Havana Bay

MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

HAVANA BAY

HAVANA

Chapter One

A police boat directed a light toward tar-covered pilings and water, turning a black scene white. Havana was invisible across the bay, except for a single line of lamps along the seawall. Stars rode high, anchor lights rode low, otherwise the harbor was a still pool in the night.

Soda cans, crab pots, fishing floats, mattresses, Styrofoam bearded with algae shifted as an investigation team of the Policнa de la Revoluciуn took flash shots. Arkady waited in a cashmere overcoat with a Captain Arcos, a barrel-chested little man who looked ironed into military fatigues, and his Sergeant Luna, large, black and angular. Detective Osorio was a small brown woman in PNR blue; she gave Arkady a studied glare.

A Cuban named Rufo was the interpreter from the Russian embassy.

"It's very simple," he translated the captain's words. “You see the body, identify the body and then go home."

"Sounds simple."

Arkady tried to be agreeable, although Arcos walked off as if any contact with Russians was contamination.

Osorio combined the sharp features of an ingenue with the grave expression of a hangman. She spoke and Rufo explained, "The detective says this is the Cuban method, not the Russian method or the German method. The Cuban method. You will see.»

Arkady had seen little so far. He had just arrived at the airport in the dark when he was whisked away by Rufo. They were headed by taxi to the city when Rufo received a call on a cellular phone that diverted them to the bay. Already Arkady had a sense that he was unwelcome and unpopular.

Rufo wore a loose Hawaiian shirt and a faint resemblance to the older, softer Muhammad Ali.» The detective says she hopes you don't mind learning the Cuban method.»

"I'm looking forward to it."

Arkady was nothing if not a good guest.

"Could you ask her when the body was discovered?"

"Two hours ago by the boat."

"The embassy sent me a message yesterday that Pribluda was in trouble. Why did they say that before you found a body?"

"She says ask the embassy. She was certainly not expecting an investigator.»

Professional honor seemed to be at stake and Arkady felt badly outclassed on that score. Like Columbus on deck, Captain Arcos scanned the dark impatiently, Luna his hulking shadow. Osorio had sawhorses erected and stretched a tape that read NO PASEO. When a motorcycle policeman in a white helmet and spurs on his boots arrived, she chased him with a shout that could have scored steel. Somehow men in T-shirts appeared along the tape as soon as it was unrolled-what was it about violent death that was better than dreams? Arkady wondered. Most of the onlookers were black; Havana was far more African than Arkady had expected, although the logos on their shirts were American.

Someone along the tape carried a radio that sang, "La fiesta no es para los feos. Quй feo es, senor. Super feo, amigo miу. No puedes pasar aqui, amigo. La fiesta no es para los feos.»

"What does that mean?" Arkady asked Rufo.

"The song? It says, 'This party is not for ugly people. Sorry, my friend, you can't come. '"

Yet here I am, Arkady thought.

A vapor trail far overhead showed silver, and ships at anchor started to appear where only lights had hung moments before. Across the bay the seawall and mansions of Havana rose from the water, docks spread and, along the inner bay, loading cranes got to their feet.

"The captain is sensitive, " Rufo said, "but whoever was right or wrong about the message, you're here, the body's here.»

"So it couldn't have worked out better?"

"In a manner of speaking.»

Osorio ordered the boat to back off so that its wash wouldn't stir the body. A combination of the boat's light and the freshening sky made her face glow.

Rufo said, "Cubans don't like Russians. It's not you, it's just not a good place for a Russian.»

"Where is a good place?"

Rufo shrugged.

This side of the harbor, now that Arkady could see it, was like a village. A hillside of banana palms overhung abandoned houses that fronted what was more a cement curb than a seawall that stretched from a coal dock to a ferry landing. A wooden walkway balanced on a black piling captured whatever floated in. The day was going to be warm. He could tell by the smell.

"Vaya a cambiar su cam, amigo. Feo, feo, feo como horror, senor."

In Moscow, in January, the sun would have crept like a dim lamp behind rice paper. Here it was a rushing torch that turned air and bay into mirrors, first of nickel and then to vibrant, undulating pink. Many things were suddenly apparent. A picturesque ferry that moved toward the landing. Little fishing boats moored almost within reach. Arkady noticed that more than palms grew in the village behind him; the sun found coconuts, hibiscus, red and yellow trees. Water around the pilings began to show the peacock sheen of petroleum.

Detective Osorio's order for the video camera to roll was a signal for onlookers to press against the tape. The ferry landing filled with commuters, every face turned toward the pilings, where in the quickening light floated a body as black and bloated as the inner tube it rested in. Shirt and shorts were split by the body's expansion. Hands and feet trailed in the water; a swim fin dangled casually on one foot. The head was eyeless and inflated like a black balloon.

"A neumdtico" Rufo told Arkady. A neumdtico is a fisherman who fishes from an inner tube. Actually from a fishing net spread over the tube. Like a hammock. It's very ingenious, very Cuban.»

"The inner tube is his boat?"

"Better than a boat. A boat needs gasoline.»

Arkady pondered that proposition.

"Much better.»

A diver in a wet suit slid off the police boat while an officer in waders dropped over the seawall. They clambered as much as waded across crab pots and mattress springs, mindful of hidden nails and septic water, and cornered the inner tube so that it wouldn't float away. A net was thrown down from the seawall to stretch under the inner tube and lift it and the body up together. So far, Arkady wouldn't have done anything differently. Sometimes events were just a matter of luck.

The diver stepped into a hole and went under. Gasping, he came up out of the water, grabbed onto first the inner tube and then a foot hanging from it. The foot came off. The inner tube pressed against the spear of a mattress spring, popped and started to deflate. As the foot turned to jelly, Detective Osorio shouted for the officer to toss it to shore: a classic confrontation between authority and vulgar death, Arkady thought. All along the tape, onlookers clapped and laughed.

Rufo said, "See, usually, our level of competence is fairly high, but Russians have this effect. The captain will never forgive you.»

The camera went on taping the debacle while another detective jumped into the water. Arkady hoped the lens captured the way the rising sun poured into the windows of the ferry. The inner tube was sinking. An arm disengaged. Shouts flew back and forth between Osorio and the police boat. The more desperately the men in the water tried to save the situation the worse it became. Captain Arcos contributed orders to lift the body. As the diver steadied the head, the pressure of his hands liquefied its face and made it slide like a grape skin off the skull, which itself separated cleanly from the neck; it was like trying to lift a man who was perversely disrobing part by part, unembarrassed by the stench of advanced decomposition. A pelican sailed overhead, red as a flamingo.

"I think identification is going to be a little more complicated than the captain imagined, " Arkady said.

The diver caught the jaw as it dropped off from the skull and juggled each, while the detectives pushed the other black, swollen limbs pell-mell into the shriveling inner tube.

"Feo, tan feo. No puedes pasar aqui, amigo. Porque la fiesta no es para los feos."

The rhythm was... what was the word? Arkady wondered. Unrelenting.

Across the bay a golden dome seemed to burst into flame, and the houses of the Malecon started to express their unlikely colors of lemon, rose, royal purple, aquamarine.

It really was a lovely city, he thought. Light from the high windows of the autopsy theater of the Institute de Medicina Legal fell on three stainless-steel tables. On the right-hand table lay the neumdtico's torso and loose parts arranged like an ancient statue dredged in pieces from the sea. Along the walls were enamel cabinets, scales, X-ray panel, sink, specimen shelves, freezer, refrigerator, pails. Above, at the observation level, Rufo and Arkady had a semicircle of seats to themselves. Arkady hadn't noticed before how scarred Rufo's brows were.

"Captain Luna would rather you watched from here. The examiner is Dr. Bias."

Rufo waited expectantly until Arkady realized he was supposed to react.

"The Dr. Bias?"

"The very one."

Bias had a dapper Spanish beard and wore rubber gloves, goggles, green scrubs. Only when he appeared satisfied that he had a reasonably complete body did he measure it and search it meticulously for marks and tattoos, a painstaking task when skin tended to slide wherever touched. An autopsy could take two hours, as much as four. At the left-hand table Detective Osorio and a pair of technicians sorted through the deflated inner tube and fishnet; the body had been left tangled in them for fear of disturbing it any more. Captain Arcos stood to one side, Luna a step behind. It occurred to Arkady that Luna's head was as round and blunt as a black fist with red-rimmed eyes. Already Osorio had found a wet roll of American dollar bills and a ring of keys kept in a leaky plastic bag. Fingerprints wouldn't have survived the bag, and she immediately dispatched the keys with an officer. There was something appeal-ingly energetic and fastidious about Osorio. She hung wet shirt, shorts and underwear on hangers on a rack.

While Bias worked he commented to a microphone clipped to the lapel of his coat.

"Maybe two weeks in the water," Rufo translated. He added, "It's been hot and raining, very humid. Even for here."

"You've seen autopsies before?" Arkady asked.

"No, but I've always been curious. And, of course, I'd heard of Dr. Bias."

Performing an autopsy on a body in an advanced stage of putrefaction was as delicate as dissecting a soft-boiled egg. Sex was obvious but not age, not race, not size when the chest and stomach cavities were distended, not weight when the body sagged with water inside, not fingerprints when hands that had trailed in the water for a week ended in digits nibbled to the bone. Then there was the gaseous pressure of chemical change. When Bias punctured the abdomen a flatulent spray shot loudly up, and when he made the Y incision across the chest and then to groin, a wave of black water and liquefied matter overflowed the table. Using a pail, a technician deftly caught the viscera as they floated out. An expanding pong of rot-as if a shovel had been plunged into swamp gas-took possession of the room, invading everyone's nose and mouth. Arkady was glad he had left his precious coat in the car. After the first trauma of the stench-five minutes, no more-the olfactory nerves were traumatized and numb, but he was already digging deep into his cigarettes.

Rufo said, "That smells disgusting."

"Russian tobacco." Arkady filled his lungs with smoke.» Want one?"

"No, thanks. I boxed in Russia when I was on the national team. I hated Moscow. The food, the bread and, most of all, the cigarettes."

"You don't like Russians, either?"

"I love Russians. Some of my best friends are Russian." Rufo leaned for a better view as Bias spread the chest for the camera.» The doctor is very good. At the rate they're going you'll have time to make your plane. You won't even have to spend the night."

"Won't the embassy make a fuss about this?"

"The Russians here? No."

Bias slapped the pulpy mass of the heart in a separate tray.

"You don't think they're too indelicate, I hope," Rufo said.

"Oh, no." To be fair, as Arkady remembered, Pribluda used to root through bodies with the enthusiasm of a boar after nuts.» Imagine the poor bastard's surprise," Pribluda would have said.» Floating around, looking up at the stars, and then bang, he's dead."

Arkady lit one cigarette from another and drew the smoke in sharply enough to make his eyes tear. It occurred to him that he was at a point now where he knew more people dead than alive, the wrong side of a certain line.

"I picked up a lot of languages touring with the team," Rufo said.» After boxing, I used to guide groups of singers, musicians, dancers, intellectuals for the embassy. I miss those days."

Detective Osorio methodically laid out supplies that the dead man had taken to sea: thermos, wicker box, and plastic bags of candles, rolls of tape, twine, hooks and extra line.

Usually, an examiner cut at the hairline and peeled the forehead over the face to reach the skull. Since in this case both the forehead and the face had already slipped off and bade adieu in the bay, Bias proceeded directly with a rotary saw to uncover the brain, which proved rotten with worms that reminded Arkady of the macaroni served by Aeroflot. As the nausea rose he had Rufo lead him to a tiny, chain-flush lavatory, where he threw up, so perhaps he wasn't so inured after all, he thought. Maybe he had just reached his limit. Rufo was gone, and walking back to the autopsy theater on his own, Arkady went by a room perfumed by carboys of formaldehyde and decorated with anatomical charts. On a table two feet with yellow toenails stuck out from a sheet. Between the legs lay an oversized syringe connected by a tube to a tub of embalming fluid on the floor, a technique used in the smallest, most primitive Russian villages when electric pumps failed. The needle of the syringe was particularly long and narrow to fit into an artery, which was thinner than a vein. Between the feet were rubber gloves and another syringe in an unopened plastic bag. Arkady slipped the bag into his jacket pocket.

When Arkady returned to his seat, Rufo was waiting with a recuperative Cuban cigarette. By that time, the brain had been weighed and set aside while Dr. Bias fitted head and jaw together.

Although Rufo's lighter was the plastic disposable sort, he said it had been refilled twenty times.» The Cuban record is over a hundred."

Arkady bit the cigarette, inhaled.» What kind is this?"

" 'Popular.' Black tobacco. You like it?"

"It's perfect." Arkady let out a plume of smoke as blue as the exhaust of a car in distress.

Rufo's hand kneaded Arkady's shoulder.» Relax. You're down to bones, my friend."

The officer who had taken the keys from Osorio returned. At the other table, after Bias had measured the skull vertically and across the brow, he spread a handkerchief and diligently scrubbed the teeth with a toothbrush. Arkady handed Rufo a dental chart he had brought from Moscow (an investigator's precaution), and the driver trotted the envelope down to Bias, who systematically matched the skull's brightened grin to the chart's numbered circles. When he was done he conferred with Captain Arcos, who grunted with satisfaction and summoned Arkady down to the theater floor.

Rufo interpreted.» The Russian citizen Sergei Segeevich Pribluda arrived in Havana eleven months ago as an attache to the Russian embassy. We knew, of course, that he was a colonel in the KGB. Excuse me, the new Federal Security Service, the SVR."

"Same thing," Arkady said.

The captain-and in his wake, Rufo-went on.» A week ago the embassy informed us that Pribluda was missing. We did not expect them to invite a senior investigator from the Moscow prosecutor's office. Perhaps a family member, nothing more."

Arkady had talked to Pribluda's son, who had refused to come to Havana. He managed a pizzeria, a major responsibility.

Rufo went on.» Fortunately, the captain says, the identification performed today before your eyes is simple and conclusive. The captain says that a key found in the effects was taken to the apartment of the missing man where it unlocked the door. From an examination of the body recovered from the bay, Dr. Bias estimates that it is a Caucasoid male approximately fifty to sixty years of age, one hundred sixty-five centimeters in height, ninety kilos in weight, in every regard the same as the missing man. Moreover, the dental chart of the Russian citizen Pribluda you yourself brought shows one lower molar filled. That molar in the recovered jaw is a steel tooth which, in the opinion of Dr. Bias, according to the captain, is typical Russian dental work. Do you agree?"

"From what I saw, yes."

"Dr. Bias says he finds no wounds or broken bones, no signs of violence or foul play. Your friend died of natural causes, perhaps a stroke or aneurysm or heart attack, it would be almost impossible to determine which for a body in this condition. The doctor hopes he did not suffer long."

"That's kind of him." Although the doctor appeared more smug than sympathetic.

"The captain, for his part, asks if you accept the observations of this autopsy?"

"I'd like to think about it."

"Well, you accept the conclusion that the body recovered is that of the Russian citizen Pribluda?"

Arkady turned to the examining table. What had been a bloated cadaver was now split and gutted. Of course, there had been no face or eyes to identify anyway, and finger bones never did yield prints, but someone had lived in that ruined body.

"I think an inner tube in the bay is a strange place to find a Russian citizen."

"The captain says they all think that."

"Then there will be an investigation?"

Rufo said, "It depends."

"On what?"

"On many factors."

"Such as?"

"The captain says your friend was a spy. What he was doing when he died was not innocent. The captain can predict your embassy will ask us to do nothing. We are the ones who could make an international incident of this, but frankly it is not worth the effort. We will investigate in our own time, in our own way, although in this Special Period the Cuban people cannot afford to waste resources on people who have revealed themselves to be our enemy. Now do you understand what I mean?" Rufo paused while Arcos took a second to compose himself.» The captain says an investigation depends on many factors. The position of our friends at the Russian embassy must be taken into account before premature steps are taken. The only issue we have here is an identification of a foreign national who has died on Cuban territory. Do you accept it is the Russian citizen Sergei Pribluda?"

"It could be," Arkady said.

Dr. Bias sighed, Luna took a deep breath and Detective Osorio weighed the keys in her palm. Arkady couldn't help feeling like a difficult actor.» It probably is, but I can't say conclusively that this body is Pribluda. There's no face, no prints and I doubt very much that you will be able to type the blood. All you have is a dental chart and one steel tooth. He could be another Russian. Or one of thousands of Cubans who went to Russia. Or a Cuban who had a tooth pulled by a Cuban dentist who trained in Russia. Probably you're right, but that's not enough. You opened Pribluda's door with a key. Did you look inside?"

Dr. Bias asked in precisely snipped Russian, "Did you bring any other identification from Moscow?"

"Just this. Pribluda sent it a month ago." Arkady dug out of his passport case a snapshot of three men standing on a beach and squinting at the camera. One man was so black he could have been carved from jet. He held up a glistening rainbow of a fish for the admiration of two whites, a shorter man with a compensating tower of steel-wool hair and, partially obscured by the others, Pribluda. Behind them was water, a tip of beach, palms.

