Havana Bay, Page 3

  She hadn't missed any opportunity. Under the lamp was a small turtle, armored and obtuse in a bowl of sand. A perfect pet for a spy, Arkady thought. The shell was branded with a brown fingerprint.

  She said, "Pribluda could have had a protocol house, but he rented here illegally from the Cuban who lives below."

  "Why do you think he did that?"

  For an answer she opened the balcony doors, their curtains lifting like wings with the breeze that rushed in. Arkady stepped out between two aluminum chairs and the balcony's marble rail and looked out on the vault of the night sky and the Malecón, displayed as an elegant curve of boulevard lights. Beyond the seawall was the flash of a lighthouse and deck lights of a freighter and pilot boat entering the bay. As his eyes adjusted he made out the fainter gunwale lamps of fishing boats and, nearer in, a widespread candle glimmer.

  "Neumáticos" Osorio said.

  Arkady imagined them, a flotilla of inner tubes riding black swells.

  "Why wasn't there a police seal on the front door?" he asked.

  "Because we are not investigating."

  "So, what are we doing here, then?"

  "Putting your mind to rest."

  She motioned Arkady inside through the parlor and to a corridor, past a laundry room and into an office that held an ancient wooden desk, computer, printer and bookshelves crammed with binders from the Cuban Ministry of Sugar and photo albums. Under the printer, two briefcases, one of brown leather, the other of extraordinarily ugly green plastic. The walls were covered with maps of Cuba and Havana. Cuba was a big island, Arkady realized, twelve hundred kilometers long, marked with X's on the map. Arkady opened an album to pictures of what looked like green bamboo.

  "Sugarcane fields," Osorio said. "Pribluda would have visited them because we foolishly depended on Russia for harvesters."

  "I see." Arkady put the album down and moved on to the map of Havana. "Where are we?"

  "Here." She pointed to where the Malecón swept east toward the Castillo de San Salvador, where the seawall ended and Havana Vieja and the bay began. West lay neighborhoods called Vedado and Miramar, where Pribluda had scribbled "Russian embassy." "Why do you ask?"

  "I like to know where I am."

  "You are leaving tonight. It doesn't matter if you know where you are."

  "True." He looked to see that the power button of the computer was dusted and prints lifted. Nice. "You're finished here?"

  "Yes."

  He turned the machine and monitor on and the screen pulsed with an electric, expectant blue. Arkady did not consider himself computer-adept, but in Moscow murderers moved with the times and it had become a requirement of investigators to be able to open the electronic files of suspects and victims. Russians loved E-mail, Windows, spreadsheets; paper documents they burned at once, but incriminating electronic information they left intact under whimsical access codes: the name of a first girlfriend, a favorite actress, a pet dog. When Arkady clicked on the icon for Programs the screen demanded a password.

  "Do you know it?" Osorio asked.

  "No. A decent spy is supposed to use a random cipher. We could guess forever."

  Arkady went through the desk drawers. Inside were a variety of different pens, stationery and cigars, maps and magnifying glasses, pen knives and pencils and brown envelopes with string ties for the diplomatic pouch. No passwords hidden in a matchbox.

  "There's a telephone but no fax machine?"

  "The telephone lines in this exchange are from before the Revolution. They're not clear enough for fax transmission."

  "The telephone lines are fifty years old?"

  "Thanks to the American embargo and the Special Period –"

  "Caused by Russia, I know."

  "Yes." Osorio snapped off the computer and shut the drawer. "Stop. You are not here to investigate. You are here only to verify that it has been examined thoroughly for fingerprints."

  Arkady acknowledged the track of prints on door-jambs and desk surfaces, ashtray and telephone. Osorio motioned him to follow her farther down the corridor where there was a bedroom containing a narrow bed, nightstand, lamp, bureau, portable radio, bookcase and, hanging on the walls, a tinted portrait of the deceased Mrs. Pribluda. Beside it was a photograph of the son in an apron looking up at a levitating disk of pizza dough. In the top bureau drawer was an empty frame of snapshot size.

  "There was a picture in here?" Arkady asked.

  Osorio shrugged. The reading material in the bedroom was Spanish-Russian dictionaries, guidebooks, copies of Red Star and Pravda, reflecting the interests of a healthy, unreconstructed Communist. The bureau top was clear but showed signs of dusting and collection. In the closet were clothes, an ironing board and an iron dusted for prints. Organized on the floor were rubber sandals, work shoes and a thin, empty suitcase. Arkady stopped for a moment when he heard drumming from the apartment below, tectonic motion with a Latin beat.

