Havana Bay (53 page)

The spear tip's wings had spread outside the muscle
of Arkady's chest. He closed them under the spear's
sliding collar and drew the shaft from the arm while it
I was numb. With his good arm he swam underwater.
The sea was a cave around a quarter-moon with glints
of fish. On the other side of the boat Walls and Luna I still struggled, trying to climb over each other to the
surface. Bubbles streaked from Walls's gun. Luna had
wrapped the spear line around the other man's neck.
Arkady came up for air and made his way back around
the stern of the
Gavilan.
No more than a meter away
the top of O'Brien's head bobbed in the water.

The patrol boat hadn't moved, although Arkady saw lights along the casino beach. The Yacht Club was still bright.

He could haul himself onto the
Gavilan,
but at this
point Arkady was happy to rest, watch the stars swarm
overhead and float on a blackness that held him up.

 
Chapter Twenty-Eight

Snow fell again in April, enough to dust the streets and
spiral in confusion around the intersections. Trucks hunched along the embankment road with lights on, a winter habit dying as hard as winter itself.

Arkady had left the prosecutor's office and walked
down to the embankment hoping to find fresher air
along the river, but there really was no escaping the
pollution, the usual pall mixed with snow into a sharp,
urban brew. Streetlamps were on and pools of light
swayed overhead, tugged this way and that by the wind.
Buildings along this stretch of Frunzenskaya were an institutional yellow, etchings of themselves behind lines
of snow. The river, choked with water and ice, ground
against stone walls.

He'd gone a block before he realized that a man in a
wheelchair was catching up with him at a determined
pace. Not an easy task in such weather, he thought, with the wheels of the chair slipping on the slick
pavement and detouring around the bodies in bedrolls who had taken up residence along the embankment.
Arkady had stepped aside for the chair to pass when he
saw who it was.

"Spring in the
Arctic
." Erasmo was packed into a
parka, ski cap, damp leather gloves. He brushed snow
off his beard and watched his breath with disgust.

"How
can you stand it?"

"You keep moving."

Erasmo looked massive in the parka and vibrantly
healthy as only Cubans could in
Moscow
. When he
offered his hand, Arkady waited until it dropped.

"What are you doing here?" Arkady asked.

"Renegotiating the sugar contract."

"Of course."

"Don't be that way," Erasmo said.» I'm in
Moscow
for one day. I called your office, and they said this was the route you were most likely to take. Please."

"Come on, then, I'll give you the Russian perspec
tive." Arkady went at a slower pace while Erasmo rolled
at his side.» '98 Jaguar, a banker who flies dollars out of
Moscow
in a Gulfstream jet. '91 Mercedes, a deputy
minister or lesser mafioso. That homeless man under
the streetlamp, well, he may be harmless or he might be an intelligence officer, you never know."

"Of course I was," Erasmo said.» Where else would
we let a Russian spy live except over a spy of our own?
It's elemental. I tried to warn you off at the graveyard.
At the restaurant I told you to drop it. After you found Mongo you could have stopped."

"No."

"There's never any reasoning with you, no middle
ground. How is the arm?"

"Nothing broken, thank you. It's my Cuban tattoo."

"I almost didn't recognize you. Here you are in a
parka like me. What happened to the wonderful coat?"

 
"It is a wonderful coat, but I decided I was wearing
it out. I still wear it on special occasions."

"Well, you're still alive, that's the main thing."

"No thanks to you. Why did you do it, Erasmo? Why
lead your friends into a trap? What happened to my
intrepid hero of
Angola
?"

"I had no choice. After all, the officers were already
plotting. When the threat is from men I served with
and loved, I mitigate the damage, channel them and do
as little harm as possible. At least no one was killed."

"No one?"

"Very few. O'Brien and Mostovoi did some things I
knew nothing about."

"But you tossed me to them like bait."

"Well, you proved to be more than just bait. Poor
Bugai."

"He's still alive."

"For God's sake, do you have a cigarette?"

The snow was thicker. Arkady put his back to the
wind, lit a couple of cigarettes and gave one to Erasmo,
who inhaled and coughed at the insult to his lungs. He took in a wider scope of the street to include figures
stirring the flakes with brooms.» Russian women.
Remember that day we drove the Jeep down the
Malecon?"

"Of course."

