Havana Bay

Chapter Sixteen

A pair of Chihuahuas led Arkady down the path, rolling soulful eyes at him, prancing around a poinsettia here, sniffing a headstone there, like a pair of tiny landlords until they led him under the hanging pods of a tamarind tree where three Chinese, stripped to the waist, were scrubbing a marble lid they had lifted off a sarcophagus. Erasmo perched inside the tomb with a sack of tools.

"There aren't a lot of jobs where having no legs is an advantage," Erasmo said.» Working in a coffin happens to be one. You don't look happy."

Arkady said, "I've just come from the Havana Yacht Club. You told me the Havana Yacht Club was a joke, just a few fishermen, you, Mongo and Pribluda. But the picture was taken at the Yacht Club and you never mentioned that the club actually existed."

Erasmo frowned, dug his hand into his beard and scratched.» It does and it doesn't. The building is there, the beach is there, but it's hardly a club anymore. It's complicated."

"Like Cuba?"

"Like you. Why didn't you tell me you killed Rufo Pinero? I had to hear it on the street."

"It was an accident."

"An accident?"

"Of a sort."

"Yes, that's like saying Russian roulette is a game of a sort. So we do the same things in different ways. Anyway, I didn't lie to you. We did call ourselves the Havana Yacht Club as a joke. It was funny at the time."

"Some club. Pribluda may be dead, Mongo may be missing and you may be the last living member."

"I admit, it's not funny when you say it."

"Unless there are others. Are there any other members you haven't told me about?"

"No."

"Rufo?"

"No."

"Luna?"

"No. The three of us, that's all. You know, you're pissing me off and you're making my friends very uneasy."

The Chinese followed the conversation with an anxiety matched by their lack of comprehension. Erasmo coolly introduced Arkady to them, brothers named Liu with spiky black hair and cigarettes gripped between their teeth. Arkady took in the cemetery's quiet anarchy, a marble cross leaning on a Buddhist altar, tablets inscribed with Chinese characters and wrapped in morning glory, headstone photographs of the departed that peered through scummy ovals of glass. A nice place to die, Arkady thought, quiet, cool, picturesque.

"So this is the Chinese Cemetery?"

"Yes, it is," Erasmo said.» I told the Lius you were an expert on fighting crime. That's why you're so angry. It makes them feel much better."

"There's a lot of crime in a cemetery?"

"In this one, yes."

Now that Arkady noticed, many of the tombs were cracked and reinforced with cement seams and steel bands. Some of the disrepair had occurred over time and under the pressure of spreading roots, but there were also signs of vandalism, marble replaced by cinder blocks or a padlock on a vault's brass door, probably not to keep the dead in, Arkady realized.

"Cubans don't like the Chinese?"

"Cubans love the Chinese, that's the problem. And some Cubans need lucky bones."

"For what?"

"Ceremonies. If they want money they dig up the bones of a banker, if they want to get well they dig up the bones of a doctor."

"That makes sense."

"Unfortunately for the Chinese, their bones are supposed to be the luckiest. So this is where certain people come with their crowbars and shovels, which is very upsetting to Chinese families that revere their ancestors. Dead or alive, they want granddad in one piece. Little did I know that demolition expertise would prove so useful in civilian life. How did you know where to find me?"

"Tico maintained radio silence but I got him to write it out." Arkady looked down at the coffin, where Erasmo had laid a drill, bell, welder's goggles and surgical mask on a towel. From an athletic bag Erasmo took a vial of something fine-grained and black.» Gunpowder?"

"Just a touch. Life would be boring without it." Taking a break, the brothers Liu sliced up a papaya and sat down between tombstones to eat. The Chihuahuas curled up with the lions. Was this the "Chinese contact" that Pribluda had been talking about, a place to come for lucky bones?

The problem was that he seemed to be going in reverse, knowing less all the time rather than more. He didn't know how or where Pribluda died, let alone why. The circle of Pribluda's acquaintances constantly expanded, but none of them had anything to do with the price of sugar, supposedly what the colonel had been investigating. Arkady had never before encountered such a variety of pristinely unrelated people and events: men in inner tubes, Americans on the run, a madman from Oriente, a ballerina, now Chinese bones and Chihuahuas. The truth was, Arkady thought, that apart from grave-robbing there was no suggestion of any crime at all, except for the attacks on him, and that was an error in timing; all they'd had to do was wait. Now? His head was clearing, the bruises on his legs had passed from blue to hopeful green, and the very shapelessness of evidence was interesting. He needed it to be interesting because while he was engaged he was like a man walking on deep black water. He needed to keep going.

