Havana Bay (40 page)

"Okay. For the sake of argument, somebody's planning something and we don't know what. But you force
their hand when you come here with a picture of
Pribluda with his friends, the two car mechanics, at the
old Havana Yacht Club, which, incidentally, since the Revolution, is the Casa Cultural de Trabajadores de
Construction, but that aside, Rufo tries to kill you for
this picture. It would have been much easier to ignore
you, so we will give some weight to that. Second, you
force someone's hand again when you visit the Havana
Yacht Club and Walls and O'Brien come out to take you
off the dock and offer you some sort of employment,
which, by the way, is too ridiculous to consider. Again it
would have been easier to pay you no attention at all.
Third, Luna beats you with a bat, but he doesn't try to
kill you, maybe because he can't find that picture. Meanwhile, is anyone trying to kill you over AzuPanama? No. Trying to put the smallest hole in you over AzuPanama?
No. Forget about AzuPanama, it's all about this picture," she said and stabbed it with her finger.

"That's one way to look at it."

 
"Good. But what this picture has to do with the
future I don't know and neither do you. You just like
to play games with time."

She was all too accurate about that, Arkady thought. She was right about a lot.» There are two ways back to whatever happened to Pribluda. One is Mongo and the
other, I think, is through O'Brien and Walls."

"Well, your friend O'Brien is nuts if he thinks he's
going to start a casino. Not while Fidel is alive. No
casinos. That would be complete surrender. And let me
tell you something else, two men like O'Brien and Walls
are not going to share their fortune with someone who lands in a plane from Russia." Ofelia hesitated to ask,
"Do you have a plan?"

"According to a note on Rufo's wall something about
Angola is happening at the Yacht Club tomorrow
night." He looked at his watch and corrected himself.»
Tonight. We might drop in."

"Angola? What has Angola got to do with this?"

"Rufo wrote 'Vi. HYC 2200 Angola.'"

"This is some plan."

"I'd also like to find Rufo's cell phone."

"He didn't have one. In Havana cellular phones come
from CubaCell, which is a joint venture between Mexico
and Cuba. Anyone with dollars can get one, but I called
CubaCell myself and they have no listing for Rufo Pinero."

"He had a phone, we just haven't found it. I'd like to
push that phone's
memory
and learn who his best
friends were."

This was the way he was at the boatyard, Ofelia
thought. Absolutely certain about something invisible.
The problem was that she agreed. A hustler like Rufo
was incomplete without a cell phone.

There was an explosion of laughter outside as a
couple walked by to a different unit. Ofelia felt compelled to explain how she knew about the Rosita, the
system of
jineteras
and police. From the Ministry of the
Interior an officer like Luna could protect Hedy and a whole string of girls at tourist bars, hotels and marinas.
The Rosita was safe because it was under the wing of
the police in the Playa del Este. She added, "Luna also
does things for his own protection. He and Rufo were
involved together in political activities, silencing dissi
dents. Maybe some of those people are anti-Cuban but Luna and Rufo sometimes went too far."

"Did Mongo?"

“No.”

"Captain Arcos?"

"I don't think so."

"And were they all involved in Santeria, too, like the
ceremony I saw?"

"That was not Santeria." Ofelia touched her necklace.»
Leave the spirits to me."

The second time was not as ravenous but just as sweet.
Pleasure left alien for so long made the skin a sensual
map to be explored in detail from an undercurve of the
breast to the pink of the tongue to the fine hairs of her
brow.

She had a variety of endearments in Spanish. He
simply liked the name Ofelia, the way it filled the mouth
and spoke of dreaminess and flowers.

The second time had a slow rhythm that rolled up the spine. He wouldn't know the beat but Ofelia did,
the steady rocking of the tall drum, the sideways shake
of the shells on the gourd, the quicker pace of hourglass
drums and then the mounting acceleration of the
iya,
the
biggest drum with the deepest pitch and in the center
of its skin a red resinous circle that spread the warmer
it grew until she felt herself stretched to the breaking
point, breathless while he held on, his heart pounding
like a machine that hadn't worked in ages.

"Now I know everything," Ofelia murmured.» I
know all about you."

She laid her head on his shoulder. The oddest thing,
he thought, was how well she fit. Staring up at the dark,
he felt he was free-floating now, as far from Moscow as
a man could get.

"What does
peligroso
mean?" he asked.

"Dangerous."

"A man said that at the Hemingway marina. We can
start there."

In the dark Ofelia told him about the priest in Hershey,
the town where she grew up.

The priest was not only Spanish but so frail that
people said it was his cassock that held him up. He
became a scandal, though, when he fell in love with the
manager's wife. The manager and his wife were American. Hershey was American. There were two great smokestacks of the mill belching black smoke and the wooden shacks of the workers, but in the center of town
was a road of shade trees and cool stone houses with
screened windows for Americans, where only Americans
or Cubans with work passes were allowed. There was a baseball and basketball team run by the Americans, and
American women taught school for Cuban and Ameri
can children. Both the wife and the priest taught school.

