Havana Bay (25 page)

She looked toward his arm, the one she had found the
bruises on.» You're sounding better. You were not in a
healthy mood when you came here."

  
"I am now. I'm curious about Pribluda and Rufo and
Luna. I have a new purpose in life, so to speak."

"But why did you want to hurt yourself?"

She half expected contemptuous dismissal, but Renko said, "You have it backwards."

Ofelia sensed the next question so strongly she asked
before she checked herself, "Did you lose someone? Not
here. In Moscow?"

"I lose people all the time." He lit one cigarette from
the other.» Most boats that go on the rocks really don't
intend to go there. It's not a mood, it's just exhaustion.
Exhaustion from self-pity." He added, "You're with
someone and for some reason with them you feel more
alive, on another level. Taste has taste and color has
color. You both think the same thing at the same time
and you're doubly alive. And if you manage to lose them in some gruesomely irrevocable way, then strange things
happen. You wander around looking for a car to hit you so you won't have to go home in the evening. So this
incident with Rufo is interesting to me because I don't
mind a car hitting me, but I do mind a driver
trying
to
hit me. A fine distinction, but there you are."

In the night Ofelia awoke to find lovers gone, the moon
becalmed. In the very lack of breeze she detected a faint
scent, a perfume she traced to Renko's soft black coat,
to the sleeve of a man who claimed he'd never been
possessed.

Chapter Fourteen

Osorio left before dawn, and as soon as she was gone
Arkady expected Luna to climb up the front of the
building or crawl through the air shaft. It wasn't so
much that Arkady didn't trust Osorio as that he didn't understand her. Why she would spend the night in a
metal chair with the island's least popular Russian was
a mystery to him, unless she was working with Luna
and only insinuating herself into the apartment. If that was the case, all the locks in the world wouldn't help.

By eight o'clock the Malecon stretched like a floodlit
stage. Boys crouched in the blue shadow of the seawall
to spool loose fishing line. Men opened cases of home
made hooks and weights for sale. Bikes rolled by with a
father on the pedals, a boy on the handlebars, mother
and baby on a plank over the rear wheel, an entire
family rolling by. Still no Sergeant Luna.

Arkady went downstairs, but instead of going out on
the street he knocked on Erasmo's door, deliberately
pounding out of rhythm with the music from the
garage's radio until Tico answered and let him into
Erasmo's private area with the cut-down bed and table.

"Erasmo's not here." Tico was in his coveralls, with
an inner tube over his shoulder and a Tropicola can in
his hand.

Arkady shouted over the radio.» You speak Russian."

"I speak Russian."
Tico sounded as if
he'd
just
realized it. He was the same age as his friend Erasmo, but time seemed to have left his hair dark and thick as fur, no wrinkles or lines of care to mark his smooth, trusting visage, a boy's face on a middle-aged man.

"Do you mind if I go out through the garage?"

"I don't mind. You can go but you can't come back.
The garage is closed."

Arkady pushed through the beaded curtain. Tico told
the truth. The doors of the garage were closed, the Jeeps
inside parked bumper to bumper.

Tico said, "The garage is closed because Erasmo
doesn't want me selling any cars while he's gone."

"I won't bother you, I just want to go out the back
way." And avoid any eyes out front, Arkady thought.

"Erasmo's with the Chinese. He's with the Chinese."

"He is? What Chinese?"

"The dead Chinese. But he'll be there all day and I'm
not supposed to sell any cars. He said, 'Radio silence!'
I'm not supposed to talk to anyone."

"Where are the dead Chinese?"

"Radio silence!"

"Ah."

"I wasn't supposed to answer the door."

"No, you were being polite." Arkady dug a pencil
from his coat and spread a piece of paper over a hood.» Can you write it?"

 
 
"I can write as well as anyone."

"Don't tell me, but write where I can find Erasmo
and the Chinese."

"They're dead, that's a clue."

"Good." As Tico bent over the paper and printed in block letters, Arkady threw in, on the off-chance, "Do
you know where Mongo is?"

"No."

"Do you know what happened to Sergei?"

"No." Tico returned the pencil with an anxious
expression.» Are you going to see Erasmo now? If you see him right away he'll know it was me."

"Not right away."

Tico brightened.» Where are you going?"

"The Havana Yacht Club."

"Where is that?"

Arkady held up a map.» In the past."

He went out the garage doors and walked the back
street half a dozen blocks before returning to the Male-con. The boulevard had become familiar in a matter of
days, the coughing of trucks, boys casting nets from the
seawall, scruffy dogs chewing on a flattened carcass of a
gull. A PNR at a corner gave all his attention to a bicycle
cart weighted with teenage girls. No Luna at all.

In Arkady's hand was Sergei Pribluda's forty-year-old
Texaco map, a foldout map that located the Presidential
Palace and American embassy, Cuban-American Jockey
Club and racetrack, Woolworth's and Biltmore Country
Club of a vanished Havana. Not that the city wasn't still surreal. Houses on the Malecon were fantasies: Greek
pediments on Moorish columns and crumbling walls
with fleurs-de-lis in faded pinks and blues. Venice had merely the threat of sinking. Havana looked sunken and
raised.

