Havana Bay (39 page)

He felt as if he had uncovered a Soviet mausoleum.
There were the floor design of a hammer and sickle
under the dirt, unlit sconces of red stars, busts of Marx
and Lenin along the balcony, the difference being that
instead of a sarcophagus in the middle of the floor there
was a Lada with plates that read 060 016. Pribluda's car.
And some lighter touches: at opposite ends of a counter
of dark wood were two statues, black and white. The
black figure looked too frail for the sugarcane she had
cut, but the white was a Russian superman who had
scooped the bounty of the sea—flounder, crab and
octopus—in a single net. A tapping led Arkady to look
up toward the mezzanine again. Between Marx and
Lenin shone the gunslit eyes of goats. Dust stirred around
the bulb. Although no one was visible in the car it shifted
from side to side and not just as a trick of the feeble light.

The keys to Pribluda's car had been in Arkady's
possession since the autopsy. He opened the trunk and
felt a mound of burlap sacks. The bottom sack was
heavy and tied with a rope. Arkady untied the sack and pulled it off while the goats bleated. Osorio raised her
head, too stiff to stand. As he lifted her the front doors
of the lobby swung open and a goat bell rang. Luna had
returned not from the hall but through the same door
Arkady had just used and the sergeant carried not a bat
but a machete. He said something in Spanish that
pleased himself enormously.

Osorio pressed her mouth to Arkady's ear.» My gun."

He saw the Makarov in the car trunk. As Osorio
hung on, he picked up the gun and cocked it.» Get out
of the way."

"No." Luna shook his head.» I don't think so."
Arkady aimed over the sergeant's head and squeezed the trigger. He needn't have bothered, the hammer
snapped on an empty breech. Luna pulled the lobby
doors closed.» This is justice."

Arkady put Osorio into the front passenger seat of
the car and went around to the driver's side. Ladas were
not known for their power, but they did start. In the
coldest or warmest weather they started. Arkady turned
on the engine and lights and, blinded, Luna stopped for
a moment, then crossed the floor in two strides and
brought the machete down on the car. Arkady reversed so that the blow landed on the hood, but Luna slapped
the blade sideways and split the windshield into two caved-in sheets of safety glass. Unable to see, Arkady
drove forward, hoping for a piece of the captain, only to hit the long counter head-on. The rear window crystallized as the machete swung through. Arkady
backed up, cutting the wheel to sweep Luna away. The
blade came straight down through the car roof, probed
and vanished. Just when Arkady thought the Cuban was
actually on the car, one headlight exploded. A ladder
toppled, crushing Osorio's side of the car.

Arkady peeled off enough windshield to see. The
falling ladder had grazed the bulb, and as the light
swung, goats, stairs, statues swayed from side to side.
He backed into a column hard enough to rock the
balcony, shot forward and aimed at Luna, silhouetted
by crystals on his shoulders. Missed him, but as the
hanging bulb flared to life Arkady saw an electric
highway of glass leading to the doors and followed. As
the doors burst open, the Lada landed askew on the
steps, righted itself and shouldered through debris. The
left-front fender was crushed, and left turns seemed to
be impossible. He drove toward the streetlamp, and
when he was a block beyond he looked back through
the gaping rear window to see Luna running after.
Arkady pushed the car as fast as it could go until the sergeant was out of sight.

 
 
At last the streets ended at docks and the deep black
and trailing lights of the harbor. Air blew through the windshield and windows and safety glass sparkled on
their laps. The Lada limped over railroad tracks and finally swung into an alley, scaring the spangly green
eyes of a cat caught in the headlight, and lurched to a
stop.

A black hand swung around Arkady's seat and hit
him in the chest. He grabbed its wrist and twisted in his
seat to the figure of Change. The man-sized doll had
been riding in the back of the car, still wearing its red
bandanna, still holding its walking stick in its other
hand, its dark expression the glower of a kidnap victim.
Ofelia aimed the Makarov, loaded or not, at the doll.

"Dios mio."
She let the gun drop.

"Exactly." Arkady got out of the car on weak legs.

He counted the gashes in the roof and sides of the
car. The front was crushed, headlights empty sockets.

"If it were a boat it would sink," he said.» It will get
you to a doctor."

"No," Ofelia said.

"To the police."

"To say what? That I've refused orders from the
police? That I hid evidence? That I'm helping a Russian
instead?"

"It doesn't sound so good when you put it that way.
Then what? Luna will only follow us to Pribluda's."

"I know where to go."

Considering that Ofelia made the arrangements in the
middle of the night, she didn't do badly. A switch from
the Lada, Change and all, to her DeSoto and then to a room at the Rosita, a love motel on the Playa del Este
just fifteen miles outside the city and a block from the beach. All the Rosita's units were free-standing white
stucco cottages from the fifties with air-conditioning
and kitchenette, television and potted plants, clean
sheets and towels at a price only the most successful
jineteras
could afford.