  Osorio opened the door at the corridor's end to a bathroom of crazed but immaculately clean tiles. A loofah and soap on a rope hung from the shower rod. The corner of the medicine cabinet mirror bore one fingerprint in full bloom, and another peeked from under the flush lever of the toilet.

  "You don't miss anything," he told her. "But I wonder why you bothered."

  "You will accept that this is Pribluda's apartment?"

  "It seems to be."

  "And that the prints we find here are Pribluda's?"

  "We haven't really checked them, but let's say I do."

  "Remember at the autopsy you told Captain Arcos it was a strange way for a Russian to fish."

  "In an inner tube at sea? Yes, it was a first for me."

  The detective led him back to the laundry room and turned on a hanging bulb and this time he saw, besides a stone basin and clothes line, reels of monofilament and wire and, on rough shelves of orange crate, jars that contained tangles of barbed, ugly hooks graded by size. Each jar was dusted and covered with clear prints. Detective Osorio handed Arkady an index card of lifted fingerprints. Immediately, Arkady saw a large print with a distinctive loop crossed by a scar identical with prints on the bottles. On a jar he found the same, carefully dusted print.

  "He was right-handed?" Osorio asked.

  "Yes."

  "From the angles you can see, when he held the jar, the prints on the jar are his right thumb and index fingers and the prints on the glass are his left thumb and index finger. They're over all the rooms, doors, mirrors, everywhere. So you see, your Russian friend was a Cuban fisherman."

  "The body, how long was it dead?"

  "According to Dr. Blas, maybe two weeks."

  "No one's been here in the meantime?"

  "I asked the neighbors. No."

  "That must be a hungry turtle."

  Arkady returned to the front room, out of habit memorizing the apartment layout as he went: balcony, sitting room, laundry room, office, bathroom, bedroom. Inside the refrigerator were yogurt, greens, eggplant, pickled mushrooms, boiled tongue and a half-dozen boxes of color 35-mm film. He fed dillweed to the turtle and glanced at the black doll that filled the corner chair. " I have to admit these are new aspects to the man I knew. Did you find his car?"

  "No."

  "Do you know the make?"

  "Lada." She shook her head a little for emphasis. "It doesn't matter. Your flight is in four hours. The body is being prepared for the plane. You will accompany it. Agreed?"

  "I suppose I will."

  Osorio frowned, as if she glimpsed a nuance in the answer.

  On the ride back she asked, "Tell me, out of curiosity, as an investigator are you any good?"

  "Not particularly."

  "Why not?"

  "Various reasons. I used to have a fair rate of success, as your captain puts it. But that was when murders in Moscow were amateur affairs with steel pipes and vodka bottles. Now they're professional work with heavy artillery. Also, militia work never paid well but it paid. Now, since the militia has not seen its salary in si
x months, men don't work with the same zeal. And there's the problem that if you do make progress on a contract homicide, the man who ordered the murder takes the prosecutor to lunch and offers him a condominium in Yalta and the case is dropped, so my success ratio is no longer something to be proud of. And, no doubt, my skills are not what they used to be."

  "You had so many questions."

  "Habit." Going through the motions, Arkady thought, as if his body were a suit that shuffled to the scene of the crime, any crime, anywhere. He was more irritated with himself than with her. Why had he started snooping? Enough! Osorio was right. He felt her eyes on him. Only for a moment, though. Because they were crossing a power blackout she had to proceed on some streets as carefully as steering a boat in the dark. In Arkady's mind, the syringe beckoned, the needle of a compass.

  When they halted for goats wandering over the road the headlights illuminated a wall on which was written "Venceremos!" Arkady tried to say it silently but Osorio caught him.

  Venceremos!' means 'We will win!' In spite of America and Russia, we will win!"

  "In spite of history, geography, the law of gravity?"

  "In spite of everything! You don't have signs like that in Moscow anymore, do you?"

  "We have signs. Now they say Nike and Absolut."

  He got a glance from Osorio no worse than the flame of a blowtorch. When they reached the embassy apartment the detective told him that a driver would gather him in two hours for the airport. "And you will have your friend to travel with."

