Havana Bay

Chapter Twenty-Six

Arkady returned to Mongo's room in the back of what had been Erasmo's boyhood house. An empty house today, enervated by heat. After a courtesy knock on the door Arkady reached to the upper lip of the frame and found the key.

Not much had changed in the bedroom since Arkady's first visit. Shutters opened wide enough to take in the curve of the sea, fishing boats trolling against the current, neumdticos wallowing in their wake. Not a cloud in the sky or a wave in the water. Dead still. The coconuts, plastic saints and photographs of Mongo's favorite fighters were just as Arkady had seen before, and whether a sheet was tucked in the same manner he couldn't tell, but a different disc topped the CD stack, and the swim flippers that had hung from a hook on the wall and the truck inner tube that had been suspended above the bed were both gone. Arkady returned to the window to see three different groups of neumdticos listlessly paddling, each group at least five hundred yards apart from the other.

Arkady went down to the street and walked a block west to a cafe of cement tables set in the shade of a wall with the sign siempre-Siempre something because bougainvillea had taken root and smeared the rest of the slogan with magenta. Arkady was not surprised that Mongo would venture out on the water. Mongo was a fisherman. He had probably been warned away from Erasmo's repair shop while a Russian investigator occupied the apartment above. Where better to hide than on the water? If he was out on his tube, sooner or later he would have to come in, somewhere along Miramar's First Avenue or the Malecon, too much ground for Arkady to watch. But it seemed to him that he could lower the odds by remembering that what a man with an inner tube needed most of all was air. From his table he had a view of a gas station with two pumps under a canopy styled with a modernistic fin, blue once, now the off-white found on the lip of a clamshell. It was a station on his Texaco map. By the office was a faucet and an air hose.

Cars came and went all afternoon, some struggling like lungfish up to the pump and then crawling away. Neumdticos had to deal with a garage dog that accepted some and chased away others. Arkady sipped his way through three Tropicolas and three cafe cubanos, his heart tapping its fingers while he sat, invisible in the shadow of his coat. Finally a skinny asphalt-black man approached the station office with an inner tube that was going limp in his arms. He threw the dog a fish, went into the office and came out a minute later with a patch he applied to the tube. When he felt the adhesive had set, he added air to check the repair. His clothes were a green cap, loose running shoes and the sort of rags a sensible man would choose for floating in the bay. Balancing the tube with its net and sticks and reels on his head, he lay his flippers over one shoulder and a string of rainbow-sided fish over the other. When he saw Arkady cross the intersection, the neutnatico's red, salt-stung eyes looked for an avenue of escape, and but for his inner tube and the day's catch, he no doubt could have easily outrun someone in an overcoat.

"Ramon 'Mongo' Bartelemy?" Arkady asked. He thought he was starting to get a grip on Spanish.

"No."

"I think so." Arkady showed Mongo the picture of himself proudly displaying a fish to Luna, Erasmo and Pribluda.» I also know you speak Russian." It was worth a stab.

"A little."

"You're not an easy man to find. Join me for a coffee?"

The elusive Mongo had a beer. Crystal beads of sweat covered his face and chest. His mesh sack of fish lay on the bench beside him.

"I saw a tape of you fighting," Arkady said.

"Did I win?"

"You made it look easy."

"I could move, you know? I could move with anyone, I just didn't like to get hit," Mongo said, although his nose was splayed enough to suggest he had been caught a few times.

"Then when they dropped me from the team I was eligible for the army. Oye, suddenly I was in Africa with Russians. Russians don't know the difference between an African and a Cuban. You learn Russian fast." Mongo grinned.» You learn 'Don't shoot, you assholes!'"

"Angola?"

"Ethiopia."

"Demolition?"

"No, I drove an armored personnel carrier. That's how I became a mechanic, keeping that puta APC alive."

"Is that where you met Erasmo?"

"In the army."

"Luna?"

Mongo regarded his large capable hands, callused from drumming and scarred from barbs.» Facundo I know from way back when he first came from Baracoa to join the boxing team. He could have been a fighter or he could have been a baseball player, but he had no discipline with women or drinking, so he wasn't on any team for long."

"Baracoa?"

"In the Oriente. He could hit."

"He and Rufo Pinero were friends?"

"Claro. But what they did I didn't know." Mongo shook his head so emphatically his sweat sprayed.» I didn't want to know."

"And you were Sergei Pribluda's friend?"

"Yes."

"You went fishing together?"

"Verdad."

"You taught him how to fish with a kite?"

"I tried."

"And how to be a neumdtico?"

"Yes."

"And what is the most important rule a neumdtico has to follow? Never go out alone at night. I don't think Pribluda went out alone on that Friday two weeks ago. I think he went out on the water with his good friend Mongo."

