Havana Bay

Chapter Twenty-Three

What Arkady remembered of Mostovoi's accommodations on the sixth floor of the Hotel Sierra Maestra were a runway balcony of parked tricycles and, within, a living room with movie posters, African artifacts, a plush shag rug, leather sofa and a balcony facing the sea. He also recalled a front-door lock and deadbolt, a sensible precaution considering the cameras and equipment inside. And in case he thought of rapelling athletically by rope from the hotel roof down to Mostovoi's oceanview balcony, he had noticed in Rufo's videotape Sucre Noir that the sliding glass door was jammed shut by a steel bar. Spetznaz troops knew all about swinging in through glass doors; Arkady did not. Also, the trick was not just getting in, it was getting Mostovoi out and taking another look at the photographs on the wall.

Mostovoi was correct in calling his hotel Central Europe. The cafe and boutique of the Sierra Maestra were Russian, the graffiti on the elevator door was Polish and the entire lobby was empty. Even the smell of rancid oil from the popcorn machine at the entrance stairs couldn't conceal a standing funk of cabbage.

The last time Arkady had visited, Mostovoi had switched a photograph of a sailboat for the safari picture. Or perhaps he had given away the rhino since otten tired of seeing a dead animal on his wall. The safari picture, however, had looked like the exotic centerpiece of his private gallery, and Arkady wanted to see it on his own before Mostovoi could rearrange the pictures again. The idea was to get Mostovoi out in a rush.

Arkady may not have been a marksman or a commando, but one valuable thing he had learned was that fuel for mayhem was everywhere. Behind a door marked entrada FROHIBIA filthy drapes lay on a three-legged chair of black leatherette set between plastic bags of corn kernels and potato chips and containers of cooking oil. Arkady made sure the other lobby exits were unlocked before he carried the chair and drapes to the popcorn machine and returned for the chips and oil. He opened the containers and poured the viscous oil down the hotel steps, threw the drapes on the oil, added the bags of chips to the drapes and lit the last bag with his lighter. Rufo's lighter, actually. The plastic bag caught nicely and potato chips, dry and saturated with grease, were by weight about the best kindling on earth. The chair and drapery were polyurethane, a form of solid petroleum. Cooking oil had to get hot enough to vaporize, but when it did it was a hard fire to put out. Then he climbed the stairs to the sixth floor.

Arkady took his time. The alarm, an old-fashioned clapper on a bell, sounded before he was halfway up, and by the time he reached the stairway door on Mostovoi's floor and looked down, the blaze was a brilliant orange accelerated by the grease of the chips while darker flames lapped at the chair and drapes. Residents lined the balconies for the spectacle of motorcycle police leading a red fire-engine pumper and a tank. The hotel was only blocks away from Miramar's embassy row and Arkady had expected a fast response. A bald Mostovoi in shorts peeked out his door, ventured to the balcony rail with the other residents on his floor and jumped back before his door latched behind him. Spectators on the sidewalk scattered as the oil ignited with an orange whoosh all the way from the popcorn machine down to the street. The effect of shore breeze over the hotel created just enough vacuum to draw black smoke toward the building. Plastic silk floated up as a fireman with a bullhorn waved for the gawkers on the balconies to evacuate. Arkady stood aside rather than be stampeded by families rushing down. Mostovoi's flat was nearer the stairs at the other end of the balcony. He hopped out again in pants, shirt, toupee, camera bags slung every which way off his shoulders, shoes in hand, the dapper sort who hated to be hurried. Even as Mostovoi started down the far stairs Arkady walked to the door, pulling Pribluda's wallet from his new hip pack as he went. Burdened with gear, Mostovoi hadn't paused to turn the deadbolt, the door was only on the latch. Arkady selected a credit card; he'd seen this done in movies, but he'd never actually tried it. If it didn't work, he'd just wait for Mostovoi to return. He slipped and wiggled the card in the jamb as he turned the knob and swung his hip into the door. Three hits and he was in.

