Havana Bay (9 page)

"He is reacting to the attack on himself," she said.

"My reaction has probably been colored by that,"
Arkady conceded.» Or finding Pribluda dead. Or jet
lag." '

Bias said, "You have a week more here. You will
adjust. It was very enterprising of you to go to Rufo's.
Ofelia said you might. She's intuitive, I think."

"I think so, too," Arkady said.

"If what you say is true, Rufo inadvertently killed
himself by his own hand during a brief, violent
struggle?"

"Accidental suicide."

"Very much so. But that does not answer the ques
tion of
why
Rufo attacked you. I find this very
troubling."

"Between us, I'm troubled too."

Bias stopped at the head of a stairway from which
rose a sour coolness like the odor of spoiled milk.» The
nature of the attack with a knife
and
a syringe is so
peculiar. There was an embalming syringe stolen here yesterday, although I don't understand when Rufo could
have taken it. You were with him the whole time,
weren't you?"

"I went to the rest room once. He could have taken
it then."

"Yes, you're right. Well, it was probably that syringe,
although I don't understand why a murderer would
choose to use it when he already had a better weapon.
Do you?"

Arkady gave the matter some thought.» Did Rufo
have any record of violence?"

"I know the opinion of Captain Arcos in this matter,
but I have to be honest. Better to say that Rufo had a
record of not being caught. He was a
jinetero,
a hustler.
The kind who hangs around tourists and finds someone
a girl, changes their money, gets them cigars. Suppos
edly very successful with German and Swedish women,
secretaries on vacation. May I be direct?"

"Please."

"It is said that he would advertise to foreign women
that he had a
pinga
like a locomotive."

"What is a
pinga?"
Arkady asked.

"Well, I'm no psychiatrist, but a man who has a
pinga
like a locomotive doesn't use a syringe to kill
someone."

"More likely a machete," Osorio spoke up.

"You can't see many of those. How many people
would have machetes in the city?"

"Every Cuban has a machete," Bias said.» I have three
in my own closet."

"I have one," Osorio said.

Arkady stood corrected.

Bias asked, "You can't shed any light on this syringe?"

"No."

"Understand I am not a detective, I am not the PNR,
I am only a forensic pathologist, but I was trained by
my Russian instructors of long ago to think in an
analytical fashion. I believe we are not so different, so I
will show you something to build your confidence in
us. And you may even learn something from us."

"Such as?"

Bias rubbed his hands like a host with a program.»
We will start where you came in."

The morgue had six drawers, a freezer and a glass-faced
cooler, all with broken handles beaded with condensation. Bias said, "The refrigerators still work. We had an
American pilot from the invasion at the
Bay of Pigs
. He
crashed and died, and for nineteen years the CIA said
they never heard of him. Finally his family came and
got him. But he was in good condition in his own
humidor right here. We called him the Cigar."

Bias rolled out a drawer. Inside, the purple body
identified as Pribluda was rearranged: skull, jaw and
right foot between the legs, a plastic sack of organs
where the head should be. Left open, the stomach cavity
released a zoo-like bouquet that made Arkady's eyes
smart, and the whole body had been placed in a zinc tub to keep the liquefying flesh from overflowing. Arkady lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. That was
reason to smoke right there. So far, Arkady's confidence
was not rising.

"We did have funding promised from our Russian
friends for a new refrigeration system. You can under
stand how important refrigeration is in
Havana
. Then
the Russians said we had to buy it." Bias turned his
head this way and that to study the corpse.» Are you
aware of any characteristics of Pribluda that are differ
ent from this body?"

"No, but I think that after a week in the water and
having body parts switched, most people look alike."

"I was instructed by Captain Arcos not to perform
biopsies. However, I think I am still the director here
and so I did. The brain and organs show no evidence of drugs or toxins. That is not conclusive because the body was in the water such a long time, but there was another
aspect. The heart muscle displayed definite signs of necrosis, which is a strong indicator of heart attack."

"A heart attack while floating in the water?"

"A heart attack after a lifetime of eating and drinking
like a Russian, an attack so massive and so quick he had
no time even to thrash, which was why all the fishing
gear was still on board. Did you know that life expect
ancy is twenty years less in
Russia
than in
Cuba
? I will
give you samples of the tissue. Show them to any doctor
in
Moscow
and they will say the same."

"Have you ever seen
neumaticos
die of a heart attack
before?"

"No, mostly shark attacks. But this is the first time
I've heard of a Russian
neumdtico."

"Don't you think that's worth an investigation?"

"You must understand our situation. We have no
crime scene and no witnesses, which makes an investi
gation very discouraging, very expensive. And no crime.
Worse, he's Russian and the embassy refuses to cooper
ate. They say no one worked with Pribluda, no one
knew him and that he was merely an innocent student
of the sugar industry. For us even to visit the embassy requires a diplomatic note. All the same we asked for a
photograph of Pribluda, and since we didn't receive
that, we have matched him and the body to the best
possible certainty. There is nothing more we can do.
We must consider him identified and you must take
him home. We will have no more 'cigars' here."

"Why ask the embassy for a photograph? I showed
you one."

"Yours wasn't good enough."