  "Let's hope it really is the colonel." Osorio was stung worse than he'd intended. "A live Russian, a dead Russian, it's hard to tell the difference."

  "You're right."

  Arkady went up alone. A rumba played either in the house or out of the house, he could no longer tell where, all he knew was that constant music made him exhausted.

  Unlocking the door, he lit a cigarette, careful not to drop embers on his sleeve. It was a cashmere coat Irina had given him as a wedding present, a soft black wreath of a coat that, she said, made him look like a poet. With the thin Russian shoes and shabby pants that he insisted on wearing he appeared all the more artistic. It was a lucky coat, impervious to bullets. He had walked through a shootout on the Arbat like an armored saint; later, he realized that no one had fired at him precisely because in his miraculous coat he resembled neither gangster nor militia.

  More than that, the coat bore the faint lingering perfume of Irina, a secret, tactile sense of her, and when the thought of her became unbearable this scent was a final ally against her loss.

  It was odd, Osorio asking whether he was any good. What he hadn't told her was that in Moscow his work suffered from what was officially labeled "inattention." When he went to work at all. He stayed in bed for days, the coat for a coverlet, occasionally rising to boil water for tea. Waiting for night before going out for cigarettes. Ignoring the visits of colleagues at the door. The cracks in the plaster of his Moscow ceiling had a vague outline of West Africa, and staring up he could catch the moment when window light was sideways enough to turn bumps into plaster mountains and turn cracks into a network of rivers and tributaries. Flying a black coat as his flag, his vessel sailed to each port of call.

  Inattention was the greatest crime of all. He had seen every sort of victim, from nearly pristine bodies in their beds to the butchered, monstrously altered dead, and he had to say that, in general, they would still be lightly snoring or laughing at a well-told joke if someone had only paid more attention to an approaching knife or shotgun or syringe. All the love in the world could not make up for lack of attention.

  Say you were on the deck of a ferry crossing a narrow strait, and although the distance was short, the wind and waves came up and the ship foundered. Into the cold water you go, and the one you love most is in your grasp. All you have to do to save her life is not let go. And then you look and your hand is empty. Inattention. Weakness. Well, the self-condemned lived longer nights than others for good reason. Because they were always trying to reverse time, to return to that receding, fateful moment and not let go. At night, when they could concentrate.

  In the dark of the room he saw the polyclinic off the Arbat where he, the solicitous lover, had taken Irina to treat an infection. She had stopped smoking – they both had, together – and out of waiting-room nerves asked him to go to a kiosk for a magazine, Elle or Vogue, it didn't matter how old. He remembered the fatuous slap of his shoes as he crossed the room and, outside, the flyers of private vendors stapled to the trees – "For Sale! Best Medicines!" – which could have explained why drugs were in short supply in the clinic. Cottonwood seeds lifted into the evening's summer light. Poised smugly on the clinic steps, what had he been thinking? That they had finally achieved a normal life, a blessed bubble above the general mayhem? Meanwhile the nurse led Irina to the examining room. (Since then he had become more tolerant of killers. The carefully planned ambush, colorful wiring, the car packed with Semtex, the trouble they went to. At least they killed deliberately.) Her doctor explained that the clinic was short of Bactrim, the usual treatment. Was she allergic to ampicillin, penicillin? Yes, Irina always made sure the fact was underlined on her chart. At which point, the doctor's pocket beeped, and he stepped into the hall to talk on his cellular phone with his broker about a Romanian fund that promised a three-for-one return. The nurse in the examining room had heard only minutes before that her apartment had been sold by the city to a Swiss corporation for offices. Who was there to complain to? She had caught the word "ampicillin." Since the clinic was out of oral doses, she gave Irina an intravenous injection and left the room. Executions should be as speedy and thorough.

  Having bought the magazine, Arkady followed the gauzy stream of seeds drifting back to the clinic, by which time Irina was dead. The nurses tried to keep him from the examining room, a mistake. The doctors tried to bar his way to the sheet covering the table and that was a mistake, too, ending in gurneys being upended, trays scattered, the medical staffs white caps crushed underfoot, finally a call to the militia to remove the madman.

  Which was sheer melodrama. Irina herself hated melodrama, the demonic excess of a Russia where the Mafia donned evening clothes with Kevlar vests, where brides wed in see-through lace, where the foremost appeal of public office was immunity to prosecution. Irina loathed it, and she must have been embarrassed to die surrounded by Russian melodrama.