The apartment looked again like the residence of a middle-level Russian diplomat abroad decorated with souvenirs of a man who had seen much of the world, who cleaned for himself better than most bachelors, with an interest in books and the arts, who kept his own creative efforts under wraps. The photograph Arkady had noticed in the videotape was on the wall, back in its place between the pictures of a colleague at the Tower of London and a circle of friends in Paris.

It was a photograph of five men with assault rifles, one standing and four kneeling around a dead rhinoceros. Now he could see that the poor animal's feet were shredded and its stomach winking with shiny intestine. The men were not hunters but soldiers, one Russian soldier and three Cubans. Mostovoi, twenty years younger and balding even then. Erasmo, his beard mere boyish wisps. A coltish, skinny Luna cradling an AK-47. Tico with the bright, reckless smile of a leader, not the nearsighted focus of a man searching for leaks in an inner tube. And standing behind them in a safari jacket of many pockets, George Washington Walls. On the bottom border was written, "The best demolition team in Angola shows a fellow revolutionary their new mine-sweeping device." The rhinoceros's legs were pulp to the knees. Arkady considered the beast's frenzy of agony and confusion when it had wandered into a minefield, and he also thought of the callousness men develop in the midst of trying to stay alive. Tico and Mostovoi were on the ends of the group. By Tico's knee was the flattened pot of a pressure mine. By Mostovoi's was the convex rectangle of a claymore, an antipersonnel mine with the warning in English "This Side to Enemy." It was a good photograph, considering that Mostovoi had most likely set the camera's timer and run to take his place, considering the sharp African light, considering that mines were probably still all around. Arkady could almost hear the flies.

Arkady moved through the rest of the apartment before Mostovoi returned. On his first visit Arkady hadn't seen the autographed photographs in the hallway of Mostovoi with famous Russian film directors or the erotic boudoir series of Cuban girls that seemed to have been shot in his own bed. Arkady looked in the bureau, night table and under the pillow. A side table held a laptop, scanner, printer. The laptop denied him access as soon as he turned it on. The chances of hitting Mostovoi's password were remote. There was no gun in the drawer or under the bed.

Arkady walked farther down the hall into a small room redone as a darkroom with a black curtain inside the door. A red light was on, as if Mostovoi had been interrupted in the middle of developing. Arkady squeezed between an enlarger and trays of sour-smelling fixer and developer. Red film curlicued from a red clothesline. Held to the light, the film had nothing more than volleyball in the nude, and the developed pictures pinned to a board were embassy fare: Russians visiting a sugar combine, delivering postcards from the children of Moscow, pushing vodka on Cuban editors. The Russians, indeed, looked like bolos.

Back in the hall, Arkady had to push past more cabinets of photographs. He riffled through contact sheets of vacations in Italy, Provence. No nudes, no Africa. Finally in the kitchen he opened the refrigerator and found vichyssoise, an open can of olives, Chilean wine, canisters of color film and behind a bag of eggs a 9-mm Astra, a Spanish pistol with a tubular barrel. He emptied the magazine on the side of the sink, replaced the clip, wiped the gun and returned it behind the eggs. An empty ice tray sat in the sink. Arkady filled the tray with bullets and water and put it in the freezer before he sat in the living room and waited for Mostovoi to return.

Going by Rufo's sort of calendar-the urgency, that is, in trying to kill someone who would be in town for only a week-Arkady felt that time was running out. His time was. Tomorrow night he could be boarding his flight for home, he and Pribluda, but he felt he was still before the event, whatever it was that would make sense of the Havana Yacht Club, Rufo and Hedy, and the best demolition team in Africa.

Ofelia didn't bring anyone. Careful not to scuff her new shoes, she walked up the steps of the Centro Russo-Cubano, dropping her dark glasses into her bag with the banana bread as she stepped into the lobby, which had changed from the day before: the statues of the cane cutter and the fisherman had toppled facedown on the tiles, the ladder stretched by a splintered counter and no car sat on the lobby floor. Dust climbed the red ray of light falling from the stained glass overhead. Centro Russo-Cubano? From what she knew of this place, when the Russians thought they led the way to the glorious future, it was a very rare Cuban who had ever been invited in.

