Havana Bay (24 page)

 
"I'd hardly call what I'm doing investigating. But
then, you're not either."

It was not easy to control her temper around this
man. She opened the bag and brought out a screw
driver, screws and slide bolt. The screwdriver was hers,
but it had taken her an hour at the flea market outside
the Central Train Station to find the bolt and screws.

"I brought you this for the door."

"Thank you, that's very thoughtful. Let me pay."

"A gift from the Cuban people." She thrust them
into his hands.

"I insist."

"I insist more."

"Then, thank you. I will sleep like a babe. Better than
a babe, a bivalve."

Whatever that meant, she thought.

After screwing in the bolt and latch, Renko celebrated what he called his "heightened sense of security" by
opening a bottle of Pribluda's rum and taking a tray of Pribluda's pickles, mushrooms and other Russian indi-gestibles on a tray out to the balcony. Sitting in an
aluminum chair, she scanned the street for danger while
he basked in a half-moon that balanced at the end of a
silver path across the water. The beam from Morro
Castle swept the air, and the occasional Lada rattled by
like a drum set being delivered.
Jineteras
in all hues of
spandex cruised the seawall. An old man sold carrots
from a briefcase that Renko pointed out looked identical with Pribluda's plastic briefcase and Ofelia said was of
Cuban manufacture. A
neumdtico
out for night fishing
carried a huge, inflated inner tube, making his way like
a two-legged snail bearing his shell. Bikers raced on the
pavement, and she saw a boy swoop by a tourist and snatch the woman's handbag off her shoulder so neatly
that she spun around searching the ground while he
crossed the boulevard and darted up a side street. PNRs
arrived to play out the drama, the tourist turned,
disillusioned, to her hotel, and the equilibrium of the
Malec6n reestablished itself. Night divers climbed up
the rocks, flashlights in one hand and squid in the
other. Small dogs fought over the carcasses of gulls.
Men drank from paper bags. Couples tucked into the
night shadows of the pillars of the wall.

From the portal below came a slow country
son,
a
poem by Guillen adapted to a six-stringed guitar.»
Maria Belen, Maria Belen, Maria Belen, watching your
hips roll and sway from Camaguey to Santiago, from Santiago to Camaguey"

Renko lit a cigarette.» Actually, Sergeant Luna seems
to have forgotten about me. He didn't seem the forgetful type. Good rum."

"Cuba is known for its rum. Did you know the
computer password the first time I brought you here?"

"No."

Ofelia hadn't thought so, which meant that he had
found it since he had moved into the apartment,
although she herself had looked everywhere when she
dusted the place for prints. She controlled the impulse
to glance back at the apartment and was aware of him watching her do just that.

"I've been thinking. Maybe it would be safer if you
went to the embassy and stayed there under guard."

"Ruin my Caribbean vacation? Oh, no."

Even in poor light she saw the scab and bandage at
his hairline. She felt unaccountably responsible for his
state of health and infuriated, as usual, by the way he
twisted a conversation.

"But you still claim that the sergeant attacked you?
You think there is a conspiracy against you?"

"Oh, no, that would be crazy. I would say, however,
after Rufo
and
Luna, a hint of animosity."

"Rufo is one thing," she maintained.» The accusation
that an officer would attack you is an effort to paint
Cuba a backward country."

"Why? It could certainly happen in Russia. The
Russian senate is full of Mafia. They regularly assault each other with clubs, chairs, guns."

"Not in Cuba. I think you imagined Luna."

"I imagined the sergeant wears Air Jordans?"

"Then why hasn't he come back?"

"I don't know. Maybe because of you."

She wasn't sure how to take that.

Renko said, "You told me Dr. Bias was honest, and
if he said the heart muscle of the man you pulled from
the bay shows signs of cardiac arrest, the doctor is
telling the truth?"

"If he says so."

 
 
"Let's say I do believe him. What I don't believe is
that a healthy man has a heart attack for no reason. If
he was out on the water and hit by lightning, that would
be a different matter. Shouldn't Bias examine the body
for signs of a bolt?"

"Anything else?" She meant to be sarcastic.

"You could find who Rufo talked to between the
time he let me off and when he came back to kill me. Check his telephone records."

"Rufo didn't have a telephone."

"He had a cell phone when he picked me up at the
airport."

"He didn't when I searched him. In any case, there is no investigation."

The Cuban guitar was the sweetest guitar on earth,
with notes that flickered the way light dappled the
water. She watched him light another cigarette from the
ember of the first.

"Have you ever stopped smoking?"

"Certainly." He inhaled.» But I know a doctor who says the optimum time to start smoking is in a person's
forties, when a person can really use nicotine's effect to
focus the mind and forestall senility. He says it generally
takes about twenty years for the consequences—cancer,
coronary problems, emphysema—to develop, and then you are ready to go anyway. Of course, he's a Russian
doctor."