Bias studied the photograph and read the scribble on the back.» Havana Yacht Club."

"There is such a yacht club?" Arkady asked.

"There was such a club before the Revolution," Bias said.» I think your friend was making a joke."

Rufo said, "Cubans love grandiose titles. A 'drinking society' can be friends in a bar."

"The others don't look Russian to me. You can make copies of the picture and circulate them."

The picture went around to Arcos, who put it back into Arkady's hands as if it were toxic. Rufo said, "The captain says your friend was a spy, that spies come to bad ends, as they deserve. This is typically Russian, pretending to help and then stabbing Cuba in the back. The Russian embassy sends out its spy and, when he's missing, asks us to find him. When we find him, you refuse to identify him. Instead of cooperating, you demand an investigation, as if you were still the master and Cuba was the puppet. Since that is no longer the case, you can take your picture back to Moscow. The whole world knows of the Russian betrayal of the Cuban people and, well, he says some more in that vein."

Arkady gathered as much. The captain looked ready to spit.

Rufo gave Arkady a push.» I think it's time to go."

Detective Osorio, who had been quietly following the conversation, suddenly revealed fluent Russian.» Was there a letter with the picture?"

"Only a postcard saying hello," Arkady said.» I threw it away."

"Idiota" Osorio said, which nobody bothered to translate.

"It's lucky you're going home, you don't have many friends here," Rufo said.» The embassy said to put you in an apartment until the plane."

They drove by three-story stone town houses transformed by the Revolution into a far more colorful backdrop of ruin and decay, marble colonnades refaced with whatever color was available-green, ultramarine, chartreuse. Not just ordinary green, either, but a vibrant spectrum: sea, lime, palm and verdigris. Houses were as blue as powdered turquoise, pools of water, peeling sky, the upper levels enlivened by balconies of ornate ironwork embellished by canary cages, florid roosters, hanging bicycles. Even dowdy Russian cars wore a wide variety of paint, and if their clothes were drab most of the people had the slow grace and color of big cats. They paused at tables offering guava paste, pastries, tubers and fruits. One girl shaving ices was streaked red and green with syrup, another girl sold sweetmeats from a cheesecloth tent. A locksmith rode a bicycle that powered a key grinder; he wore goggles for the sparks and shavings flying around him as he pedaled in place. The music of a radio hanging in the crook of a pushcart's umbrella floated in the air.

"Is this the way to the airport?" Arkady asked.

"The flight is tomorrow. Usually there's only one Aeroflot flight a week during the winter, so they don't want you to miss it." Rufo rolled the window down.» Phew, I smell worse than fish."

"Autopsies stay with you." Arkady had left his overcoat outside the operating theater and separated the coat now from the paper bag holding Pribluda's effects.» If Dr. Bias and Detective Osorio speak Russian, why were you along?"

"There was a time when it was forbidden to speak English. Now Russian is taboo. Anyway, the embassy wanted someone along when you were with the police, but someone not Russian. You know, I never knew anyone so unpopular so fast as you."

"That's a sort of distinction."

"But now you're here you should enjoy yourself. Would you like to see the city, go to a cafe, to the Havana Libre? It used to be the Hilton. They have a rooftop restaurant with a fantastic view. And they serve lobster. Only state restaurants are allowed to serve lobster, which are assets of the state."

"No, thanks." The idea of cracking open a lobster after an autopsy didn't sit quite right.

"Or a paladar, a private restaurant. They're small, they're only allowed twelve chairs but the food is much superior. No?"

Perhaps Rufo didn't get a chance to dine out often, but Arkady didn't think he could even watch someone eat.

"No. The captain and sergeant were in green uniforms, the detective in gray and blue. Why was that?"

"She's police and they're from the Ministry of the Interior. We just call it Minint. Police are under Minint."

Arkady nodded; in Russia the militia was under the same ministry.» But Arcos and Luna don't usually go out on homicides?"

"I don't think so."

"Why was the captain going on about the Russian embassy?"

"He has a point. In the old days Russians acted like lords. Even now, for Cuban police to ask questions at the embassy takes a diplomatic note. Sometimes the embassy cooperates and sometimes it doesn't."

Most of the traffic was Russian Ladas and Moskviches spraying exhaust and then, waddling as ponderously as dinosaurs, American cars from before the Revolution. Rufo and Arkady got out at a two-story house decorated like a blue Egyptian tomb with scarabs, ankhs and lotuses carved in stucco. A car on blocks sat in residence on the porch.

"'57 Chevrolet." Rufo looked inside at the car's gutted interior, straightened and ran his hand over the flecked paint. From the back.» Tail fins." To the front bumper.» And tits."

From the car key in the bag of effects Arkady knew that Pribluda had a Lada. No breasts on a Russian car.

As they went in and climbed the stairs the door to the ground-floor apartment cracked open enough for a woman in a housedress to follow their progress.

"A concierge?" Arkady asked.

"A snoop. Don't worry, at night she watches television and doesn't hear a thing."

"I'm going back tonight."

"That's right." Rufo unlocked the upstairs door.» This is a protocol apartment the embassy uses for visiting dignitaries. Well, lesser dignitaries. I don't think we've had anyone here for a year."

"Is someone from the embassy coming to talk about Pribluda?"

"The only one who wants to talk about Pribluda is you. You like cigars?"

"I've never smoked a cigar."

"We'll talk about it later. I'll be back at midnight to take you to the plane. If you think the flight to Havana was long, wait till you go back to Moscow."

The apartment was furnished with a set of cream-and-gold dining chairs, a sideboard with a coffee service, a nubby sofa, red phone, a bookshelf with titles like La Amistad Russo-Cubana and Fidel y Arte supported by erotic bookends in mahogany. In a disconnected refrigerator a loaf of Bimbo Bread was spotted with mold. The air conditioner was dead and showed the carbon smudges of an electrical fire. Arkady thought he probably showed some carbon smudges of his own.

He stripped from his clothes and showered in a stall of tiles that poured water from every valve and washed the odor of the autopsy off his skin and from his hair. He dried himself on the scrap of towel provided and stretched out on the bed under his overcoat in the dark of the bedroom and listened to the voices and music that filtered from outside through the closed shutters of the window. He dreamed of floating among the playing fish of Havana Bay. He dreamed of flying back to Moscow and not landing, just circling in the night.

Russian planes did that, sometimes, if they were so old that their instruments failed. Although there could be other factors. If a pilot made a second landing approach he could be charged for the extra fuel expended, so he made only one, good or not. Or they were overloaded or underfueled.

He was both.

Circling sounded good.

Chapter Two

Osorio negotiated a white PNR Lada down a potholed street. Like her driving, she talked in a quick, surefooted way, deleting any s in the Russian language that she found superfluous. Since Arkady's Spanish consisted of gracias and par favor, he wasn't inclined to be critical even if she had appeared without warning in the early evening and gathered him in a rush.

She said, "You wanted to see your friend's apartment and so we will."

"That's all I asked."

"No, you asked much more. I think you are refusing to make an identification of your friend because you think you can force us to investigate."

"I assume you want to be sure you're sending the right body to Moscow."

"You think it's impossible for him to be out on the water the way we found him? Like a Cuban?"

"It does strike me as unusual."

"What I find unusual is that when a message comes to you from an embassy in Havana you drop everything to come. That's unusual. That must have been expensive."

The round-trip took half his savings. On the other hand, what was he saving for? Anyway, everything in Havana struck him as unusual, including the detective, although there was something about her small size and imperiousness he found endearing. Her features were delicate and sharply cut, dark eyes made darker with suspicion as if she were an apprentice devil handed a tricky soul. He also liked her sporty PNR cap with plastic visor.

"Tell me about this friend of yours," she demanded.

"You're interested?" He got no response to that. Oh well, he was fishing.» Sergei Sergeevich Pribluda. Workers' family from Sverdlovsk. Joined the Committee for State Security out of the army. Higher education at Frunze Party School. Stationed eight years at Vladimir, eighteen in Moscow, rising to colonel. Hero Worker, honored for bravery. Wife, dead ten years; one son, a manager in an American fast-food franchise in Moscow. I was unaware of Pribluda's ever being stationed abroad before or studying Spanish. Politically reactionary, a Party member. Interests, Central Army ice-hockey team. Health, vigorous. Hobby, gardening."

"Not drinking?"

"He made flavored vodka, that's part of gardening."

"Not culture, the arts?"

"Pribluda? Hardly."

"You worked together?"

"In a way. He tried to kill me. It was a complicated friendship." Arkady gave her the short version.» There was a murder in Moscow involving politics. As it happened, there was a woman who was a dissident that he suspected. Since I thought she was innocent, I became a suspect and Pribluda was given the job of delivering, as we say, a nine-gram letter in the back of my head. But we had spent time together by then, long enough for me to discover there was something strangely honest about him and for him to decide there was, as you say, something of the idiota about me. And when he was given the order to shoot me, he didn't. I don't know whether you could call it a friendship, but our relationship was built on that."

"He disobeyed an order? There's never an excuse for that."

"God knows. He liked to grow his own vegetables. When his wife died, I would go round to his place and drink his vodka and eat his cucumbers and he would remind me that not every guest got to dine with his executioner. Red tomato pickle, green tomato pickle, peppers and dark bread to eat. Lemongrass and buffalo grass to flavor the vodka."

"You said he was a Communist."

"A good Communist. He would have joined the Party coup if it hadn't been led, as he said, by imbeciles. Instead, he drank until it all blew over and then went into a decline. He said we weren't real Russians anymore, only eunuchs, that the last Russian, the last true Communist anywhere was Castro." Which Arkady had taken as drunken ranting at the time, a detail he decided not to share with Osorio.» He said he was looking for a post outside Moscow. I never knew he meant here."

"When was the last time you saw the colonel?"

"More than a year ago."

"But you were friends."

"My wife didn't like him."

"Why not?"

"An old score. Why would the captain turn down the picture of Pribluda and his friends?" Arkady asked.

"He must have his reasons," Osorio said in a tone that suggested she didn't fathom them either.

Jasmine lay like snow over walls, Dumpsters overflowed with the sweet stench of fruit skins.

Binding the ocean was what Osorio called the Malecon, a seawall that protected a six-lane boulevard and an oceanfront line of three-story buildings. The sea was black, and traffic on the boulevard consisted of the running lights of cars a block apart. The buildings were the gaudy group Arkady had seen at daybreak from the other side of the bay; without their colors, dimly lit by lamps, they were occupied wrecks. In the shadow of a long arcade Osorio unlocked a street door and led him up worn stone stairs to a steel door which let them into a living room that could have been delivered complete from Moscow: subdued lamps, stereo, chess set, upholstery on the front door, lace curtains on the balcony doors. Homey Soviet hammer and sickle in silk tacked to a wall. A table and tray of water glasses, dish of salt. Whittled nostalgia-roosters, bears, St. Basil's-on the shelves. Plastic ivy and carnations trimming a kitchenette with a two-burner range, refrigerator, butane tanks.

Bottles of Havana Club rum and Stolichnaya stood under the sink.

The only element out of place was a black man in a white shirt with a red bandanna around his head and Reebok basketball shoes on his feet sitting in a corner chair and holding a long, straight walking stick. It took a moment without breathing for Arkady to realize that the figure was a man-sized effigy. The face had a crudely molded brow and nose, mouth and ears, making its glass eyes glitter all the more.

"What is that?"

"Change."

"Change?"

"A Santeria spirit."

"Right. And why would Pribluda have it?"

"I don't know. That's not what we came for," Osorio said. What they had come for, apparently, was to see how thoroughly she had dusted the apartment for fingerprints, every door, jamb, knob and pull. Some prints had been lifted, leaving the transfer tracks of tape. But many more prints were visible as brown whorls expertly brushed.

"You did all this?" he asked Osorio.

"Yes."

"Brown powder?" He hadn't seen that before.

"Cuban fingerprint powder. In this Special Period, imported powders are too expensive. We make powder from burned palm fronds."

She hadn't missed any opportunity. Under the lamp was a small turtle, armored and obtuse in a bowl of sand. A perfect pet for a spy, Arkady thought. The shell was branded with a brown fingerprint.

She said, "Pribluda could have had a protocol house, but he rented here illegally from the Cuban who lives below."

"Why do you think he did that?"

For an answer she opened the balcony doors, their curtains lifting like wings with the breeze that rushed in. Arkady stepped out between two aluminum chairs and the balcony's marble rail and looked out on the vault of the night sky and the Malecon, displayed as an elegant curve of boulevard lights. Beyond the seawall was the flash of a lighthouse and deck lights of a freighter and pilot boat entering the bay. As his eyes adjusted he made out the fainter gunwale lamps of fishing boats and, nearer in, a widespread candle glimmer.

"Neumdticos" Osorio said.

Arkady imagined them, a flotilla of inner tubes riding black swells.

"Why wasn't there a police seal on the front door?" he asked.

"Because we are not investigating."

"So, what are we doing here, then?"

"Putting your mind to rest."

She motioned Arkady inside through the parlor and to a corridor, past a laundry room and into an office that held an ancient wooden desk, computer, printer and bookshelves crammed with binders from the Cuban Ministry of Sugar and photo albums. Under the printer, two briefcases, one of brown leather, the other of extraordinarily ugly green plastic. The walls were covered with maps of Cuba and Havana. Cuba was a big island, Arkady realized, twelve hundred kilometers long, marked with X's on the map. Arkady opened an album to pictures of what looked like green bamboo.

"Sugarcane fields," Osorio said.» Pribluda would have visited them because we foolishly depended on Russia for harvesters."

"I see." Arkady put the album down and moved on to the map of Havana.» Where are we?"

"Here." She pointed to where the Malecon swept east toward the Castillo de San Salvador, where the seawall ended and Havana Vieja and the bay began. West lay neighborhoods called Vedado and Miramar, where Pribluda had scribbled "Russian embassy." "Why do you ask?"

"I like to know where I am."

"You are leaving tonight. It doesn't matter if you know where you are."

"True." He looked to see that the power button of the computer was dusted and prints lifted. Nice.» You're finished here?"

"Yes."

He turned the machine and monitor on and the screen pulsed with an electric, expectant blue. Arkady did not consider himself computer-adept, but in Moscow murderers moved with the times and it had become a requirement of investigators to be able to open the electronic files of suspects and victims. Russians loved E-mail, Windows, spreadsheets; paper documents they burned at once, but incriminating electronic information they left intact under whimsical access codes: the name of a first girlfriend, a favorite actress, a pet dog. When Arkady clicked on the icon for Programs the screen demanded a password.

"Do you know it?" Osorio asked.

"No. A decent spy is supposed to use a random cipher. We could guess forever."

Arkady went through the desk drawers. Inside were a variety of different pens, stationery and cigars, maps and magnifying glasses, pen knives and pencils and brown envelopes with string ties for the diplomatic pouch. No passwords hidden in a matchbox.

"There's a telephone but no fax machine?"

"The telephone lines in this exchange are from before the Revolution. They're not clear enough for fax transmission."

"The telephone lines are fifty years old?"

"Thanks to the American embargo and the Special Period-"

"Caused by Russia, I know."

"Yes." Osorio snapped off the computer and shut the drawer.» Stop. You are not here to investigate. You are here only to verify that it has been examined thoroughly for fingerprints."

Arkady acknowledged the track of prints on door-iambs and desk surfaces, ashtray and telephone. Osorio motioned him to follow her farther down the corridor where there was a bedroom containing a narrow bed, nightstand, lamp, bureau, portable radio, bookcase and, hanging on the walls, a tinted portrait of the deceased Mrs. Pribluda. Beside it was a photograph of the son in an apron looking up at a levitating disk of pizza dough. In the top bureau drawer was an empty frame of snapshot size.

"There was a picture in here?" Arkady asked.

Osorio shrugged. The reading material in the bedroom was Spanish-Russian dictionaries, guidebooks, copies of Red Star and Pravda, reflecting the interests of a healthy, unreconstructed Communist. The bureau top was clear but showed signs of dusting and collection. In the closet were clothes, an ironing board and an iron dusted for prints. Organized on the floor were rubber sandals, work shoes and a thin, empty suitcase. Arkady stopped for a moment when he heard drumming from the apartment below, tectonic motion with a Latin beat.

Osorio opened the door at the corridor's end to a bathroom of crazed but immaculately clean tiles. A loofah and soap on a rope hung from the shower rod. The corner of the medicine cabinet mirror bore one fingerprint in full bloom, and another peeked from under the flush lever of the toilet.

"You don't miss anything," he told her.» But I wonder why you bothered."

"You will accept that this is Pribluda's apartment?"

"It seems to be."

"And that the prints we find here are Pribluda's?"

"We haven't really checked them, but let's say I do."

"Remember at the autopsy you told Captain Arcos it was a strange way for a Russian to fish."

"In an inner tube at sea? Yes, it was a first for me."