What surprised Arkady was how much Havana was
the same as on a forty-year-old map. He walked by the
colossal Hotel Nacional and the angled glass tower of the Hotel Riviera, both "popular with vacationing
Americans" according to the key of the map.
Neumdti-
cos
rilled inner tubes with air at a former Texaco gas
station "with Fire Chief service!"

It took Arkady ninety minutes to walk the Malecon,
cross the Almendares River with its small boatyards and
sewer stench, and stroll westward the length of Mira-mar, past Erasmo's family house and the steps where Mongo disappeared. He could have taken a taxi at any
point, and he knew by now that half the cars on the
road were happy to be flagged down to earn a few
American dollars. He didn't want to drive into the past,
he wanted to sink into it step by step.

At Miramar's very end he approached a traffic circle
with an at-one-time Texaco station, a stadium that had been the Havana greyhound track and, according to Pribluda's map, the Havana Yacht Club.

It wasn't the sort of place people just stumbled onto.
There were no other pedestrians. Cars hurtled around
the circle and spun away. Only someone looking for it
would have noticed a driveway curving along a screen
of royal palms and around a lawn to a classical mansion in white with heavy columns, twin grand staircases and
broad colonnades. Over it lay the ghostly silence of a
colonial governor's palace abandoned in a coup, occupants decamped, the first signs of decay visible in the
split reflection of a broken window and a red tile
missing from the hip of the roof. Carved above the pediment of a central porch was the design of a ship's
wheel on a pennant. In the entire scene there was no movement at all except for the sway of palm fronds. It
was easy to imagine Havana's social elite posing on the
steps because he'd already seen it, in the photograph of
Erasmo's family.

He climbed a stairway and walked through open
mahogany doors into a hall of white walls and limestone
floors. Under a wrought-iron chandelier an elderly black
woman in an aluminum chair stared up at him through
thick glasses as if he'd dropped from a spaceship. A red
telephone sat at her side, and the sight of a visitor
prompted her to call and talk to someone in slurred
Spanish while Arkady went on through tall French
doors to an empty hall. A line of reception rooms
connected like a bright and airy tomb, and the sound of
his footsteps preceded him in the direction of a bar
with a dark, curving counter stripped of stools, chairs,
bottles. A portrait of Che hung by an empty glass case
that must at one time have displayed race trophies,
sailing ladders, models. All that was left of a nautical theme were wall medallions of a ship's wheel. The bar
opened to an outdoor area with a stage ready for a
Cuban band that could teach even Americans the
mambo.

He returned inside and climbed to the second floor.
At the top of the stairway was a tall admiral's chair of
black mahogany. Everything else had been carted away
and nothing added except more metal chairs of the
Revolution. He stepped out onto a porch facing the
ocean for a view of a private cove.

A brick promenade as large as a city plaza spread out
to a row of thatched umbrellas and fan-shaped palms that led on to white sand and shallow water embraced
by broad piers and, beyond, enough anchorage in bright
blue water for a regatta. The only craft Arkady saw now
were
neumdticos,
dots on the horizon, and the only
figures on the beach were a dozen boys kicking a soccer
ball back and forth.

Arkady couldn't resist the temptation. After he went
back down the stairs he removed his shoes and socks to
walk onto the beach and feel the warm fine-grained
sand underfoot. The boys ignored him. He climbed the
steps of a wide cement pier and walked fifty meters to
its end. Havana had disappeared. The club dominated a
hundred meters of waterfront, joined on the western
side by the old dog track and toward the east by a white
minaret rising over palms. Not a single person was on the beach before the Moorish tower, and although the
sand ran to a point of wild scrub that could have been
a desert island, it was familiar. From his shirt pocket Arkady brought out the photograph of Pribluda, Mongo
and Erasmo with those same trees at the same size and
angle in the background. He was standing where the
picture had been taken. At the Havana Yacht Club.

The boys on the beach of the club waved, Arkady
thought, at him and then he turned to the clapping of
an inboard powerboat sweeping around a breakwater. It
skimmed the waves, shooting rays off its windshield,
then slowed with a skater's turns until Arkady could
make out George Washington Walls in short sleeves
and sunglasses. He swung the boat about and ap
proached parallel to the pier, dropping the engine to a
silken idle and keeping a safe distance from the pilings.
The boat was low, long and angular, its hull and deck
of gleaming, black mahogany, its bow sheathed in brass.
In the cabin, black curtains were drawn. The dash had the glinting brightwork and deep patina that came only from age and infinite care. Fluttering from the transom
pole was a pirate's pennant with crossed sabers.

"Hemingway's boat?" Arkady asked.

Walls shook his head.» Maybe Al Capone's. A sea
plane tender turned rumrunner."

"Capone was here?"

"He had a place."

Once again, Arkady was impressed.» How did you
know I was here?"

"The basic form of communication on this island is
old women with phones. Why are you here?"

"Curiosity. I wanted to see the yacht club."

"Doesn't exist."