Havana Bay (37 page)

Said like a true believer, Arkady thought; he could
see what a match Pribluda and Olga Petrovna had been.

"You're the one who sent the message from the
embassy to me in Moscow, aren't you? 'Sergei Sergeevi
ch Pribluda is in trouble. You must come at once.' It
was unsigned."

"I was worried, and Sergei had spoken so respectfully of you."

"How did you manage to send it? You must need
authorization to send messages to Moscow."

"Officially, but we're so understaffed. They rely on
me to do more and more, and in some ways it's much
easier to get things done. And I was right, wasn't I? He
was in trouble."

"Did you tell anyone else?"

"Who would I tell? The only real Russian at the
embassy was Sergei." Her eyes brimmed. She took a
deep breath and glanced toward the door.» What
Cubans don't understand is while we may not sing and
dance as much as they do, we love just as passionately, don't we?"

"Yes, we do."

 
 
Certainly Osorio would never understand, Arkady
thought. It was a relief to be away from the detective's steamy mix of revolutionary zeal and Santeria spirits, to be in a more solid world where post-Soviet romance
blossomed over pickles and vodka, and motive could be
measured in dollars and bones were left in the ground
and murder made logical sense.

The sight of chicken thawing in a plastic bag seemed
to bring Olga Petrovna back to earth. She heaved a
bosomy sigh, twisted out her cigarette in an ashtray and
in a minute became a businesswoman again, checking a
mirror for the proper image of a sweetly gray grand
mother.

On the way out Arkady passed a file of people waiting
on the steps. From the top of the stairs, Olga Petrovna had a second thought.

"Or, maybe I've been here too long," she said,
"maybe I'm turning Cuban."

 
Chapter Twenty

Ofelia parked the DeSoto near the docks for fear of
blowing a tire. Havana had been the staging area for the
treasure fleets of the Spanish empire. Over time silver
and gold were replaced by American automobiles,
which were replaced by Russian oil. All of this was
handled in the warehouses of a barrio called Atares, and
when the Soviet Union collapsed parts of Atares, like
a half-empty vein, did too. One decrepit warehouse
dragged down its neighbor, which destabilized a third and spewed steel and timbers into the street until they
looked like a city that had undergone a siege, stone pulverized in heaps, garlands of twisted steel, not to mention the potholes and shit and doorways heady with
the reek of urine. Ofelia had done invasion training in
Atares and remembered how convincing it was to carry
make-believe wounded across a landscape of collapse. It
was no place you'd want to drive into.

The single building standing on its corner was the
Centre Russo-Cubano. The center had served as a hotel
and social meeting place for Soviet ships' officers in
port and was designed like a three-story ship's deck
house in cement with porthole-style windows and a red Soviet flag of glass set into the house at bridge height,
although at this point the ship seemed to have sailed
through bad weather and run aground, rubble piled
around the steps, iron railings ripped off. Ofelia was surprised the doors opened as easily as they did.

Inside, faint rays of light fell from the windows into
a lobby. A curved reception desk of Cuban mahogany
was flanked by a girl in black marble cutting a brass
sheaf of cane and, on the other end, a bronze sailor
hauling a net. The cane cutter was barefoot, work
clothes molded to her body. The sailor bore heroic
Slavic features, and his net overflowed with fish. Russo-
Cubano, indeed! Cubans had never been allowed in,
this had been strictly Russians only. All the signs,
reception, buffet, director,
were in Russian.
Through the dust Ofelia made out a floor mosaic of a
hammer and sickle on a barely discernible pattern of
blue waves. The only sign of recent life was in the
middle of the lobby where a dull red ray of light reached
down from the glass flag to a Lada with Russian diplo
matic plates.

The sound of clicking drew her eyes up to a lightbulb
hanging on a cord, to busts of Marti, Marx and Lenin
decorating a mezzanine balcony and finally to a goat
moving along the balcony rail. The goat stared down
with disdain. Nothing but a goat could have climbed
the stairs, blocked as they were by the ripped-out and
abandoned cage of the elevator. No great loss, Ofelia
thought. Since power outages began, people didn't trust
elevators anyway. An extension ladder reached from the
lobby to the balcony. More goats appeared.

At the steering wheel of the Lada sat a black man, his
head twisted toward her, staring. When he didn't answer
her or get out she pulled her gun and opened the door.
Out sagged a rag doll, Chango, with a half-formed face
and glass eyes, dressed in pants and shirt, a red ban
danna around his head. She looked into the car. Red candles were burned down to waxy tears on the dash.
From the rearview mirror hung a shell necklace and a
rosary. The sound of a bell drew her attention back to
the balcony, where a Judas goat pushed its way to the
forefront of the other goats and stretched its neck to
stare down. As a group they stiffened and, in a clatter
of hoofs, scattered not at the sight of her, she realized,
but someone else behind her.