The detective led him back to the laundry room and turned on a hanging bulb and this time he saw, besides a stone basin and clothes line, reels of monofilament and wire and, on rough shelves of orange crate, jars that contained tangles of barbed, ugly hooks graded by size. Each jar was dusted and covered with clear prints. Detective Osorio handed Arkady an index card of lifted fingerprints. Immediately, Arkady saw a large print with a distinctive loop crossed by a scar identical with prints on the bottles. On a jar he found the same, carefully dusted print.

"He was right-handed?" Osorio asked.

"Yes."

"From the angles you can see, when he held the jar, the prints on the jar are his right thumb and index fingers and the prints on the glass are his left thumb and index finger. They're over all the rooms, doors, mirrors, everywhere. So you see, your Russian friend was a Cuban fisherman."

"The body, how long was it dead?"

"According to Dr. Bias, maybe two weeks."

"No one's been here in the meantime?"

"I asked the neighbors. No."

"That must be a hungry turtle."

Arkady returned to the front room, out of habit memorizing the apartment layout as he went: balcony, sitting room, laundry room, office, bathroom, bedroom. Inside the refrigerator were yogurt, greens, eggplant, pickled mushrooms, boiled tongue and a half-dozen boxes of color 35-mm film. He fed dillweed to the turtle and glanced at the black doll that filled the corner chair.» I have to admit these are new aspects to the man I knew. Did you find his car?"

"No."

"Do you know the make?"

"Lada." She shook her head a little for emphasis.» It doesn't matter. Your flight is in four hours. The body is being prepared for the plane. You will accompany it. Agreed?"

"I suppose I will."

Osorio frowned, as if she glimpsed a nuance in the answer.

On the ride back she asked, "Tell me, out of curiosity, as an investigator are you any good?"

"Not particularly."

"Why not?"

"Various reasons. I used to have a fair rate of success, as your captain puts it. But that was when murders in Moscow were amateur affairs with steel pipes and vodka bottles. Now they're professional work with heavy artillery. Also, militia work never paid well but it paid. Now, since the militia has not seen its salary in six months, men don't work with the same zeal. And there's the problem that if you do make progress on a contract homicide, the man who ordered the murder takes the prosecutor to lunch and offers him a condominium in Yalta and the case is dropped, so my success ratio is no longer something to be proud of. And, no doubt, my skills are not what they used to be."

"You had so many questions."

"Habit." Going through the motions, Arkady thought, as if his body were a suit that shuffled to the scene of the crime, any crime, anywhere. He was more irritated with himself than with her. Why had he started snooping? Enough! Osorio was right. He felt her eyes on him. Only for a moment, though. Because they were crossing a power blackout she had to proceed on some streets as carefully as steering a boat in the dark. In Arkady's mind, the syringe beckoned, the needle of a compass.

When they halted for goats wandering over the road the headlights illuminated a wall on which was written "Venceremos!" Arkady tried to say it silently but Osorio caught him.

Venceremos!' means 'We will win!' In spite of America and Russia, we will win!"

"In spite of history, geography, the law of gravity?"

"In spite of everything! You don't have signs like that in Moscow anymore, do you?"

"We have signs. Now they say Nike and Absolut."

He got a glance from Osorio no worse than the flame of a blowtorch. When they reached the embassy apartment the detective told him that a driver would gather him in two hours for the airport.» And you will have your friend to travel with."

"Let's hope it really is the colonel." Osorio was stung worse than he'd intended.» A live Russian, a dead Russian, it's hard to tell the difference." "You're right."

Arkady went up alone. A rumba played either in the house or out of the house, he could no longer tell where, all he knew was that constant music made him exhausted.

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, racing. 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 manners, 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 introduced 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 someone 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 insistent 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."

"I'm not interested and I don't have one hundred dollars."

"Fifty dollars. Usually I wouldn't let them go for so little, but..." Rufo spread his hands like a millionaire temporarily out of change.

"I'm just not interested."

"Okay, okay." Rufo was disappointed but amenable.» You know, when I was here before, I think I left my cigarette lighter. Did you see it?"

Arkady felt as if he were trying to leap from a plane and people kept dragging him back. There was no lighter in the living room. Arkady searched the bathroom and bedroom, no lighter. When he returned to the front, Rufo was digging through the paper bag of Pribluda's effects.

"There's no lighter there."

"I wanted to make sure you had everything." Rufo held up the lighter.» Found it."

"Good-bye, Rufo."

"A great pleasure. I'll be back in an hour. I won't bother you before." Rufo backpedaled to the door.

"No bother, but good-bye."

Arkady pulled back the coat sleeve from his arm as soon as Rufo went downstairs and with his thumb he found his vein and snapped it with a finger. The urge to be done was so strong now that he stayed at the open door to finish the job. The light on the stairwell below went out. See, now he needed a lighter. Typical socialist collapse, a bulb here, a bulb there. In the light from the room his exposed arm looked like marble. A samba drifted from another apartment. If Cuba sank into the sea, probably the water would percolate with sound. His throat was dry and sore. He leaned on the wall, took the long syringe from his pocket of his coat, tentatively touched his vein with the needle and a red dot appeared and wrapped around his wrist, which he wiped to keep the cashmere clean. But he heard someone climb the steps and, syringe in hand, deciding not to end up as a public spectacle, slipped inside his door and rested against it. Feet stopped at his door.

"Yes?" Arkady asked.

"I forgot the cigars," Rufo said.

"Rufo-"

As soon as Arkady opened the door Rufo carried him past the apartment's cream-and-gold dining chairs and into the far wall's collected works of Fidel, and pressed Arkady by the neck to the cabinet with a forearm. Perhaps Rufo was big but he was quicker on his feet than Arkady had imagined. He pinned Arkady with one arm and pulled the other until Arkady realized that his overcoat was pinned to the cabinet by a knife that Rufo was trying to free for a second thrust. The flapping of Arkady's open coat had misled him. Rufo's other problem was the embalming syringe that stood from his left ear, which meant that six centimeters of steel needle was buried in his brain. Arkady had struck back without thinking because the attack had come so fast. The addition to Rufo's head slowly gained the Cuban's attention, his eyes lifting sideways for a glimpse of the barrel and returning perplexed to Arkady. Rufo stepped back to grope at the syringe like a bear bedeviled by a bee, turning his head and wandering in a circle, leaning sideways lower and lower until he dropped to a knee and pushed with the opposite foot, squeezing his eyes shut until he finally pulled out the needle. Rufo blinked through tears at the long, red shaft and looked up for an explanation.

Arkady said, "All you had to do was wait."

Rufo rolled onto his back, his eyes still turned to the syringe as if it contained his last thought .

Chapter Three

Not that she would tell Renko, but Ofelia Osorio had once worked on a Cuban factory ship built by the Russians and complete with Russian advisers, so she was not only practiced in dealing with overbearing "big brothers" from the north but skilled in fending them off with a gutting knife. Earlier, as an idealistic Young Pioneer she had served as a delegate to a World Youth Conference in Moscow and toured Lenin's Tomb, Lumumba University and the subway. She remembered how subway riders drew in their faces at the sight of someone black. Cubans only touched their forearms to indicate someone dark. Russians recoiled as if from a snake. At least, at home. At sea, they were willing enough to experiment.

It wasn't only Russians. Vietnamese investigators came to Havana and Ofelia trained both men and women. When she visited Hanoi she discovered that her best female students had been relegated to typing and that after dinners of international solidarity the plates Ofelia used were washed twice.

What was interesting was that when European and Asian men met Cuban girls in Cuba they were like gluttons in a candy store. Decent family men became animals the moment they landed. Cartoons posted on the streets warned girls to be sure their tourists arrived with condoms. There were vice squads, usually run by detectives putting together their own strings ofjineteras. A great word, jinetera. Jockey, especially descriptive of a girl astride a bouncing pig. In addition to Ofelia's homicide caseload, and with half-hearted official support, she had put together an operation of her own against corrupt police. At any rate, she was mentally armed for a visiting Russian investigator, the worst of all possible combinations.

She lived in a solar, an alley of one-room apartments, aptly named for the way it soaked in the heat of the day. In spite of the late hour, Muriel and Marisol, her two daughters, were spread languorously on the cool of the floor intent on a television show about dolphins. The girls were eight and nine with dark hair flocked with gold, and the blue glow of the screen lapped up to their chins like a coverlet. Her mother tipped on the rocking chair pretending to be asleep, a silent reprimand to Ofelia for coming home so late, letting rice and beans simmer on the burners. Two could play at that game. It was a scandal that the mother of a PNR detective would spend the day running errands for everyone in the solar, going for cigarettes for one house, standing in line for a pair of shoes for another.» Hustle or starve," the old woman would respond to protests.» With your big pay and our family rations, your daughters will eat two days out of three. You know the joke, 'What are the three achievements of the Revolution? Health, education and sports. What are the three failures? Breakfast, lunch and dinner.' They say Fidel tells that joke. Why?" Ofelia only argued to a certain point because her mother was right. Besides, there were so many other things to argue about with her mother. The week before, Ofelia had come home to find that a portrait of Che had been moved to make way for a picture torn from a magazine of Celia Cruz. Who would displace the greatest martyr of the twentieth century with a fat, old traitor from Florida? Her mother, without a second's hesitation.

Ofelia wrapped her belt around her holster, stripped and folded her uniform neatly on a hanger. As a detective she could go in plain clothes or not, but she enjoyed the reassurance of the blue pants, the gray shirt with PNR shield on the pocket, the cap with its own embossed shield. Also, wearing a uniform saved on her clothes, which were basically two pairs of jeans. She slipped through the curtain into an alcove that served as bathroom, vanity, and shower stall, automatically turning on the Walkman that hung from a string. The radio was a prize found on the Playa del Este on a family trip. She had told her girls to ignore the "love couples" of jineteras and their tourists, but after Muriel had stumbled upon something as incredible as a radio the size of a clamshell she and her older sister watched the beach like vultures, ready to search the sand for treasure as soon as any "couple" left.

Water came in lukewarm rivulets, but it was enough. It ran over her forehead and neck and trailed from her hands. She was secretly pleased with her hair, which was cut short and as soft as a cap of Persian lamb. The music was insinuating and percussive. Your cigar fell down. You told me how good it was and how all the women liked your big cigar. We hardly started smoking and your cigar fell down. Ofelia let her shoulders relax and roll to the beat. Water ran out the drain between her feet. In the mirror above the sink she saw herself begin to fog. A thirty-year-old woman who still looked like a black cane cutter's daughter. Although she wasn't vain she hated a tan line-better to be the same brown all over. She leaned forward to let water run off her hair like threads of glass.

The detective in her wondered about the dead Russian they found in the water. She would have expected much more interest from his embassy and the fact that they seemed ready to dispose of him like a dog hit on the street was practically proof that he had obviously been up to no good. The bay, after all, was a perfect vantage point for smuggling, infiltration, to spy on shipping. As the Comandante himself said, there was no more vicious enemy than a man you had once called friend.

The new Russian was a bit of a contradiction. The plush coat was a sure sign of corruption, while the poor state of the rest of his clothes indicated a complete disregard for appearance. One moment he seemed a reasonably alert investigator, and the next he disappeared into some private train of thought. He was pale but with eyes deep-set in shadow.

The soap was a sliver her mother had obtained from a friend who worked in a hotel and so luxurious that Ofelia drew out the shower, the most private moment of the day despite the voices from other apartments in the solar. One song's worth was what she allowed herself to save the batteries.

Dressed in a pullover and jeans, she ladled rice to Muriel and beans to Marisol and an obscure, deep-fried gristle that her mother refused to identify. From the refrigerator she took a plastic Miranda soda bottle filled with chilled water.

"On the cooking show today they showed how to fry a steak from grapefruit skin," her mother said.» They turned a grapefruit skin into steak. Isn't that amazing? This is a revolution that is more amazing all the time."

"I'm sure it was good," Ofelia said.» Under the circumstances."

"They ate it with gusto. With gusto."

"This is also good." Ofelia sawed into the gristle.» What did you say it was?"

"Mammalian. Did you meet any dangerous men today, someone who might kill you and leave your daughters without a mother?"

"One. A Russian."

It was her mother's turn to be exasperated.» A Russian, worse than a grapefruit skin. Why did you join the police? I still don't understand."

"To help the people."

"The people here hate you. You don't see anyone from Havana who joins the police. Only outsiders. We were happy in Hershey."

"It's a sugar-mill town."

"In Cuba, what a surprise!"

"You can't move to Havana without a permit. I'm an expert in police work. They want me here and I want to be here and so do the girls."

This was one issue where Ofelia could always count on her daughters' support.

"We want to be here."

"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 maintained an expression of innocence until Ofelia hung up.

"What was it?"

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

"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 stumbled 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 maintained 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 virtually 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 longitude, 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.

Arkady discovered he fostered a killer's calculation hat even if his story was implausible, the truth was no more plausible. He was also a little bemused by his own reaction to the attack. He had defended himself instinctively, the way a man about to dive resists being pushed.

He had no idea why he had been attacked except that it had to do with his friend Pribluda. Not that Pribluda was a friend in the ordinary sense. They shared no tastes, interests, politics. In fact, truth be told, Pribluda was in many ways a terrible man.

Arkady could imagine him now bringing out the vodka and saying, "Renko, old pal, you're fucked. You are in a crazy country, in a foreign land where you know nothing, including the language." Pribluda would hunch forward to touch glasses and grin that ghastly smile of his. He had the habit of loosening a button, a collar, a cuff with each glassful, as if drinking was serious work.» All you can be sure of is that you know nothing. No one will help you because of your brown eyes. Everyone who steps forward as a friend will be an enemy. Everyone who offers to help is hiding a knife behind his back. Cheers!" The colonel would make a grand gesture of throwing the vodka's cap into the sea. That was his idea of panache.» Do you appreciate logic?"

"I love logic," Arkady might say.

"This is logic: Rufo had no reason to kill you. Rufo tried to kill you. Ergo, someone sent Rufo. Ergo, that someone will send someone else."

"A nice thought. Was that a present to take home?"

Arkady would nod in the direction of the man-sized doll brooding in the corner. The way its shadow shifted when the breeze pushed the lamp was a bit unnerving.» Charming." He fished from his coat a piece of note-paper on which he had written Rufo's address and the house key he had lifted off the body before Luna arrived.

"What I think you should do," Pribluda would steamroll on, "is lock yourself with a gun and oranges, bread and water in a room at the embassy, maybe a bucket for personal needs, and don't open the door until you go to the airport."

In his mind, Arkady asked, "Spending a week in Havana hiding in a room, wouldn't that be a little perverse?"

"No. Killing Rufo when you were going to kill yourself, that's perverse."

Arkady went down the hall to the office and returned with a map of the city that he spread under a lamp.

"You're leaving?" Pribluda was always horrified when Arkady quit before the bottom of the bottle.

Arkady searched for a street called Esperanza and wrote down Rufo's address on a piece of paper. He thought, I'm not just going to sit and wait. I also have your car key. If you want to help, tell me where the car is. Or give me your code.

Pribluda's ghost, insulted, disappeared. Arkady, on the other hand, was wide awake.

Stepping onto the street in a foreign city in the middle of the night was diving into a dark pool without knowing how deep the water was. An arcade of columns ran the length of the block, and he didn't emerge into faint, gassy light until he reached the lamp at the corner. He continued along the boulevard because its long curve against the sea simplified the problem of orientation.

Although he listened for the stir of a car or a footfall, all he heard was his own echo and the surge of the ocean on the other side of empty traffic lanes. On the way he passed a mural of Castro painted up the side of a three-story building. The figure appeared to be a giant walking through his city, his head obscured in the dark above streetlamp level, wearing his characteristic military fatigues, legs in mid-stride, right hand tossing a salute toward an unseen someone vowing "A Sus Ordenes, Comandante!" Well, Arkady thought, the Coman-dante and he made a strange pair of insomniacs, a furtive Russian and a sleepless giant on patrol.

Six blocks on was a dark hotel front and a taxi, the driver's head cradled on the steering wheel. Arkady shook the man and, when one eye squinted open, held up Rufo's address and a five-dollar bill.

Arkady sat up front as the taxi flew like a bat through the blackout, the driver yawning the entire way as if nothing short of a collision was worth waking up for, slowing only when mounds of urban rubble loomed in the headlights. Rufo's address was stenciled on the front of a low, windowless house on a narrow street. The cab fumbled away while, with Rufo's lighter, Arkady found the right key; when he had taken the house key off the dead man before calling the PNR Arkady noticed how like his own house key Rufo's was, a Russian design with a star stamped on the grip, no doubt a souvenir of socialist commerce. It did occur to him that if Detective Osorio had tried to enter with the keys he had left on Rufo she was frustrated and annoyed.