Mongo rested his chin on his chest. Sweat poured off the man as if he were a fountain, not the sweat of fear like Bugai's but sweat that came from the heavy work of guilt. It was late in the day. Arkady got more beers so Mongo could sweat some more.

"He said it was like ice fishing for sharks," Mongo said.» He used to tell me all about ice fishing. He said I should come to Russia and he would take me ice fishing. I said 'No, thanks, comrade.'"

"What time did you go into the water?"

"Maybe seven. After dark, because he knew how that would draw attention if people saw a Russian in a tube. Voices travel on water, so even when we were out there he would whisper."

"What was the weather like?"

"Raining. He still kept his voice low."

"Is that a good time to fish, when it's raining?"

"If the fish are biting."

Arkady considered that fisherman's truth and asked, "Where did you go in?"

"West of Miramar."

"Near the Marina Hemingway?"

"Yes."

"Whose idea was that?"

"I always said where we were going to go, except that time. Sergei said he was tired of Miramar and the Malecon. Sergei wanted to try somewhere new."

"Once you were in the water you stayed there. Or did you go west? North? East?"

"Drifted like."

"East because that's the way the current runs, by Miramar and the Malecon and towards."

"Yes."

"And, on the way, the marina? Whose idea was it to go in there?"

Mongo slumped against the wall.» So, you already know."

"I think I do."

"We really fucked up, huh?" Mongo beat nervously on the bench, stilled his hands and let the rhythm drop.» I said, Sergei, why would we want to fish in the marina with the guardia to chase us and maybe a boat moving through? That's an active channel, and it's night and the boats won't see us, I said, it's crazy. But I couldn't stop him. The guardia was in their office out of the rain. If you come in close they can't see you anyway, not at night in a tube. I followed Sergei up the channel, that's all I could do. He seemed to know where he was going. They have lights there, but they don't reach down to the water so well. No one was fueling. The disco was shut down because of the rain. We could hear people at the bar, that's all, and then we were in a canal where boats were docked one after the other and Sergei headed for this one I couldn't even see at first, it was so low and dark. Very sleek, an old boat but fast, you could tell. There were lights in the cabin and Americans on board, we could hear them but we couldn't see who. Right away, I knew that this was some kind of business of Sergei's he was getting me into. I told him I was going, but he wanted to climb up and see who was in the boat, which is difficult because there is an overhang on the dock. I was leaving when the lights on the boat went out. My whole body vibrated. Sergei was about five meters away between the boat and the dock and he was shaking, shaking, shaking. They let those rucking power leads lie in the water. I couldn't get any closer. Then I saw flashlights come up on deck and I hid." Mongo nodded in doleful self-judgment.» I hid. They came up to see if it was just their boat or everyone and while they talked back and forth to the person in the cabin Sergei drifted out. He wasn't shaking anymore. They didn't see him and they didn't see me because I stayed in the dark.

"As soon as his tube's clear, I told myself, I'd pull Sergei over, but before I could get to Sergei another boat came up the canal. There's not a lot of room. The boat went by and then Sergei went by. Sometimes, you know, boats trail tackle in the water, they shouldn't but they do, and Sergei was hooked by the net of his tube. He went by faster than I could keep up. I knew he was dead by the way he sat. They went out the canal together, the boat and tube. I knew once they cleared the guardia dock and opened the throttle they would feel the line and find Sergei or the hook would cut the net.

"Or maybe they would find Sergei and just cut him loose, because who needs to get involved with a dead neumdtico, no? That would be a story they could tell in a bar in Key West about a crazy Cuban they caught one time. I don't know, I just saw my friend being towed in the dark until I couldn't see him anymore. By the time I got past the guardia I couldn't even see the boat."

"Did you see its name?"

"No." Mongo drank the last of his beer and stared at the pail offish.» I didn't even do that."

"Who did you tell about this?"

"No one until you showed up. Then I told Erasmo and Facundo because they're my compays, my good friends."

The water was flat and glassy enough for pelicans to skim their reflection. Despite the accumulated heat of the day Arkady felt oddly comfortable, balanced by beer and overcoat.

"The men who came on deck of the boat that lost its power, did you recognize them?"

"No, I was looking for Sergei or trying to hide."

"Did they have guns?"

"You know," Mongo said, "it doesn't matter. Sergei was dead by then and it was an accident. He killed himself, I'm sorry." Mongo looked at the fish.» I have to go keep these fresh. Thanks for the beer."

An accident? After all this? But it made sense, Arkady thought. Not only the heart attack but the general confusion. Murders had much better cover-ups. Then he had arrived from Moscow the same time the body was found in the bay. Small wonder why Rufo had rushed to be his interpreter, and why Luna had been so badly surprised by the photograph of the Havana Yacht Club. No one had known what happened to Pribluda.