She had angelic blond hair that shone through the
mantilla she wore to church. All Ofelia could remember
about the husband was that his Oldsmobile always
gleamed because it was always being washed. The prob
lem in Hershey was the heavy soot that came from
burning bagasse, the sugarcane after the juice had been pressed out. Bagasse burned very hot and produced soot
as thick as fur. It was well known among maids who worked in the houses that the manager drank, and when
he was drunk he hit his wife. One time when he came
to school and began to drag her out, the priest stepped
in between and that was probably when all three
realized that the priest and the wife were in love.
Everyone saw, everyone knew.

Then all three disappeared the same night. Weeks later when men cleaned ash from the furnaces at the
mill, they found a crucifix and pieces of bone. They
recognized the priest's crucifix from around his neck.
Everyone assumed that the manager killed him and
threw his body in the oven and took his wife back to
the States and that was the end of it, except, a year later,
someone came back from a trip to New York and said
he had seen the manager's wife walking on the street
arm in arm with the priest, who wasn't dressed like a
priest anymore but just an ordinary man. Everyone else
in Hershey laughed at this account because they remembered the priest, how timid he was. But Ofelia believed
because she had seen that very same priest fight a bull.

 
Chapter Twenty-Two

Ofelia had gone out earlier, and he didn't recognize her
at first when she returned in skintight white jeans, white
tube top and white-rimmed dark glasses, and carrying
bags of coffee, sugar, oranges. She had a blinding new
aura, he thought, like a nuclear reactor when control
rods were withdrawn, and she had for him a shirt with
the embroidered design of a polo player, short-brimmed
straw hat, fashionable hip pack, sunglasses.

"Where did you find these?"

"There are hotels in the Playa del Este with dollar
boutiques. It's your friend Pribluda's money, but I think
he would approve, no?"

He picked up the shirt.» I don't think it's me."

"You have no choice. Luna has a picture of you. In
case he circulates it, we have to make you look different."

"I'm never going to look Cuban."

"Not Cuban, no. If people can mistake a tourist for you, maybe they'll mistake you for a tourist."

The truth she admitted only to herself: that she had experienced a shameful thrill walking into boutiques
with so much money. She had also added a new comb
and brush to her floppy straw bag. Necessities for a
certain role. And to dress a man was a pleasure she felt
in the marrow of her bones.

She folded his coat over a chair.» We paid for two
nights, we can leave your coat here for now."

 
The Playa del Este offered the overwhelming nothing
ness of sand and sea and houses wearing a sun-bleached
memory of color rather than color itself. A billboard announced the imminent construction of a French hotel
by a "Socialist-Leninist Brigade of Workers," and down
the beach rose ranks of new hotels already built. Ofelia drove, and Arkady discovered that to ride in Ofelia's
DeSoto, a vintage monster with wedge-shaped fins, was
to be invisible. A white tourist with an attractive Cuban
woman was instantly categorized and dismissed. For the
first time, he fit in because there were examples of him and Ofelia everywhere, a tall Dutchman and a nearly
miniature black girl sitting at a table under a single
Cinzano parasol that constituted a sidewalk cafe, a
Mexican with a blonde
jinetera
taking the air in a bicycle
cab, a beefy Englishman with a girl tottering on new platform shoes. Ofelia identified their nationality at a
glance. What Arkady noticed was that each couple held
hands but had no conversation.

"They each have a fantasy," Ofelia said.» He that he
can leave his ordinary life and live like a rich man on
an island like this. She that he will fall in love with her
and take her away to what she thinks is the real world.
It's better they can't communicate."

But Ofelia, too, felt a welcome invisibility in her dark
glasses and jeans, in the attitude of her chin, and when
they passed the plate glass of a gift shop she saw the
reflection of a perfectly acceptable
jinetera
and tourist,
perhaps slightly more handsome than usual.

 
At the approach of a Cuban girl the guard at the gate of
the Marina Hemingway started from his box, only to
step back in when he saw Arkady escort her around the
barrier. He led Ofelia by the marina shop and across
the grass to the dock where George Washington Walls
had left him off after his visit to the Havana Yacht Club.
The same loud volleyball game seemed to be in pro
gress. Other Americans trafficked back and forth with
bags of laundry. A boy in cutoffs hand-trucked cases
of beer to a blue-water yacht the size of an iceberg,
yet Ofelia treated the sight of three canals filled with
million-dollar power yachts as offhandedly as Cleopatra
reviewing her barges. Perhaps she was unimpressed, he
thought, because of the Cuban girl suspended in a
hammock from a sailboat boom.

"What's so dangerous here?" Ofelia asked.

"I don't know. You've been here before?"

"Once or twice. You go ahead. I'm looking for
someone."

Among the sameness of fiberglass boats the
Gavilan
had a dark, distinctive silhouette, and Arkady picked it out at the slip Walls had been heading for when he was
waved off by a harbor master yelling
"Peligroso!"
at
snorkelers. There were no swimmers in the water now,
and Arkady couldn't see any problem. The seaplane
tender nudged peacefully against the tire fenders of the dock while lines fed electricity from a shoreside outlet box over the boat's brass rail. No swimmers, no shouts,
only the deep throbbing of a motor yacht taxiing down
the canal.