The door opened to a room narrow enough to make claustrophobia creep up his back. He walked the lighter flame between an unmade daybed and a low table with a ceramic ashtray-and-nude and a stack of TV and stereo, tape deck and VCR. A minibar looked ripped out of a hotel suite. A pedestal sink was lined with minoxidil, vitamins and aspirin. An armoire held, besides clothes, boxes of Nike and New Balance running shoes, cigar boxes, a library of videotapes and copies of Windows '95, a regular emporium. He opened a door to glimpse a filthy toilet, ducked back into the room and moved more slowly. Tacked to the walls were newspaper articles headlined gran exito de equipo cubano and, over a photo of a young world-beating Rufo raising his boxing gloves, pinero triunfa en ussr! Framed pictures showed groups of men in team jackets in Red Square, at Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower. Arkady turned the photos and copied names he found on the back. Names and numbers were also scribbled on the wall by the bed.

Daysi 32-2007

Susy 30-4031

Vi. Aflt. 2300

Kid Choc. 5/1

Vi. HYC 2200 Angola

The only sense Arkady could make of the list was that he had been the visitor arriving on Aeroflot at 2300 hours, eleven at night, and that there seemed to be another visitor from Angola due at almost the same late hour. Anyway, the list was a lot of phone numbers for a room with no phone or phone jack. Arkady remembered that Rufo had had a cell phone when they met at the airport, although when Arkady had searched Rufo's body later, the phone was gone.

On a hook hung an elegant, ivory-colored straw hat with "Made in Panama" and the initials RPP stamped on the sweatband. He searched the bureau, felt under the pillow and mattress, flipped through videos that all seemed to be boxing films or porn for more personal labels. The minibar held airline nuts and healthful bottles of Evian. There was no sign of any visit by Luna or Osorio, no fingerprint dust of burned palm fronds,

Most important, he found no reason for Rufo to try to kill him. Rufo had put some planning into the attack. The running suit made sense for the same reason painters wore coveralls, and he felt that the same thought had registered with Osorio. But why bother killing someone who would be gone from the scene in a matter of hours? Was Rufo after something or was it simply open season on Russians in Havana?

As he stepped outside, the light of dawn showed next to the apartment a scarred wall in bullfight red that said gimnasio atares. At the curb in a PNR sedan was Detective Osorio. She fixed her eyes on Arkady long enough to make him squirm before she put out her hand.» The key."

"Sorry." Arkady fished in his pocket and gave her the key to his apartment in Moscow. He could always break into his own home if need be.

"Get in the car," Osorio said.» I would like to lock you into a cell but Dr. Bias wants to talk to you."

With his trimmed beard and whiff of carbolic soap, Dr. Bias was the Pluto of a personal, genial underworld, welcoming Arkady back to the Institute de Medicina Legal and praising Osorio.

"Our Ofelia is very intelligent. If Hamlet had an Ofelia half as smart he would have solved the murder of his father the king in short order. Of course, they wouldn't have had much of a play." Two young women in snug IML T-shirts walked by in the corridor; the doctor's eyes approved.» We were trained by the FBI in Washington and Quantico until the Revolution, then by the Russians and Germans. But I like to think we have our own style. Your problem, Renko, is that you have no confidence in us. I noticed that the first time you were here."

"Is that it?" Arkady asked.

He thought his problem was that Rufo had tried to kill him, but the director seemed to have a bigger picture. They walked by a glass case with two head shots of men with slack mouths and closed eyes.

"Missing persons and unidentified dead. For the public to see." Bias picked up his thread.» When you think of Cuba you think of a Caribbean island, a place like Haiti, a country like Nicaragua. When we say, for example, we have identified a body as a Russian, you wonder how good is that identification, how qualified are these people who are telling me to accept this body and take it home? When you see a body retrieved from the water the way dogs play with bones, you question how careful the police work is. That is why you stole Rufo's key and went to his room on your own. I go to international conferences all the time and I meet people who don't know Cuba and have the same misgivings. So, let me tell you something about myself. I have a medical degree from the University of Havana with a specialty in pathology. I have studied at the Superior School of Investigation in Volgograd, in Leipzig and Berlin. Last year I lectured at Interpol conferences in Toronto and Mexico City. So, you have not been dropped off the end of the earth. Some enemies of Cuba want to isolate us, but we are not isolated. The international aspect of crime does not allow us to be isolated. I will not allow it."

They passed a handcuffed man in a chair. He lifted a face of old scars and fresh bruises.

"Waiting for his psychological evaluation," Bias explained.» We have other experts in forensic biology, dentistry, toxicology, immunology. A Russian might find this hard to believe. You used to be the teacher and we used to be the students. Now we are the teachers in Africa, Central America, Asia. Our Ofelia"-Bias nodded to Osorio, who had been gliding along modestly- "has taught in Vietnam. There is no ignorance here. I will not allow it. As a result, I am pleased to say that Havana has the lowest rate of unsolved homicides of any capital city in the world. So when I say who a body is, that's who he is. But Detective Osorio tells me that you are again hesitant about the identification of Colonel Pribluda."

"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 question 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. Supposedly 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 understand 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 different 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 expectancy 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 investigation very discouraging, very expensive. And no crime. Worse, he's Russian and the embassy refuses to cooperate. 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. Resting 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 adapting 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 comparison to the laborious reconstruction of faces from skulls that Arkady knew in Moscow, the tedious application of plastique to plaster bone, this was manipulation 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 distance 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.

"The numbers are discrepancies in measurement between the missing man and the skull when they are exactly matched. So we prove, scientifically, they could not possibly be the same man."

Bias started over again, this time with photo no. 3, a boy smiling proudly in a Chicago Bulls shirt, one hand weighing a basketball. Bias sliced off, enlarged and enhanced the boy's head, then brought up and positioned the skull on the screen. The distances between marker darts came up virtually the same, and when Bias merged the two images the numbers ratcheted down to zero and a single face that was both dead and alive looked out from the screen. If ever there was a picture of a ghost this was it.

"Now our missing man is not missing anymore and you see that even if things are supposed to be impossible in Cuba we do them anyway."

"That's why you wanted a photograph of Pribluda?"

"To make a match to the body we took from the bay, yes. But the photograph you brought was insufficient and the Russian embassy refuses to provide another."

There was an expectant wait until Arkady picked up the cue.

"I don't need a diplomatic note to go to the embassy."

Bias acted as if the thought had never occurred to him.» If you want to. The Revolution always needs volunteers. I can write the embassy address, and any car on the street will probably take you there for two dollars. If you have American dollars this is the best transportation system in the world."

Arkady was awed by the doctor's ability to put a good gloss on anything. His attention returned to the screen.» What was the head cut off with?"

"In the Dumpster?" said Bias.» A machete. The machete cut is a distinct wound. No sawing."

"Did you identify the murderer?"

Osorio said, "Not yet. We will, though."

"How many homicides a year did you say?"

"In Cuba? About two hundred," Bias said.

"How many in the heat of passion?"

"Overall, a hundred."

"Of the rest, how many for revenge?"

"Maybe fifty."

"Robbery?"

"Maybe forty."

"Drugs?"

"Five."

"Leaving five. How would you characterize them?"

"Organized crime, without a doubt. Paid murders."

"How organized? What were the weapons in those cases?"

"Occasionally a handgun. The Taurus from Brazil is popular, but usually machetes, strangling, knives. We have no real gangs here, nothing like the Mafia."

"Machetes?" To Arkady's ear, that did not have the ring of modern homicide. True, he remembered when any Russian murderer who wiped his knife after slicing a victim's throat was rated a smooth operator, back in the curiously innocent days before the worldwide spread of money transfers and remote-control bombs. Which left Cuba in terms of criminal evolution the equivalent of the Galapagos Islands. Suddenly, the Institute de Medicina Legal was put in perspective.

"We have a ninety-eight percent homicide solution rate," Bias said.» The best in the world."

"Enjoy it," Arkady said.

Chapter Five

The Russian embassy was a thirty-story tower with an architectural suggestion of squared chest and armored head looming like a monster of stone that had crossed continents, waded through oceans and finally stopped dead in its tracks ankle-deep among the green palm trees of Havana. Plate glass shone on its face, but overall the building stood in its own shroud of shadow and stillness. Inside, office after office was stripped to bare walls and phone jacks. Ghosts lingered in the bald spots and stains of hallway runners, in the hazy, unwashed bottles standing along the walls, in a ventilation system that spread an ancient reek of cigarettes. From the office of Vice Consul Vitaly Bugai, Arkady looked down at a world of white-colonnaded mansions, embassies French, Italian and Vietnamese, their roofs strung with elaborate radio dipoles and antennae, satellite dishes framed by gardens of pink hibiscus.

Bugai was a young man with small features squeezed into the center of a soft face. He wore a silk robe and Chinese sandals and floated in a liquid atmosphere of air-conditioning, moving, it seemed to Arkady, by contradictory impulses; relief that another Russian national was not dead and irritation that he would have to deal with the survivor for another week. He was also, perhaps, a little surprised that any vestige of Russian authority had been able to defend itself.

"Those houses were all from before the Revolution." Bugai joined Arkady at the window.» They were rich people. The biggest Cadillac dealership in the world was in Havana. When the Revolution came, the road to the airport was lined with Cadillacs and Chryslers left behind. Imagine being a rebel in a free Cadillac."

"I think I've seen some of those cars."

"Still, this is not a Black Hole. A Black Hole would be a posting in Guyana or Suriname. There's the music, the beaches, shopping in the Bahamas an hour away." Bugai flashed a golden Rolex on his wrist.» Havana's sea level and for me that's important. Of course, it's no Buenos Aires."

"It's not like the old days, either?" Arkady asked.

"Not at all. Between technicians and military support we had twelve thousand Russians here and a diplomatic staff of another thousand in attaches, deputies, cultural liaisons, KGB, secretaries, clerks, communications, couriers, security. We had Soviet housing, Soviet schools and camps for Russian children. Why not? We put thirty billion rubles into Cuba. Cuba got from Russia more foreign aid per person than any other country in the world. You have to ask yourself, who did more to bring down the Soviet Union than Fidel?" Bugai caught Arkady's glance.» Oh, the walls have ears. The Cubans are excellent at electronic surveillance. We trained them. The only really safe lines are at the embassy. You just have to stop worrying. Anyway, now we have a diplomatic staff of twenty people. This is a ghost ship. Never mind that we drove ourselves into bankruptcy to pay for this floating circus, that our entire system came crumbling down while they danced the salsa. The point is, relations between us and the Cubans have never been worse and now you tell me that you can't identify Pribluda's body?"

"Not conclusively."

"It was conclusive enough for the Cubans. I've talked to a Captain Arcos and he seemed very reasonable, considering he pulled a Russian out of Havana Harbor."

"A dead Russian."

"As I understand it, death was caused by a heart attack. A tragic but natural event."

"There's nothing natural about Pribluda floating in the bay."

"With spies these things happen."

"Officially, he was a sugar attache."

"Right. Well, all he had to do was drive around the island and visit some cane fields and see the Cubans won't make their sugar quota, because they never have. As for secret intelligence, the Cuban army is now moving missiles with oxen instead of trucks, that's all you need to know about that. The faster we get this little episode behind us the better."

"There is the other little episode of Rufo and me."

"Well, who knows what you are? We've lost a driver and an apartment thanks to you."

"I'll stay at Pribluda's. It's empty."

Bugai pursed his lips.» That's not the worst solution. I intend to keep this problem as far from the embassy as possible."

Arkady discovered that talking to Bugai was much like trying to catch a jellyfish; every time he groped for an answer the vice consul floated out of reach.

"Before the Cubans even found the body someone here at the embassy knew that Pribluda was in trouble and sent me a fax. It was unsigned. Who could that be?"

"I wish I knew."

"You can't find out?"

"I don't have enough staff to investigate my staff."

"Who assigned Rufo to me?"

"The Cuban Ministry of the Interior assigned Rufo to us. Rufo was their man, not ours. There was no one else on hand when you arrived in the middle of the night. I didn't know exactly who you were and I still don't know exactly who you are. Of course, I've called Moscow, and perhaps they've heard of you but what you're really involved in I don't know. Crime is not my specialty."

"What I'm involved in is identifying Pribluda. The Cubans asked for photographs of him and wanted to come to the embassy. You refused."

"Well, this is my field. First, we had no photographs. Second, the Cubans always use any opportunity to gain access to the embassy and poke around sensitive areas. It's a state of siege. We were the comrades, now we're the criminals. Punctured tires in the middle of the night. Being pulled over for shakedowns when the police see Russian license plates."

"Like Moscow."

"But in Moscow the government has no control, that's the difference. I have to say we never had any trouble with Rufo until you."

"Where's the ambassador?"

"We're between ambassadors."

Arkady reached for a notepad from the desk and wrote, "Where is the resident intelligence agent Pribluda reported to?"

"It's no big secret," Bugai said.» The chief of guards is here, he's just muscle. But the chief of security has been in Moscow for the past month interviewing for a position in hotel management, and he made very clear to me that while he was gone he wanted 'no red flags.' And as for me, I do not intend to be recalled to Moscow over a spy who had a heart attack floating around in the dark."

"When Pribluda communicated with Moscow he used a secure line?"

"We send encrypted E-mail on a hooded machine that wipes clean, not even a ghost on the hard drive once you delete. But not that many messages are encrypted. The usual faxes, calls and E-mail are plain text on ordinary machines, and I would love a shredder that actually worked." Arkady produced the photograph of the Havana Yacht Club to ask about Pribluda's Cuban friends, but the vice consul barely glanced.» We have no Cuban friends. It used to be an event when a Russian artist visited Havana. People just watch American films on television anyway. Fidel steals them and shows them. It costs him nothing. Some people have satellite dishes and pick up Miami. And there's Santeria. He's willing to promote voodoo to entertain the masses. African superstitions. The longer I'm here the more African these people get."

Arkady put the Yacht Club away.» The Cubans need a better picture of Pribluda. The embassy must have a security photograph of him."

"That would be up to our friend in Moscow. We'll have to wait until he returns from his job search, and that could be another month."

"A month?"

"Or more."

Bugai had kept retreating and Arkady had kept advancing until he stepped on a pencil that broke with a sharp crack. The vice consul jumped and looked not as cool as jellyfish anymore, more like an egg yolk at the sight of a fork. His nervousness reminded Arkady that he had killed a man; whether in self-defense or not, killing someone was a violent act and not likely to attract new friends.

"What was Pribluda, your sugar attache, working on?"

"I can't possibly tell you that."

"What was he working on?" Arkady asked more slowly.

"I don't think you have the authority," Bugai began, and amended as Arkady started around the desk.» Very well, but this is under protest. There's a problem with the sugar protocol, a commercial thing you wouldn't understand. Basically they send us sugar they can't sell anywhere else, and we send them oil and machinery we can't unload anywhere else."

"That sounds normal."

"There was a misunderstanding. Last year the Cubans demanded negotiations of agreements already signed. With such bad feelings between the two countries we let them bring in a third party, a Panamanian sugar trader called AzuPanama. Everything was resolved. I don't know why Pribluda was looking into that."

"Pribluda, the sugar expert?"

"Yes."

"And a photograph of Pribluda?"

"Let me look," Bugai said before Arkady took another step. He backed to the bookshelves and retrieved a leather album, which he opened on the desk, flipping through ring-bound pages of mounted photographs.» Guests and social events. May Day. Mexican Cinco de Mayo. I told you Pribluda didn't come to these things. Fourth of July with the Americans. The Americans don't have an embassy, only a so-called Interests Section bigger than an embassy. October, Cuban Independence Day. Did you know that Fidel's father was a Spanish soldier who fought against Cuba? December. Maybe there's one. We used to have a traditional New Year's party with a Grandfather Frost for Russian children, a major affair.

Now we have only a few children, but they demand Santa Claus and a Christmas party."

In the photograph two girls with bows in their hair sat on the lap of a bearded man in a plush red suit, a round figure with cheeks rouged to a cheery glow. Presents ringed a tinsel tree. Behind the children spread a buffet line of adults balancing plates of cheeses and Christmas cakes and glasses of sweet champagne. At the far end someone who might have been Sergei Pribluda shoved his whole hand into his mouth.

"The heat in that suit was unbelievable."

"You wore it?" Arkady took a closer look at the picture.» You don't look well."

"Congestive heart failure. A bad valve." Kneading his arm, Bugai went around his desk and rooted through drawers.» Pictures. I'll make a list of possible names and addresses. Mostovoi is the embassy photographer, then there is Olga."

"You should be in Moscow."

"No, I angled for Cuba. They may not have enough drugs here but they have excellent doctors, more doctors per person than anywhere else in the world, and they'll operate on anyone, a general, a farmer, some little man who rolls cigars, it doesn't matter. Moscow? Unless you're a millionaire you wait two years at least. I'd be dead." Bugai blinked through a film of sweat.» I can't leave Cuba."

Elmar Mostovoi had a monkey's round mug and curved fingernails and a hairpiece of frizzled orange that sat on his head like a souvenir. He was in his mid-fifties, Arkady guessed, but still in good shape, the sort who did push-ups on his fingertips, wore his shirt open and rolled up his pants to show off a shaved chest and shins as smooth as tubes. He lived in Miramar, the same area as the embassy, in an oceanfront hotel named the Sierra Maestra, which offered many of the features of a sinking freighter: listing balconies, rusted railings, a view of the water. The furnishings of Mostovoi's apartment were quite plush, however, with a sofa and chairs covered in vanilla leather sitting on a deep shag rug.

