Havana Bay (52 page)

"What feels like?"

"I'm sorry, Arkady," O'Brien said.» It's time to give
up the coat now. In fact, everything. You can do it
yourself or we can do it for you."

While Walls took the coat and the rest of Arkady's
clothing, too, Luna went below to change clothes, a
modesty that surprised Arkady. The sergeant reappeared
in uniform swollen with a menace kept in thin control,
and Arkady wondered how he had ever managed to
throw Luna into a wall. He was, himself, past lifting
weights or fattening up. Then it was Arkady's turn to put
on Luna's sodden shorts and shirt. Up to the point of
pulling on flippers Arkady considered himself relatively safe because they were so difficult to put on the feet of a
dead man. With the flippers on he felt both unsafe and
ridiculous. Still, a patrol boat had to be coming.

  
Holding the binoculars by the strap, O'Brien
returned them to Arkady.» See how it ends."

Onstage, a melee of golden dancers moved to a
quickening pace. Daughters of Oshun, Arkady thought.
Well, he'd learned that much. It wouldn't be a detona
tion set by a timer, he thought, because there were too many variables in public events. The back two rows of the stands had thinned out. Erasmo backed his wheelchair from the stage. An ecstasy in rays of sweat flew
from the dancers. Change leaned. By the side of the
stage a dozen men looked at their watches. In the front
row, the leader himself and Chango seemed to look
straight through the frenzy of the dancers. How the
dancers could turn faster Arkady didn't know, but they
did, their golden skirts spread and spinning at the
runaway pace of the congas. He braced for the flare of
explosion.

Instead, plainclothes men started to appear. They
came in pairs, quietly taking away the man in aviator
glasses, Bias and, one by one, the other men Arkady
recognized from the
paladar.
Each man reacted with the
same sequence of surprise, bafflement and resignation.
Their military training showed. No one ran or called out at the moment of his arrest. Arkady looked for
Erasmo being wheeled away. Instead, Erasmo seemed to
be in charge of this new phase. Hardly anyone else in
the audience seemed to notice, fixed as they were on
blurred hands on drums and the golden skirts of sen
suous Yemayas, every eye transfixed except for the old
man in too much uniform in the front row. He dropped
his head by small degrees until Arkady realized that
under the bill of his cap the nation's leader was checking his own watch.

"He knew," Arkady said.» He knew about the plot."

"Much better," O'Brien said.» He helped start it. He does it every few years to weed out malcontents. The same as he did with Isabel's father. The Comandante
didn't last this long by waiting for a conspiracy to come
for him."

"Erasmo helped, too?"

"In spite of himself, Erasmo is a Cuban patriot."

"You took care of the details?"

"More than mere details."

"The talk about the Havana Yacht Club?"

"All true to a degree. The fact is, Arkady, revolutions are chancy things, you never know how they're going to
turn out. I prefer to bet with the house, whoever the
house is. The glasses?" He took the binoculars from
Arkady by the strap and lowered them into a plastic
Ziploc bag, which he placed in the seabag that was supposedly Pribluda's.» There's nothing trickier than an
assassination, especially an assassination that's not sup
posed to succeed. You have to keep the means and
trigger of destruction in your own hands. And you have
to undermine the conspirators in the public eye. These
are highly regarded men, military heroes. It helps paint
them black if the man who actually tries to set off the
blast isn't Cuban at all but a generally unpopular figure
as, say, a Russian. A dead Russian, to be precise."

Walls and O'Brien weren't just waiting to explain
how brilliant they were, Arkady knew. There was more
to come. Luna opened a cockpit bench to take out a
speargun. He placed the butt against his hip, cocked the
power bands and slid into the muzzle a shaft with a spearhead with folded wings for barbs. No patrol boat, Arkady understood, was on the way.

"Why would anyone connect me to the blast?"

Walls held up another Ziploc bag so that Arkady
could see inside a television remote control.» Remember
the monitor you turned on for John at the Riviera? We modified the remote, it's a radio transmitter now, but it
still has your fingerprints. Then, people saw the doll in
Pribluda's apartment while you were there. We may
have lost Sergei, but John said you were so bright you'd serve even better."

O'Brien answered his cell phone. Arkady hadn't
heard a ring. After a word of satisfaction, O'Brien folded
the phone up.

Luna fished in the pockets of Arkady's coat and
found the snapshot of Pribluda, Mongo and Erasmo.»
Fuck your Havana Yacht Club."

He tore the picture
into pieces that he threw onto the water. He kicked
the inner tube off the transom after the bits of paper.

"Get in."

Standing at the carved doors of the old gambling hall,
Ofelia caught the button tones and soft fluorescence of
Mostovoi's cell phone. The call was over in a second.

"Who did you call?"

 
 
"Friends. Have you ever posed?"

"What friends?"

"At the embassy. I explained that I was helping
somebody, which I certainly am trying to do. I meant it
about posing."

"For what?"

"Something different."

Her attention was half on Mostovoi talking to her in
the dark interior of the hall and half on the pale strand
of the beach. Music played on the other side of the
beach wall. A rumba for Yemaya.

