Havana Bay (22 page)

[email protected]/IntelWeb/ru Mon Oct 1 1996

Serkov,

The Chinese contact has borne fruit. I think you will
see that the fox is flushed! A fox and a wolf!

Pribluda

What a wordsmith. Pribluda had obviously been
flushed with victory.» Success!" was all an agent need say.» Chinese contact" seemed far too much, not that
Arkady was aware of any part of China abutting

Havana.

According to the spreadsheet, Pribluda's finances were
straightforward, so much allotted each month for food,
laundry, personal items, gasoline and car repair. The
only unexplained expenditure was a hundred dollars paid
every Thursday. If the item was sex, Arkady thought,
Pribluda would have hidden it; as an unreconstructed
Communist, Pribluda had a skewed but ironbound
morality. No, the item could be for his Chinese contact. Or karate lessons. According to little Carmen, Pribluda did carry a black belt in his briefcase.

The more immediate fact was that the colonel had
much more money than was found with the body in
the inner tube. Arkady shut down the computer and searched the apartment again, more his line of work.
This time he emptied everything, including shoes and
hatbands. In pants hanging in the closet he found two
red ticket stubs. In the medicine cabinet he found,
rolled with white pasteboard inside a white aspirin
bottle, a couple of pills left for sound effects and $2,500
American.

Which didn't tell him much. All the same, Arkady
was satisfied with finding anything. He picked up a
knife in the kitchen and let the blue of the sea draw
him to a balcony chair. One moment he was full of
nervous energy, the next barely able to move his feet.
Was it the six-hour time difference from Moscow? Fear?
The breeze was soft, the weight of the knife across his
stomach was reassuring and he fell asleep, cooled by the
sweat on his face.

He awoke to the rising pitch of sirens. The sun had
moved to the far end of the Malecon, and coming up
the seawall boulevard was a high-speed vanguard of
four motorcycles, their way cleared in advance by PNRs
who had suddenly appeared ahead at every intersection
to stop all other traffic and chase bikers and pedicabs
out of the way. Behind the bikes came a smooth, silent
convoy, and as it flashed by people on the sidewalk
paused in midstep, eyes darting to each vehicle as it flew
past, from boxy Land Rover to wide Humvee, to a little
Minint Lada that ran like a lapdog in front of two black
Mercedes 280s with tinted glass and the swaying ride of
heavy armor, from radio van to ambulance, from trail
ing Land Rover to a rear guard of four more cycles, an energetic whirlwind that made the entire Malecon come
to a stop like a population in a trance and then, with its
passing, released them.

Arkady's name was being shouted, and down on
the pavement he saw Erasmo tilted backward in his
wheelchair.

"Bolo, did you see him?" Erasmo touched his beard
to signify
El Lider, El Comandante,
Fidel himself.

"That was him?"

"In one of the Mercedes. Or his double. No one
knows and the where or when of the presidential
cavalcade is never announced ahead of time. In fact, it's
the only surprise in Cuba." Erasmo grinned and swung
the chair back and forth.» You said you wanted to talk
to Mongo when he came to work. Well, he didn't
come."

"Has he got a phone?"

"Very funny. Come down and we'll find him.
Besides, it's too beautiful to be inside. I'll give you the Cuban perspective."

Arkady thought that unless a person had an armored
car and entourage it might be beautiful outside, but
with Luna outside it was probably safer in.»
Look," Erasmo admitted, "I need a driver."

Driving a Jeep with the radio pounding and Erasmo
half over the car door, calling to friends on the Malecon
was a different view of life. To begin with, the mechanic
gave the PNRs a rude salute.

"Professional
hijos de puta,"
he explained to Arkady.»
I'm a
capitalino,
someone from Havana. We despise police, who are all rubes from the countryside, and they
don't like us. It's war."

"Okay."

Some houses were Spanish castles carved from pink
limestone, office buildings showed ranks of shutters
with cockeyed slats and the sun itself disintegrated into light. While Arkady watched for Luna, Erasmo identi
fied oncoming traffic.» '50 Chevy Styleline, '52 Buick
Roadmaster, '58 Plymouth Savoy, '57 Cadillac Fleet-
wood. You're a lucky man to see one of those." He also had Arkady slow by every girl thumbing a ride. In their
bright Lycra pedal pushers, halters and hair clips each girl resembled Madonna, the singer not the mother of
God.

"Isn't it dangerous for girls to hitch rides?" asked
Arkady. In Moscow the only females who dared were
either prostitutes or women so old they were bullet
proof.

"If buses aren't running, women must find rides
some other way. Besides, Cuban men may be macho but they have a sense of honor." All the girls Arkady
saw were fullbore pubescent, with bare midriffs or body
suits painted on, their thumbs out ostensibly for eun
uchs. Erasmo spotted a hitchhiker in hot orange.» When
you see a girl like that, you should at least honk."

"Did Pribluda honk?"

"No. Russians know nothing about women."

"You think so?"

"Describe a woman to me."

"Intelligent, humorous, artistic."