"They put Poles, Germans and Russians here. They call it the Sierra Maestra, I call it Central Europe." Mostovoi inserted a Marlboro into an ivory cigarette holder.» Did you see the popcorn machine in the lobby? Very Hollywood."

Mostovoi's apartment was decorated with movie posters (Lolita, East of Eden), the photographs of an expatriate (Paris bistro, sailing, someone waving at the Tower of London), books (Graham Greene, Lewis Carroll, Nabokov), souvenirs (dusty campaign cap, bronze bells, ivory phalluses in ascending size).

"Are you interested in photographs?" Mostovoi asked.

"Yes."

"An appreciator?"

"In my way."

"Do you like nature?" It was very natural. Mostovoi had boxes of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of young female nudes half hidden by fronds, romping through waves, peeking through bamboo.» A cross between Lewis Carroll and Helmut Newton."

"Do you have any photographs of your colleagues at the embassy?"

"Bugai is always after me to take pictures of his so-called cultural events. I can't be bothered. You can't get Russians to pose like this. You can't even get them to take their clothes off."

"The climate, perhaps."

"No, even here." Mostovoi pondered the photograph of a Cuban girl lightly breaded in sand.» Somehow, the people here manage to balance socialism with naivete. And by mixing with the Cubans I don't live with the paranoia that has gripped the rest of our dwindling community."

"What paranoia is that?"

"Ignorant paranoia. When an intelligence agent like Pribluda floats around the harbor in the middle of the night, what is he doing but spying? We never change. It's disgusting. It's what happens to Europeans in Paradise, we kill ourselves and blame the natives. I hoped Pribluda had more sense. You know, the KGB used to produce very civilized people. I said something in French to Pribluda once and he looked at me as if I were speaking Chinese."

Mostovoi opened another box. On top, a girl squeezed a volleyball.» My sports series."

"More of that dramatic angle."

The next shot was of a light-colored nude cradling a skull on her lap. The girl directed a sultry glower through a mane of curls that only half covered her breasts. Around her were molten candles, drums, bottles of rum.

"Wrong box," Mostovoi said.» My rainy-day series. We shot in here and I had to use the props at hand."

The skull was a rough facsimile, lacking detail around the nasal orifice and teeth, although Arkady was impressed by the number of artifacts a serious photographer had to have ready for a rainy day. In the next picture another girl wore a beret to model clay.

"Very artistic."

"That's kind of you. There's talk of a show at the embassy. Bugai strings me along. I don't care. I only hope I'm there with my camera when he has his heart attack."

She was buxom with fine hair fading from blond to gray and an oval face with small eyes a little damp with recollection. Although her air-conditioning had failed, Olga Petrovna's flat was a little corner of Russia with an Oriental rug on the wall, geraniums thriving in pots and a canary bright as a lemon trilling in a cage. Brown bread, bean salad, sardines, coleslaw with pomegranate seeds and three types of pickle were laid on the table. By an electric samovar sat a pot of jam and tea glasses in silver holders. She sorted through photograph albums for Arkady and, in a ladylike fashion, plucked at her dress where it adhered.

"They go back twenty-five years. It was such a life. Our own schools with the best teachers, good Russian food. It was a real community. No one spoke Spanish. The children had their Pioneer camps, all in Russian, with archery and mountain climbing and volleyball. None of this baseball idiocy of the Cubans. Our own beaches, our own clubs and, of course, there were always birthdays and weddings, real family events. It made you proud to be Russian, to know you were here protecting socialism on this island far from home in the teeth of the Americans. It seems hard to believe we were so strong, so sure."

"You are an unofficial historian of the embassy?"

"The embassy mother. I've been there longer than anyone else. I came very young. My husband is dead and my daughter married a Cuban. The truth is, I'm hostage to a granddaughter. If it weren't for me she wouldn't speak Russian at all. Who can imagine such a thing? Her name is Carmen. This is a name for a Russian girl?" She poured tea and added jam with a conspiratorial smile.» Who needs sugar?"

"Thank you. Did your granddaughter go to the embassy Christmas party?"

"Here she is." Olga Petrovna opened to the first picture of what appeared to be the most recent album and pointed to a curly-haired girl in a white dress that made her look like a walking wedding cake.

"Very cute."

"Do you think so?"

"Completely."

"Actually, it's an interesting mix, Russian and Cuban. Very precocious, a little of the exhibitionist. Carmen insisted-all the children insisted-on an American Santa Glaus. That comes from watching television."

From snapshot to snapshot Arkady followed the little girl's progress to Santa's lap, a whisper in his ear and her retreat along the buffet. He pointed to a broad back at the table.» Isn't that Sergei Pribluda?"

"How could you tell? It was Carmen who dragged him to the party. He is such a hard worker."

Olga Petrovna had the highest esteem for Pribluda, a strong individual with a real worker's background, patriotic, never drunk though never shy, quiet but profound, obviously an agent but not the sort to act mysterious. Certainly not a weakling like Vice Consul Bugai.

"Remember the word 'comrade'?" asked Olga Petrovna.

"All too well."

"That's what I would call Sergei Sergeevich in the best sense of the word. And cultured."

"Really?" That was such a new perception of Pribluda that Arkady wondered whether they were speaking of the same person. Unfortunately, despite her respect for the colonel, she had no other pictures of him. Then, with great delight, "Oh, here she is." A girl of about eight in an outgrown school jumper of dull maroon stood at the threshold of the room. She glowered at Arkady from under a vee of brows.» Carmen, this is our friend Citizen Renko."

The girl advanced in three deliberate steps, shouted "Hai!" and delivered a kick a millimeter short of contact with his chest.» Uncle Sergei knows karate."

"He does?" Arkady had always thought of Pribluda as more a kidney-punch devotee.

"He carries a black belt in his briefcase."

"Did you ever see it?"

"No, but I'm sure." She administered a karate chop to the air and Arkady stepped back.» Did you see? Fists of fear."

"That's quite enough," Olga Petrovna said.» I know you have homework."

"If he's a friend of Uncle Sergei's he'll want to see it."

"That is enough, young lady."

"Stupid coat." Carmen looked Arkady up and down.

Olga Petrovna clapped her hands until the girl tucked in her chin and marched to the next room.» I'm sorry, that's children now."

"When was the last time you saw Sergei Sergeevich?"

"A Friday after work. I had taken Carmen for an ice cream on the Malecon when we ran into him talking to a Cuban. I remember Carmen said that she heard something roar, and Sergei Sergeevich said his neighbor kept a lion that ate little girls. She became so irritable we had to hurry home. Usually they did get on wonderfully." When Arkady had her show him on a map she pointed to the Malec6n in front of Pribluda's flat.» Sergei Sergeevich wore a captain's cap and the Cuban was carrying one of those enormous inner tubes they fish from. A black man is all I remember."

"Did you hear a roar?"

"Something, maybe." As she put the albums away she asked, "Do you think there's any truth to this story that Sergei Sergeevich is dead?"

"I'm afraid there might be. Some of the Cuban investigators are very competent."

"Dead of what?"

"A heart attack, they say."

"But you have some doubts?"

"I just like to be sure."

Olga Petrovna sighed. Even in her time in Havana the city had become another Haiti. And Moscow was overrun by Chechens and gangs. Where could a person go?

He thought for a moment he had caught sight of a man keeping pace behind him in the dark of the arcade. Was he being followed? He couldn't tell. It was hard to single out a shadow when everyone knew which way the streets ran except you, when everyone looked in place but you, with the sea on one side and on the other a maze of demolition piles, cars hauled onto sidewalks, lines of people waiting for ice cream, a bus, bread, water.

So he plunged on in his coat, drawing glances as if he were a monk wandered off the Via Dolorosa.

Arkady took a taxi back to the Malecon and walked the last few blocks to Pribluda's apartment past boys demanding Chiclets and men offering mulatas, and beyond conversation starters of "Amiga, que hora es? De que pais? Momentico, amigo." Overhead hung balconies, arabesques of wrought-iron spikes and potted plants, women in housedresses and men stripped to their underwear and cigars, music shifting from window to window. Decay everywhere, heat everywhere, faded colors trying to hold together disintegrating plaster and salt-eaten beams.

Chapter Six

Ofelia was Arkady and Dr. Bias played Rufo. They positioned the tables and taped the floor of the IML conference room to indicate the perimeters of the walls, bookshelves and doors of the embassy flat so that they could-for their own information-"reconstruct the facts" of Rufo Pinero's death.

"Reconstruction of the facts" distinguished Cuban forensic medicine from the American, Russian, German. In Cuban laboratories, in Nicaraguan rain forests, in the dusty fields of Angola, Bias had re-created homicides to the amazement not only of judges but of the criminals themselves. A reconstruction of the facts surrounding the death of the Russian neumatico might be impossible because of the drifting and deterioration of the body. Rufo's death, however, took place in an apartment, not open water, and left certain irrefutable facts: Rufo's body with an oversized arterial syringe in hand, a knife with Rufo's prints stuck into a bookcase, no bruises on the dead man's body, no disheveled clothes, no signs that pointed to anything but a swift, fatal confrontation.

Nevertheless, the doctor was stymied and breathing hard. They took into account that Rufo Pinero was a former athlete, taller and heavier than Renko by twenty kilos, maybe more. The Russian was exhausted by travel, confused, clearly not athletic, though not totally obtuse. Bias thought that described Renko well enough.

They staged the attack in various ways. Rufo rising from a chair, waiting in the room, entering the door. No matter, wielding scissors and a pencil as a knife and syringe, Bias didn't come close to efficiently or rapidly dispatching Ofelia. Part of the problem was that she was so fast afoot. Ofelia had run the hundred-meter dash at school and hardly gained a kilo since then. She had a habit of shifting her weight from foot to foot that Bias found annoying.

Another problem was that the attack spoke of surprise. Yet using both a "knife" and a "syringe" made Bias slow and unwieldy. The simple act of bringing out not one but two weapons gave a victim time to react. Rufo would have been led laps around the room and table and chairs would have flown in all directions had Ofelia been the intended victim.

"Maybe it was a spontaneous attack," Bias said.

"Rufo wore a body-length jumpsuit of waterproof material over his shirt and pants. There's nothing spontaneous about that. He knew what he was going to do."

"Renko does not look quite so elusive."

"Maybe if he was threatened with a weapon."

"Two weapons."

"No," Ofelia decided, "Rufo had one weapon, the knife. The needle was the surprise for him." She hurried because she was a mere detective and Bias was a pathologist renowned for the rigor of his methodology. However, she could almost see the fight take place.

"You know how the Russian always wears that ridiculous coat. I believe the knife pinned the coat to the bookcase. There is a tear in the lapel of the coat and there was a coat fiber on the knife. I think that was when Rufo was killed."

"With the syringe?"

"In self-defense."

Bias took Ofelia's hand, which was slim on the soap-scented meat of his palm.» What is wonderful about you is your sympathy for the most unlikely people. Only, this is not an investigation. You and I are merely satisfying our professional curiosity about the physical facts of a death."

"But don't you wonder?"

"No." Bias's expression said he wasn't a sexist, but that women often lost focus.» You're concerned about the syringe. Very well, we lost one in the lab. Either Renko or Rufo could have stolen it. But why would Renko? For drugs? I found no drugs in the syringe. He stole it as a weapon? If he had any fear for his life he wouldn't have come to Havana. We must be more sophisticated. For example, consider character. Rufo was a hustler, an opportunist. He saw the syringe and took it. Renko is a phlegmatic Russian. Everything for him is a mental debate, I guarantee you. And there is the matter of physical force. Ask yourself if Renko thought he could subdue someone as strong as Rufo. Even in self-defense."

"Maybe he didn't think, maybe he reacted."

"With a syringe already in his hand? A syringe for which he had no use? A syringe that ended in Rufo's grip?"

She withdrew her hand.» Rufo pulled it out of his head. I would."

"Maybe? Would? You are speculating. Truth reveals itself more to logic than to inspiration." Bias had caught his breath.» We'll try the reconstruction again. Only, this time move a little slower. You forget that Renko is a smoker, probably a drinker, certainly out of condition. You, on the other hand, are most definitely in shape, younger, more alert. I don't see how he could start to defend himself. Maybe Rufo slipped. Ready?"

Rufo was not the sort who slipped, Ofelia thought.

She had had a good friend named Maria at the university. Some years later, Maria married a poet who declared himself an observer for human rights in Havana.

Soon Ofelia saw on television that he had been sentenced to twenty years for assault and that Maria had been arrested for prostitution. When Ofelia visited her in jail Maria told a different story. She said that she had just come out of her house in the morning when a man grabbed her and started to pull her clothes off at her own front door. When her husband ran out to protect her, the man knocked him to the ground and kicked in his teeth. Only then did a police car appear, driven by a single officer who took only a statement from the man, who claimed that Maria had propositioned him and, when he turned her down, that her husband had assaulted him. Maria remembered two other items: that the backseat of the car was already covered in a plastic sheet and that when the man who beat her husband got into the front of the patrol car he picked up two aluminum cigar tubes from the seat and slipped them into his shirt pocket. The cigars were his, laid aside for safekeeping. The poet and Maria hanged themselves in different prisons on the same day. Out of sheer curiosity Ofelia went back and read their arrest report, which declared that the good citizen who had come wandering by their door was Rufo Pinero.

Rufo hardly needed one weapon, let alone two.

If the issue of the syringe bothered her and the death of Maria upset her, the Russian infuriated her. The arrogance to steal Rufo's key, as if he would even know what he was looking at in a Cuban's room. To think that he could stand in front of a map of Havana in Pribluda's office and see more than a piece of paper.

For Ofelia every street, every corner on the map was a memory. For example, her first school trip to Havana when she was running hurdles at what used to be the greyhound track in Miramar, where she returned at night with Tolomeo Duran and lost her virginity on the high-jump mat. That was Miramar to her. Or the theater in Chinatown where her uncle Cucho was knifed to death in the middle of a pornographic movie. Or the Coppelia ice-cream parlor on La Rampa where she met her first husband, Humberto, while they waited three hours for a spoonful to eat. Or the Floridita bar in Havana Vieja where she caught Humberto with a Mexican woman. More than one marriage had ended because tourists came prowling for Cuban men. Divorce was easy in Cuba. She had friends who had been divorced four or five times. What would a Russian know about that?

Bias gasped, "Still too fast."

Chapter Seven

Havana had sunk into evening shadow, the sea scalloped black, swallows darting through the arcade when Arkady reached the Malecon. As he went up the stairs he heard the ground-floor neighbor's radio and not quite a lion's roar but a definite reverberation.

Slotted light spread from shutters across the walls of Pribluda's sitting room to the black doll sitting in the corner, its head tucked away. Perhaps it was the low angle of sun off the water but the flat seemed subtly altered: a lower ceiling, wider table, a chair turned a different direction. Since a kid, Arkady always turned chairs slightly out from a table as if they carried on a silent conversation. A childish habit, but there it was.

Apart from the door the only access to the apartment was the balcony and an air shaft midway down the corridor. Even as Arkady turned on lights a power brownout reduced them to candles. He hung up his coat in the bedroom closet and stuck his passport in a shoe while he opened his bag. The shirts were perhaps folded a little differently.

If there were snoops they hadn't taken any food- the Russian stockpile in the refrigerator was still complete. Arkady poured chilled water from a jar. Dim light crept from the refrigerator to the glasses on the table, the turtle's bowl, the glass eyes of the rag doll. Black paint gave Change not only color but a rough kind of vigor. Arkady lifted the red bandanna to touch the face, which was papier-mache molded into crude features, half-formed mouth about to speak, half-formed nose about to breathe, half-formed hand about to push off its walking stick and rise. Dolls should be more insubstantial, not quite so conscious or as watchful, Arkady thought. Sweat located his spine. He was going to have to stop wearing a coat in Havana.

The noise from below reminded him that he had meant to try in at least one language or another to interview the ground-floor neighbor. According to Detective Osorio, this was the person who had illegally rented Pribluda the second-floor rooms. The illegal part appealed to Arkady. Also, he wondered why the neighbor didn't want both floors himself. The cacophony could have been even more stereophonic.

When the noise stopped it was interesting how like a seashell a shuttered apartment could sound. The barely audible sweep of cars, stirring of water along the seawall, the pounding of the heart. Maybe he was wrong about the chairs and bag, he thought. Nothing else seemed out of place. The din started downstairs again, and he took his glass to Pribluda's office phone and studied the list of numbers he had copied off Rufo's wall.

Daysi 32-2007

Susy 30-4031

Vi. Aflt. 2300

Kid Choc. 5/1

Vi. HYC 2200 Angola

Now that he thought about it, why had he assumed that Vi. stood for visitor? Granted, he was a visitor arriving on Aeroflot, but was the word for visitor the same in Spanish and English? Rufo knew he was coming. Wouldn't it be more important to know what day of the week? He looked up the word for Friday in Pribluda's Spanish-Russian dictionary.» Viernes." Vi. stood for Friday. Which suggested that on another Friday at 10:00 p.m. with a person or at a place with the initials HYC something would happen concerning Angola. Was that vague enough?