She took a deep breath. Ofelia had come alone to see whatever Luna had carted in the night before because she didn't want to involve anyone else until she knew what evidence she could find. The PNR did not accuse an officer of the Ministry of the Interior lightly. That was her professional reason. The real reason was personal. Nothing humiliated Ofelia more than being afraid, and inside the trunk of the Lada she had been afraid to the point of tears. She took extra target practice at the Guanabo range just so that wouldn't happen. A dusty mirror hung over the counter. She caught sight of herself as she took the gun from her straw bag and swung, body and weapon moving as one dangerous little jinetem.

Being back in the lobby made her taste the hemp and coconut milk again. That was the way Luna had picked her up, like a coconut to be thrown into a bag and the bag tossed into a trunk. She'd tried to find the Lada on the way, and it had disappeared, perhaps already being cannibalized in an Atares warehouse. A shiny track showed where the cart's iron wheels had rolled over the floor tiles of a hammer-and-sickle pattern toward a grim corridor of cement walls and doors of Cuban hardwood.

Ofelia kicked the first door open, entered an empty luggage room, scanned with the gun and returned to the hall before anyone could approach behind her. The next door had the title of "Director" and promised to be larger and farther from the dim light of the lobby. She'd reloaded the gun but she should have brought a flashlight. She knew she should have thought of that.

This was the sort of situation where a person had to gauge what they were most likely to encounter. A sergeant of the Ministry of the Interior carried the same firearm she did, but a man from the Oriente might have more confidence in his machete. Also, he knew the layout of the Centra Russo-Cubano, she didn't. He could pop out of any corner like an oversized goblin.

Ofelia shoved the door with her foot, slipped in and crouched against a wall. When her eyes adjusted she saw that the office had been stripped of desk, chairs, rug. All that was left were a bust of Lenin on a pedestal and horizontal red-and-black stripes spray-painted on the walls, windows, across Lenin's face. She heard something move in the hall.

It occurred to Ofelia that perhaps she should have changed into her uniform. If the PNR found her dressed like this, what would they assume? And Bias? He'd think what fun they could have had in Madrid.

She slid out of the office on one knee aiming left, then right. Whatever it was had stopped, although Luna could be coming from either direction. This was a time when target practice paid off just for holding a heavy gun steady for so long. Banana bread was a ludicrous item to be toting and she considered lightening her load. But the girls had helped bake it.

The next office was empty except for corn kernels and feathers underfoot. She heard a step behind her again, tentative, hanging back, and she tried to get low enough to sight on a silhouette. She moved across the hall into what had been a meeting room with no table, no chairs, no windows, just a faint row of framed Russian faces and ships. She thought if there was more than one individual after her this was a perfect opportunity to lock the doors at each end and seal her in as effectively as entombing her.

Slower, she told herself, although she was blinking through sweat, mouth breathing too, not a good sign, and her shoulders ached from the weight of the gun. She was in the dark until she opened a door to a linen room, where the light poured through unbroken windows onto shelves that once held sheets and pillowcases still white; even the dust was white as talc. On the floor a headless white chicken lay in a circle of dried blood. She left the door open to illuminate the hallway and followed a sign that pointed to "Buffet." Checked into a pantry with nothing except lists on the wall in Russian of meat, dairy and starchy goods expected six years before. There was a note to a certain Lena, "Russian potatoes, not Cuban potatoes." Historical documents that faded as the linen-room door shut.

This was the darkest yet. Reentering the hall was like stepping into a pit. Nothing but black behind her, and nothing ahead but faint light tracing a buffet door. She could feel as much as hear the step behind her, it was that close. Her father had cut cane, she knew how cane cutters worked. First slice to the base, second high to lop off the cane head. Arkady had said Luna was right-handed, which meant that, constrained by the dimensions of the hall, a downward swing to the left. She got as small she could on the right side.

She felt breathing on her. A hairy face pressed against hers and she reached out to feel two stubby horns. A goat. She'd forgotten about the goats. The rest were gone or this was the only one that had found a way down to the ground floor. A small goat with a stiff beard, sharp ribs and an inquisitive muzzle that pressed into her bag. The banana bread, of course, Ofelia thought. She laid her gun between her legs, unwrapped the bread and broke off half. She couldn't see the goat but she could hear it devour the bread as if it hadn't been fed for days. The scent of the bread must have been an irresistible trail through the building. She was glad her Russian hadn't seen this.