The first thing Ofelia did once they were inside
was to shower the burlap and shag off her body.
Wrapped in a towel, she asked him to pick nuggets of
glass from her hair. He'd expected her curls to be stiffer,
but they were as soft as water and his fingers never looked more thick and clumsy. Between the wings of
her shoulder blades the skin was rubbed raw and
seamed with grains of glass. She didn't flinch. In the
bathroom mirror he saw her eyes on him and the
natural kohl of their lids.

She said, "You were right about the photograph
Pribluda took of you. I found it when I dusted his
rooms for prints just as you said. I was the one who
gave it to Luna."

"Well, I never told you that what Luna wanted from
me was the photograph that Pribluda called the Havana Yacht Club. We're even."

"Claro,
we're both liars. Look at us."

He saw an unlikely pair, a woman smooth as soap-stone with a ragged man.

 
 
"What was Luna saying when he came back?" he
asked.

"He said Rufo's television was warm, so he knew you
were there. Why didn't you think of that?"

"Actually, I did."

"You followed him anyway?"

Arkady wondered, "Are you possible to please?"

She said, "Yes."

 
Chapter Twenty-One

She was a dark sprite, except that in bed she was a
woman. Her breasts were small, tipped in purple, her
stomach sleek down to a triangle of sable. He laid his
mouth on hers, and it was so long since he had been
with a woman that it was like learning to eat again.
Especially when the taste was different, heady and
strong, as if she were coated in sugary liqueur.

He was helpless in his own greed, working his way
through the exquisite unfolding as Ofelia, his new
measure, drew him in. There was something convulsive
in this feast for the starving, who had taken the vow of hunger.

He would have said he cared for people, wished them well and did his best by them, but he had been dead. She would raise Lazarus and close her legs around him so as
not to let him go. She kissed his forehead, lips, the
bruises on the inside of his arm as if each kiss healed. She
was hard and lithe and soft and certainly more artful and
vocal than he was. This seemed to be allowed in Cuba.

Outside, he heard the ocean say, This is the wave
that will sweep away the sand, topple the buildings and
flood the streets. This is the wave. This is the wave.

 
 
On the bed Arkady arranged Pribluda's photograph of
the "Havana Yacht Club," the AzuPanama documents,
his chronology of Pribluda's last day, list of dates and
phone numbers from Rufo's wall. While Ofelia sorted
through them Arkady took in a cement floor painted
blue, pink walls with paper cupids, plastic roses in ice
buckets and an air-conditioner that gasped like an
Ilyushin taking off. They had placed Change in a corner
chair, the doll's head resting heavily against a kitchen
counter, hand balanced on his stick.

"If these documents are real," Ofelia said,
"entonces,
I can see why a Russian would think AzuPanama is
more an instrument of the Cuban Ministry of Sugar
than a genuine Panamanian corporation."

"It would seem that way."

Arkady told her about O'Brien and the Mexican
truck parts, the American boots and the real Havana
Yacht Club.

"He's a charmer, an intriguer, he goes from one story
to another. It's like being led down a path."

"I'm sure it is."

He was distracted by the fact that all she wore was
his coat and a glimpse of yellow beads. He hadn't
noticed when she had put on the necklace. The coat
was huge on her, and the sight was like rinding a
photograph of one woman in a frame that had always
held a picture of another. Every second that it clung to
her, it was exchanging auras of scent and heat and
memory.

Ofelia knew. It was not totally true, but the charge
could be made that once she had detected his grief she
had suspected his loss, and once she had observed the
tenderness with which he treated his coat and dis
covered the faint history of perfume on its sleeve, from
that moment on she was determined to wear the coat
herself. Why? Because here was a man who had loved a
woman so deeply he was willing to follow her right into
death.

Or it might be he was just the melancholy sort—in
short, a Russian. But it had to be said that when she
was in the trunk of the car, trussed, bagged and barely
breathing, the one person she thought might save her
was this man she hadn't even met a week before.
Muevete!
Ofelia told herself. Get your clothes on and
run. Instead, she said, "In Panama almost anything can
happen. O'Brien's bank is in the Colon Free Trade Zone of Panama where
everything
happens. Still, he has been
a friend to Cuba and I don't see what sugar has to do
with the Havana Yacht Club or Hedy or Sergeant Luna."

"Neither do I, but you don't try to kill a man who is
leaving in a week unless whatever is going to happen
will happen soon. Then, of course, everything will be
perfectly clear."

In his disheveled way, in a white shirt, sleeves rolled,
long fingers cupping a cigarette, he was Ofelia's picture
of a Russian musician. A musician sitting by a bus
stalled on the side of the road somewhere in the Urals.»
Let me get this right. You're saying that Rufo, Hedy,
Luna, everything that has happened so far is to cover up a crime that took place not in the past but hasn't
even taken place yet? How are we going to find that?"

"Think of it as a challenge. The biggest advantage a detective usually has is that he knows what the crime is,
that's his starting point. But we're two professional
investigators. Between the Russian Method and the
Cuban Method let's see if we can stop something before
it happens."