'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
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
