Havana Bay (5 page)

Unlocking the door, he lit a cigarette, careful not to
drop embers on his sleeve. It was a cashmere coat Irina
had given him as a wedding present, a soft black wreath
of a coat that, she said, made him look like a poet.
With the thin Russian shoes and shabby pants that he
insisted on wearing he appeared all the more artistic. It
was a lucky coat, impervious to bullets. He had walked
through a shootout on the Arbat like an armored saint;
later, he realized that no one had fired at him precisely because in his miraculous coat he resembled neither gangster nor militia.

More than that, the coat bore the faint lingering
perfume of Irina, a secret, tactile sense of her, and when
the thought of her became unbearable this scent was a
final ally against her loss.

It was odd, Osorio asking whether he was any good. What he hadn't told her was that in
Moscow
his work
suffered from what was officially labeled "inattention." When he went to work at all. He stayed in bed for days,
the coat for a coverlet, occasionally rising to boil water
for tea. Waiting for night before going out for cigarettes.
Ignoring the visits of colleagues at the door. The cracks
in the plaster of his Moscow ceiling had a vague outline
of West Africa, and staring up he could catch the
moment when window light was sideways enough to turn bumps into plaster mountains and turn cracks into a network of rivers and tributaries. Flying a black coat
as his flag, his vessel sailed to each port of call.

Inattention was the greatest crime of all. He had seen
every sort of victim, from nearly pristine bodies in their
beds to the butchered, monstrously altered dead, and
he had to say that, in general, they would still be lightly
snoring or laughing at a well-told joke if someone had
only paid more attention to an approaching knife or
shotgun or syringe. All the love in the world could not
make up for lack of attention.

Say you were on the deck of a ferry crossing a narrow
strait, and although the distance was short, the wind and waves came up and the ship foundered. Into the
cold water you go, and the one you love most is in your
grasp. All you have to do to save her life is not let go.
And then you look and your hand is empty. Inattention.
Weakness. Well, the self-condemned lived longer nights than others for good reason. Because they were always
trying to reverse time, to return to that receding, fateful
moment and not let go. At night, when they could
concentrate.

In the dark of the room he saw the polyclinic off the
Arbat where he, the solicitous lover, had taken Irina to
treat an infection. She had stopped smoking—they both
 
magazine,
Elle
or
Vogue,
it didn't matter how old. He remembered the fatuous slap
of his shoes as he crossed the room and, outside, the
flyers of private vendors stapled to the trees—"For
Sale
!
Best Medicines!"—which could have explained why
drugs were in short supply in the clinic.
Cottonwood
seeds lifted into the evening's summer light. Poised
smugly on the clinic steps, what had he been thinking?
That they had finally achieved a normal life, a blessed
bubble above the general mayhem? Meanwhile the
nurse led Irina to the examining room. (Since then he
had become more tolerant of killers. The carefully
planned ambush, colorful wiring, the car packed with Semtex, the trouble they went to. At least they killed deliberately.) Her doctor explained that the clinic was
short of Bactrim, the usual treatment. Was she allergic
to ampicillin, penicillin? Yes, Irina always made sure the
fact was underlined on her chart. At which point, the
doctor's pocket beeped, and he stepped into the hall to
talk on his cellular phone with his broker about a
Romanian fund that promised a three-for-one return.
The nurse in the examining room had heard only
minutes before that her apartment had been sold by the
city to a Swiss corporation for offices. Who was there to
complain to? She had caught the word "ampicillin."
Since the clinic was out of oral doses, she gave Irina an
intravenous injection and left the room. Executions
should be as speedy and thorough.

Having bought the magazine, Arkady followed the
gauzy stream of seeds drifting back to the clinic, by
which time Irina was dead. The nurses tried to keep
him from the examining room, a mistake. The doctors
tried to bar his way to the sheet covering the table
and that was a mistake, too, ending in gurneys being upended, trays scattered, the medical staffs white caps
crushed underfoot, finally a call to the militia to remove
the madman.

Which was sheer melodrama. Irina herself hated melodrama, the demonic excess of a
Russia
where the
Mafia donned evening clothes with Kevlar vests, where
brides wed in see-through lace, where the foremost
appeal of public office was immunity to prosecution.
Irina loathed it, and she must have been embarrassed to
die surrounded by Russian melodrama.

There were five hours until his plane left. Arkady
thought the problem with airlines was that they didn't
allow passengers to carry handguns. Otherwise he could
have brought his and shot himself with a tropical view
of dark rooflines rigged with laundry as full as sails and whole new constellations.