Arkady tried the names on the list and got an answer on the first ring.

"Digame."

Arkady, in Russian, "Hello, is this Daysi?"

"Digame."

"Is this Daysi?"

"Oye, quien es?'

In English, "Is this Daysi?"

"Si, es Daysi"

"Do you speak English?"

"Unpoco,si."

"Are you a friend of Rufo?"

"Muy poco."

"You know Rufo Pinero?"

"Rufo, si."

"Could we meet and talk?"

"Talk?"

"Do you know someone who speaks English?"

"Muypoco."

"Thanks."

He hung up and tried Susy.

"Hi."

"Hello. You speak English."

"Hi."

"Could you tell me where I could find Rufo Pinero?"

"El cono Rufo? Es amigo suyo? Es cabron and come-mierda. Oye, hombre, singate y singa a tu madre tambien."

"I didn't catch that."

"Y singa tu perro. Cuando veas a Rufo, preguntale, donde estd el dinero de Susy? O mi regalito de QVC?"

"Let's say, you know Rufo. Do you know anyone who speaks English or Russian?"

"Y digale, chupa mis nalgas hermosas!"

While he was trying to find chupa in the dictionary, Susy hung up.

A noise drew him to the parlor, although he found no one but Chango glowering from his chair. The doll had slumped a little, still surly, top-heavy. Had its head turned since he had been in the room last, raised its eyes to steal a sideways glance? For some reason he was reminded of the giant Comandante he had seen painted on a wall the night before, the way the figure seemed to loom above the lamps like an all-knowing, all-seeing specter, or the way a director hovered in the dark at the back of a theater. Arkady had felt exceedingly small and uninformed.

He refilled his glass and wandered back to the office and the map of Havana over the desk. Facing it, Arkady could see the full scope of his ignorance. Neighborhoods called Havana Vieja, Vedado, Miramar? They sounded beautiful, but he could have been staring at hieroglyphics for all he understood. At the same time, it was a relief to be far from Moscow, where every street suggested Irina or a journalist's cafe she'd favored, the shortcut to the puppet theater, the ice rink where she'd goaded him into skating again. At every corner he'd expected her to appear, walking full tilt as she always did, scarf and long hair snapping like flags. He had even returned to the clinic, retraced his steps like a man trying to find that single step, that pivotal error he could correct and turn everything back. But his futility mounted as the days rolled in like waves, one black crest after another, and the distance between him and the last time he saw her only grew.

In fact, his very work was a reminder that time was a one-way proposition. A homicide meant, by definition, that someone was too late. Of course, investigating a crime that had already happened was relatively simple. Investigating a crime that hadn't yet occurred, to see the lines before they connected, that might demand skill.

At a creak of wood Arkady noticed Sergeant Luna standing in the office door. It wasn't just the sound, Arkady thought, more like an entire force field crossing the threshold. He didn't recognize Luna immediately because the sergeant was in jeans, sweatshirt and a cap that said "Go Gators." Air Jordans graced his feet and his muscular hands flexed around a long metal club as if he were trying to squeeze it in half. The man was a natural athlete just by the bounce in his feet. Dirt covered his arms and shirt as if he'd come directly from a game. The barrel of the club said "Emerson."

"Sergeant Luna, I didn't hear you come in."

"Because I walk quiet and I have a key." Luna held a key up to illustrate and put it in a pocket. He had a voice like wet cement being turned by a shovel. The narrow cap emphasized his round head and the way muscles played on his forehead and jaw. The whites of his eyes were slightly fried. His biceps balled with anger.

"You speak Russian, too."

"I picked it up. I thought we could have a talk without the captain or the detective, with no one else."

"I'd like to talk." Luna had been so silent around Captain Arcos, Arkady was happy to hear the sergeant out. The bat bothered him.» Let me get you something to drink."

"No, just talk. I want to know what you're doing."

Arkady always tried honesty first.

"I'm not sure myself. I just didn't think the identification of the body was certain enough. Since Rufo attacked me, I think maybe there is more to find out."

"You think that was stupid of Rufo?"

"Maybe."

"Who are you?" Luna poked him with the fat end of the bat.

"You know who I am."

"No, I mean who are you?" Luna poked him again in the ribs.

"I'm a prosecutor's investigator. I wish you'd stop doing that."

"No, you can't be an investigator here. You can be a tourist here, but you can't be an investigator here. Understand? Comprendes?" Luna walked around him. For Arkady it was like talking to a shark.

"I understand perfectly."

"I wouldn't go to Moscow and tell you how to do things. It shows a lack of respect. And you killed a Cuban citizen."

"I'm sorry about Rufo." Within limits, Arkady thought.

"It seems to me you're very difficult."

"Where is Captain Arcos? Did he send you?"

"Don't you worry about Captain Arcos." The sergeant gave him another poke of the bat.

"You're going to have to stop that."

"Are you going to lose your temper? Are you going to attack a sergeant of the Ministry of the Interior? I think that would be a bad idea."

"What do you think would be a good idea?" Arkady tried to emphasize the positive.

"It would be a good idea if you understood you are not Cuban."

"I swear I don't think I'm Cuban."

"You don't know anything here."

"I couldn't agree more."

"You do nothing."

"That's pretty much what I'm doing."

"Then we can be friendly."

"Friendly is good."

For his part, Arkady felt he was being agreeable, soft as a pat of butter, but Luna still circled him.

"Is that a baseball bat?" Arkady asked.

"Baseball is our national sport. Want to see it?" Luna offered the bat to him handle first.» Take a swing."

"That's all right."

"Take it."

"No."

"Then I'll take it," Luna said and swung the bat into Arkady's left leg above the knee. Arkady dropped to the floor and Luna moved behind him.» See, you have to step into it to drive the ball. Did you feel that?"

"Yes."

"You have to turn into the ball. You're from Moscow?"

"Yes."

"I'll tell you something I should have told you before. I am from the Oriente, the east of Cuba." When Arkady tried to rise, Luna took a judicious chop into the back of the other knee and Arkady fell backward into the hall and started to crawl toward the parlor to lead the sergeant away from the list of phone numbers. Always thinking, Arkady told himself. Luna followed.» Men from the Oriente are Cuban, but more so. They like you or they don't. If they like you, you have a friend for life. If they don't, you have a problem. You're fucked." Luna kicked Arkady forward onto his face.» Your problem is I don't like Russians. I don't like the way they talk, I don't like their smell, I don't like the way they look. I don't like them." The hall was too narrow for a full swing of the bat, but Luna jabbed Arkady's ribs to emphasize his points.» When they stabbed Cuba in the back, we threw them out. Hundreds of Russians flew from Havana every day. The night before the KGB was thrown out someone punctured the tires of all the embassy cars so that they would have to walk to the airport. It's true. The fuckers had to find cars at the last second. Otherwise, think of the embarrassment, Russians walking twenty kilometers to the airport."

Arkady called for help, all too aware he was shouting in the wrong language and that with the banging from below no one would hear him anyway. Once in the parlor he pushed himself up against a wall and, standing on legs that went every which way, actually landed a blow that made the bigger man grunt acknowledgment. As the two men scuffled around the table the turtle bowl rolled off. Finally the sergeant got free enough to swing the bat again and Arkady found himself on the rug, blinking through blood, aware he'd lost a few seconds of memory and a brain cell or two. He felt a foot across his neck as Luna bent close to feel Arkady's shirt pocket and pants. All Arkady could see was the rug and Change in his chair staring back. No mercy there.

"Where is the picture?"

"What picture?"

The foot pressed on Arkady's windpipe. Well, it was a dumb answer, Arkady admitted. There was only one picture. The Havana Yacht Club.

"Where?" Luna eased up to give him another chance.

"First you didn't want it, now you do?" As Arkady felt his windpipe close he said, "At the embassy. I gave it to them."

"Who?"

"Zoshchenko." Zoshchenko was Arkady's favorite comic writer. He felt the situation needed humor. He hoped there was no poor Zoshchenko at the embassy. He heard a contemplative slap of the bat in Luna's hand.

"Do you want me to fuck you up?"

"No."

"Do you want me to seriously fuck you up?"

"No."

"Because you will stay fucked."

Although Arkady was pinned like an insect he did his best to nod.

"If you don't want me to mess with you, you stay here. From now on you're a tourist, but you will do all your touring in this room. I'll send some food every day. You don't leave. Stay here. Sunday you go home. A quiet trip."

That sounded quiet, Arkady got that.

Satisfied, Luna removed his foot from Arkady's neck, lifted Arkady's head by the hair and clubbed him one more time as if dispatching a dog.

When Arkady was conscious again it was dark, and he was stuck to the carpet. He ripped his head off and rolled to the wall to look and listen before he dared move any more. New blood oozed around one eye. The furniture was a mass of shadows. Sounds of work had stopped below, replaced by the unctuous strains of a bolero. Luna was gone. Altogether, Arkady thought, a hell of a vacation. And certainly the worst suicide he had ever attended.

Just standing proved to be a feat of balance, as if the sergeant's baseball bat had driven all the fluid from one inner ear to the other, but he managed to drag a chair to prop against the door.

With the blood washed off, the head in the bathroom mirror wasn't so bad, one gash at the hairline he had to shave around and pull back together with butterfly tapes from the medicine chest, otherwise just a new topologi-cal feature at the back of the skull. A little broader bridge of his nose, a knot on his forehead, a lasting impression of the rug on his cheek, some difficulty swallowing, but all teeth accounted for. His legs felt broken, but on the other hand, they worked. Luna had done a fairly good job of limiting the damage to bruises and indignities.

He hobbled to the bedroom closet and found the pockets of his coat turned out, but his passport with the photograph of the Havana Yacht Club still rested in the shoe where he had put them. Light-headedness and nausea rose, signs of a concussion.

Muddy blood stained the parlor rug. Like any party, he thought, cleaning up was the hard part. He'd do it later. First things first. In a kitchen drawer he found a whetstone and a narrow bladed boning knife that he honed to a fine edge. On the seat of the chair propped against the door he balanced a bag of empty cans as an alarm and perhaps a little fun underfoot, and he unscrewed all the lightbulbs in the parlor and hall so that if Luna returned he would enter the dark and be silhouetted by the light. The best Arkady could do for the air-shaft window was ram it shut with a stick. The best he could do for his head was stay flat. Which he was about to do when he passed out.

He didn't feel refreshed. What time it was he couldn't tell, the room was dark. What room he was in he wouldn't have known except for the rough bristles of the parlor rug on his face. Like a drunk, he wasn't positive which way was up.

His body had set in a position of least pain, all things being relative, and in the manner of a broken chair it had no intention of sitting up again. He did anyway because a little circulation was probably good for bruised limbs. The turtle crawled by, practically trotting.

Arkady followed on all fours to the refrigerator, pulled out the water jar and luxuriated in the soft, unthreatening nimbus of the appliance light.

On a purely objective basis it was interesting how much worse he felt. Drinking water was painful. Touching his head with a damp cloth combined agony and relief.

Irina liked to say, "Be careful what you wish for." Meaning, of course, her. Having lost her, what he'd wished for was an end to his guilt, but he really hadn't meant being beaten to death. In Moscow you were left alone to kill yourself. In Havana there wasn't a moment's peace.

The phone cord was ripped from the wall, although Arkady wasn't sure whom to call anyway. The embassy, so they could cringe again at the trouble one of their nationals was causing?

The dark was so quiet he could almost hear the sweep of the lighthouse beam over the bay and feel the brush of light across the shutters.

Don't leave, Luna had said.

Arkady didn't plan to. He laid his head in the refrigerator and went to sleep.

He staggered down the hall to the bathroom mirror. The nose was no better and his forehead had the dark hue of a storm cloud. He dropped his pants to see the stripes of bruises on his legs.

Rest and water, he told himself. He ate a handful of aspirin, but didn't dare shower for fear of slipping, for fear of not hearing the front door, for fear of hurting.

Two steps and he was dizzy, but he reached the office. He had crawled from it when Luna began demonstrating his baseball skills to lead the sergeant away from the miserable list of Rufo's phone numbers. Oddly enough, the list was where Arkady had left it, in the Spanish-Russian dictionary, meaning that Luna either didn't know how to search or that he had come only for the picture of the Havana Yacht Club.

Since he had a little time now, Arkady thought that a real investigator would use this opportunity to learn Spanish and phone repair and try Daysi and Susy again. Instead, he slid down the wall to a seated position with the knife in his hand. He wasn't aware of sleeping until a backfire from the street jolted him awake.

Not that he was scared.

When he woke again morning light streamed into the flat. Arkady lifted his head as carefully as a cracked egg. The Malecon's backfires and shouts sounded loud and hot, amplified by the sun.

Two young uniformed policemen, one white, one black, patrolled the seawall. Although they carried radios, handguns and batons, their orders seemed entirely in the negative: don't lean against the wall, don't listen to music, don't fraternize with girls. Although they seemed to pay no special attention to the house, Arkady thought it would be a little wiser to escape in the evening.

He cleaned the carpet because it was too depressing to look at his own dried blood. The music below had changed to a work-theme salsa accompanied by a power drill; Arkady wasn't sure whether he was above a flat or a factory. Not all the blood came out of the rug; enough remained to suggest a mottled rose.

Luna could scrub the bat and Arkady was sure that the entire ball team was willing to swear the sergeant had been gamboling on a field with them. How many players were there on a side in baseball? Ten, twenty? More than enough witnesses. Bugai wouldn't lodge a protest. Even if he did find the nerve, to whom would he complain but Arcos and Luna? The only communication that Arkady could expect between the embassy and Luna was the question "Do you have a Zoshchenko working there? No? Thank you very much."

Arkady shaved for morale's sake, working around the damage on his face, and tried to comb his hair over the repair on his brow. When the nausea let up he celebrated by changing into a clean shirt and pants, so that he looked like a well-groomed victim of a violent crime. He also tied another knife to a broom to use as a spear and, giddy with achievement, peeked through the balcony shutters.

A PNR patrol car appeared about every forty minutes. In between, the patrolmen fought their own war against boredom, sneaking a cigarette, staring at the sea, watching Havana girls in their variety strut by in shorts and platform shoes.

In the late afternoon Arkady woke with an enormous thirst and a headache aggravated by the noise below. He had aspirin and water while he admired Pribluda's variety of pickled garlic heads and mushrooms. He just didn't feel like food at the moment, and when he turned away from the refrigerator he realized that Change had disappeared. The doll that had sat in the corner was gone.

When? During Luna's lecture on the finer points of baseball? With the sergeant or of Change's own volition? The missing doll was reminder enough that a patrol car was due in a minute and that Luna was overdue. Through the shutters he saw two black girls dressed in matching pedal pushers of citrus yellow teasing the PNRs.

Some vacations stretched and some seemed to fly by in a moment, not even time for a tan. Arkady decided that when man-sized dolls started walking around it was time for him to go, too, and camp at the embassy whether he was welcome or not. Or the airport. Moscow's airports, for instance, were full of people going absolutely nowhere.

Arkady put on his precious coat with the phone list and picture in one pocket and keys and knife in the other, and cleared the chair and bag of cans from the door. He still had Pribluda's car key. Who knew, he might be able to drive. As he tottered down, the stairs pulsated underfoot.

From the street door he saw the girls and the two PNRs bantering and posturing. Behind them the Cuban sky was gold edged in blue, more mixed day and night than a simple sunset. As a car limped by, my God, a two-seater Zaporozhets belching black smoke, Arkady slipped out into the long shadow of the arcade.

Chapter Eight

Wearing a cherry-red halter and denim shorts with a Minnie Mouse patch on a back pocket, Ofelia sat in an aquamarine '55 DeSoto outside the Casa de Amor and asked herself: Was it cigar fumes? Something in the rum? The two spoonfuls of sugar in cafe cubano that made men crazy? If she saw one more young Cuban girl on the arm of one more fat, balding, lisping Spanish tourist, Ofelia would kill.

She'd pulled enough of them in. Some were family men who had never before been unfaithful but suddenly found it unnatural to spend a week in Havana without a chica. More were the sort of human slugs who came for Cuban girls, as before they had traveled to Bangkok or Manila. It wasn't white slavery anymore, it was sex tourism. More efficient. And it wasn't white, anyway. What tourists in Cuba wanted were mulatas or negritas. The more northern the European, the more guaranteed that he was after the experience of a black girl.

The Casa de Amor was originally a motel, ten units with patios and sliding aluminum doors around a swimming pool. A heavyset woman in a housedress read a paperback in a metal chair on a lawn that had been paved over and painted green. In the office was a register and selections of condoms, beer, rum, Tropicola. The tip-off that something wrong was going on was that the pool water was clean. That was for tourists.