As Mongo resettled his cap and inner tube on his head, and picked up his flippers and fish, Arkady thought of Pribluda's tow in his rubbery sleigh out of the marina to deeper water-the Gulf Stream, O'Brien had said-where he either tore loose or was cut free by a no doubt exasperated fisherman.» Cubans are biting tonight!" Would that have been the joke? Then the long journey in the rain, drifting past Miramar, along the Malecon to the mouth of the bay, a "bag bay," as Captain Andres of the good ship Pinguino had said. Under the beam of the lighthouse on Moro Castle and then a swing toward the village of Casablanca to gently snag among the nest of plastics, mattresses and worm-riddled piers, all sheeted by petroleum scum, where a body could comfortably rest in the rain for weeks.

Arkady took Pribluda's photograph from under his coat and asked, "Who took this picture?"

"Elmar."

"Elmar who?"

"Mostovoi," Mongo said as if there had been only one photographer in the group.

Confession was always short-lived and always conditional, and both men knew it wasn't as if Arkady had the authority to question anyone. Just for the sake of a reaction, though, Arkady read the reverse of the picture.» 'The Havana Yacht Club.' Does that mean anything to you?"

"No."

"A joke?"

"No."

"A social club?"

"No."

"Do you know what's happening there tonight?"

That was pressing too hard. The elusive Mongo backed into the street and broke into a gliding sort of trot, a one-man caravan, his headgear undulating with every step. He slid by a blue wall, pink wall, peach and the shadow of an alley seemed to reach out and swallow him up.

Ofelia had not been at the embassy apartment since she had seen Rufo spread out on its floor. She remembered the building's blue walls and Egyptian decoration of lotuses and ankhs, that hint of the Nile. In the dusk even the car sitting on the porch had some of the silent grandeur of a sphinx in residence. Flecks of paint made a red skirt around the car. Salt pitted once proud chrome, windows were open to the elements, upholstery cracked and split and the hood ornament was missing, but hadn't the sphinx itself lost a nose? And although they sat on wooden blocks the wheels were caked in grease, a promise that someday this beast would cough and rise again.

Ofelia was looking for Rufo's phone. Arkady had said that in Moscow a hustler like Rufo would have as likely stepped out of his house without a leg as without a cell phone. If this were a real investigation she could have taken a laundry list of names associated with Rufo to CubaCell and worked backward from their calls. Instead, she'd have to find the phone itself. It was somewhere. For killing someone with a knife, work that could get messy, Rufo had taken the precaution of changing shoes and wearing over his clothes a one-piece silvery running suit; Goretex let in the air, kept out the blood. Likewise, cell phones were delicate, dollars-only items, not something a careful man placed in harm's way. Rufo thought ahead, the trick was to think like him.

The door knocker to the ground-floor apartment was answered by a white woman in a drab housedress and flamboyantly coiffed and hennaed hair. Half the women in Havana, it seemed to Ofelia, spent their lives getting ready for a party that never happened. In turn, the woman made a sour study of Ofelia's jinetera gear until presented with a PNR badge.

"Figures," the woman said.

"I'm here to see the murder scene upstairs. Do you have a key?"

"No. You can't go in there anyway. That's Russian property, no one can go in. Who knows what they're doing?"

"Show me."

The woman led the way in slippers that snapped against the stairs. The lock on the apartment door was shiny and new even in the poor light of the hall. Ofelia remembered making a search of the sitting room, pulling out Fidel y Arte and other books, a sofa and sideboard, performing a more hurried look into the other rooms for fear that the confrontation between Luna and the Russian would get out of hand. There was a chance the phone was inside the embassy apartment, but not likely. She reached on tiptoe to the dark underside of the stairs above for any ledge that Rufo could have set the phone on. No.

"You didn't find anything here?" Ofelia asked.

"There's nothing to find. The Russians don't put anyone there for weeks at a time. Good riddance."

As Ofelia went back down the stairs she let her hand trail on the risers above. She stepped out onto the porch with nothing but a dirty hand.

"I told you," the woman said.

"You were right." The woman was starting to remind Ofelia of her mother.

"You're the second one."

"Oh? Who else?"

"A big negro from the Ministry of Interior. Really black. He looked everywhere. He had a phone, too. He called on it and didn't speak and just listened, but not to the phone, understand?"

Naturally, Ofelia thought, because Luna was calling Rufo's number and was trying to hear it ring. That was the trouble with trying to hide a phone, sooner or later someone would call the number and the phone would announce itself.

"Did he find anything?"

"No. Don't you people work together? You're like everything else in this country. Everything has to be done twice, no?"

