. His name was Andres; he wore a captain's cap
tipped confidently forward, and he produced what
sounded like florid explanations before they were
trimmed by Osorio.

The boat being repaired, he said, was built in Spain,
used as an auxiliary of a freighter, declared technologi
cally obsolete and sold to Cuba for scrap. That was
twenty years ago. Arkady suspected that suggestions of smuggling and storms at sea were lost in the translation. Osorio was different from other Cubans, who registered
every emotion with a sweeping emotional needle. Oso-rio's needle never budged.

"Has Andres heard about the body found here?"

"He says that's all they talk about. He wonders why
we came back."

"Did they find anything else in the water where the
neumatico
was found?"

"He says no."

"Does he have a chart of the bay?" Arkady picked his
way to the dock around mounds of cans and bottles
salvaged from the water and stinking of slime.

"I told you before, the body just floated here. We
don't have anything like a scene of the crime."

"Actually, what I think we have is a very large scene
of the crime."

Andres returned with a chart that revealed
 
 
as a channel that flowed between Havana the city
and Morro Castle and fed three separate inner bays:
Atares, west and nearest to downtown Havana, Guana-bacoa in the middle and Casablanca east. Arkady fol
lowed with his finger the tracery of shipping lanes, ferry
routes, depths, buoys, the very few hazards, and under
stood why the bay of Havana had been the great
marshaling yard of Spain's American possessions. But it
was all one "bag bay" to Andres.

"What floats in can float out, he says. Depend
ing on the tide: in during high, out during low. Depending
on the wind: northwest in, southeast out. Depending on
the season: in winter winds were generally stronger, in
summer hurricanes drew water out to sea. If everything
is equal a body can spin forever in the middle of the
bay, but usually the wind is steady from the northwest
and drives bodies right to his boatyard, which was why
you find live
neumaticos
in Havana and dead
neumaticos
in Casablanca."

Arkady tested the spindly dock and for some reason
felt promise. Andres's own boat,
El Pinguino,
was a
coquettish blue with room for two if they could shift
around an engine box, floats, buckets, gaff and tiller.
Forward, a sail was furled between outrigged fishing
poles. Aft, rope and wire lay on a transom crosshatched
from braining fish. No satellite uplink, sonar, fish finder,
radar or radio.

Osorio followed.» Looks are deceiving, Andres says.
It's enough boat, he claims, to reach Key West and get arrested for taking American marlin." As a note of her own she added, "In Havana the first Hemingway deep-sea fishing tournament was won by Fidel."

"Why am I not surprised?"

Drawn to the boat, Arkady crossed planks spaced
widely enough for him to follow his reflection in the
water. What he didn't understand were the floats, each numbered and skewered so that at least three meters of orange pole would stand free above the water.

"This," Andres explained through Osorio, "is the
Cuban system." The fisherman turned the chart over
and, with a pencil stub, drew a wavy surface of the
water and then, at regular intervals, the poles floating
upright. A "mother line" connected them in a long
string of poles.» The problem with fish is that they swim
at different depths at different times. At night with a
full moon, the tuna feed deeper. At the same time, red
snapper or grunts feed closer to the surface. And turtles,
too, though you can only catch them while they're
copulating, a season that only lasts a month. Of course,
they're illegal, so he never would. But with the Cuban
system you can fish for them all by hanging hooks from
different sections of the mother line at different depths:
forty meters, thirty meters, ten. Everybody sets out
different lines and this way they comb the whole sea."

"Ask him about a current that would have carried a
drifting
neumatico
from the Malecon into the bay."

"He says that is where boats concentrate because
that's where fish are found, in the current. Boats don't
fish the entire bay, just that corridor with mother lines
and a gamut of hooks."

"Now ask him what they found, not here at the dock
but out on the water. I don't mean fish."

Andres stopped for breath like a man outrun by his
mouth. A Cuban who poached in Florida, after all,
Arkady thought, was a man given to overreaching.

"He asks, something snagged in the bay? Around
the time that poor man was found at the dock?" As if to
aid recollection Andres glanced back toward the two
men who had been working on the propeller shaft
but his friends had vanished.» Trash maybe, hooked
accidentally?"

"Exactly."

By now Osorio understood the drift, and when
Andres retreated to his shack she went with him. They
returned with a plastic bag and perhaps fifty sheets of
what looked like lottery tickets that had obviously been
soaked through and then set out to dry. In green on
white, a barely legible pattern said
"Montecristo, Habana
Puro, Fabrica a Mano"
over and over again.

"These are official state seals before they're gummed
and cut for cigar boxes," Osorio said.» With these,
ordinary cigars could have been labeled expensive Mon-
tecristos. This is very serious." Andres became a torrent
of explications.» He says the seals snagged on someone's
line, he can't remember whose, a week or more before
the body was found. The bag had leaked, the seals were
ruined, besides that was when the weather changed, no
one came to their boats and the seals were forgotten.
He dried them but just to read them and see if they
were worth reporting. He was about to himself."

Arkady was entertained by the idea of such valuable
cigars. Sugar and cigars, the diamonds and gold of
Cuba.

"Could you ask exactly where the bag was found?"

Andres marked the chart five hundred meters off the
Malecon between the Hotel Riviera and Pribluda's flat.»
He says only a lunatic would steal government seals,
but he thinks a
neumdtico
is desperate to begin with. To sail on a ring of rubber and air? At night? The tide goes
out or a current carries him to sea? One little puncture?
Sharks? A man like that makes all fishermen look bad."

Osorio was disgusted with Casablanca. In the village's
PNR station, so dark that a portrait of Che was an
undusted ghost, the officers stirred just enough to take a signed statement from Andres and give a receipt for
the seals to her.

Arkady was content, having done something remotely
professional, and on the ferry ride back bought a paper
flute of peanuts roasted in sugar that he induced Osorio
to share.