Havana Bay

Chapter Nineteen

The bodega was a warehouse with the dimmest light in Havana, and the fact that the lines were short and Ofelia was going to do the mule's work of carrying a sack of Vietnamese rice and a tin of cooking oil did nothing to improve her mother's mood.

"You either come home late or you don't come home at all. Who is this man?"

"He's not a man," Ofelia said.

"He's not a man?" Her mother amplified her wonderment to include as many people as possible in the conversation.

"Not a man like that."

"Like the musicians? Great husbands. Where is the last one, massaging Swedes in Cayo Largo?"

"I came home last night. Everything is okay."

"Everything is wonderful. Here I am with the world's greatest work of fiction." She slapped her ration book.» What could be belter? To know why you come home so late?"

"It's a police matter."

"With a Russian! Hija, maybe you haven't heard, the Russian boat has sailed. Gone. How did you even find one? I'd love to see this stranded Lothario."

"Mama," Ofelia begged.

"Oh, you're in your uniform, you're embarrassed to be seen with me. I can wait in line all day so you can run around and make the world safe for…" She indicated a beard.

"We're almost there." Ofelia fixed her eye on the counter.

"We're almost nowhere. This is nowhere, hija. Remember that boy you knew in school, the one with the fish tank?"

"Aquarium."

"Fish tank. Nothing but dirty water and two catfish that never moved. Take a look at those clerks."

At a counter with a register and scale were two women with whiskers who looked so much like those catfish that it was difficult for Ofelia to keep a straight face. There were four counters in the gloom of the bodega, each with a chalkboard that listed goods, prices, ration per person or family, and date available, the "date available" clouded from many corrections.

"Tomatoes next week," Ofelia said.» That's good news."

Her mother exploded with a laugh.» My God, I've raised an idiot. There will be no tomatoes, no evaporated milk, no flour and maybe no beans or rice. This is a trap for morons. Hija, I know you are a brilliant detective, but thank God you have me to shop for you."

A woman behind them hissed and warned, "I will report this counterrevolutionary propaganda."

"Piss off," Ofelia's mother said.» I fought at Playa Giron. Where were you? Probably waving your tits at American bombers. I assume you had tits."

Her mother was good at shutting people up. Playa Giron was what the rest of the world called the Bay of Pigs. Strangely enough, she actually had been in the army and shot an invader, although now she claimed she should have made him take her to Florida while she had a gun on him.

"I have a question," Ofelia said.

"Please, I'm reading the board. Two cans of green peas per family for the month. They will be delicious, I'm sure. Sugar is available. You will know the end is near when no sugar is available."

"About pickles."

"I don't see pickles."

"Where would I find them?" The Eastern Bloc had tried to unload bottled pickles in Cuba, but Ofelia hadn't seen them for years.

"Not here. In the free market you buy cucumbers and pickle them."

"Different sizes?"

"A cucumber is a cucumber. Why would anyone want a small cucumber?" At the counter her mother made a show of having her book properly marked and announcing, "You know, if you live on your rations you will enjoy a very balanced diet."

"That's true," one of the clerks was stupid enough to agree.

"Because you eat for two weeks and starve for two weeks." Having delivered her torpedo, Ofelia's mother turned and sailed for the exit, leaving Ofelia to follow with the heavy sack and can of oil the length of the bodega while everyone stared.

When they reached the street her mother stumped toward home.

"You are impossible," Ofelia said.

"I hope so. This island is driving me crazy."

"This island is driving you crazy? You've never been off this island."

"And it's driving me crazy. And having a daughter who's one of them." Her mother had been stopped by the police for selling homemade cosmetics door to door. They'd let her go, of course, as soon as they learned Detective Osorio was her daughter.» Your uncle Manny wrote to say there is a rocking chair waiting on the porch for me in Miami."

"With a drive-by shooting every night is what he wrote me."

"In his new letter he says he could take Muriel and Marisol. He says they would love South Beach. We could all go and the girls could stay."

"We are not going to talk about this."

"They would knock Miami out. They're beautiful girls and they're light."

That was always the insinuation her mother could twist like a knife, that Ofelia stood apart in the family by the deeper color of her skin, that Ofelia was different from her own daughters and, in reverse, a lifelong and bitter disappointment to her mother. And Ofelia knew her mother could see the red heat in her cheek.