Erasmo pulled the mask over his nose and goggles over his eyes before lifting a can with a plastic lid.

"More gunpowder?" Arkady asked.

"A different explosive." Erasmo lifted the lid and shut it at once, as if taking a peek at plutonium.» Ground habaneros, the hottest chilies on earth. I defused all sorts of bombs in Africa. Bombs that looked like doorknobs, alarm clocks, toilet seats, toy planes, dolls. You have to be creative." He upended the empty can between his thighs and drilled through its bottom. Erasmo poured in gunpowder and tamped it down.

"In your room I saw some pictures of you with …" Arkady tried out the gesture of the make-believe beard for the Name That Could Not Be Uttered just to feel Cuban.

"Fidel," Erasmo said warily.

"And another officer in glasses."

"Our commander in Angola."

"You won a lot of military decorations."

"The ribbons? Oh, yes. Well, what would I rather have, the ribbons or my legs? I'll let you guess. I used to be so proud. Fidel said we would go to Africa and I saluted and said, 'At your orders, Comandante!' I didn't know he would be giving orders after we got there. Fidel was here in Havana looking at a map of Angola. We were in hills and rivers that didn't exist on Fidel's map, but it didn't matter, he gave orders to set up our forces wherever his finger landed. Sometimes we had to ignore him. When he found out he was furious. There was one little village, a speck that must have been on his map. He said we had to take it and use it as a battalion command post. We said it was just a couple of huts, a garage and a well. We could go around it and come back whenever we wanted, but Fidel said that unless the village was taken in twenty-four hours every battalion officer would be charged with treason. So, Tico and Luna and a boy named Richard and I went in to clear the way. Maybe this is a boring story?"

"No."

"Very well. The village was strung like a Christmas tree. Little plastic mines to pop through your foot. Bouncing Betties to cut you off at the waist. Claymores with trip wires to something as insignificant as an empty can you'd kick out of your way. There was a car in the garage, not with the key, that would have been too obvious. A '54 Ford station wagon with real wooden panels. You can't imagine how valuable a vehicle was in country like that. But just stepping into the garage meant digging up a whole daisy chain of little mines. Then to look underneath the car first with a mirror and then on your back. To pop the hood with a wire from a distance, to inspect the engine and make sure every wire's automotive, open the glove compartment, the trunk, power windows, seats, hubcaps. It was in beautiful condition. We cleared everyone else out of the garage so I could cross the wires. It started right off. It ran out of gas right away, but the battery was good and everything seemed fine until Richard kicked a tire. That was one place I hadn't looked, in the tire." Erasmo pushed a cardboard disk over the gunpowder.

"That was the end of Richard. Plus, the bumper flew off spinning like a helicopter rotor and caught Tico. We radioed for the ambulance. On the way it hit a hole where we had dug out a mine and drove right into the minefield. Somehow it didn't touch a mine but that's where the ambulance was stuck while Tico was bleeding to death until Luna picked him up and ran right through the mines to the ambulance. And that's how we liberated a pisshole in Angola on special orders from the Comandante."

"And how Tico became careful about tires."

"He's very careful about tires."

Erasmo dropped the can and Arkady retrieved it.

"Can I help?"

"No, thanks," Erasmo said.» Do you know the largest minefield in the world? The American base here at Guantanamo, thanks to the U.S. Marines and, especially, our Russian friends, who designed our side of the minefield and then took the plans home. No more help, please." He opened the can of chilies and poured them into the larger can.» Aha! When a grave robber opens this, there will be a deadly cloud awaiting him. Coughing, crying, sneezing, temporary blindness is, I think, a very humane way of dealing with grave robbers. As/, a Cuban solution to a Cuban problem."

"Luna saving Tico is a different picture of the sergeant."

"No, it's not. It's just the other side. People here have two sides, what you see and the opposite."

"It's complicated?"

"It's real. You don't understand. Cuba was something. We had idealism, and we stood up to the most powerful, most vindictive country on earth. Fidel was great. But Cuba isn't a big enough country for him, and the rest of us can't be heroes forever. Stop asking questions, Arkady. For your own sake, go home."