Traffic went in and out. At this point Ofelia was expert at telling a German (pink) from an Englishman (sallow) from a Frenchman (safari shorts), but what she was waiting for was a Cuban uniform. The law was useless. Cuban law excused a man for making sexual advances, assuming it was a masculine given, and put the burden of proof on Ofelia to prove that the girl initiated the approach. Now, any Cuban female over the age of ten knew how to incite a male into making the first overt proposal. A Cuban girl could make Saint Jerome make the first advance.

The police were worse than useless, they preyed on the girls, demanding money for letting them into hotel lobbies, for wandering around the marina, for allowing them to take tourists to places like the Casa de Amor, which was supposed to be for conjugal activities between Cuban couples who couldn't find sufficient privacy at home. Well, jineteras had the same problem and could pay more.

Traffic went in and out the office, the girls steering in their clients like little tugboats. Ofelia let them go. Someone in authority had arranged matters at the Casa de Amor, and what Ofelia wanted more than anything else was for some sleazy PNR commander to check his operation, see her in the car and invite her to join his string. A badge and gun rested in her straw bag. The look on his face when she brought them out? Vaya.

Sometimes Ofelia felt it was her against the world.

This one feeble little campaign of hers against an industry that was nearly official. The Ministry of Tourism discouraged any real crackdown on jineteras as a threat to Cuba's economic future. If they deplored prostitution, why did they always add that Cuba's were the most beautiful, healthiest prostitutes in the world?

The week before, she had picked up a twelve-year-old jinetera in the Plaza de Armas. One year older than Muriel. That was the future?

She hadn't given Renko a lot of thought until she gave up surveillance at the end of the day and visited the IML to check whether the dead Russian was tagged for transport and, when she found the body wasn't, looked for Bias. She found the director working at a laboratory counter.

"I'm looking into something," Bias said.» I am not investigating, but you made such a point about the syringe I think you especially will be interested."

His instrument was a camcorder modified to fit onto a microscope. The microscope eyepiece had been removed so that the camera could focus directly on a grayish paste spread on a specimen slide. A cable led from the camcorder to a video monitor. On its screen was a magnified version of the paste with gradations in color that ran from tarry black to chalk white. In front of the monitor was an embalming syringe.

"Rufo's needle?" Ofelia asked.

"Yes, the syringe stolen from here, from my own laboratory, and found in the hand of Rufo Pinero. Embarrassing but also informative because the tissue packed into a needle shaft, you know, is a core sample as good as a biopsy."

"You squeezed it out?"

"For curiosity's sake. Because we are scientists," Bias said as he moved the slide in minute increments under the camera.» Working backward: brain tissue, blood corresponding to Rufo's blood type, bone, cocheal material from the inner ear, skin and more blood and skin. What's interesting is the last blood, which actually would have been the first blood in the needle shaft. Tell me what you see."

The screen was a stew of cells, larger ones solid red, the smaller cells with white centers.

"Blood cells."

"Look again."

With Bias you always learned, she thought. On the second look, many of the red cells seemed crushed or exploded like overripe pomegranates.» There is something wrong with them. A disease?"

"No. What you see," he told her, "is a battlefront, a battlefront of whole blood cells, fragments of blood cells and clumps of antibodies. This blood is hemolyzed, it is at war."

"With itself?"

"No, this is a war that only occurs when two different blood types come into contact. Pinero's and...?"

"Renko's?"

"Most likely. I'd love to have a sample from the Russian."

"He says he wasn't touched."

"I say otherwise." He was definite, and she knew that when Bias was definite he was almost always right.

"Will you test for drugs?" she asked.

"No need. You weren't at the autopsy, but I can tell you that on Rufo's arm are the tracks of old injections. Do you know how much a new syringe is worth to a user? This proves Rufo had two weapons."

"But Renko is alive and Rufo is dead."

"I admit that is the baffling part."

Ofelia thought of the cut in Renko's coat. That was from the knife. Why wouldn't the Russian mention a wound from the needle?

Bias had registered the fact that she was still in her shorts and halter, black curls shining, a glow on her brown skin.» You know, there is a meeting next month in Madrid I have to attend. I could use someone to help with the projector and charts. Have you ever been to Spain?"

The doctor was popular with the women on his staff. In fact, an invitation to accompany him to an international conference on pathology was one of the prizes of the institute. He was admired, sometimes awe-inspiring, connected to the highest government elite, and all Ofelia could really say against him was that his lower lip, nested in his trim beard, was always wet. Somehow that was enough.

"It sounds nice but I have to help take care of my mother."

"Detective Osorio, I've asked you to two conferences now. Both important, both in fascinating places. You always say you have to take care of your mother."

"She's so frail."

"Well, I hope she gets well."

"Thank you."

"If you can't go, you can't go." Bias pushed aside the microscope and camera as if they were dinner gone cold. Ofelia's eyes, however, were fixed to the monitor, to a magnified terrain of warring blood cells where she saw a new answer.

Chapter Nine

There were more PNRs stationed on the Malecon than Arkady had expected. Taking the first street from the water, then avoiding a patrol car at the next corner, he found himself behind the block he had just left and at an alley with a flat-faced, vintage American Jeep in house-paint red. Behind it were two more Jeeps, green and white, each with new roll bars and upholstery. They shone under lamps strung out from a humming generator set inside open garage doors where a man in coveralls inspected an inner tube he held in a tub of water. He raised a white, amiable face and carried the tube to an air hose.

"Needs air," he said in Russian.

"I suppose so," Arkady said.

Inside, under a caged bulb hanging on a cord, a Jeep sat on ramps over a mechanic working on his back. As the engine revved a rubber hose taped to the exhaust pipe funneled white smoke to the alley. There were other signs of the garage's makeshift nature, the lack of work pits and hydraulic lifts. An engine hung on chains from an I beam above garage disorder, tanks, tool cabinets, oilcans, ammeters, tires, tire lever and well, a folding chair behind a worktable of mallets, a board of car rings on hooks, vises and clamps and greasy rags everywhere, a beaded curtain marking off a personal area, and Arkady realized that he was directly below Pribluda's parlor. A boom box vied for volume next to the Jeep. Since the hood was open, Arkady could see a transplanted Lada engine resonating like a pea in a can. A knit cap, smudged face and dirty beard rolled out from under the car to study Arkady from an upside-down angle.

"Russian?"

"Yes. Everyone can tell?"

"It's not so hard. Have an accident?"

"Kind of."

"In a car?"

"No."

The mechanic looked up at the object of his labor.

"If you need a car you could do worse than this. A '48 Jeep. Try to get parts for a '48 Jeep. The best I can do is a Lada 2101. I had to eliminate the differential and adapt the brakes. It's just the seals and valves now that are driving me crazy." His eyes strained to watch something he was reaching for under the car. The engine raced and he winced.» What a shit rain." He rolled back under and shouted, "See any tape?"

Arkady found wrenches, goggles, welding gauntlets, buckets of sand, but reported no tape.

"Mongo isn't there?"

"What is a Mongo?" Arkady wasn't sure he heard right because of the music.

"Mongo is a black man in coveralls and a green baseball cap."

"No Mongo."

"Tico? Man working on a tire?"

"He's there."

"He's looking for a leak. He'll be looking all day." After what Arkady had to assume were strong words in Spanish the mechanic said, "Very well, we'll perform heart surgery by going in through the ass. Find me a hammer and a screwdriver and get a pan ready."

Arkady handed him the tools.» You like Jeeps?"

The mechanic rolled under the car.» I specialize in Jeeps. Other American cars are too heavy. You have to put in Volga engines and Volgas are hard to find. I like a tough little Jeep with a little Lada heart that goes takatakataka. Are you sure you don't want a car?"

"No."

"Don't be put off by appearances. This island is like a Court of Miracles, like in medieval Paris, where the lame could walk and the blind could see because all these cars are still running after fifty years. The reason is that the Cuban mechanic is, by necessity, the best in the world. Could you turn the radio up?"

Unbelievably, the volume had another notch. Maybe this was a Cuban-made radio, Arkady thought. Meanwhile, the violent whacks from under the Jeep made his head throb.

"So you sell cars?" Arkady shouted.

"Yes and no. An old car from before the Revolution, yes. To buy a new car requires approval from the highest level, the very highest. The beauty of the system is that no car in Cuba is abandoned. It may look abandoned, but it's not." One more whack.» The pan, the pan, the pan!"

Arkady heard a glutinous gush. In a single move, the mechanic swung the pan under the Jeep in his place and shot out on his cart, rolling across the floor until he backhanded a column of tires and swung to a stop and sat up, grinning. He was a robust specimen with the smirk of near disaster, and looked so much like a test pilot after an interesting landing that it took Arkady a moment to notice that the mechanic's coverall legs ended at leather pads at the knees. When he wiped his face and removed his cap his hair rose into a salt-and-pepper mane too unique for Arkady not to recognize the short man from Pribluda's photograph of the Havana Yacht Club, simply far shorter than Arkady had expected.

"Erasmo Aleman," he introduced himself.» You're Sergei's friend?"

"Yes."

"I've been waiting for you."

Erasmo pushed his cart with wooden blocks edged in tire tread to maneuver around his garage at full speed, washing at a cut-down sink, wiping his hands at a barrel of rags. The radio was down to half throat.

"I saw a policewoman take you upstairs a couple of nights ago. You look ... different."

"Someone tried to teach me baseball."

"It's not your sport." Erasmo's eyes went from the bruise on Arkady's cheek to the Band-Aid on his head.

"Is this Sergei?" Arkady produced the snapshot of Pribluda with the Yacht Club.

"Yes."

"And?" Arkady pointed to the black fisherman.

"Mongo," Erasmo said, as if it were self-evident.

"And you."

Erasmo admired the picture.» I look very handsome."

"The Havana Yacht Club," Arkady read the back.

"It was a joke. If we'd had a sailboat we would have called ourselves a navy. Anyway, I heard about the body they found across the bay. Frankly, I don't think it's Sergei. He's too pigheaded and tough. I haven't seen him for weeks, but he could come back tomorrow with some story about driving into a pothole. There are potholes in Cuba you can see from the moon."

"Do you know where his car is?"

"No, but if it were around here I'd recognize it."

Erasmo explained that diplomatic license plates were black on white and Pribluda's was 060 016; 060 for the Russian embassy and 016 for Pribluda's rank. Cuban plates were tan for state-owned cars, red for privately owned.

"Let me put it this way," Erasmo said, "there are state-owned cars that will never move so that private cars can run. A Lada arrives here like a medical donor so that Willy's Jeeps will never die. Excuse me." He turned down a salsa that threatened to get out of hand.

"The reason for the radio is so the police can say they don't hear me, because you're really not supposed to make a garage out of your apartment. Anyway, Tico likes it loud."

Arkady thought he understood Erasmo, the type of engineer who labors happily below the deck of a sinking ship, lubricating the pistons, pumping out the water, somehow keeping the vessel moving while it settles in the waves.

"Your neighbors don't complain about the noise?"

"There's Sergei and a dancer in this building, both out all the time. On one side is a private restaurant, they don't want the police visiting because it costs them a free dinner at the least. On the other side lives a santero and the police certainly don't want to bother him. His apartment is like a nuclear missile silo of African spirits."

"A santeror

"As in Santeria."

"He's a friend?"

"On this island a santero is a good friend to have."

Arkady studied the picture of the Havana Yacht Club. There still was some message in it that he didn't understand. If he was going to be beaten over the head he wanted to know why.

"Who took the picture?"

"Someone passing by. You know," Erasmo said, "the first time I met Sergei, Mongo and I saw him standing next to his car on the side of the road, smoke pouring from the hood. Nobody stops for anyone with Russian plates, but I have a weak spot for old comrades, no? Pues, we repaired the car, only a matter of a new clamp on a hose, and as we talked I discovered how little of Cuba this man had seen. Cane fields, tractors, combines, yes. But no music, no dancing, no fun. He was like the walking dead. Frankly, I thought I'd never see him again. The very next day, though, I was on First Avenue in Miramar and I was fishing with a kite."

"With a kite?"

"A most beautiful way to fish. And I became aware that this Russian, this human bear from the day before, was standing on the sidewalk and watching. So I showed him how. I have to tell you that we never saw Russians alone, they always moved in groups, watching each other. Sergei was different. In our conversation he mentioned how much he wanted a place on the Male-con. I had the rooms upstairs I certainly wasn't using and one thing led to another." For a disabled man, Erasmo was constantly in motion. He rolled backward to a refrigerator and returned with two cold beers.» '51 Kelvinator, the Cadillac of refrigerators."

"Thanks."

"To Sergei," Erasmo proposed. They drank and his eyes tabulated the damage on Arkady, "That must have been a long flight of stairs. Nice coat. A little warm, no?"

"It's January in Moscow."

"That explains it."

"Your Russian is very good."

"I was in Cuban army demolitions in Africa assigned to work with Russians. I can say in ten different ways in Russian, 'Don't step on that fucking land mine.' But Russian boys are always stubborn, so he blew himself into very small pieces and I lost both legs. As a living symbol of internationalist duty and in place of my limbs I was honored with my very own Lada. From that Lada came two Jeeps and, voila, I had a garage. I have Him to thank."

"God?"

"El Comandante." Erasmo gestured as if stroking his beard.

"Fidel?"

"You're getting it. Cuba is a big family with a wonderful, caring, paranoid papa. Maybe that describes God, too, who knows? Where did you serve?"

"Germany. Berlin." For two years Arkady had monitored Allied radio transmissions from the roof of the Adlon Hotel.

"The rampart of socialism."

"The crumbling dike."

"Crumbled. Dust. Leaving nothing standing but poor Cuba, like a woman naked to the world."

They drank to that, the first food Arkady had in a day, the beer's alcohol a mild anesthetic. He thought of the black fisherman that Olga Petrovna had seen with Pribluda. There was time to go to the embassy later and hide away.

"I'd like to meet Mongo."

"Can't you hear him?" Erasmo turned the radio off and Arkady heard what could have been a rolling of stones in surf if stones shifted to a beat.

Walking in the santero's door, Arkady was unprepared. When Russians were taught about Cuba, all they read about was white men like Che and Fidel. What Russians learned about blacks were the Western crimes of imperialism and slavery. The only blacks they encountered in Moscow were the miserably cold African students imported to Patrice Lumumba University. The musicians in the santero's front room were different. They were black men with lined faces, dark glass and blackness wrapped around them, with little accent marks like white golf caps or dreadlocks or Mongo's green baseball cap, but with a mantle of shadow vibrant in the candlelight. The entire room floated in the watery light of forty or fifty candles placed on a side table and along the wainscoting. No more than settling in, a drummer lazily slapped the wooden boxes he sat on, two others cocked their heads to listen to tall, narrow drums as they tapped the heads and Mongo shook a gourd draped in seashells. Bells, sticks, rattles lay at his feet. He put the gourd down to pick up a metal plate that he hit with a steel rod to produce notes so fine and bright it took Arkady a while to recognize the instrument as the blade of a hoe. A tablecloth hung over a mirror. When Arkady tried to approach Mongo, a fat man in a cloud of cigar smoke chased him and Erasmo away.

"The santero," Erasmo told Arkady.» Don't worry, they're just warming up."

The mechanic had changed from his coveralls to a pleated white shirt he called a guayabera, "the very height of Cuban formality," but with telltale grease on his hands and his beard he looked like a corsair in a wheelchair. He pressed on through a kitchen and hallway until he led Arkady to a backyard where, under two spindly coconut palms crossed like an X, an old black woman in a white skirt and a Michael Jordan pullover stirred a cauldron simmering on coals. Her hair was gray and cropped as short as cotton.

Erasmo said, "This is Abuelita. Abuelita is not only everyone's grandmother, she is also the CDR for our block. The Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Informers usually, but we are blessed with Abuelita, who dutifully watches from her window from six in the morning and sees nothing all day long."

"Did she ever see Pribluda?"

"Ask her yourself, she speaks English."

"From before the Revolution." Her voice was young and whispery.» There were a lot of Americans and I was a very sinful girl."

"Did you ever see the Russian here?"

"No. If I saw him, then I would have to report him for renting from a Cuban, which is against the law. But he was a nice man."

A pig's head bobbed in the stew. A bottle came Erasmo's way; he took a long drink and shared it with Abuelita, who drank daintily and passed it to Arkady.

"What is it?" he asked her.

"Fighting rum." Her eyes took in the tape on his head.» You need it, no?"

Arkady had expected that by now he would be safely tucked away in the embassy basement with maybe a cup of tea. This was only a minor detour. He drank and coughed.

"What's in it?"

"Rum, chilies, garlic, turtle testicles."

More people arrived every minute, as many white as black. Arkady was used to the hushed assembly of the Russian Orthodox Church. Cubans pushed into the yard as if they were joining a party, a few with the somber devotion of worshipers, most with the bright anticipation of theatergoers. The only arrival without any expression was a pale, black-haired girl in jeans and a shirt that said "Tournee de Ballet." She was followed by a light-brown Cuban man with blue eyes, hair silver at the temples, in a formal, short-sleeved shirt.