When the goat tried to tear up the rest of the bread Ofelia gave it a not unkind kick, then scratched its scrawny neck to make amends. Growing up in Hershey, she'd had to deal with goats, chickens, voracious hogs.

Discouraged, the goat backed away with a tremulous baa, and although Ofelia expected it to go the way it had come and return to the herd, something seemed to pull it in the opposite direction. She couldn't see the goat, but she heard its hooves tap closer to the buffet door, to the ghostly smell of food six years past. It was a swinging door. The goat nosed it open, there was a glimpse of dingy light, enough to invite the goat and it trotted through. The door flapped twice, settled, and then flew open to flame and smoke.

Although she was shielded at the moment of detonation Ofelia's ears rang, her face felt scoured. Cement dust filled the dark hall, and devoid of both sight and hearing she swung the gun one way and then the other until the air cleared enough for her to make out again the faint light that traced the buffet door. She crawled forward, felt a cord hanging slack on its lower lip and pushed the door open.

It had only been a fragmentation grenade, Ofelia thought, but in close quarters it accomplished its mission well. Half the goat was close to the door, half well down the hall, like a botched job of being shot from a cannon. One wall was pocked from metal shards. Burn marks on the other showed where the grenade had been placed at floor level, the cord around its ring. Soft clots dripped from the ceiling.

Beyond, the hall opened to the buffet, where Russian sea captains and their officers had once been served cognac and cakes, and farther on she saw a large kitchen with a vent that someone from the outside had once tried to break through, bending a louver enough let a single finger of light pierce the murk.

She waited for the nerve to move forward. It would come any second.

Arkady missed the park rendezvous with Ofelia. He sat in Mostovoi's living room facing the door and flipped through the pages of an address book he had found in the nightstand. Pinero, Rufo. Luna, Sgt. Facundo. Guzman, Erasmo. Walls. No Tico that Arkady could find, but otherwise the old team was all accounted for. Plus, Vice Consul Bugai, Havana hotels and garages, French film labs, many girls' names with notes on age, color, height.

Eight o'clock. Mostovoi was taking a long time to reappear. The emergency was long over, fire engines gone and residents returned to their apartments. He'd expected Mostovoi to enter, be surprised and affect outrage at the sight of an interloper. Arkady would ask him questions about Luna and Walls and pose them in a manner designed to make Mostovoi resort to the gun in the refrigerator. It was Arkady's experience that people who were upset were much more talkative when they felt they had turned the tables. If Mostovoi actually pulled the trigger, that would be information too. Of course, this scenario depended on Mostovoi's not carrying another gun in one of his camera bags.

Arkady only had to close his eyes for images to appear. Pribluda's Havana Yacht Club. Olga Petrovna's Pribluda and Pribluda's farewell snapshot of him. The best demolition team in Africa. The images we carry. Tribal people seeing photographs for the first time thought they were stolen spirits. Arkady wished that were true. He wished he had taken more photographs of Irina, but he saw her all the time whenever he was alone. Of course, being in Havana was like living in a faded, badly tinted picture.

Nine o'clock. The day had disappeared while he had waited for a man who wasn't coming back. Arkady carefully replaced the address book where he had found it, refiled the photos in their boxes and slipped out the door to the balcony, where tots up late raced tricycles back and forth. From halfway across Miramar the lights of the Russian embassy stared back. He took the elevator down. The popcorn machine was gone and the stairs were charred; otherwise it was as if he hadn't come at all.

Following First Avenue along the water, he put one foot in front of the other in the manner, he thought, of a sailing ship towed by rowboats when the wind had died. Not until he passed Erasmo's family house did he realize his legs were taking him to the rendezvous with Ofelia at the Havana Yacht Club.» Vi. HYC 2200 Angola." Tonight was the night.