The Lius looked up expectantly; they may not have understood the words but they could tell when a conversation had wound to an end. The Chihuahuas blinked their marble-sized eyes, then tore after a lizard. They chased it up a bougainvillea vine to the peak of a waist-high pagoda and when the youngest Liu laughed and performed a karate kick, Arkady was reminded of something else.

"Are there any martial arts dojos in Havana?"

Erasmo said, "Chinatown."

You had to block things out, Ofelia thought. She ignored the technicians collecting their small evidence first-clots, hairs, night bag, glasses, bottles of Havana Club-working their way up to plastic bags for bed-sheets and clothes. She paid no attention to the photographers working around the female sprawled in bed like a Naked Maja. All her focus was on Dr. Bias. His hands in waxy rubber gloves, he bent over the body by the door to show her why, although the male was painted in his own blood and the track on the carpet showed his agonizing, futile progress to the door, the dying man didn't cry for help.

"The radio was on. People who take these rooms, as you told me, tend to make noise, and who knows how much alcohol they consumed? His carotid and peroneal arteries were both cut-however, he was alive enough to try to cover up while he was hacked by the machete. He was alive enough to make it to the door, probably after his assailant left. But he never called out. Why? It wasn't because of the radio." With the tip of a pencil he probed a dark spot under the dead man's Adam's apple and slid the pencil halfway in.» A hole in the trachea. With a hole in your windpipe you cannot say a word. There is no such wound on the neck of the female, she had her throat cut pure and simple. But the first blow to the male, I am sure, was this puncture."

"Not made by a machete."

"No, the wound is perfectly round. Still, this sort of mess is typical of the 'crime of passion.' You did well to keep the hotel calm, and you were lucky to find the documents the way you did."

Which was Bias's sly way of saying he knew she had been ill in the toilet. The doctor was at ease with death in a way she, it was becoming clear, never would be. A body that had been cut up was a flower in bloom, releasing a smell that lodged like beads of blood in the sinuses and a taste that coated the tongue. All the same, she had made a sketch and notes to hand over to whomever the Ministry of the Interior sent over; this was no longer a case of prostitution, and the ministry didn't generally leave violent crimes involving foreign visitors to mere detectives of the PNR.

Bias said, "I'll examine the sexual aspect, too. She was a prostitute."

Ofelia looked at the bed. For a girl with her head half sliced off Hedy looked remarkably serene, neatly edged in blood, sheets hardly rumpled.» The killer didn't have sex with her."

"You kill a girl in bed, that's sexual to me."

A little insight there, Ofelia thought.

"I saw the female last night at a Santeria ceremony."

"What is the matter with you? You have so much potential, why do you indulge in such mumbo jumbo?"

"The girl was possessed."

"Ridiculous."

"You've never been possessed?"

Bias wiped his pencil.» Of course not."

"It happened to me once. They had to tell me later." The entire night had remained a blank to her.

"Was this Italian at the ceremony?"

"No."

"Fine. Then she came somewhere else later and picked him up here. If I were you I wouldn't get into Santeria unless there is a very good reason. We are at a hotel that, wrongly or rightly, specializes in tourists. Should we tell everyone there are religious fanatics going from room to room killing people?"

"What do you think the Russian will say?"

"Renko? Why should he say anything?"

"He was at the ceremony last night. He saw the girl."

"He'll still say nothing because we won't tell him. Do you think the Russians would inform us of every murder?" Bias ran the waxy fingers of his gloved hand down the back of the Italian's legs, hamstrung so that the dead man had to drag them as he crawled.» Renko is not our colleague. We don't know really what he is. The fact that an investigator would come to Havana is a sign of something else going on. A better photograph of Pribluda is all I want from him."

The photograph of Renko at the airport resided in her pocket. With all the confusion in the room there was still time to rediscover it.

She asked, "Did Sergeant Luna ever show you a picture of Renko?"

"No." Bias ran his hand up the dead man's arms.» Right-handed by the musculature. Lovely fingernails."

A chevron of deep cuts down the dead man's back indicated that the attacker had stood over him and hacked right and left. Ofelia considered mentioning the two round bruises she'd found on Renko's arm, but it seemed somehow a breach of trust.

"Perhaps we should reexamine the dead Russian. Is it possible he was struck by lightning? It did rain that week."

"Only there was no lightning on the bay. I'm ahead of you. I checked the meteorological record for lightning and the body for burns. Don't worry about Renko." Bias pinched the arm for stiffness.» I have dealt with Russians. Every one, including women with whom I was intimate, was a spy. Each was the exact opposite of what he or she claimed to be." He tucked a smile into his beard, and at that moment looked to Ofelia like a man too fond of his memories.» What does Renko claim to be?"