"Is this your grandmother? I mean a woman. Like
the kinds here.
Criolla:
very Spanish, very white. Like
the dancer Isabel.
Negra:
African, black, which can be
very forbidding or very sexy. In the middle,
mulata:
a
caramel color, skin soft as cocoa, eyes like a gazelle. Like
your friend the police detective."

"You saw her?"

"I noticed her."

"Why do men always describe women in edible
terms?"

"Why not? And the best to most Cuban men,
china:
mulata
with just a hint of Chinese, of the exotic. Now
describe a woman."

"A knife in the heart."

They drove for a while.

"That's not bad," Erasmo said.

"When you called me on the street, you said
'Bolo.'
What does that mean?"

"Bowling ball. That's what we call Russians.
Bolos."

 
"For our...?"

"Physical grace." Erasmo unveiled a vicious grin. The
mechanic had a broad, vigorous face, huge shoulders.
Arkady realized that with legs the man would have been
a Hercules.

"Speaking of Chinese," Arkady said, "are there Chi
nese events on Thursdays around Havana?"

"Chinese events? Wrong city, my friend."

Undeniably, Arkady thought.

They went past high rises that had the dinginess of
fingered postcards, until the Malecon was swallowed by
a tunnel. Emerging in Miramar, Erasmo directed Arkady
along the water on a dreary, sun-washed street called
First Avenue. They passed the Sierra Maestra, the apart
ment house, where Arkady had interviewed the pho
tographer Mostovoi. Erasmo pointed out a film theater
called the Teatro Karl Marx that had been the Teatro Charlie Chaplin, and if there was a better example of
socialist humor Arkady couldn't think of it. Beyond was
a line of beach houses in pastels (peeling), family crests
(defaced) and patios with (new) cinder-block benches,
where Erasmo had Arkady steer the Jeep up on the
sidewalk and stop as if that were safer than the street.

"For the tires, at least," Erasmo said.» This is an
island of cannibals. Remember A/ive? The plane crash?
Fidel is our pilot, but he would call a crash a Special Period."

Erasmo's wheelchair was a folding model with bicycle
tires and once it was pulled from the back of the car
and he was seated, he let Arkady know not to even offer
a push. He tacked recklessly around broken bottles to a
series of pool-sized basins filled with brackish water
and, only a step below them, a shelf of pocked coral
and seawater of restless green. Concrete blocks like the
stones of a pyramid had been set out as a breakwater
and snorkelers floated between them and the coral.

"They're spearfishing for octopus," Erasmo said when
Arkady caught up.» Before the Revolution you could
swim here in a freshwater pool, a saltwater pool or the
ocean. Parties all the time, American friends learning
the mambo." He lifted his chin toward a house with a
wooden pergola on the second floor where sheets billowed like eager sails.» My grandmother's. She wore a
sable jacket and used a lorgnette instead of eyeglasses,
women of a certain class did. I used to tear up and
down here on a Schwinn tricycle with streamers on the
handlebars. I suppose in a way I still do."

"Do you still have family here?"

"They left long ago. Flew out, sailed out, paddled
out. And, of course, if you leave, you're officially a
traitor, a
gusano,
a worm. You can't just disagree with
Fidel, you are
against
Fidel,
against
the Revolution, a
criminal, a faggot or a pimp. That way there's no one
against Fidel except scum."

Arkady looked at the house. It was quite grand.
Erasmo's hair and beard had gone a little wild in the
breeze.

"You didn't want to live here?"

"I used to. I traded for rooms where a garage
wouldn't be so obvious. Mongo lives here now."

 
"You're old friends?"

"Old friends. You know, he often misses work but
up to now he always let me know."

They backed the chair up the steps and through a progression of dining room, sitting room, courtyard,
second parlor all turned into separate apartments, the
larger rooms divided by plywood and sheets into two
apartments, so that the house was a
pueblecito,
as
Erasmo called it, a little city. He knocked at a door in
the rear. When there was no answer, he told Arkady to feel over the doorframe for a key.

"This was my bedroom whenever I slept here. Some
things stay the same. I loved it. Here I was Captain
Kidd."

The room afforded such a sweeping view of the water
it had to be a theater of fantasy for a boy brought up
on pirate tales of the Caribbean, Arkady thought. The
accommodations were tight: cot, sea chest, desk and
shelf of adventures like
Don Quixote, Ivanhoe
and
Treasure Island,
with the overlay of a CD player, a
mirror trimmed in red velvet, coconuts and seashells on
the windowsill, a plastic saint surrounded by paper
flowers. A truck-sized inner tube suspended from the
ceiling made a bumper and chandelier in one. Hung in
fishnet bags around the walls were flippers, reels, candles, sticks, jars of hooks by size. Under the bed were a
toolbox, cans of motor oil, drums and gourds. On a
hook over the bed was what looked like a crossbow
without the bow, a long wooden muzzle with a pistol
grip and trigger and three round bands of heavy rubber
hanging from the front end.

"Speargun," Erasmo said. He had Arkady take it
down and showed him how to place the elongated back
end against a hip to pull the bands with both hands to
a cocked position. The spear itself was a steel bolt with,
instead of barbs, two folding wings held down by a
sliding collar behind the tip.» The Cuban fisherman
meets his prey on all fronts."