"They're staving with me. If you want to go to Miami, you can go."

"I'm only saying, it's a new world. It probably doesn't involve a Russian."

Arkady had Walls and O'Brien drop him off a couple of blocks short of the Malecon. Because he had the sense that Luna could leap over the seawall any second with an ice pick or machete once Arkady reached the boulevard, he stayed in the shadows of building columns until he reached an address with the tricolored banner of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, knocked at Abuelita's door and entered.

"Come in."

Light squeezed through with him into the narrow confines of her room, to the statue of the shrouded, dark-skinned Virgin and her shimmering peacock feather. Scents of cigar and sandalwood tickled his nose. Abuelita sat before the Virgin and solemnly laid cards. Tarot? Arkady looked over the old woman's shoulder. Solitaire. Today she sported a pullover that said "New York Stock Exchange." Arkady noticed that the statue also wore something new, a yellow necklace like Osorio's.

"May I?"

"Go ahead." When he touched the necklace beads Abuelita said, "In Santeria this Virgin is also the spirit Oshun and her color is yellow, honey, gold. Oshun is a very sexy spirit."

That hardly described Osorio, Arkady thought, but he didn't have time to delve into religious matters.

"I saw you leave this morning in that big white car, that chariot with wings," Abuelita said.» The whole Malecon was looking at that."

"Did you happen to notice any tall, black sergeant from Minint go in the building after I left?"

"No."

"No one fitting that description carrying a machete or a baseball bat?" He added five dollars to the crown at the Virgin's feet.

Abuelita sighed and took the money out.» I know the man you mean. The one who arranged the Abakua. I was at my window like I always am, but the truth is, I fell asleep right there standing up. Sometimes my body gets old."

Arkady put the money back.» Then I have another question. I still need a picture of Sergei Pribluda for the police and I'm looking for any close friends of his who might have one. No one here does, but the first time we met you mentioned that Sergei Pribluda was a man who shared his pickles. Yesterday I was at a market that sold vegetables, including cucumbers, but nothing like the homemade pickles in Pribluda's refrigerator. Because you're right, there's nothing like a Russian pickle. Did he have a special visitor?"

Abuelita spread her hand wide as a fan and hid her grin.» Now you're talking. There was one woman, a Russian, who came sometimes with a basket, sometimes not."

"Could you describe her?"

"Oh, like a fat little dove. She came on Thursdays, sometimes alone, sometimes with a girl."

Ofelia climbed a ladder to Hedy Infante's home, a platform built under the ceiling of a rococo foyer. The ten-by-ten loft held her cot, rack of dresses and stretch pants, electric bulb and candles, cosmetics and shoes, window with rope to a pail and view of the chandelier and, far below, a marble floor. The house had been built by a sugar magnate with a taste for froth, and the ceiling's swirls of white plasterwork evoked a sense of nesting in the clouds.

Hedy's interior decoration was just as fantastic, an interior of pictures she had clipped from magazines and taped to her walls, a handmade wallpaper of Los Van Van, Julio Iglesias, Gloria Estefan singing soulfully to a microphone, bathed in strobe lights, reaching out to fans. On one singer she had superimposed her own face, which reminded Ofelia of the real condition of Hedy's neck. The loft wasn't the sort of room a prostitute took a client, it was more her true, private place.

Private but violated by the little touches left by forensic technicians, police tape around the dresses, fingerprint powder on the mirror, the subtle disarray when men rather than women put things away. Hedy had collected hotel soaps, cutlery, coasters, made a seashell frame around a photograph of her quince, her fifteenth birthday party-the picture showed off the state-supplied frosted cake, beer and rum. In another photograph Hedy wore the blue ruffles and scarf of a devotee of Yemaya, the goddess of the seas, and, sure enough, on the wall was a statuette of Our Lady of Regla, spirit and saint being one and the same. A cigar box held snapshots of a variety of tourists with Hedy, toasting her with daiquiris or mojitos at cafes in the Plaza Vieja, Plaza de Armas, Plaza de la Catedral, the make-believe world of Old Havana. Hedy's favorites, though, seemed to be two photos pinned to a heart-shaped pillow of her and Luna. What had the techs made of that, the dead girl with the officer in charge? The photos had apparently been taken at different times because of a difference in clothes, but both in front of a building that bore in rusty stains the name Centra Russo-Cubano. On the underside of the pillow was pinned a third snapshot, this of Hedy, Luna and the little jinetera Teresa in the back of a white Chrysler Imperial. There were no names, telephone numbers or addresses around the bed, in the cigar box or on the wall.