"You can't match anything to the way he looks now."

Bias let a smile win his face. He rolled the body
drawer shut.» I have a surprise for you. I want you to
return home with the right idea of
Cuba
."

On the second floor Bias led Arkady and Osorio into an
office with the faded title
antropologia
on the door.

Arkady's first impression was of a catacomb, the
remains of martyrs assiduously sorted by shelves of
skulls, pelvises, thigh bones, metacarpals lying hand in
hand, spines tangled like snakes. Dust swam around a
lampshade, the light reflected by case after case of neatly
pinned tropical beetles iridescent as opals. A fer-de-
lance with open fangs coiled within a specimen jar
topped by a tarantula on tiptoe. What looked like
dominoes were burned bones in gradations from white
to charcoal black. On the wall the baroque jaws of a
shark outgrinned a jawbone of human teeth filed to
points. The cord for the ceiling fan was the braided hair
of a shrunken head. No catacomb, Arkady changed his
mind, more a jungle trading post. A sheet covered
something humming on a desk, and if it were a great
ape going philosophical Arkady wouldn't have been
surprised.

"This is our anthropological laboratory," said Bias.»
Not a large one, but here we determine by bones and
teeth the age, race and sex of a victim. And different
poisonous or violent agents."

"The
Caribbean
has a number you won't see in
Moscow
," Osorio said.

"We are deficient in sharks," Arkady said.

"And," Bias said, "by insect activity how long the
victim has been dead. In other climates, different insects
start at different times. Here in
Cuba
, they all start at
once, but at different rates of progress."

"Fascinating."

"Fascinating but perhaps not what an investigator
from
Moscow
would call a serious forensic laboratory?"

"There are different laboratories for different places."

"Exactly!" Bias picked up the jawbone of pointed
teeth.» Our population is, let's say, unique. A number
of African tribes practiced scarification and sharpening teeth. The Abakua, for example, was a secret leopard
society from the
Congo
. They were brought here as
slaves to work on the docks and in a short time
controlled all the smuggling in
 
. It took the
Comandante to turn them into a folkloric society." He
set down the teeth and directed Arkady's attention to
an exhibit of a skull and two-edged ax spattered in
dried blood.» This skull might look to you like evidence
of trauma."

"It conceivably might."

"But to a Cuban a skull and an ax covered in animal
blood may be a religious shrine. The detective can tell you all about it if you want." Osorio squirmed at the
suggestion and Bias went on.» So when we make a psychological analysis of a person we use the
Minnesota
profile, of course, but we also take into consideration
whether a person is a devotee of Santeria."

"Oh." Not that Arkady had ever used the
Minnesota
profile.

"Nevertheless"—Bias lifted the cloth—"let me prove
that, in spite of superstitions,
Cuba
is still abreast of the
world."

Unveiled on a desk was a 486 computer hooked up
to a scanner and printer, each running, and an 8-mm
video camera mounted lens down above a stand. Rest
ing in a ring on the stand and tilted up to the camera
was a skull with a hole in the center of the forehead.
The cranium was wired together. Missing teeth made
for a gaping cartoon smile.

Arkady had only read about a system like this.» This
is a German identification technique."

"No," said Bias, "this is a Cuban technique. The
German system, including software, costs over fifty
thousand dollars. Ours costs a tenth as much by adapt
ing an orthopedic program. In this case, for example,
we found a head with teeth hammered out." Bias
touched the keyboard, and on the screen appeared a
color picture of a Dumpster stuffed with palm fronds
topped by a decapitated head. At a keystroke the police
and Dumpster were replaced by four photographs of
different men, one getting married, another dancing
energetically at a party, a third holding a basketball, the
last slouching on a swaybacked horse.» Four missing
men. Which could it be? A murderer might have been
confident once in believing a face in advanced decay with no teeth could not be matched to any photograph
or records. After all, here in
Cuba
nature is a very
efficient undertaker. Now, however, all we need is a
clear photograph and a clean skull. You are our guest,
you choose."

Arkady chose the bridegroom, and at once the man's
image filled the screen, eyes popping from nervousness,
hair as carefully arranged as the frills on his shirt.

Dragging a mouse on the pad, Dr. Bias outlined the
groom's head, hit a key and erased his shirt and
shoulders. At the tap of a key, the head floated to the
left of the screen, and on the right appeared the skull as
it stared up at the video camera like a patient waiting
for the dentist's drill. Bias repositioned the skull so that
it gazed up at the camera lens at precisely the same
angle as the face. He enlarged the face to the same size,
enhanced the shadows so that flesh melted and eyes
sank into hollows, placed white darts on the skull at jaw
and crown of the skull, at the outside points of the
brow, within the orbital and nasal cavities, across the
cheekbones and the corners of the mandible. In com
parison to the laborious reconstruction of faces from
skulls that Arkady knew in
Moscow
, the tedious application of plastique to plaster bone, this was manipula
tion at the speed of light. Bias added arrows at the same
points of the photograph and, with a tap, brought up
between each pair of corresponding markers their dis
tance measured in pixels, the screen's many thousand phosphors of light. A final keystroke merged the two
heads into a single out-of-focus image with an overlay
of numbers between the arrows.