Havana Bay (38 page)

Depend on the Russians. There was no spare tire and
the nut and bolt that usually held one down dug
painfully into her back. She squirmed, trying to hook
the bolt on the rope that pinioned her arms, but it was
like twisting in a shroud.

He was more depressed by the possible identification of
Pribluda's body than he would have expected. Originally
he had refused the body simply to goad the Cubans into some sort of investigation, but now he found there was
also part of him that at a more basic level irrationally
and against all the evidence refused to accept the
colonel's death. How could anyone so tough and ugly
die? The man was a brute, and yet Arkady felt like a
one-man funeral cortege, perhaps for selfish reasons. Sergei Pribluda was the person on earth he knew best
and, in the colonel's way, one of Arkady's last connec
tions to Irina.

When she had been wrapped in white on a gurney,
her hair brushed, her eyes meditatively shut, her mouth
relaxed into a smile, the doctor reassured him it was
normal to think that a loved one was still breathing.
The cool chilled his sweat. He recalled Pushkin's lines
how the lover
... counts the slow hours, vainly trying
To hurry them: he cannot wait.
The clock strikes ten: he's off, he's flying,
And suddenly he's at the gate.

This was the gate that would never open. He would return again and again, race and pant like a schoolboy,
strain to see her breathe one more time and the gate
would stay barred.

Did people die of love? Arkady knew a man on a
factory ship in the Bering Sea, a killer, who had fallen
in love with a woman, a whore who died at sea. He
erased himself from the face of the earth by stripping
off his clothes and plunging through the ice. The shock
of the water on bare skin must have been incredible,
but the man was immensely strong and kept swimming away, away, away from the light. For murderers, sena
tors, whores and good wives, love proved to be not the lamp at the ship's bow but the ship itself, and when the
light was gone a person had no place to go but down.

Although Arkady was no expert in love he was an
expert in death, and he knew the possibility of a
relatively painless death for the diver. What killed expert
swimmers practicing underwater laps in pools was not
a strangling on water but the soft oblivion of oxygen
deprivation. At the end they no more than gently
stirred, even if in the last lit cell in their brain they were still stroking powerfully ahead,
 
 
from the depths of her throat for the edification of new
admirers. The image of herself naked on a steel table
for the doctor's examination was bad enough, but she'd
seen other bodies after a day or two in a warm car
trunk, and the recollection was enough to make her saw the rope against the tip of the bolt whether it cut her or not.

She tried to think of music that would lend a vigorous rhythm to work to, but all that came to mind was a
famous lullaby by Merceditas called "Drume Negrita"
that whispered, "Go to sleep, my little black girl. If you sleep I'll bring you a new cradle and for your new cradle I'll bring a new bell. You are my favorite, my pearl, my
beloved girl, so don't cry no more," though strangely enough the voice Ofelia heard was her mother's.

 
Ofelia prayed. There was a panoply of spirits and saints that might help her if they only knew. Sweet Yemaya,
who saved men from drowning. Meek Santa Barbara,
who changed in an instant to Change wreathed in
lightning. Ofelia's patron, though, had always been Oshun, not that Oshun had particularly helped in the
past if husbands were anything to go by. However, the
gods picked you more than you picked them, and
Oshun was the useless god of love. Ofelia saw herself
sometimes as a little dark boulder in the middle of a
river of useless love. What she needed was a sharp knife.
Unless she got out of the car trunk soon, she would asphyxiate and Bias would be tweezering hemp threads

 
Floating in the dark above his bed the halo of the ceiling
fixture put Arkady in mind of Rufo's white hat of
woven straw, made in Panama with Rufo's gilded initials
on the sweatband, which didn't mean anything to
Arkady at the time because he hadn't connected it to
AzuPanama S.A. Now he had to wonder what else he
had seen in Rufo's room and not understood. The fact that neither Luna nor Osorio had come for Rufo's key
suggested that they still hadn't tried the key Arkady had
surrendered, and it was even possible that no one had
been in the room since.

Was Luna waiting? Was Luna coming? Since the odds were even, Arkady slipped on his overcoat, his
protective shadow, emptied the envelope of meager
evidence into a pocket and went down to the street. He
walked a block until he flagged a car. Arkady didn't
remember Rufo's address, but he recalled the fading
words on the wall next door and asked for the Gimnasio
Atares.

"Te gustan los pugilistas?"
The driver punched the air.

"Absolutely," Arkady said. Whatever they were.

Fighters. Next door to Rufo's the open-air boxing arena of the Gimnasio Atares had come to life, and
Arkady got a glimpse over a line pushing through the
gate of a ring illuminated by a hanging rack of lights.
Spectators chanted, blasted whistles, rang cowbells under a layered atmosphere of smoke and orbits of
insects. It was between rounds, and in opposite corners
two black boxers shining with sweat sat on stools while
their trainers convened like great minds of science. As
the gong rang and every head craned to the center of
the ring, Arkady unlocked Rufo's door and slipped
inside.

There were some changes from his earlier visit. Bed,
table and sink were in place. Rufo's Panama still hung on its hook, the photos of the boxing team still popu
lated the wall and by the sofa was the same curious list of phone numbers for a man without a phone. The TV and VCR hadn't disappeared, nor the boxes of running
shoes and cigars, but the minibar had disappeared.