There were no neighbors in the building to talk, and Ofelia went across the street to a botdnica, where a cardboard listed guava for diarrhea, oregano for congestion, parsley for gas. A Coca-Cola mirror hung on the wall, and taped to it were testimonials, including a postcard from Mexico with the illustration of a dancer with the same sort of ruffled skirt, black hair and fair skin as the woman she had seen kissing Renko. Ofelia personally couldn't care less, but she was annoyed, after all her efforts to ensure the bolo's safety, to see him invite just anyone in. Ofelia remembered how the woman leaned into Renko and brought his face down to hers.

"Hija?" The herbalista stirred from a chair.

"Oh, yes." Ofelia bought a bag of mahogany bark for her mother's rheumatism before mentioning Hedy.

"Yerba buena," the herbalista remembered Hedy by remedy.» A pretty girl but a nervous stomach. A dancer, too. Such a shame."

The woman knew Hedy from the local group that performed at Carnival. There had been sixty dancers, drummers, men balancing giant tops, all dressed in Yemaya's signature blue and swirling like waves all the way up the Prado where the Comandante himself was in the reviewing stand. And she remembered Hedy's friend, who could burn a hole through wood with his gaze.

"There, that's him."

A Minint Lada stopped outside Hedy's address, and Luna emerged with more haste than usual. Ofelia turned her back to the door, removed her cap and watched the street in the mirror, which meant she had to endure more recommendations from the herbalist and the stupid card from Mexico, but only for a minute before the sergeant came out of Hedy's with the heart-shaped pillow.

But it didn't matter to Ofelia that none of the technicians who visited Hedy Infante's loft had gathered the pillow and its photographs in time. It didn't matter whether or not they dusted Hedy's childish possessions for prints. None of them for all their expertise would understand Hedy as well as she did.

Ofelia lived in two worlds. One was the ordinary level of ration lines and bus lines, of streets of rubble, of the blue trickle of electricity that allowed Fidel to flicker on the television screen, of oppressive heat that made her two daughters spread like butterflies on the cool tiles of the floor. The other was a deeper universe as real as the veins beneath the skin, of the voluptuous Oshun, maternal Yemaya, thundering Change, spirits good and bad that brought blood to the face, taste to the mouth, color to the eye and dwelled in everyone if they were evoked. Just as drums carried a kola seed that was the soul of the drum, that only spoke when the drum was played, every person carried a spirit that spoke through their own heartbeat if they would only listen. So Ofelia Osorio carried the fire of the sun hidden behind her dark mask and saw with a penetrating light the double worlds of Havana.

This time Arkady found Olga Petrovna in a housedress and her hair up in curlers as she was organizing bags of food in the front room of her apartment. She gave him the pained smile of a pretty woman, an older woman caught by surprise. A fat little dove? Perhaps.

"A side business," she said.

"A healthy side business."

What had been a Russian nook was obscured by rows of white plastic bags stretched to the bursting point by Italian coffee tins, Chinese tableware, toilet paper, cooking oil, soap, towels, frozen chicken and bottles of Spanish wine. Each bag was taped and marked with a different Cuban name.

"I do what I can," she said.» It was so much easier in the old days when there was a real Russian community here. Cubans could depend on us for a decent supply of dollar goods from the diplomatic market. When the embassy shipped everyone home, that put a heavy burden on those of us who were left."

For a percentage, Arkady was sure. Ten percent? Twenty? It would have been vulgar to ask such a perfect Soviet matron.

"I'll be right back," she promised and slipped into a bedroom, which emitted a hint of sachet. She called through the door, "Talk to Sasha, he loves company."