Or maybe not. He was late when the royal palms of the Yacht Club's driveway came into view and Ofelia's DeSoto wasn't in sight at all. The club was black, the only lights two flashlight beams patrolling the long driveway. No sound except cars circling the rotary and the laugh of a bird nesting in a palm. This had been his brilliant idea, his chance to jump ahead of events. Whatever this event was, it was on a different Friday night. He looked for Ofelia on the other streets feeding the rotary. Although half an hour didn't seem very late in Cuba, she wasn't there.

A taxi stopped for him and Arkady dropped into the seat beside the driver, an old man with a cold cigar.

"A donde?"

A good question, Arkady thought. He had gone everywhere he could think. Back to Mostovoi's? To the Playa del Este and Ofelia? See, this was exactly the way he'd lost Irina, he reminded himself. Inattention. How else could a man miss not one but two rendezvous? In English he said, "I'm looking for someone. Maybe we can just drive around."

"A donde?"

"If we could drive around here, around the Yacht Club?"

"Where?" the old man took the cigar from his mouth, blew the word as if it were a ring of smoke.

"Is there an event nearby for Angola?"

"Angola? Quieres Angola?"

"I don't want to go to the embassy for Angola."

"No, no. Entiendo perfectamente." He motioned for Arkady to be patient while he pulled a stack of business cards from his shirt pocket, found one and showed Arkady a well-thumbed pasteboard card with an embossed tropical sun over the words "Angola, Un Paladar Africano en Miramar."

"Muy cerca."

"It's near?"

"Claw." The driver stuffed the card back in his shirt.

Arkady understood the routine. In Moscow when a taxi driver delivered a tourist to a restaurant, he had an arrangement by which he collected a little extra from the establishment. The same in Havana, apparently. Arkady thought they'd just drive by in case the DeSoto was there.

The Angola was on a dark street of large Spanish colonial homes only a minute away. Over a tall iron gate hung a neon sign of a sun so golden it seemed to drip. The taxi driver took one look and kept on going.

"Lo siento, no puedes. Esta reservado esta noche."

"Go by again."

"No podemos. Es que digo, completemente reservado. Cualquier otro dia, si?"

Arkady didn't speak Spanish but he understood completemente reservado. All the same he said, "Just drive by."

“No.”

Arkady got out at the corner, paid the driver enough for a good cigar and walked back under a dramatic canopy stof ragged cedar branches. Along both curbs were new Nissans and Range Rovers, some with drivers sitting almost at attention behind the wheel. Along the sidewalk were shadows within shadows and the orange swirls of cigarettes used in conversation, voices hushing as Arkady slowed to admire a white Imperial convertible reflecting the neon sun. When he pushed the gate open, a figure materialized from the dark to stop him. Captain Arcos in civilian clothes, like an armadillo out of his shell.

"It's all right." Arkady pointed to a table inside the gate.» I'm with them."

The Angola was an outdoor restaurant set in a garden of underiit tree ferns and tall African statues. Two men in white aprons worked an open-air grill and although Arkady had been told that a paladar could serve no more than twelve diners at a time there were, at tables arranged around the grill, easily twenty customers, all men, in their forties and fifties, most white, all with a bearing of command, prosperity, success and all Cuban except for John O'Brien and George Washington Walls.

"I knew it"-O'Brien waved Arkady in.» I told George that you'd show up."

"He did." Walls shook his head in wonder more at O'Brien than at Arkady.

"When I heard Rufo was so stupid as to write the place and time on a wall I knew you couldn't fail." O'Brien had another chair brought. Even the developer was in a Cuban guayabera; the evening's uniform seemed to be graybeards. The two Cubans at the table looked to O'Brien for a lead; although they were hard, mature men, O'Brien seemed to have for them the status of a priest among boys. The entire restaurant had gone quiet, including Erasmo in a wheelchair two tables away with Tico and Mostovoi, their old comrade-in-arms, the only other non-Cuban. It was strange to see the mechanics so spruced.» It's perfect that you're here." O'Brien seemed genuinely pleased.» Everything's falling into place."

Walls said to the Cuban next to him, "El nuevo bolo."

Relief spread to every face except Erasmo's. He telegraphed Arkady a glum look from across the garden. Mostovoi saluted.

"I'm the new Russian?" Arkady asked.