With an eye for other souvenirs from Panama,
Arkady once more went through the closet and drawers, shoes and cigar boxes. The Rogaine came from a Pana
manian pharmacy and a cardboard coaster came from
a Panama City club, but he didn't find anything
significant.

It seemed possible to Arkady that a man who memo
rialized a visit to the Eiffel Tower might have taped a
trip to Panama. He turned on the television, slid a
cassette into the player and at once turned down the
volume of hyperexcited Spanish as on the screen two
fighters pummeled each other around a ring under the
auspices of their national flags. The tape had the blotchy
color of old East German film and the jerkiness of too
few frames per second, but he could make out a young,
lithe Rufo hammering an opponent and, a moment
later, having his glove raised by a referee. The next fight
on the tape featured Mongo, and it occurred to Arkady
how boxers were basically drummers, each man trying to establish his rhythm as
the
beat: I am the drummer, you are the drum. A dozen tapes were of other inter
national tournaments, and another half-dozen were
instructional: proper ways to jump rope, work the bag,
move without falling down.

All the other tapes had glossy sleeves with porno
graphic pictures and titles in different languages. Bringing sex films to Cuba seemed to Arkady like bringing
pictures of pearls to an oyster bed. A couple of French videotapes had been shot in Havana and featured couples romping on deserted beaches—no one he recog
nized. One tape tided
Sucre Noir
had been shot on a
rainy day. It featured interracial couples sporting in a
living room decorated with cinema posters. Arkady was
interested in the decor because he realized that he had
been in the same room. Down to the stacks of photo
albums, collection of cast-bronze bells, ivory phalluses arrayed by size, he recognized the apartment of Mostovoi, the Russian embassy's photographer. On the wall between the posters were the same framed photographs
of friends in Paris, London, waving from a boat. He
paused the tape. There was one more photograph that
hadn't been up when he'd visited Mostovoi, five men
with rifles kneeling around what looked like a dead
rhinoceros, too unfocused on the tape for him to make
out faces. Big-game hunters in Africa, a Hemingway-
style memento given center stage in Mostovoi's collec
tion. Why would Mostovoi hide that?

Someone was trying to unlock the door. Arkady
turned off the VCR and listened to a key trying to force its way through the cylinder, followed by a low curse in
a voice he recognized. Luna.

Arkady could hear him thinking. The sergeant probably had the key Arkady had given to Osorio, which
worked perfectly well on Arkady's apartment in Moscow. Luna wouldn't know that; all he'd know was that
keys didn't
stop
working, and either the lock had been
changed or this was the wrong key. He'd examine his
other keys. No, this was the key the detective had given
him. Maybe he hadn't had to use it before. On Arkady's
first visit he had closed the door but not set the latch
and anyone could have simply turned the knob to open
it. Someone had, since some items were gone and the
latch had been set by the time Arkady returned,
although setting it didn't necessarily require a key, just
pushing a button on the lock plate, and this might be
the first time Luna actually had to try the key.

For his part, Arkady became aware that the Gimnasio
Atares was silent, the riot of whistles and bells over. Luna had been annoyed to see Arkady merely venture
to the
santero's.
How unhappy would he be to find
Arkady in Rufo's room?

The door jumped as a fist hit it. Arkady could feel
Luna stare at the lock. Finally, feet turned away, accom
panied by the sound of metal scraping stone. When
Arkady cracked the door open, Luna was a block away
under a streetlamp that had faded to brown. Two
fighters in sweatsuits shuffled painfully out of the arena
gate, followed by a trainer mopping his face with a
towel. As they reached his door, Arkady slipped out in
front of them, close enough to screen himself from
Luna and merge his shadow with theirs all the way to
the far corner. Focused on their own aches, the trio stumbled on. Arkady stopped and looked back.

Luna was returning. The sound of metal was an
empty cart with iron wheels that he pushed to the curb
outside Rufo's. The captain was in plain clothes and this
time, instead of relying on the niceties of a key, he
jammed his ice pick into the latch, applied his shoulder and the door swung open. The captain seemed to know
what he was after, carrying out the television, VCR and
boxes of running shoes to the cart. He rolled the load
away, the wheel's grinding reverberating on either side.
Despite the dim lights, with the cart's slow pace and
noise Luna was easy to follow.

Somehow the sergeant was able to find more empty
and desolate streets as he went, maneuvering the cart
around mounds of broken stone, the sort of scene that
made Havana appear an earthquake zone. Some warehouses had fallen in so long ago that palm trees leaned
out the windows. The two men traveled about ten
blocks before Luna stopped at the darkest intersection
yet and let the cart stand while he positioned a board
on the steps of a corner building, then muscled the cart
up the makeshift ramp and through outward-opening
double doors. Arkady heard the cart roll on stone and what sounded like the bleat of goats.

He followed up the steps. Somehow power had been
fed to the building because in the vaulted dark was the ember of a hanging bulb. Luna had moved out of sight
to a deeper interior; Arkady heard the cart progressing through a hallway.