Havana Bay (7 page)

"Nobody wants to be in Hershey. That's a sugar-mill town."

Her mother said, "
Havana
is full of girls from sugar-
mill towns without official permits, and they're all
making dollars on their backs. The day is going to come
when I'm looking for condoms for my granddaughters."

"Grandmother!"

Her mother relented, and they all quietly sawed the
meat on their plates until the old woman asked, "So
what does this Russian look like?"

It struck Ofelia.» Once in Hershey you pointed out a
priest who was defrocked for falling in love with a
woman."

"I'm surprised you remember, you were so little. Yes, she was a beautiful woman, very religious, and it was a
sad story all around."

"He looks like that."

Her mother mulled it over.» I can't believe you remembered that."

Just when Ofelia thought that family tension had
subsided enough for a pleasant evening meal, however
late, the phone rang. Theirs was the only phone in the
solar,
and she suspected her mother of using it to run
the neighborhood lottery. The illegal Cuban lottery was
rigged to the legal Venezuelan lottery, and the bet takers
with phones had a great advantage. Ofelia rose and
moved slowly around the girls' chairs toward the phone
on the wall to let her mother know she wasn't going to run for anyone's nefarious business. Her mother main
tained an expression of innocence until Ofelia hung up.

"What was it?"

"It's about the Russian," Ofelia said.» He killed some
one."

"Ah, you were meant for each other."

When she arrived at the apartment, Captain Arcos was slamming down the phone and telling Renko, "Your
embassy cannot provide you protection. There will be
expressions of anger from the Cuban people to those
who have sold them out. To those who plant the Judas
kiss on us for thirty pieces of silver. If it were up to me,
I would not let a single Russian on the street. I could
not guarantee the safety of a Russian, not even in the
safest capital in the world, because Cuban anger is so
deep. You crawl to the camp of the enemy and you
warn Cubans we better do the same. That history has
left us behind. No!
Cuba
is master of history.
Cuba
has
more history to make and we do not need instruction from any former comrades. That's what I told your
embassy."

Arcos had worked himself into such a rage his face
balled like a fist. His black sergeant Luna stood by,
slouching, ominous and bored at the same time. Renko sat calmly wrapped in his coat. Rufo sprawled in his
silvery running suit, his gaze aimed at a syringe clasped
in his left hand. What amazed Ofelia was the lack of
technicians. Where was the normal bustle of video and
light operators, the forensics experts and detectives?
Although she didn't question the authority of the two
men from the ministry, she made a point of loudly
snapping on surgical gloves.

"The captain speaks Russian, too," Renko told Ofelia.»
It's a night of surprises."

Arcos was in his forties, Ofelia thought, exactly the
generation who had wasted their youth in learning
Russian, and been bitter ever since. Not an insight she'd
share with Renko.

"He has a point, though," Renko told her.» My
embassy does not seem inclined to help me."

"This is the unbelievable statement he gives us,"
Arcos said.» That Rufo Pinero, a man with no criminal
record, an honored Cuban sportsman, a driver and
interpreter for Renko's own embassy, approached him
with the intent to sell cigars, was told 'no' and, anyway,
returned to this apartment here and, without warning
or provocation, attacked Renko with two weapons, a
knife and a syringe, and in a fight accidentally drove a
needle through his own head."

"Are there any witnesses?" asked Ofelia.

"Not yet," Arcos said, as if he might dig one up still.

Ofelia had not worked with the captain before
but she recognized the type, better at vigilance than
competence and promoted well beyond his natural
abilities. She couldn't expect any help from Luna; the sergeant seemed to regard everyone, including Arcos, with the same dark disregard.

She unzipped Rufo's running suit and found that
under it he was still completely dressed in the shirt and
pants he had been wearing at the ILM. In warm weather
that made very little sense. In his shirt pocket was a
plastic case and passport-sized ID that read:
"Rufo Perez
Pinero; Fecha de nacimiento:
2/6/56
; Profesion: traductor;
Casado: no; Numero de habitation: 155 Esperanza, La Habana; Status Militar: reserva; Hemotipo: B."
Glued in
a corner was a photo of a younger, leaner Rufo. In the
same case was a ration card with columns for months
and rows for rice, meat, beans. She emptied Rufo's
pockets of dollars, pesos, house and car keys, handling
everything by the edge. She thought she remembered
his having a cigarette lighter, too. Cubans noticed that. For some reason she also had the conviction that the Russian had already gone through Rufo's pockets, that she wasn't going to find anything that he hadn't already.

"Has the investigation started now?" Renko asked.

"There will be an investigation," Arcos promised, "but of
what
is the question. Everything you do is
suspicious: your attitude to Cuban authority, reluctance
to identify the body of a Russian colleague, now this attack on Rufo Pinero."

"My attack on Rufo?"

"Rufo's the one who is dead," Arcos insisted.

"The captain thinks I came from
Moscow
to attack Rufo?" Renko asked Ofelia.» First Pribluda and now
me. Murder and assault. If you don't investigate that,
what exactly do you people investigate?"