"A fool."

"His case may be an exception."

Bias turned the body onto its back. Loss of blood ended in stupefaction, and although his hair twisted in matted strips, the expression on the Italian's face was of someone yielding to sleep. Ofelia brushed hair from an oblong scab at the hairline.

"It looks like he bumped his head a few days ago," Bias said.» The least of his problems now."

"Who does he remind you of?"

"No one."

"How would you describe him?"

Bias cocked his head like a carpenter delivering an estimate.» European, forty to fifty, medium height, hair black, eyes brown, high forehead, incipient widow's peak."

"Renko?"

"Now that you mention it."

They had to shift the body from the door as an investigating team from the ministry arrived, led by Captain Arcos and Sergeant Luna. Arcos gawked at the body on the floor. Luna went to the foot of the bed and stared down at Hedy. His skin went gray, and as his lips spread he breathed through his teeth while Ofelia delivered her statement. She wanted to ask, Where is your ice pick? Instead she slipped away while Bias took over.

The Casa de Amor had emptied. At the sight of PNR Ladas and an IML forensics van with scales of justice painted on the door the Casa's guests returned just long enough to grab their overnight bags and run. At the bottom of the stairs Ofelia found a hose and washed first the soles of her shoes and then her face and hands.

The criminal laboratory of the Ministry of the Interior was in the Antiguo Hotel Via Blanca, a nineteenth-century brownstone palace erected in an erroneous burst of Spain's imperial confidence just before the first Cuban Revolution. A somber Iberian mood still resided in the building's dark walls and narrow windows.

While Bias's Institute de Medicina Legal carried out autopsies the laboratories of Minint analyzed drugs and arson, ballistics and explosives, fingerprints, documents and currency. The work was done for the PNR, but the uniform was military fatigues.

"Fidel loves uniforms," her mother always claimed.» Put someone in uniform and you've created an idiot who watches his neighbors and says, 'How did he get that dollar? How did she get those chickens?'" Her mother would laugh so hard she'd have to waddle to the water closet.» 'Socialismo o Muerte?' Please inform Fidel it's not 'either-or.'"

In the evidence room, weapons were labeled and kept on shelving that on the underside still bore stencils of the FBI. The rifles were farmers' shotguns; anything military was recirculated back to the army or militia. Enough machetes to clear a cane field, axes and knives and homemade curiosities: a mortar barrel made from bamboo, sugarcane shaved into spears. On opposite shelves lay incidental evidence: bagged clothes, envelopes of rings and earrings, centavos in jars, shoes, sandals, a freshly tagged black swimming flipper and an inner tube.

Someone had rinsed the flipper, and when Ofelia held it to the light she saw the faintest charring inside the strap, which could have been her imagination or Renko's influence. She replaced the flipper carefully, as if putting off a question.

She went to the records room, where a haze of paper dander hung under fluorescent lights. The two working computers at the table were being used, but in a carrel behind stacks of volumes tied with faded ribbon she found a third, where she pulled up the file on her friend i Maria.

Maria Luz Romero Holmes, age: 22, address: Vapor 224, Vedado, La Habana, charged with solicitation outside that address. Jose Romero Gomez, 22, same address, charged with assault. There was more: marital and educational status, employment, and the statement of the witness.

I was walking up Vapor to the university when this woman (indicating Maria Romero) came out her door and asked the time. Then she asked where I was-igoing and placed her hand on my member. I said, to the university. When she tried to arouse me I said no, I wasn't interested, I didn't have the time. That's' when she began screaming and this man (indicating JosЈ Romero) rushed out of the house, cursing and swinging a lead pipe at me. I defended myself until the police came along.

Signed,

Rufo Pinero Perez

It was Rufo Pinero's name that had prodded her memory. A former boxer innocently headed to the university. For a lecture on poetry? Ofelia wondered. Nuclear science?

The police photograph of Maria showed her wet with tears but defiant. In his photograph her husband's eyes were dark slits, his nose split, his jaw swollen large as a gourd.

The statement of the witness is corroborated by this arresting officer, who was also threatened and assaulted by the Romero couple in the course of his duty.