  There were five hours until his plane left. Arkady thought the problem with airlines was that they didn't allow passengers to carry handguns. Otherwise he could have brought his and shot himself with a tropical view of dark rooflines rigged with laundry as full as sails and whole new constellations.

  What was the final image Irina had in the clinic? The eyes of the nurse widening as she understood the depth of her mistake? Not too deep, only intravenous, but deep enough. They both must have understood. Within seconds, Irina's arm would have displayed a raised, roseate circle and her eyes begun to itch. Arkady was allowed to read their statements later, a professional courtesy. Irina Asanova Renkova opened the door to the hall, interrupted the doctor's conversation and held up the empty vial. Already her breath came as a wheeze. While the doctor called for the emergency cart, Irina shook and sweat, her heart accelerating to changing rhythms like a kite buffeted by gusts of wind. By the time the cart was located and rolled in, she was in deep anaphylactic shock, her windpipe shut and her heart racing, stopping, racing. However, the Adrenalin supposed to be on the cart, the shot that could have reset her heart like a clock and eased the constriction of her throat, was misplaced, missing, an innocent error. In a panic, the doctor tried to open the pharmacy cabinet and snapped off the key in the lock. Which was the same as a coup de grâce.

  When Arkady ripped the sheet off the table at the polyclinic, he was amazed to see all they had done to Irina in the time it had taken him to walk to a kiosk and buy a magazine. Her face lay twisted in the disarray of hair that seemed suddenly so much darker she looked
drowned, as if immersed in water for a day. Tangled and unbuttoned to the waist, her dress revealed her chest bruised by pounding. Her own hands were fists of agony, and she was still warm. He closed her eyes, smoothed her hair from her brow and buttoned her dress in spite of the doctor's insistence that he "not disturb the corpus." As an answer, he picked up the doctor and used him to crack a plate glass sold as bulletproof. The impact exploded cabinets, spewed instruments, spilled alcohol that turned the air silvery and aromatic. When the staff was routed and he had command of the examining room he made a pillow of his coat for her head.

  He'd never considered himself melancholy, not on a Russian scale. It wasn't as if there was suicide in his family – with the exception of his mother, but she'd always been more dramatic and direct. Well, there was his father, too, but his father had always been a killer. Arkady resisted the idea not out of morality but manners, not wanting to make a mess. And there was the practical question of how. Hanging was unreliable and he didn't want to leave such a sight for anyone to discover. Shooting announced itself with such a boastful bang. The problem was that experts in suicide could teach only by example, and he had seen enough bungled attempts to know how often there was a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Best was simply to vanish. Being in Havana made him feel already half disappeared.

  He used to be a better person. He used to care about people. He had always regarded suicides as selfish, leaving their bodies to frighten other people, their mess for other people to clean up. He could always start over, devote himself to a worthy cause, allow himself to heal. The trouble was that he didn't want the memory to fade. While he still remembered her, her breath in her sleep, the warmth of her back, the way she would turn to him in the morning, while he was still insane enough to think he would wake up beside her, or hear her in the next room or see her on the street, now was the time. If it inconvenienced other people, well, he apologized.

  From his jacket he took the sterile syringe he had stolen in the embalming room. He'd stolen it on impulse, with no conscious plan, or as if some other part of his brain was seizing opportunities and setting an agenda that he was only learning about as it went. Everyone was well aware that Cuba was hard-pressed for medical supplies and here he was stealing. He broke the bag and laid the contents – a 50-cc embalming syringe and needle – on the table. The needle itself was a 10-cm shaft. He screwed it into the syringe and drew the plunger to fill the chamber with air. His chair had uneven legs, and he had to sit just so in order not to wobble. He pushed the coat and shirt sleeves up his left forearm and slapped the inside of the elbow to raise the vein. It would take about a minute after air was introduced into the bloodstream for the heart to stop. Only a minute, not the five minutes Irina was condemned to live out. There had to be enough air, no mere chain of bubbles but a goodly worm of air because the heart would churn and churn before it gave up. The shutters rattled and swung in. A perfectionist, he rose to push them back, resumed his place at the table. He rubbed the coat a last time on his cheek, the cashmere soft as cat's fur, then pushed the sleeve out of the way, stung his arm again and, as the green cord snapped to attention, eased in the needle deep. Blood budded in the chamber.