Ofelia was unhappy because basic protocol was to work a crime scene as soon as possible and Luna had
done nothing. She stepped back for a wider view and saw a knife lodged chest-high in the side panel of a
wooden cabinet yet not a book in it disturbed, not even
Fidel y Arte,
which was a heavy presentation book with
valuable plates. Neither a chair broken nor a bruise on
Renko, as if the confrontation had been over in an
instant.

"Your friend is a spy and you are a murderer," Luna
laid into Renko.» This is intolerable!"

Without dislodging it, Ofelia examined the knife in
the cabinet. The weapon was of Brazilian manufacture,
spring-loaded with an ivory handle and silver butt, the
blade double-edged and sharp as a razor. Driven into
the wood was a black thread.

Arcos said, "
I.
told the embassy, Renko is like any other visitor, he enjoys no diplomatic protection. This
apartment is like any Cuban apartment, it does not
enjoy extraterritorial protection. This is a Cuban matter,
completely up to us."

"Good," said Renko.» It was a Cuban that tried to
kill me."

"Don't be difficult. Since the facts of this matter are
so cloudy and you are alive and no harm done, you should consider yourself lucky if you are allowed to
leave
Havana
."

"You mean leave
Havana
alive. Well, I missed
tonight's flight."

"There will be another in a week. In the meantime,
we will continue to investigate."

The Russian asked Ofelia, "Would you consider this
an investigation?"

She hesitated because she had found in the lapel of
his black coat a narrow cut in the wrong place for a buttonhole. Her pause incensed Arcos.

"This is my investigation, run as I see fit, considering
many factors, such as whether you surprised Rufo,
stabbed him with the needle and, when he was dead,
placed it in his hand. It could still have your prints."

"Do you think so?"

"Rigor mortis has not set in. We'll look."

Before Ofelia could stop him, the captain knelt and tried to bend Rufo's fingers off the syringe. Rufo held
tight, the way dead men sometimes did. Luna shook his
head and smiled.

Renko told Ofelia, "Inform the captain it's a death
spasm, not rigor mortis, but now he'll have to wait for the rigor to come and go. Depending on how much he
wants to wrestle with Rufo, of course."

Which only made Arcos pull harder.

She took Renko back to Pribluda's flat on the Malecon
for lack of a better place for him to stay. He didn't have
the money for a hotel, the embassy's apartment was
now a crime scene, and until he officially identified
Pribluda he would only be staying in the flat of an
absent friend.

For a minute she and Renko stood on the balcony
to watch a solitary car sweep along the boulevard
and waves lap against the breast of the seawall. Out on the water lamplights spilled from fishing boats and
neumdticos.

"You've been on the ocean before?" Ofelia asked.

"The
Bering Sea
. It's not the same thing."

"You don't have to be sorry for me," she said
abruptly.» The captain knows what he's doing."

Which sounded hollow even to her, but Renko
relented, "You're right." He was wrapped in his black
coat, like a shipwrecked man happy with the only article
he'd rescued. She felt a conspiracy of sorts between the two of them because he hadn't mentioned to Arcos and
Luna the earlier visit to Pribluda's flat.

"The captain doesn't usually investigate homicides,
does he?"

"No."

"I remember newsreels of Castro's first trip to
Russia
.
He was a dashing revolutionary hunting bear in a beret
and green fatigues while our Kremlin Politburo stum
bled through the snow after him like a pack of fat, old,
love-smitten tarts. It was a romance meant to last forever. It's hard to believe that Russians are now
hunted in
Havana
."

"I think you are in a confused state. Your friend dies
and now you are attacked. This could give you a very
distorted view of Cuban life."

"It could."

"And be upsetting."

"Certainly distracting."

She didn't know what he could mean by that.

"There were no other witnesses?"

"No."

"You answered the door and Rufo attacked you
without warning."

"That's right."

"With two weapons?"

"Yes."

"That sounds implausible."

"That's because you're a good detective. But do you know what I've found?"

"What have you found?"

"I have found from my own experience that—in the
absence of other witnesses—a simple, resolutely main
tained lie is wonderfully difficult to break."

 
Chapter Four

As soon as Arkady was alone in Pribluda's flat he went to the office and opened the computer, which immediately demanded the password. An access code that combined up to twelve letters and numbers was virtu
ally unbreakable, but a code also had to be remembered,
and this was where the humans Arkady knew tended to
use their birthday or address. Arkady tried the names of
the colonel's wife, son, saint (although Pribluda was an
atheist, he had always enjoyed a bottle on his saint's
name day), favorite writers (Sholokhov and Gorky),
favorite teams (Dynamo and Central Army). Arkady
tried 06111968 for the date of Pribluda's Party membership, a chemical C12H22011 for sugar, a homesick
55-45-37-37 for the coordinates (latitude and longi
tude, minutes and seconds) of
Moscow
. He tried words
written and transposed into numbers (even though the
correct order of the Russian alphabet was a matter of controversy heading into the twenty-first century). The
computer fan would buzz for a moment, then purr
along. He tried until he traded the glow of the machine
for the dark of the balcony, where he took solace in the
steady sweep of the lighthouse beam and the deep
insomnia of the night.