"George Washington Walls," Erasmo introduced him.» Arkady."

Not Cuban. In fact, an American name that rang a bell. Behind Walls came a tourist with a maple-leaf pin and the last man Arkady wanted to see, Sergeant Luna. This was nightlife Luna, a splendid Luna in linen pants, white shoes and tank shirt that showed off the slabbed muscles of a triangular upper body. Arkady felt himself automatically cringe.

"My good friend, my very good friend, I didn't know you were feeling so good." Luna put one bare arm around Arkady and the other around a girl whose skin and mass of hair were the same amber color. She dazzled in spandex pants, halter, scarlet fingernails, and squirmed so much in Luna's grip Arkady wouldn't have been surprised if a ruby popped from her navel.» Hedy. Mujer mia." The sergeant leaned confidentially on Arkady's shoulder.» I want to tell you something."

"Please."

"There's no Zoshchenko at the Russian embassy."

"I lied. I'm sorry."

"But you did lie and you left the apartment, where I told you to stay, understand? Now you have a good time tonight. I don't want to see you spoil anybody's fun. Then you and I will have a talk about how you're going to the airport." Luna scratched his chin with a short ice pick. Arkady understood the sergeant's dilemma. Half of Luna wanted to be a good host, half of him wanted to plunge the ice pick into someone's face.

"I don't mind walking," Arkady said.

Hedy laughed as if Arkady had said something clever, which Luna didn't like, and he said something to her in Spanish that chased the color from her cheeks before turning his attention back to Arkady. Luna had a smile with broad white teeth and lots of pink gums.

"You don't mind walking?"

"No. I've seen so little of Cuba."

"You want to see more?"

"It seems a beautiful island."

"You're crazy."

"That could be."

The girl in the Tournee de Ballet shirt was named Isabel and she spoke excellent Russian. She asked Arkady whether it was true he was staying in Pribluda's apartment.» I live above him. Sergei was receiving a letter for me from Moscow. Did it come?"

Arkady was so disconcerted by Luna it took him a second to respond.» Not that I know of."

The sergeant seemed to have other duties. After consulting with Luna, Walls told his friend with the maple-leaf pin, "The real thing starts in a minute."

"I wish I spoke Spanish."

"You're Canadian, you don't need to. Investors don't need to," Walls assured him.» And all the investors are coming here. Canadians, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Swedes, even Mexicans. Everyone but Americans. This is the next big economic explosion on earth. Healthy, well-educated people. Technological base. Latin is hot. Get in while you can."

"He's been selling me for two days," the Canadian said.

"He sounds persuasive," Arkady said.

"Tonight," said Walls, "we've organized something folkloric for my friend from Toronto."

"I detest this," Isabel told Arkady.

"Isabel, we're speaking English for our friend now," Walls pleaded in the good-natured way of a man who actually means it.» I gave you English lessons. Even Luna can speak English. Can you speak a little English?"

"He says he'll take me to America," Isabel said.» He can't even take himself back to America."

"I think the show's about to begin." Walls ushered people back into the house as drumming hit a new intensity.» Arkady, I missed something. What are you doing here?"

"Just trying to fit in."

"Good job." Walls gave him a thumbs-up.

Each drum was different-a tall tumba, hourglass bata, twin congas-and each called to a different spirit of Santeria or Abakua, a tnaraca to rouse Change, a bronze bell for Oshun, it was all mixed up, like mixing drinks, a little dangerous, yes, Erasmo asked even as he explained. Mongo, eyes shining from wells of perspiration, beat on his blade, his call in a language that was not Spanish answered simultaneously by the drummers and their drums, as if each man possessed two voices. Everyone had crowded into the room and pressed against the walls. Erasmo rocked in his chair as if he could lift it up by the sheer power of his arms to tell Arkady this was the wealth of Cuba, its history of Spanish bolero and French quadrille colliding with the whole continent of Africa, creating a tectonic explosion. The boxes on which they sat and drummed proved the Cuban genius. In Africa the secretive Abakua had "talking drums," Erasmo said. When they arrived in chains to work on the docks of Havana and the slave masters here took their drums away, they simply beat on boxes, and presto! Havana was full of drums. The Cuban musician, like the Cuban fisherman, could not be stopped! All Arkady knew was that in Moscow he had heard a little Cuban music on tape; this was the difference between seeing a picture of the sea and standing knee-deep in the water. As Mongo's deep voice called in a language that was not Spanish, the rest of the room swayed and answered, congas carrying the rhythm, hands on boxes syncopating off the beat. Luna smiled and nodded, arms folded by the door. Arkady tried to plot an escape route to slither through, but Luna was always between him and the exit.

"You know that man?" Erasmo asked.

"We've met. He's a sergeant in the Ministry of the Interior. How can he be involved in a show like this?"

"Why not? Everybody does two things, they have to, there's nothing unusual about that."

"Arranging Santeria?"

Erasmo shrugged.» That's Cuba today. Anyway, it's not really Santeria, it's more Abakua. Abakua's different. When my mother heard there were Abakua in the neighborhood, she'd pull me off the street because she thought they were collecting little white children to sacrifice. Now she lives in Miami and she still thinks so."

"But this is a santero's house, you said."

"You don't do Santeria at night," Erasmo said as if it were self-evident, "that's when the dead are out."

"The dead are out right now?"

"It's a crowded island at night." Erasmo smiled at the idea.» Anyway, Luna must have connections with the Abakua. Everyone is into Santeria or Abakua or something."

"His friend, George Washington Walls. Why is that name familiar?"

"He was famous once. The radical, the hijacker."

Very famous once, Arkady realized. He remembered a newspaper picture of a young American in an Afro and bell-bottom trousers burning a small flag at the top of an airplane ramp.

"What kind of investments can Walls offer in Cuba? When the dead aren't walking?"

"Good question."

Arkady had missed the point when the rhythm had changed and Luna and his golden friend, Hedy, had taken center stage, dancing not so much separately as skin to skin, hips rolling, the sergeant's large hands sliding around her back as she arched, eyes and lips bright, slipping away only to invite him even closer. Arkady did not know if this was religious or not; he did know that if it took place in a Russian church the icons would have fallen to the floor. As everyone else joined in Walls maneuvered Hedy away from Luna and toward the Canadian, who danced as if he were playing ice hockey without a stick. Now it was even harder to reach the door.

Erasmo pushed Arkady.» Get out there."

"I don't dance." He was doing well just standing, Arkady thought.

"Everyone dances." The rum seemed to hit Erasmo all at once. He rocked back and forth in his wheelchair to the beat until he locked his chair, slid off the seat and danced with Abuelita like a man wading energetically through heavy surf. He said to Arkady, "No legs and I still move better than you."

Embarrassing but true, Arkady thought. It was also true that, in his condition, Arkady found the drumming and darkness and mixed smells of smoke, rum and sweat as overwhelming as an overstoked fire. The drums spoke together, apart, together again, breathless, syncopated, off the beat. As Mongo shook the gourd the shells strung across its belly rippled like a snake. The chant went from call and response to Mongo in his dark glasses, his voice volcanically deep. He swayed, hands a blur. The rhythm spread, divided, split again like rolling lava. Maybe it was the effect of fighting rum on an empty stomach. Arkady slipped into the hall and found that Isabel followed.

"I didn't study classical dance for this," she told Arkady.

"It's not the Bolshoi, but I don't think the Bolshoi does this sort of thing very well."

"Do you think I'm a whore?"

"No." He was taken aback. The girl looked more like a candlelit saint.

"I'm with Walls because he can help me, I admit. If I were a real whore, though, I'd learn Italian. Russian is no use at all."

"Maybe you're a little hard on yourself."

"If I were hard on myself, I'd cut my throat."

"Don't do that."

"Why not?"

"I've noticed that few people are good at cutting their own throat."

"Interesting. A Cuban man would have said, 'Oh, but it's such a pretty throat.' Everything with them leads to sex, even suicide. That's why I like Russians, because with them suicide is suicide."

"Our talent."

Isabel looked thoughtfully aside. She had the emaciated allure of a Picasso, he thought. Blue Period. Wonderful, the two most depressed people in the house had connected like magnets. He caught Walls's anxious glances in their direction. At the same time he noticed that Luna remained by the door.

"How long are you going to be in Havana?" Isabel asked.

"A week, then back to Moscow."

"Is it snowing there now?" She rubbed her arms as if imagining them cool.

"I'm sure it is. Your Russian is extraordinarily good."

"Yes? Well, in my family Moscow was like Rome to Catholics, and, before the Special Period, to speak Russian was useful. Are you a spy like Sergei?"

"It seems to have been a great secret. No."

"Claro, he isn't a very good spy. He says if they needed a good agent in Havana they never would have sent him. He was going to help me get to Moscow and from there, of course, I could go anywhere. Maybe you can help me." She scribbled an address on a piece of paper and gave it to him.» We will talk tomorrow morning. Can you come just at that time?"

Before Arkady could beg off, Walls joined them.» You're missing everything," he told Isabel.

"I wish I could," she said.» We were talking about Sergei."

"Were you?" he asked Arkady.» Where is the good comrade?"

"A good question."

Shouts erupted in the living room, and a moment later Hedy rushed past them through the hall. The santero and the Canadian followed.

"Oh, no," Walls said.» I didn't mean this real."

"What do you mean?" Arkady asked.

"She's possessed."

Isabel was unfazed.» It happens all the time. This whole island is possessed."

The backyard was dark, but Hedy had kicked over the soup cauldron and spun on the coals as sparks nested in her hair. She swung out of the fire, her spandex dulled by ashes, golden hair pulled into tufts, while the santero ran after, trying to pull something invisible from her body. The Canadian looked ready to retreat to someplace tame and far away. As Luna burst into the yard the santero spread his arms helplessly and put Hedy between himself and Luna.

Erasmo squeezed his chair through and told Arkady, "Luna says he is going to kill the santero if he doesn't get the spirit out of Hedy. The santero says he can't."

"Maybe he should try again." Arkady saw the ice pick in Luna's hand.

As Luna yanked Hedy aside, her halter strap broke and one breast spilled out like a loose eye. Luna seized the santero by the neck and bent him belly-up between the trees. The Canadian bolted through the crowd as it poured into the yard and pushed Arkady forward. No one else moved except Abuelita, who shoveled her hands into the fire, rose to her toes and poured a bright stream of live coals over Luna's back. As Luna wheeled on her Arkady caught the sergeant's wrist, which was like grabbing the iron wheel of a locomotive, bent it back and up in the "come along" grip as taught to the Moscow militia and ran Luna headfirst into the wall. Luna bounced off, leaving a pink imprint on the cement. Blood ruby-spotted his white shoes.

Arkady decided he had not swung the sergeant hard enough.

"Now you're fucked de verdad." Luna wasn't even breathing hard, he'd barely started.

"Parate." A small woman with a needle-sharp voice stepped in between. Since she was in a skimpy top and shorts and not a PNR uniform, it took Arkady a moment to recognize his new colleague, Detective Oso-rio. Where she had come from and how long she had been taking in the scene with her grim little gaze he didn't know. A straw bag hung from one hand and in the other was a Makarov 9-mm. He recognized the gun right away. She didn't raise it or aim it, but it was there. Luna recognized the gun, too. He lifted his hands to signify not surrender or shyness but an awareness of growing complications, his own duties as an officer, and that he was done only for the time being.

"Truly fucked," Luna told Arkady on his way out.

"You okay?" Walls asked Arkady.» I'm sorry about this. Typical Cuban party. Too many spirits in one place. Now you'll have to excuse me, my investor has a head start."

Abuelita dusted ashes from her palms. In the middle of the yard Hedy looked down at her torn halter and the dirt on her shiny shorts and burst into tears. Arkady went into the house to look for Mongo and the drummers, but they had all left. Osorio followed him with an expression that said fools were multiplying.

Chapter Ten

While he and Osorio put Erasmo to bed Arkady looked around at what the mechanic afforded himself for living quarters: a small space enlarged by the fact that his cot, counter, table and chairs were all cut to half height. On a pillow of gold African cloth was a collection of military medals and campaign ribbons. The photographs on the wall reflected more glory than Erasmo had let on. A hospital-bed scene of Erasmo being visited by two men in military fatigues-a tall, swarthy man in aviator glasses who would have passed as Armenian in Russia, the other older with a full gray beard and wiry brows, unique and unmistakable, the Comandante himself. Neither man wore officer's insignia on his cap or shoulders; this was, after all, an egalitarian army. Castro was as puffed with pride as a father. The second visitor seemed to focus more ruefully on Erasmo's shortness of limb.

"The Cuban general in Angola," Osorio said.

Another picture showed the same distinguished friends on the deck of a fishing boat, this time with Erasmo strapped into the fighting chair. Family pictures displayed friendly, affluent men and women at swimming pools, bridge tables, dancing. Or children on baseball fields, bicycles, ponies. And the entire family in formal suits and ballroom gowns at champagne receptions and Christmas parties. In one wide photomontage they and hundreds more like them spread up and down the grand double stairway of a white mansion.

"He'll sleep a long time," Osorio said.

" 'Unconscious' is the word."

Just as Luna had been the last man Arkady wanted to encounter, the last place he'd expected to see again was Pribluda's apartment, but at Osorio's insistence he climbed the steps with her. Although he thought he had tidied up fairly well, as soon as he turned on the light the detective noticed a difference.

"Dried blood on the carpet. What happened here?"

"You don't know? You work with Luna and Arcos."

"Only for this case because Russians are involved."

"You weren't surprised to see the sergeant come after me with an ice pick?"

"All I saw was you throwing him into a wall."

"It's a tense relationship. After all, he did beat me with a baseball bat. I think it was a baseball bat, he said it was."

"He hit you?"

"You know nothing about that?"

"This is a serious charge."

"Other places, not here. Here, my experience is, not much is investigated."

"As a matter of fact," Osorio said, "I did ask your friend, Erasmo, before he passed out, what happened to you. He said you told him you fell down the stairs." See, Arkady thought, that was the penalty of ever telling less than the truth. Osorio's eye fell on the empty corner chair.» What did you do with Change?"

"What did I do with Change?" Arkady asked.» The doll? Only in Cuba would this question come up. I don't know. Either Luna took him or Chango left on his own. How did you find me?"

"I was looking for you. You weren't here, so I followed the drums."

"Naturally." Arkady touched the cut on his hairline to feel if it had split open.

Osorio set her bag on the parlor table.» Let me see your head. You cleaned up all the other evidence of this so-called attack."

"Detective, I've been here three days and I've seen the PNR excuse itself from two violent deaths. I don't think you're going to investigate mere assault."

She pulled his head down, brusquely turned it one way and then the other and ran her fingers over his scalp.» What do you claim Luna said?"

"The sergeant mentioned that he'd prefer I stayed off the street."

"Well, you didn't."

He winced as she parted the hair around a cut.» I didn't get far."

"What else?"

"Nothing." Arkady wasn't about to strip and show her the bruises on his back and legs and he wasn't going to hand over the Yacht Club picture so it could be delivered straight to the sergeant. That he still had it was the luck of tossing his passport with the picture inside a shoe.

Osorio released his head.» You should see a doctor."

"Thanks, that's helpful."

"Don't be insulting. Listen, I'm only saying that since there's no evidence here that you haven't compromised and your story has changed already once and since officers of the Ministry of the Interior do not beat visitors from other countries, even from Russia, another explanation is more likely. Considering the blows you took to your head, you may not be responsible for what you say."

He wondered why Osorio had insisted on coming to the apartment. He also wondered why she was dressed like a vamp with platform shoes and carrying a big straw bag.» Detective, what are you here for?"

"Because I want you to go home alive."

While he tried to come up with an answer to that the lights in the room faded and went dark. He stepped out to the balcony and saw that the problem wasn't only in the apartment; an entire arc of buildings along the Malecon had gone black.

Arkady fed Pribluda's turtle by the illumination of Rufo's lighter and then lit a cigarette and inhaled wonderful, pain-soothing fumes. Osorio sat in the dark at the table.

"A power outage," Osorio said.

"I know the feeling."

"You should stop smoking."

"That's my biggest problem?" He found candles above the sink, lit the fattest one and joined the detective.

"Besides Sergeant Luna and your friend downstairs, who else did you know at the santero's?"

"No one," Arkady said.» I'd heard of Walls."

"Everyone in Cuba knows George Washington Walls."

"Luna arranged the show for him. I think Luna's going to arrange a show for me. You may not be safe here." Arkady had not intended to stay in the flat himself. She reached into her bag and laid out a Makarov 9-mm, the same police issue as in Moscow.» Would you have used that on Luna?"

"He knows I have the bullets. The patrolmen you see on the street, they have guns but they don't have bullets."

"There's a comfort." He saw her lay a toiletry kit by the gun.» What is that for?"

"I'm staying the night."

"I appreciate the gesture, Detective, but you must have some place to be. A home, a family, a beloved pet."

"Are you offended to have a woman protect you? Is that it? Do Russians suffer from machismo?"