Signed,

Sergeant Facundo Luna, PNR

Ofelia remembered how Maria had said a plastic sheet had been placed over the rear seat of the police car because Luna knew he would be transporting people covered in blood, and how Rufo had taken cigars out of the police car's glove compartment, cigars he had put in beforehand so they wouldn't be damaged during the scuffle. Luna and Rufo planned ahead.

She thought she knew what had happened at the Casa de Amor. Bias had suggested a crime of passion, a Cuban boyfriend who killed the Italian and the Cuban girl in a fit of uncontrollable anger. But what Ofelia saw in her mind was Franco Mossa and Hedy drinking in the dark, dancing to the radio, laughing. It wasn't likely Hedy spoke much Italian, but how much did she need? She retired to the bathroom, emerged undressed, a busty honey-colored girl. She slipped into bed, and as he took his turn in the bathroom she slipped right out again and opened the balcony door for a friend. The Italian turned off the bathroom light and, half blind, walked into the darkened bedroom. Hedy couldn't have seen much. She'd have heard the sucking sound of the ice pick as it was pulled from the Italian's neck, though. What had Hedy thought they were up to? Extortion was the usual game with tourists. She would have been silent and surprised when the machete whistled out of the dark and cut her head half off her shoulders. The killer must have been as bloody as a slaughterhouse wall when he was done. The question was, Why the photograph of the Russian? Who had carried it, Hedy or her friend? Was there a moment when he turned on the bathroom light and saw to his own surprise that he had butchered an Italian named Franco, not a Russian named Renko? Since she was on the machine already, she ran a search for other connections between Rufo Pinero and Facundo Luna. Besides Maria's case, two files showed up. Four years earlier a group of criminals had gathered to distribute drugs under the pretense of organizing a political opposition. When members of the community became aware of this plan, they burst into the ringleader's house and demanded he surrender the drugs. In a scuffle provoked by the ringleader and his family, two patriots who had to defend themselves were Rufo Pinero and Facundo Luna. More recently a cell of so-called democrats had staged a rally with the true intent of releasing infectious diseases, only to be physically barred by vigilant citizens, including the alert Luna and Pinero.

Ofelia felt that Cubans should be allowed to fight their enemies because the gangsters in Miami would stop at nothing: assassination, bombing, propaganda. For Cuba to even exist took vigilance. However, the role of Rufo and Facundo in these cases made Ofelia uneasy. She turned off the computer half wishing she hadn't turned it on in the first place.

On her way out, she discovered the officers who had been working at the table were gone. Sitting alone was Sergeant Luna. She was surprised he had left the Casa de Amor already. His arms were crossed, stretching his shirt across his chest. His face hung in the shadow of his cap as he worked his jaw from side to side. His chair was turned, half blocking the way to the door.

Suddenly she was back in Hershey, in the cattle fields where the egrets came from their roosts along the river. The birds were as white as shavings of soap, and as they crossed the carbon-black smoke that lifted from the chimneys of the sugar mill her anxiety was for the egrets' purity. Nevertheless they would float in and stalk the cattle fields, impervious to dirt. She was so busy watching them that she didn't notice that the bull had been let into the field, and the person who had led the bull in hadn't seen her. The bull saw her, though.

The bull was the largest animal she'd ever seen. Milky white with downward twisting horns, creamy curls between the horns, shoulders bloated with muscle, a pink sac down to his knees, eyes red with the indolent torpor of a violent king. Not dumb, however, not in this situation. Because he ruled. And he waited for her to make her move.

But something distracted it. Ofelia turned her head and saw a figure in black that had jumped the fence and was waving and hopping from foot to foot. It was the town priest, a pale man who had always seemed so sad. His cassock flapped around him as he laughed and goaded the bull, ran in a circle around it and threw clods until it charged. Lifting his cassock, the priest took the longest strides Ofelia had ever seen. He dived over the fence ahead of the bull, which drove a deep-rooted post half over and went on savaging the wood in frustration while Ofelia raced to the part of the fence nearest her. She remembered her first gulp of air from the safety of the other side and how she didn't stop running until she was home.

Luna said, "Captain Arcos asked if you gave us all the evidence you found in the motel?"

"Yes."

Luna shifted so that his bulk blocked her even more and let his thick arm hang slack.

"Everything?"

"Yes."

"You told us everything you know about this?"

"Yes."

The sergeant looked toward the carrel.

"What were you looking for?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe something I can help you with?"

"No."

The sergeant didn't move. He made her press by his arm as if it were a line that would define just where she stood.