"It makes you part of the club," O'Brien said.

"What club is that?"

"The Havana Yacht Club, what else?"

Waiters poured water and rum, although coffee seemed as popular at the tables, an odd choice for the hour, Arkady thought.» How do you know I visited Rufo's?"

"You know George is a big fight fan. He went to see some sparring today at the Gimnasio Atares, and a trainer told him about a white man in a black coat he saw come out of Rufo's last night. George went in and there it was right on the wall, a clue no one as sharp as you was going to miss. Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't. We have to be careful. Remember, I have been the target of more police stings and entrapment than you could dream of. By the way, keep in mind that j all our friends here tonight still remember the Russian ', language. Watch what you say."

Walls ran his eyes.over Arkady's new clothes.» Big _: improvement.":The chefs lifted lobsters from a huge sack to a cutting board, where they sliced and cleaned the underside of I the tails before setting the lobsters alive onto the grill, poking them with wooden sticks when they tried to crawl from the flames. Arkady saw no menus, no African food. The two Cubans at Arkady's table shook his hand but offered no names. One was white, the other mulatto, but they shared the musculature, direct gaze and obsessionally trimmed fingernails and hair of military men.

"What does this club do?" Arkady asked.

"They can do anything," O'Brien said.» People wonder, what will happen to Cuba when Fidel dies? As a Caribbean North Korea? Will the gang in Miami march in and take back their houses and sugarcane fields? Will the Mafia swoop in? Or will there just be anarchy, another Haiti? Americans wonder how without a managerial infrastructure full of MBAs Cuba can even hope to survive."

The lobsters were monsters, the largest Arkady had ever seen. They reddened among flares and sparks.

"But the wonderful thing about evolution," O'Brien said, "is that it can't be stopped. Eliminate business. Make the army the preferred career route for idealistic young men. Send them to foreign wars, but don't give them enough money to fight. Make them earn it. Make them trade in ivory and diamonds so they have enough ammunition to defend themselves, and you end up with an interesting group of entrepreneurs. Then, because it works cheap, when the army comes home make it go into farming, hotels, sugar. Reassign heroes to run the tourism and citrus and nickel industries. Let me tell you, negotiating a contract with a construction company from Milan is as good as two years at Harvard Business School. The ones here tonight are the creme de la creme."

"The Havana Yacht Club?"

"They like the name," Walls said.» It's just a social thing."

When the first lobsters were done, a chef stirred a glass bowl full of twists of paper, picked four twists, unrolled and read them before sending the lobsters to a table. It seemed to Arkady a better system for a lottery than a restaurant. How did the chef know who ordered what? Why were there only two choices, lobster or nothing?

"I thought private restaurants weren't allowed to serve lobster," Arkady said.

"Maybe tonight is an exception," O'Brien said.

Arkady caught sight of Mostovoi again.» Why am I the new Russian? Why can't Mostovoi be?"

"This is an enterprise that needs more than a pornog-rapher. You've replaced Pribluda. Everyone can accept that." O'Brien adopted a forgiving tone.» And you can keep the photograph Pribluda sent to you. It would have been nice if you'd offered it as a sign of trust at some point, but you're on the team now."

"Rufo died for that picture."

"Thank God, I much prefer you. I mean, it's worked out wonderfully."

"Do some of these people work in the Ministry of Sugar? Are some of them involved with AzuPanama?"

"We met some that way, yes. These are the men who make decisions, as much as anyone can make decisions besides Fidel. Some are deputy ministers, some are still generals and colonels, men who have known each other all their lives and now in their prime. Naturally, they're making plans. It is a normal human aspiration, the need to better themselves and leave something for their families. The same as Fidel. He has one legitimate son and a dozen illegitimate children salted away in the government. These men are no different."

"The casino fits somewhere in here?"

"I hope so."

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"John always tells the truth," Walls said.» Just that there are a lot of layers to the truth."

"Casino, combat boots, AzuPanama. Which is real and which is fake?"

