Havana Bay

come out of her house in the morning when a man grabbed her and started to pull her clothes off at her own front door. When her husband ran out to protect her, the man knocked him to the ground and kicked in his teeth. Only then did a police car appear, driven by a single officer who took only a statement from the man, who claimed that Maria had propositioned him and, when he turned her down, that her husband had assaulted him. Maria remembered two other items: that the backseat of the car was already covered in a plastic sheet and that when the man who beat her husband got into the front of the patrol car he picked up two aluminum cigar tubes from the seat and slipped them into his shirt pocket. The cigars were his, laid aside for safekeeping. The poet and Maria hanged themselves in different prisons on the same day. Out of sheer curiosity Ofelia went back and read their arrest report, which declared that the good citizen who had come wandering by their door was Rufo Pinero.

Rufo hardly needed one weapon, let alone two.

If the issue of the syringe bothered her and the death of Maria upset her, the Russian infuriated her. The arrogance to steal Rufo's key, as if he would even know what he was looking at in a Cuban's room. To think that he could stand in front of a map of Havana in Pribluda's office and see more than a piece of paper.

For Ofelia every street, every corner on the map was a memory. For example, her first school trip to Havana when she was running hurdles at what used to be the greyhound track in Miramar, where she returned at night with Tolomeo Duran and lost her virginity on the high-jump mat. That was Miramar to her. Or the theater in Chinatown where her uncle Cucho was knifed to death in the middle of a pornographic movie. Or the Coppelia ice-cream parlor on La Rampa where she met her first husband, Humberto, while they waited three hours for a spoonful to eat. Or the Floridita bar in Havana Vieja where she caught Humberto with a Mexican woman. More than one marriage had ended because tourists came prowling for Cuban men. Divorce was easy in Cuba. She had friends who had been divorced four or five times. What would a Russian know about that?

Bias gasped, 'Still too fast.'

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