"How different?"

"I mean very different."

She couldn't tell what was in the room, but its large
space magnified sound, and she heard Mostovoi swallow in a way she found unpleasant. All she could see of him
was the oily eye of his camera and she talked mainly to
keep track of him.

"What was in this room?"

He slipped sideways from the moonlight at the door.

"What was here? It was the main casino. Chandeliers
from Italy, tiles from Spain. Roulette tables, craps,
blackjack. It was a different world."

"Well, no one's here now."

"I know what you mean. You think maybe Renko
went to the plane?"

Would Arkady do that? she wondered. Slip away
without a word? It was one of the things men did best.
They didn't need planes, they just disappeared. Her mother could count them: Primero, Segundo and now
Tercero. Bias would deliver Pribluda's body to the airport. Arkady still might wander in like a beach
comber or stroll down the portal of arches that framed
the sea, but it was more likely with every minute that
he had accomplished the classic retreat, the exit with no
good-bye. She felt profoundly stupid.

"I could see you in any number of poses," Mostovoi
said.

But she thought about Arkady's black coat and decided, no, his problem was that he abandoned no
one. One way or another, he was going to come.

"There in the moonlight," Mostovoi said, "is perfect."

Ofelia heard the shutter of his camera click, although the flash failed. She heard two more rapid clicks before
she realized they weren't from a shutter but from a
hammer on the empty breech of a gun. She tried to dig
her own gun out of her straw bag, but it was under
Rufo's phone. The hammer clicked again. When Ofelia
found her own gun, it was tangled with straw. She fired
one wild round that exploded the bottom of the bag.
Something crushed the plaster wall by her ear. She dropped to her back and held her gun with both hands
more deliberately. Her second shot through the bag lit
Mostovoi, a flash of him swinging his gun down like a
club. The third tunneled into his mouth.

Arkady floated in the tube on a short rope from the
stern of the
Gavilan.
The Caribbean was warm, the net a hammock, the rubber tube actually cushy, but he felt
as if he were looking up from the bottom of a well at O'Brien, Walls with the gun and Luna with the spear-
gun. They blocked the stars. Arkady would have liked to think at least he was stalling. No, they were only
waiting, having outthought and outmuscled him all the way. One stunning accomplishment: he not only found
out how Pribluda was duped but got to be the dupe
too. Finally a
neumdtico
himself.

Their heads lifted at the sound of gunshots.

Walls said, "The son of a bitch was supposed to use
a silencer."

"And why three shots?" asked O'Brien.

A cell-phone tone came from Luna's shirt pocket. He
flipped the phone open and answered. As he listened he
turned toward the beach.

"Who is it?" Walls said.

"It's her, the detective." O'Brien followed Luna's
eyes' turn to the casino; it really was wonderful to see
how quickly the man calculated, Arkady thought.» She
got Mostovoi's phone. Or Rufo's, and she's using the memory." O'Brien told Luna, "Hang up."

Luna raised the speargun for quiet and pressed the
phone tight against his ear.

"Take the phone from him," O'Brien told Walls.

Luna pointed the spear at Arkady.» She says he never
harmed Hedy. You told me he came looking for me.
What she says is he wasn't after me at all."

"How does she know?" Walls said.

"The night someone killed Hedy, she says he was
with her."

 
"She's lying," Walls said.» They sleep together."

"That's why I believe her. I know her and she knows
me. Who hurt my Hedy?"

"Do you believe this?" O'Brien appealed to Arkady as one sane man to another.» George, will you please
take his fucking phone away?"

"Your stupid Hedy," Walls told Luna, "was a whore."

The speargun jumped and a steel shaft with a line of
white nylon stuck out of Walk's stomach. When he
looked down blood under pressure sprayed his face.

"George," O'Brien said.

Walls sat down on the gunwale, raised his gun and
shot Luna, who took a single backward step before
moving forward. As Walls tried for another clear shot
the two men fell over the side.

Arkady began climbing out of the tube. On deck
O'Brien had pulled the second speargun from the cock
pit bench and was trying to insert the spear and pull
back the two stiff elastic power bands, not an easy task
at the best of times, worse standing amid loose spear cable and blood on the deck. But as Arkady came up over the transom O'Brien managed to notch one band
and pull the gun's trigger, and Arkady found himself on
his back in the water, a spear through his forearm and
the spearhead lodged shallowly in his chest, the spear's
force spent on his arm. Spear cable led back to O'Brien,
who had one tasseled shoe on the transom and was
already, Arkady could tell, calculating ten or eleven moves ahead. With his free hand Arkady yanked the
cable. O'Brien dropped the speargun overboard, but the
line that tangled around his ankle stretched him over
the polished mahogany. Arkady pulled with both hands
and O'Brien slid all the way over the stern and in.

O'Brien shouted, "I can't swim!"

The
Gavilan
was low-slung enough for O'Brien to try
to claw his way back on, but Arkady towed him by the
line away from the boat. O'Brien turned to the inner
tube, but his splashing chased the tube more than it
closed the distance. The speargun floated, but not
enough to hold up a man.