Havana Bay (3 page)

"Is this the way to the airport?" Arkady asked.

"The flight is tomorrow. Usually there's only one
Aeroflot flight a week during the winter, so they don't
want you to miss it." Rufo rolled the window down.»
Phew, I smell worse than fish."

"Autopsies stay with you." Arkady had left his over
coat outside the operating theater and separated the
coat now from the paper bag holding Pribluda's effects.» If Dr. Bias and Detective Osorio speak Russian, why
were you along?"

"There was a time when it was forbidden to speak
English. Now Russian is taboo. Anyway, the embassy
wanted someone along when you were with the police,
but someone not Russian. You know, I never knew
anyone so unpopular so fast as you."

"That's a sort of distinction."

"But now you're here you should enjoy yourself.
Would you like to see the city, go to a cafe, to the
Havana Libre? It used to be the Hilton. They have a
rooftop restaurant with a fantastic view. And they serve
lobster. Only state restaurants are allowed to serve
lobster, which are assets of the state."

"No, thanks." The idea of cracking open a lobster
after an autopsy didn't sit quite right.

"Or a
paladar,
a private restaurant. They're small,
they're only allowed twelve chairs but the food is much superior. No?"

Perhaps Rufo didn't get a chance to dine out often,
but Arkady didn't think he could even watch someone
eat.

"No. The captain and sergeant were in green uni
forms, the detective in gray and blue. Why was that?"

"She's police and they're from the Ministry of the
Interior. We just call it Minint. Police are under
Minint."

Arkady nodded; in
Russia
the militia was under the
same ministry.» But Arcos and Luna don't usually go
out on homicides?"

"I don't think so."

"Why was the captain going on about the Russian
embassy?"

"He has a point. In the old days Russians acted like
lords. Even now, for Cuban police to ask questions at
the embassy takes a diplomatic note. Sometimes the
embassy cooperates and sometimes it doesn't."

Most of the traffic was Russian Ladas and Moskviches
spraying exhaust and then, waddling as ponderously as dinosaurs, American cars from before the Revolution.
Rufo and Arkady got out at a two-story house decorated
like a blue Egyptian tomb with scarabs, ankhs and
lotuses carved in stucco. A car on blocks sat in residence
on the porch.

"'57 Chevrolet." Rufo looked inside at the car's
gutted interior, straightened and ran his hand over the
flecked paint. From the back.» Tail fins." To the front
bumper.» And tits."

From the car key in the bag of effects Arkady knew
that Pribluda had a Lada. No breasts on a Russian car.

As they went in and climbed the stairs the door to
the ground-floor apartment cracked open enough for a woman in a housedress to follow their progress.

"A concierge?" Arkady asked.

"A snoop. Don't worry, at night she watches television and doesn't hear a thing."

"I'm going back tonight."

"That's right." Rufo unlocked the upstairs door.»
This is a protocol apartment the embassy uses for
visiting dignitaries. Well, lesser dignitaries. I don't think
we've had anyone here for a year."

"Is someone from the embassy coming to talk about
Pribluda?"

"The only one who wants to talk about Pribluda is
you. You like cigars?"

"I've never smoked a cigar."

"We'll talk about it later. I'll be back at
midnight
to
take you to the plane. If you think the flight to
Havana
was long, wait till you go back to
Moscow
."

The apartment was furnished with a set of cream-and-
gold dining chairs, a sideboard with a coffee service,
a nubby sofa, red phone, a bookshelf with titles like
La Amistad Russo-Cubana
and
Fidel y Arte
supported
by erotic bookends in mahogany. In a disconnected
refrigerator a loaf of Bimbo Bread was spotted with
mold. The air conditioner was dead and showed the
carbon smudges of an electrical fire. Arkady thought he
probably showed some carbon smudges of his own.

He stripped from his clothes and showered in a stall
of tiles that poured water from every valve and washed
the odor of the autopsy off his skin and from his hair.
He dried himself on the scrap of towel provided and
stretched out on the bed under his overcoat in the dark
of the bedroom and listened to the voices and music
that filtered from outside through the closed shutters of
the window. He dreamed of floating among the playing
fish of
Havana
Bay
. He dreamed of flying back to
Moscow
and not landing, just circling in the night.

Russian planes did that, sometimes, if they were so
old that their instruments failed. Although there could
be other factors. If a pilot made a second landing
approach he could be charged for the extra fuel
expended, so he made only one, good or not. Or they
were overloaded or underfueled.

He was both.

Circling sounded good.

Chapter Two

Osorio negotiated a white PNR Lada down a potholed
street. Like her driving, she talked in a quick, surefooted
way, deleting any
s
in the Russian language that she
found superfluous. Since Arkady's Spanish consisted of
gracias
and
par favor,
he wasn't inclined to be critical even if she had appeared without warning in the early
evening and gathered him in a rush.