From its perch a canary seemed to examine Arkady for a tail. Arkady peeked into the kitchen. Samovar on an oilcloth, oilcloth on the table. Calendar with a nostalgically snowy scene. Salt in a bowl, paper napkins in a glass. A sparkling shetf of home-bottled jams, pickles and bean salad. He was back in the front room when she returned, ash-blond hair brushed into place, primped in record time.

"I would offer you something, but my Cuban friends will be arriving soon. It makes them nervous to see strangers. I hope this won't take long. You understand."

"Of course. It's about Sergei Pribluda. You said the first time we spoke that some women on the embassy staff speculated because of the improvement of his Spanish that he had become romantically involved with a Cuban."

Olga Petrovna allowed herself a smile.» Sergei Ser-geevich's Spanish was never that good."

"I suspect you're right, because he was so Russian. Russian to the core."

"As I told you, a 'comrade' in the old sense of the word."

"And the more I investigate, the more it's clear that if he did find a woman to admire that deeply, she only could have been as Russian as he was. Would you agree?"

While Olga Petrovna maintained the same bland smile, something defiant appeared in her eyes.

"I think so."

"The attraction must have been inevitable," Arkady said.» Perhaps with reminiscences of home, a real Russian dinner and then, because an affair within the embassy is always discouraged, the necessity to plan liaisons that were either secret or seemed accidental. Fortunately, he lived well apart from other Russians, and she could always find a reason to be on the Malecon."

"It's possible."

"But she was seen by Cubans."

There was a knock at the door. Olga Petrovna opened it a crack, whispered to someone and shut the door gently, returned to Arkady, asked for a cigarette and, when it was lit, sat and exhaled luxuriously. In a new voice, a voice with body, she said, "We didn't do anything wrong."

"I'm not saying you did. I didn't come to Havana to ruin anyone's life."

"I have no idea what Sergei was up to. He didn't say and I knew better than to ask. We appreciated each other, was all."

"That was enough, I'm sure."

"Then what do you want?"

"I think that someone close to Pribluda, who cared for him, probably has a better photograph than what you showed me the first time."

"That's all?"

"Yes."

She rose, went to her bedroom and returned a moment later with a color photograph of a tanned and happy Colonel Sergei Pribluda in swim shorts. With the warm Caribbean at his back, sand on his shoulders, and a grin as if he'd shed ten years. For Bias's purposes of identification the photograph was perfect.

"I'm sorry, I would have given it to you before, but I was sure you would find another one and this is the only good one I have. Will I get it back?"

"I'll ask." He slipped the picture into his pocket.» Did you ever ask Pribluda what he was doing in Havana? Did he ever mention anyone or anything to you?"

"Men like Sergei perform special tasks. He would never say and it wasn't my place to pry."

Said like a true believer, Arkady thought; he could see what a match Pribluda and Olga Petrovna had been.

"You're the one who sent the message from the embassy to me in Moscow, aren't you? 'Sergei Sergeevich Pribluda is in trouble. You must come at once.' It was unsigned."

"I was worried, and Sergei had spoken so respectfully of you."

"How did you manage to send it? You must need authorization to send messages to Moscow."

"Officially, but we're so understaffed. They rely on me to do more and more, and in some ways it's much easier to get things done. And I was right, wasn't I? He was in trouble."

"Did you tell anyone else?"

"Who would I tell? The only real Russian at the embassy was Sergei." Her eyes brimmed. She took a deep breath and glanced toward the door.» What Cubans don't understand is while we may not sing and dance as much as they do, we love just as passionately, don't we?"

"Yes, we do."

Certainly Osorio would never understand, Arkady thought. It was a relief to be away from the detective's steamy mix of revolutionary zeal and Santeria spirits, to be in a more solid world where post-Soviet romance blossomed over pickles and vodka, and motive could be measured in dollars and bones were left in the ground and murder made logical sense.

The sight of chicken thawing in a plastic bag seemed to bring Olga Petrovna back to earth. She heaved a bosomy sigh, twisted out her cigarette in an ashtray and in a minute became a businesswoman again, checking a mirror for the proper image of a sweetly gray grandmother.

On the way out Arkady passed a file of people waiting on the steps. From the top of the stairs, Olga Petrovna had a second thought.

"Or, maybe I've been here too long," she said, "maybe I'm turning Cuban."