What was the final image Irina had in the clinic? The
eyes of the nurse widening as she understood the depth
of her mistake? Not too deep, only intravenous, but
deep enough. They both must have understood. Within
seconds, Irina's arm would have displayed a raised,
roseate circle and her eyes begun to itch. Arkady was
allowed to read their statements later, a professional
courtesy.
Irina Asanova Renkova opened the door to the
hall, interrupted the doctor's conversation and held up the
empty vial.
Already her breath came as a wheeze. While
the doctor
called for the emergency cart,
Irina shook and
sweat, her heart accelerating to changing rhythms like a kite buffeted by gusts of wind. By the time the cart was
located and rolled in, she was in
deep anaphylactic shock,
her windpipe shut and her heart racing, stopping, rac
ing. However, the
Adrenalin supposed to be on the cart,
the shot that could have reset her heart like a clock and
eased the constriction of her throat, was misplaced,
missing, an innocent error. In a panic, the doctor tried
to open the pharmacy cabinet and
snapped off the key in
the lock.
Which was the same as a coup de grace.

When Arkady ripped the sheet off the table at the
polyclinic, he was amazed to see all they had done to
Irina in the time it had taken him to walk to a kiosk
and buy a magazine. Her face lay twisted in the disarray of hair that seemed suddenly so much darker she looked
drowned, as if immersed in water for a day. Tangled
and unbuttoned to the waist, her dress revealed her
chest bruised by pounding. Her own hands were fists of
agony, and she was still warm. He closed her eyes,
smoothed her hair from her brow and buttoned her
dress in spite of the doctor's insistence that he "not
disturb the corpus." As an answer, he picked up the
doctor and used him to crack a plate glass sold as
bulletproof. The impact exploded cabinets, spewed
instruments, spilled alcohol that turned the air silvery
and aromatic. When the staff was routed and he had
command of the examining room he made a pillow of
his coat for her head.

He'd never considered himself melancholy, not on a
Russian scale. It wasn't as if there was suicide in his
family—with the exception of his mother, but she'd
always been more dramatic and direct. Well, there was his father, too, but his father had always been a killer.
Arkady resisted the idea not out of morality but man
ners, not wanting to make a mess. And there was the
practical question of how. Hanging was unreliable and
he didn't want to leave such a sight for anyone to
discover. Shooting announced itself with such a boastful
bang. The problem was that experts in suicide could
teach only by example, and he had seen enough bungled
attempts to know how often there was a slip twixt the
cup and the lip. Best was simply to vanish. Being in
Havana
made him feel already half disappeared.

He used to be a better person. He used to care about
people. He had always regarded suicides as selfish,
leaving their bodies to frighten other people, their mess
for other people to clean up. He could always start over, devote himself to a worthy cause, allow himself to heal.
The trouble was that he didn't want the memory to
fade. While he still remembered her, her breath in her
sleep, the warmth of her back, the way she would turn
to him in the morning, while he was still insane enough
to think he would wake up beside her, or hear her in
the next room or see her on the street, now was the time. If it inconvenienced other people, well, he
apologized.

From his jacket he took the sterile syringe he had
stolen in the embalming room. He'd stolen it on
impulse, with no conscious plan, or as if some other
part of his brain was seizing opportunities and setting
an agenda that he was only learning about as it went.
Everyone was well aware that
Cuba
was hard-pressed
for medical supplies and here he was stealing. He broke
the bag and laid the contents—a 50-cc embalming
syringe and needle—on the table. The needle itself was
a 10-cm shaft. He screwed it into the syringe and drew the plunger to fill the chamber with air. His chair had
uneven legs, and he had to sit just so in order not to
wobble. He pushed the coat and shirt sleeves up his left forearm and slapped the inside of the elbow to raise the
vein. It would take about a minute after air was intro
duced into the bloodstream for the heart to stop. Only
a minute, not the five minutes Irina was condemned to live out. There had to be enough air, no mere chain of
bubbles but a goodly worm of air because the heart
would churn and churn before it gave up. The shutters rattled and swung in. A perfectionist, he rose to push
them back, resumed his place at the table. He rubbed
the coat a last time on his cheek, the cashmere soft as
cat's fur, then pushed the sleeve out of the way, stung
his arm again and, as the green cord snapped to attention, eased in the needle deep. Blood budded in the
chamber.

Over the pounding steps of his heart he heard some
one knocking on the door.

"Renko!" Rufo called.

The plunger had yet to be pushed in, and what
Arkady did not want was to make someone hear him
drop. What he'd die of was like a deep-sea diver's
 
bends, and convulsions made considerable noise. Like a
diver hiding under the surface, he waited for the visitor
to go away. When the knocks only became more insist
ent he shouted, "Go away."

"Open the door, please."

"Go away."

"Let me in. Please, it's important."

Arkady drew out the needle, tied a handkerchief
around his arm, let his sleeve fall and dropped the
syringe into the pocket of his overcoat before he went
to the door and opened it a crack.

"You're early."

"Remember, we talked about cigars." Rufo managed
to squeeze his way in, a foot, a leg, an arm at a time.
He had changed into a one-piece jogging outfit and
carried a box of pale wood sealed with an imposing
design of interlocking swords.» Montecristos. Handmade from the finest tobacco leaf in the world. You
know, for a cigar smoker this is like the Holy Grail."

"I don't smoke cigars."

"Then sell them. In
Miami
you could sell this box
for one thousand dollars. In
Moscow
, maybe more. For
you, one hundred dollars."