Ofelia walked out to the middle of the street. It was a block of old town houses transformed by revolution, idealism followed by fatigue and lack of paint and plaster. One front yard a parking lot for bicycles, another an open-air beauty salon. Collapsing buildings but busy as a hive.

She tried to imagine a reconstruction of the facts. The same street late at night. Arkady upstairs, Rufo outside in his freshly donned running suit, improvising on the run because no one had expected the arrival of a Russian investigator. Perhaps even placing one last call before he went into the house and up the steps to what he assumed would be the Russian's doom. Between the two corners of the block, where was the most likely place for Rufo to put, just for a few minutes, his precious phone?

Ofelia remembered Maria, the police car and Rufo's cigars. She returned to the porch.

"Whose car is this?"

"My husband's. He went to get some windows for the car, and the next thing I know I got a letter from Miami. I'm keeping the car till he gets back."

"Chevrolet?"

"'57, the best year. I used to get in and pretend Ruperto and I were driving to Playa del Este, a nice cruise to the beach. I haven't done that for a long time."

"Car windows are hard to find."

"Car windows are impossible to find."

The upholstery was more a rat's nest than seats. From her bag Ofelia took a pair of surgical gloves.» Do you mind?"

"Mind what?"

With gloves on, Ofelia reached through the open window and opened the glove compartment. Within was a wooden cigar box with a broken Montecristo seal of crossed swords. Inside the box were ten aluminum cigar tubes and an Ericson cell phone set on vibrate instead of ring.

Ofelia heard a click and looked through the car at a man taking her picture from the sidewalk. He was a large, middle-aged man with a camera bag over a shoulder and the sort of vest with many pockets that photographers wore, all topped by an artistic beret.

"I'm sorry," he said, "you just looked beautiful in that old wreck of a car. Do you mind? Most women don't mind if I photograph them-in fact, they rather like it. The light is awful but you looked so perfect. Do you think we could talk?"

Ofelia put the phone in the cigar box and the box and gloves in her bag before she straightened out.» What about?"

"About life, about romance, about everything." Despite his size he made a show of coming shyly through the gate. His Spanish was fluent, with a Russian accent.» Arkady sent me. Even so, I'm a great admirer of Cuban women."

Arkady didn't set anything on fire at the Sierra Maestra and didn't knock on Mostovoi's door. Instead he inserted the credit card into the jamb the moment he arrived and hit the door with a grunt that took the breath out of a watching toddler. Inside, Arkady looked to see whether the "greatest demolition team in Africa" was still the centerpiece of the wall. It was.

On his first visit he had gone to pains to make sure Mostovoi wouldn't notice that he'd had any guests. This time Arkady didn't care. Where there was one photograph of the Havana Yacht Club there were bound to be more, because a man who documented his greatest moments didn't destroy his pictures when the wrong company came-he just put them out of sight.

Arkady took off his coat to work. He emptied shoe boxes and suitcases, spilled book and kitchen shelves, upended files and drawers, pulled the refrigerator from the wall and tipped over chairs until he had discovered more photographs, pornography that was not so sporty and not so sweet, and videotapes of sex and leather. But everybody had a side business, everyone had a second job. All Arkady really produced was the sweat on his face.

He visited the bathroom to wash up. The walls were tiled and the medicine-cabinet mirror was half silvered, half black. Inside the cabinet were a couple of nostrums, hair elixirs and recreational amounts of amyl nitrate and amphetamines. As he dried his hands he noticed that the shower curtain was closed. People with small bathrooms usually kept their curtains drawn for the illusion of space or a childish fear of what was on the other side. Since that was an anxiety Arkady freely admitted to, he pulled the curtain wide.

Floating in the tub in ten centimeters of water were four black-and-white photographs not of nubile sports or foreign travels but of the dead Italian and Hedy. Blood showed as black and the carpet and sheets were soaked and striped. The Italian looked almost gilled from machete wounds. Arkady didn't know him, but he did recognize Hedy even if her head balanced precariously on her shoulders. At first Arkady thought that Mostovoi had gotten hold of police photographs, but of course these pictures had just been developed and none of the usual evidence markers had been laid, no shoe tips of detectives trying to stay out of the camera's way, and the darkness of the shadows themselves suggested that no other source of illumination had been on. The photographer had worked alone in a dark room the night before Ofelia arrived, and real skill must have been required just to estimate the focus. He'd only chanced four shots or only developed four from a roll. A single shot of the Italian as he dragged himself, still alive, toward the door. More thought had gone into the pictures of Hedy. A low shot from between her legs up to her head. A second that framed her head between deflated breasts. A third just of Hedy's face, surprise still fresh in her eyes. The man with the camera had been unable to resist marking the moment, thrusting his tubular white wrist and hand into the sheen of her curls to improve the pose.