Havana Bay

Chapter Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daysi 32-2007

Susy 30-4031

Vi. Aflt. 2300

Kid Choc. 5/1

Vi. HYC 2200 Angola

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

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

"Digame."

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

"Digame."

"Is this Daysi?"

"Oye, quien es?'

In English, "Is this Daysi?"

"Si, es Daysi"

"Do you speak English?"

"Unpoco,si."

"Are you a friend of Rufo?"

"Muy poco."

"You know Rufo Pinero?"

"Rufo, si."

"Could we meet and talk?"

"Talk?"

"Do you know someone who speaks English?"

"Muypoco."

"Thanks."

He hung up and tried Susy.

"Hi."

"Hello. You speak English."

"Hi."

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

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

"I didn't catch that."

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

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

"Y digale, chupa mis nalgas hermosas!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You speak Russian, too."

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

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

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

Arkady always tried honesty first.

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

"You think that was stupid of Rufo?"

"Maybe."

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

"You know who I am."

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

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

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

"I understand perfectly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You don't know anything here."

"I couldn't agree more."

"You do nothing."

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

"Then we can be friendly."

"Friendly is good."

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

"Is that a baseball bat?" Arkady asked.

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

"That's all right."

"Take it."

"No."

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

"Yes."

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

"Yes."

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

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

"Where is the picture?"

"What picture?"

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

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

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

"Who?"

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

"Do you want me to fuck you up?"

"No."

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

"No."

"Because you will stay fucked."

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

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

That sounded quiet, Arkady got that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't leave, Luna had said.

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

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

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

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

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

Not that he was scared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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