"How long do you think that's going to last? Not
very. You know, sometime we're going to look back at
the Special Period and say, well, it was a ridiculous mess

 
but it was Cuban. It was the sunset, the last Cuban age.
Miss it?"

They had come to a halt under a lamp. Flakes
sparkled on Erasmo's beard and brows.

"How is Ofelia?" Arkady said.» I tried to reach her
through the PNR and there was no reply. I don't have a
home address for her. That night they just wrapped up
my arm, threw some clothes on me and put me on the
plane with Pribluda. I never saw her."

"And you won't. Keep in mind, Arkady, you left a
lot of confusion behind you. Detective Osorio will be
kept busy for quite a while. But she sent this." Erasmo
removed his gloves and felt inside his parka until he pulled out a color snapshot of Ofelia. She was in an
orange two-piece on a beach with her two girls and a
tall, light-brown, handsome man. The girls looked up at
him with adoration and clung proudly to his hands. A
conga drum was slung over his shoulder as if music
might be called for at any moment, and on his face
was a smirk somewhere between penitence and self-
satisfaction. Behind this domestic tableau, planted on a towel by the weight of her horror, was Ofelia's mother.

"Which father?" Arkady asked.

"The smaller girl's."

Arkady couldn't see anything coerced about the
photograph, no ominous shadows on the sand or signs
of anxiety besides the family tension. Ofelia, however,
seemed to be totally apart from the others. Her hair was
damp, combed into ink-black waves. Her lips open, on
the point of speaking. Her expression said, yes, this is
the situation, but the intentness of her eyes had nothing
do with anyone else in the picture, as if she were looking
not from the photograph but through it.

Nothing was written on the back.

"You don't seem particularly moved," Erasmo said.

"Should I be?"

"Yes, I would think so. I wanted to reassure you that all in all, things came out pretty well for the detective."

"Yes, they look happy."

"I wouldn't go that far. Anyway, you can keep the
picture. That's the reason I came out in this blizzard looking for you just to give it to you."

"Thank you." Arkady unzipped his parka so he could
put the photograph safely away without bending it.

Erasmo blew on his hands before pulling his gloves
back on. Suddenly he looked miserable.» Cold people
for a cold climate, that's all I can say." Snow started to
clump on his brows and under his nose. He swung his chair and gave Arkady half a wave.» I know my way
back."

"Just follow the river."

Going back, the wind was against Erasmo. He leaned
into it, bucking the oncoming current of headlights, his wheels losing a little friction on the melting snow but
maintaining the speed of a man who knows where a
warm room waits.

Arkady's apartment was in the opposite direction.
Headlights fanned his shadow ahead of him. Like pachy
derms, trucks stepped in and out of potholes. In true

 
winter the reflection of lights off river ice made an
illuminated path through the city, but a late snowfall
merely dissolved in sheets into black water. Traffic
police waded between cars, pulling aside that luckless soul whose lights were deemed malfunctioning until
dollars, not rubles, passed hands. It was the sort of
evening, Arkady thought, when each individual apartment window looked like a craft tossing in a dangerous
sea. The Kremlin was out of sight but not its bonfire
glow. Snow outlined lampposts, gutters, sills; packed
against truck tarps and wing mirrors and on the collars
people clutched up to their eyes; melted at the wrist and
neck, trickled down the arm and chest; flew down one flagstone wall of the river and up the other like sparks
from a chute; turned the trees of the park into white-
caps; made each step a visible memory and then covered it over.

Author's Note

Although this novel is set in
Havana
,
Cuba
, the characters and dialogue are products of the
author's imagination and do not portray actual
persons or events. Any resemblance to living
people is entirely coincidental.

for Em

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank, in
Cuba
, the writers Jose LaTour,
Daniel Chavarria and Arnaldo Correa; in
Spain
, Justo Vasco; in
Russia
, Konstantin Zhukovski of Tass. They are in no way responsible for any political opinions expressed in this book.

In the
United States
I was aided by the medical
knowledge of Drs. Neil Benowitz, Nelson Branco, Mark
Levy and Kenneth Sack, the arson expertise of George
Alboff and Larry Williams, the camera of Sam Smith,
the lyrics of Regla Miller, the worldly advice of Bill
Hanson and the critical reading by Bob Loomis, Nell Branco and Luisa Smith.

Most of all, I owe Knox Burger and Kitty Sprague,
who waited for the story.