Ofelia wasn't so much aware of being hit as plunging
to the floor and then waking in a burlap sack, blind as a rabbit bagged for market. She'd lost her gun and a
large hand wrapped tight around her throat as a sugges
tion not to scream. When the fingers relaxed, the sweet,
milky scent of coconut burst into her mouth.

Sometimes, not knowing was better than knowing.
Isabel's long-awaited E-mail from Moscow glowed on
Pribluda's screen.

Dear Sergei Sergeevich, what a pleasure to hear from
you and what a surprise! I should have written you
long ago and told you how sorry I was to hear of the
passing of Maria Ivanova, who was always so kind to
everyone. You were blessed to have such a wife. I
remember the day we came in off an assignment and
were so cold we couldn't speak. We had to point at
the frostbite on each other's nose. She made practi
cally a banya in the bathroom with herbs and birches and steaming water and a cold bottle of vodka. She
saved our lives that day. All the best people are gone,
it's true. And now there you are in the tropics and I
am still here but not much more than a librarian.
But busy, every day someone wants to declassify this
or that. Last week I had a visit from a lawyer of a
Western news organization demanding I open the
most sensitive archives of the KGB as if they were
nothing more than a family album. Is nothing sacred?
I say that with tongue in cheek but also seriously. We
can no longer simply say, "Those who know, know." Those days are gone. However, promises made must
be promises kept, that is my watchword. Where
society and historical truth are served by disclosure,
where traitors will not be lionized or honorable
reputations destroyed, where innocent people who thought they were doing their duty in often hazardous circumstances are not victimized by new stan
dards then, yes!, I am the first man to drag facts to
the sunlight.

Which brings me to this inquiry of yours about a
former leader of the Cuban Communist Party, Lazaro
Lindo. In particular, you ask whether Lindo was
involved in a so-called Party conspiracy against the
Cuban state. As I remember, Castro claimed that a
circle within the CCP, feeling that he had led his
countrymen down a path of adventurism, was con
spiring with the USSR against him. True or not, the
consequences were severe: strained relations between
the Cuban and Soviet states, arrest and imprisonment
of some of the most devoted Cuban Party members,
Lindo among them. Naturally, this was and remains
a most sensitive matter. What you ask for is docu
mentation that.no such conspiracy existed or that, if
it did, Lindo was not part of it. I understand this
might allow his daughter to gain permission to travel.
Unfortunately, I cannot satisfy you. But it was a
wonderful surprise to hear from an old friend.

By the by, the entire country is a cheese full of
maggots these days. You're well out of it.

Roman Petrovich Rozov

 
Senior Archivist
Federal Intelligence Service

 
[email protected]

Arkady printed the letter out to give Isabel, but it
was clear that Rozov, Pribluda's old comrade-in-arms,
as good as admitted both the plot and Lindo's part in
it, and although Arkady didn't know Isabel well or even
like her, he dreaded passing the letter on because he
had recognized the desperation in the kiss she had given
him the night before. Why kiss him otherwise?

The kiss angered him because it was a parody of real
desire, her hard mouth clinging to him until he pushed
her away. All the same, he asked himself, would a
Cuban have rejected her? Would any warm-blooded
man?

The other answer he dreaded was in the photograph he had extracted from Olga Petrovna, the picture that
could conclusively identify the body in the morgue as
Sergei Pribluda, yes or no. It was revealing how relieved
he was that Bias had not been at the laboratory. Arkady
had left the photograph rather than wait for the doctor
to learn for a certainty that Pribluda was the body in
the drawer.

Arkady folded the printout from Moscow to slip
under Isabel's door.

How many sorts of coward could a man be?

She was inside a car trunk in a sack, arms tied at elbow
level, more burlap sacking piled on top of her. Ofelia
threatened and reasoned, but whoever put her in closed
the lid and never said a word. A car door shut without
the sagging of someone getting in. Steps walked away.
White or black, she hadn't seen, but an inner part of
her had registered his scent, the sound of his breathing, his speed and size, and she knew it was Luna.

She shouted until her throat was raw, but the sacks
stuffed on top muffled her and she doubted she was
heard more then ten steps away, let alone from the
street. She decided to wait until she heard someone,
although she didn't feel even the reverberation of a car passing the Centro Russo-Cubano. Well, who would
drive there? She could as well have been at the bottom
of the bay.

With every breath, sacking clung to her face, hemp
and coconut shag filled her nose and mouth, and she
became aware that with all the bags over her she'd
already consumed most of the trunk's available oxygen. She'd never thought of herself as having an unusual fear
of tight spaces. Now it took all her concentration not to hyperventilate and waste what air was left. She felt her
gun under her but outside the sack, a particularly
embarrassing tease. At least she didn't yet need to empty
her bladder; she thanked God for small favors.

Irrelevant items came to mind. Whether the trunk
was clean. What sort of dinner her mother was cooking
for Muriel and Marisol. Something with rice. She started
tasting tears as well as sweat.

Ofelia thought about the statue of the girl gathering
cane. The hair was wrong, long and flowing instead of
wiry, but the face was right, especially the eyes anxiously
twisting up, surprised.