Havana Bay

choose to use it when he already had a better weapon. Do you?'

Arkady gave the matter some thought.» Did Rufo have any record of violence?'

'I know the opinion of Captain Arcos in this matter, but I have to be honest. Better to say that Rufo had a record of not being caught. He was a jinetero, a hustler. The kind who hangs around tourists and finds someone a girl, changes their money, gets them cigars. Supposedly very successful with German and Swedish women, secretaries on vacation. May I be direct?'

'Please.'

'It is said that he would advertise to foreign women that he had a pinga like a locomotive.'

'What is a pinga?' Arkady asked.

'Well, I'm no psychiatrist, but a man who has a pinga like a locomotive doesn't use a syringe to kill someone.'

'More likely a machete,' Osorio spoke up.

'You can't see many of those. How many people would have machetes in the city?'

'Every Cuban has a machete,' Bias said.» I have three in my own closet.'

'I have one,' Osorio said.

Arkady stood corrected.

Bias asked, 'You can't shed any light on this syringe?'

'No.'

'Understand I am not a detective, I am not the PNR, I am only a forensic pathologist, but I was trained by my Russian instructors of long ago to think in an analytical fashion. I believe we are not so different, so I will show you something to build your confidence in us. And you may even learn something from us.'

'Such as?'

Bias rubbed his hands like a host with a program.» We will start where you came in.'

The morgue had six drawers, a freezer and a glass-faced cooler, all with broken handles beaded with condensation. Bias said, 'The refrigerators still work. We had an American pilot from the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He crashed and died, and for nineteen years the CIA said they never heard of him. Finally his family came and got him. But he was in good condition in his own humidor right here. We called him the Cigar.'

Bias rolled out a drawer. Inside, the purple body identified as Pribluda was rearranged: skull, jaw and right foot between the legs, a plastic sack of organs where the head should be. Left open, the stomach cavity released a zoo-like bouquet that made Arkady's eyes smart, and the whole body had been placed in a zinc tub to keep the liquefying flesh from overflowing. Arkady lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. That was reason to smoke right there. So far, Arkady's confidence was not rising.

'We did have funding promised from our Russian friends for a new refrigeration system. You can understand how important refrigeration is in Havana. Then the Russians said we had to buy it.' Bias turned his head this way and that to study the corpse.» Are you aware of any characteristics of Pribluda that are different from this body?'

'No, but I think that after a week in the water and having body parts switched, most people look alike.'

'I was instructed by Captain Arcos not to perform biopsies. However, I think I am still the director here and so I did. The brain and organs show no evidence of drugs or toxins. That is not conclusive because the body was in the water such a long time, but there was another aspect. The heart muscle displayed definite signs of necrosis, which is a strong indicator of heart attack.'

'A heart attack while floating in the water?'

'A heart attack after a lifetime of eating and drinking like a Russian, an attack so massive and so quick he had no time even to thrash, which was why all the fishing gear was still on board. Did you know that life expectancy is twenty years less in Russia than in Cuba? I will give you samples of the tissue. Show them to any doctor in Moscow and they will say the same.'

'Have you ever seen neumaticos die of a heart attack before?'

'No, mostly shark attacks. But this is the first time I've heard of a Russian neumdtico.'

'Don't you think that's worth an investigation?'

'You must understand our situation. We have no crime scene and no witnesses, which makes an investigation very discouraging, very expensive. And no crime. Worse, he's Russian and the embassy refuses to cooperate. They say no one worked with Pribluda, no one knew him and that he was merely an innocent student of the sugar industry. For us even to visit the embassy requires a diplomatic note. All the same we asked for a photograph of Pribluda, and since we didn't receive that, we have matched him and the body to the best possible certainty. There is nothing more we can do. We must consider him identified and you must take him home. We will have no more 'cigars' here.'

'Why ask the embassy for a photograph? I showed you one.'

'Yours wasn't good enough.'

'You can't match anything to the way he looks now.'

Bias let a smile win his face. He rolled the body drawer shut.» I have a surprise for you. I want you to return home with the right idea of Cuba.'

On the second floor Bias led Arkady and Osorio into an office with the faded title antropologia on the door.

Arkady's first impression was of a catacomb, the remains of martyrs assiduously sorted by shelves of skulls, pelvises, thigh bones, metacarpals lying hand in hand, spines tangled like snakes. Dust swam around a lampshade, the light reflected by case after case of neatly pinned tropical beetles iridescent as opals. A fer-de-lance with open fangs coiled within a specimen jar topped by a tarantula on tiptoe. What looked like dominoes were burned bones in gradations from white to charcoal black. On the wall the baroque jaws of a shark outgrinned a jawbone of human teeth filed to points. The cord for the ceiling fan was the braided hair of a shrunken head. No catacomb, Arkady changed his mind, more a jungle trading post. A sheet covered something humming on a desk, and if it were a great ape going philosophical Arkady wouldn't have been surprised.

'This is our anthropological laboratory,' said Bias.» Not a large one, but here we determine by bones and teeth the age, race and sex of a victim. And different poisonous or violent agents.'

'The Caribbean has a number you won't see in Moscow,' Osorio said.

'We are deficient in sharks,' Arkady said.

'And,' Bias said, 'by insect activity how long the victim has been dead. In other climates, different insects start at different times. Here in Cuba, they all start at once, but at different rates of progress.'

'Fascinating.'

'Fascinating but perhaps not what an investigator from Moscow would call a serious forensic laboratory?'

'There are different laboratories for different places.'

'Exactly!' Bias picked up the jawbone of pointed teeth.» Our population is, let's say, unique. A number of African tribes practiced scarification and sharpening teeth. The Abakua, for example, was a secret leopard society from the Congo. They were brought here as slaves to work on the docks and in a short time controlled all the smuggling in . It took the Comandante to turn them into a folkloric society.' He set down the teeth and directed Arkady's attention to an exhibit of a skull and two-edged ax spattered in dried blood.» This skull might look to you like evidence of trauma.'

'It conceivably might.'

'But to a Cuban a skull and an ax covered in animal blood may be a religious shrine. The detective can tell you all about it if you want.' Osorio squirmed at the suggestion and Bias went on.» So when we make a psychological analysis of a person we use the Minnesota profile, of course, but we also take into consideration whether a person is a devotee of Santeria.'

'Oh.' Not that Arkady had ever used the Minnesota profile.

'Nevertheless'-Bias lifted the cloth-'let me prove that, in spite of superstitions, Cuba is still abreast of the world.'

Unveiled on a desk was a 486 computer hooked up to a scanner and printer, each running, and an 8-mm video camera mounted lens down above a stand. Resting in a ring on the stand and tilted up to the camera was a skull with a hole in the center of the forehead. The cranium was wired together. Missing teeth made for a gaping