"In Cuba," O'Brien said, "there is a fine line between the real and the ridiculous. As a boy, Fidel wrote Franklin Roosevelt and asked for an American dollar. Later Fidel was scouted as a pitcher by the major leagues. Here was a man who could have been a model American, an inch away. Instead, he becomes Fidel. Incidentally, the scouting report was 'Fair fastball, no control.' At heart, my dear Arkady, it's all ridiculous."

The body in the bay was dead, Rufo was dead, Hedy and her Italian had been slashed to death, Arkady thought. That was real. The Cubans at the table listened with half an ear as they watched lobsters continue to march off the grill and the curious ceremony of reading papers at random from a bowl. It didn't seem to matter who had lobster so much as that they all did. Arkady had the sense that if one anonymous twist of paper was blank, if one diner hadn't ordered lobster, the group to a man would have stood and left at once.

"Do you mind…?" Arkady nodded toward Erasmo's table.

"Please." O'Brien gave his blessing.

Tico was happily dismembering his crustacean and Mostovoi was caught sucking on a claw.

"You can't get lobster this succulent anywhere else in the world." Mostovoi wiped his mouth as Arkady dropped into a chair. There was no sign from the photographer that he had connected the fire at the Sierra Maestra to Arkady.

Erasmo didn't say a word or touch his lobster. Arkady remembered him drinking ron peleo and swaying in his wheelchair to Mongo's drum at the santero's, leaning out the Jeep like a bearded buccaneer as they cruised the Malecon. This was a more subdued Erasmo.

"So, this is the real Havana Yacht Club," Arkady said to him.» No Mongo, no fish."

"It's a different club."

"Apparently."

"You don't understand. These are all men who fought together in Angola and Ethiopia, who fought side by side with Russians, who shared a common experience."

"Except for O'Brien."

"And you."

"Me?" Arkady didn't remember the initiation.» How did that happen?"

Erasmo's head lolled as if he'd been trying unsuccessfully to drink himself into a stupor.» How does it happen? By accident. It's like you're in the middle of a play, say, Act II, and someone wanders onto the stage. Somebody new, never in the script. What do you do? First, try to get him off, drop a sandbag on him or lure him behind the scenery so you can hit him over the head with a minimum of fuss because there is an audience watching. If you can't get the son of a bitch off the stage what do you do then? You start incorporating him into the play, find him a role of someone who is missing, feed him some lines as smoothly as you can so that the Third Act goes virtually unchanged, just like you always planned."

The last lobster was delivered. Every plate was covered by a lobster or a well-picked carapace, although Arkady had noticed that many guests had shown no interest in their dinner once it had been served. A tall man with aviator glasses rose with a glass of rum. He was the same army officer Arkady had seen in a picture with Erasmo and the Comandante. The man proposed a toast to "The Havana Yacht Club."

Everyone but Arkady and Erasmo stood, although Erasmo raised his glass.

"Now what?" Arkady asked.» A meeting's going to begin?"

"The meeting's over." Erasmo added in a whisper, "Good luck."

In fact, men were leaving as soon as they set down their glass, not pouring out as a crowd but slipping under the neon sun to the dark of the street in twos and threes. Arkady heard a muffled sound of car doors opening and engines starting. Mostovoi vanished like a shadow. Tico pushed Erasmo, who leaned his brow on his hand like Hamlet considering his options. Soon the only ones left in the paladar were the staff, Walls, O'Brien and Arkady.

"You're part of the club now," O'Brien said.» How does it feel?"

"A little mysterious."

"Well, you've only been here six days. Cuba takes a lifetime to understand. Wouldn't you say, George?"

"Absolutely."

O'Brien pushed himself to his feet.» Anyway, we have to run. It's almost the witching hour and, frankly, I'm bushed."

Arkady said, "Pribluda was involved in this?"

"If you really want to know, come by the boat tomorrow evening."

"I'm flying to Moscow tomorrow night."

"It's up to you," Walls said and opened the gate. The Imperial glowed at the curb.

"What is the Havana Yacht Club?" Arkady asked.

"What do you want it to be?" John O'Brien said.» A few guys goofing off with a fishing line. A dump of a building waiting to be touched by a magic wand and be turned into a hundred million dollars. A group of patriots, veterans of their country's wars, having a social evening. Whatever you want, that's what it is."