She said, "You wanted to see your friend's apartment
and so we will."

"That's all I asked."

"No, you asked much more. I think you are refusing
to make an identification of your friend because you
think you can force us to investigate."

"I assume you want to be sure you're sending the
right body to
Moscow
."

"You think it's impossible for him to be out on the
water the way we found him? Like a Cuban?"

"It does strike me as unusual."

"What I find unusual is that when a message comes
to you from an embassy in
Havana
you drop everything
to come. That's unusual. That must have been
expensive."

The round-trip took half his savings. On the other
hand, what was he saving for? Anyway, everything in
Havana
struck him as unusual, including the detective, although there was something about her small size and imperiousness he found endearing. Her features were delicate and sharply cut, dark eyes made darker with suspicion as if she were an apprentice devil handed a
tricky soul. He also liked her sporty PNR cap with
plastic visor.

"Tell me about this friend of yours," she demanded.

"You're interested?" He got no response to that. Oh
well, he was fishing.» Sergei Sergeevich Pribluda. Work
ers' family from
Sverdlovsk
. Joined the Committee for
State Security out of the army. Higher education at
Frunze
Party
School
. Stationed eight years at Vladimir,
eighteen in
Moscow
, rising to colonel. Hero Worker,
honored for bravery. Wife, dead ten years; one son, a
manager in an American fast-food franchise in
Moscow
. I was unaware of Pribluda's ever being stationed abroad
before or studying Spanish. Politically reactionary, a
Party member. Interests, Central Army ice-hockey team.
Health, vigorous. Hobby, gardening."

"Not drinking?"

"He made flavored vodka, that's part of gardening."

"Not culture, the arts?"

"Pribluda? Hardly."

"You worked together?"

"In a way. He tried to kill me. It was a complicated friendship." Arkady gave her the short version.» There
was a murder in
Moscow
involving politics. As it
happened, there was a woman who was a dissident that
he suspected. Since I thought she was innocent, I
became a suspect and Pribluda was given the job of
delivering, as we say, a nine-gram letter in the back
of my head. But we had spent time together by then,
long enough for me to discover there was something
strangely honest about him and for him to decide there
was, as you say, something of the
idiota
about me. And
when he was given the order to shoot me, he didn't. I
don't know whether you could call it a friendship, but our relationship was built on that."

"He disobeyed an order? There's never an excuse for
that."

"God knows. He liked to grow his own vegetables.
When his wife died, I would go round to his place and
drink his vodka and eat his cucumbers and he would remind me that not every guest got to dine with his
executioner. Red tomato pickle, green tomato pickle, peppers and dark bread to eat. Lemongrass and buffalo grass to flavor the vodka."

"You said he was a Communist."

"A good Communist. He would have joined the
Party coup if it hadn't been led, as he said, by imbeciles.
Instead, he drank until it all blew over and then went
into a decline. He said we weren't real Russians anymore, only eunuchs, that the last Russian, the last true
Communist anywhere was Castro." Which Arkady had taken as drunken ranting at the time, a detail he decided not to share with Osorio.» He said he was looking for a
post outside
Moscow
. I never knew he meant here."

"When was the last time you saw the colonel?"

"More than a year ago."

"But you were friends."

"My wife didn't like him."

"Why not?"

"An old score. Why would the captain turn down
the picture of Pribluda and his friends?" Arkady asked.

"He must have his reasons," Osorio said in a tone
that suggested she didn't fathom them either.

Jasmine lay like snow over walls, Dumpsters over
flowed with the sweet stench of fruit skins.

Binding the ocean was what Osorio called the Malecon, a seawall that protected a six-lane boulevard and an
oceanfront line of three-story buildings. The sea was
black, and traffic on the boulevard consisted of the
running lights of cars a block apart. The buildings were
the gaudy group Arkady had seen at daybreak from the
other side of the bay; without their colors, dimly lit by
lamps, they were occupied wrecks. In the shadow of a
long arcade Osorio unlocked a street door and led him up worn stone stairs to a steel door which let them into
a living room that could have been delivered complete from
Moscow
: subdued lamps, stereo, chess set, uphol
stery on the front door, lace curtains on the balcony
doors. Homey Soviet hammer and sickle in silk tacked
to a wall. A table and tray of water glasses, dish of salt.
Whittled nostalgia—roosters, bears, St. Basil's—on the
shelves. Plastic ivy and carnations trimming a kitchenette with a two-burner range, refrigerator, butane tanks.

Bottles of Havana Club rum and Stolichnaya stood
under the sink.

The only element out of place was a black man in a
white shirt with a red bandanna around his head and
Reebok basketball shoes on his feet sitting in a corner
chair and holding a long, straight walking stick. It took
a moment without breathing for Arkady to realize that
the figure was a man-sized effigy. The face had a crudely
molded brow and nose, mouth and ears, making its
glass eyes glitter all the more.