Although she regarded it as a filthy habit, Ofelia
heard herself say, "There were times I wished I smoked.

My mother smokes cigars and watches Mexican
telenov
elas
and shouts to the characters, 'Don't believe her, don't believe that bitch!'"

"Really?"

"My mother is light-skinned from a family of tobacco
growers, and even though she married a black cane
cutter, my father, she always maintains the cultural
superiority of tobacco workers. 'When they roll cigars
in the factory, there's someone reading aloud the great
stories.
Madame Bovary, Don Quixote.
You think in the
middle of the cane field there's someone reading
Madame Bovary?
"

"I imagine not."

Ofelia opened her bag, laid the Makarov on her
knees and placed a necklace of white and yellow beads
around her neck.

"Very pretty," Renko said.

Bias would have disapproved. Yellow was for Oshun,
the goddess of fresh water and sweet things, the color
of honey and gold and Oshun's
mulata
glow. Ofelia was
comfortable wearing it around the Russian because he
was ignorant.

"Just beads," she said.» Does the music bother you?"

A song lingered in the arcade under the balcony.
Havana being so crowded, there was a problem of
privacy. Sometimes lovers chose the dark of the Male-con portal to consummate what they couldn't find room
for anywhere else. The song said,
"Eros, blind man, let
me show you the way. I crave your strong hands, your
body hot as flames, spreading me like the petals of a rose."

 
 
"No," Arkady said.

"You don't understand any Spanish?"

"Honey and absinthe pour from your veins, into
my burning furrow and making me insane."
Along with
the song came murmuring and rustling from below.
Couples on the seawall moved closer.

"Not a word."

"You know," Ofelia said, "there are differences
between rumba, mambo, son, songo, salsa."

"I'm sure."

"But everything is based on drums, for dancing."

"Well, I'm not much of a dancer."

Not everyone had to be a dancer, Ofelia thought.
Not that she found him attractive. As her mother would
say, will he live through the day? Ofelia's first husband,
Humberto, was black as a domino, a baseball player, a
fantastic dancer. The second, a musician, was the sort
everyone called
chino,
not only because he was such a
handsome mix but because everybody liked him. He played bongos, which demanded an outgoing person
ality. Until he finally went out completely. But an even
better dancer than Humberto. Her mother despised
them both and simply called them Primero and
Segundo, leaving lots of room for additions. Compared
with them, wrapped in his black coat in spite of the
heat, Renko looked like an invalid.

"That's how spirits communicate," she explained.»
They're in the drums. Unless you dance the spirits
can't come out."

"Like they came out for Hedy?"

 
"Yes."

"Then it's safer not to dance."

"Then you're already dead."

"Good point. Abakua is a version of Santeria?"

"They couldn't be more different. Santeria is from
Nigeria, Abakua is from the Congo." It was like confus
ing Germany and Sicily.

"Bias said they used to run smuggling."

Ofelia was starting to learn how Renko hid behind the most innocent expressions ready to pounce. She
wasn't going to get into the fact there were two Abak-
uas, a public one with sincere devotees who could be
university professors or Party members and a secret
criminal Abakua that had risen from its grave. This
second Abakua was, needless to say, for men only and
had a thieves' morality. Murder of an outsider was
allowed, while informing on another Abakua was the
ultimate sin. And Cubans believed the Abakua could
reach anywhere. Ofelia knew an informer who got
himself assigned to a post in Finland to escape Havana.
He died falling through the ice and people said,
"Abakua!" The police had not penetrated the Abakua.
In fact, more police—black and white—were becoming
members. Anyway, the last thing she needed was this
sort of conversation with a Russian.

"We don't have to talk about it," Arkady said.

"It was the way you asked."

"I sounded smug? It's just my ignorance. I
apologize."

"We will not talk about religions."

 
 
"God knows."

From the radio in the portal rose the deep beat of a
drum that Ofelia knew had to be a tall
iya
with a dark
red center on the skin, accompanied by the grinding rhythm of a belly-shaped gourd. A single horn insinuated itself, the way a man asked a woman to dance.

"Anyway, it's not a bad thing to be possessed," Ofelia
said.

"Well, I have an unimaginative Russian mind, I don't
think it's going to happen to me. What is it like?"

"Theoretically?" She watched him for the slightest
hint of condescension.

"Theoretically."

"As a child, you must have spread your arms and put
your head back and danced in the rain. You are
drenched and clean and dizzy. If you are possessed, it's like that."

"Afterward?"

"Your mind still spins."

An
abwe,
the poor man's triangle, joined in from
below. It was nothing more than a hoe blade played with
a stick of iron, but an
abwe
could sound like the ticking
in the mind when a man's strong hand reached around
your waist. As the saxophone tried to wrap around it, the
gourd trembled, the drum stopped and started like a
heart. These were the snares set for silly girls who lingered
in shadows. Not Ofelia. She visualized a clear mind.