Sometimes events were just a matter of luck.
The diver stepped into a hole and went under. Gasping, he came up out of the water, grabbed onto first the inner tube and then a foot hanging from it. The foot came off. The inner tube pressed against the spear of a mattress spring, popped and started to deflate. As the foot turned to jelly, Detective Osorio shouted for the officer to toss it to shore: a classic confrontation between authority and vulgar death, Arkady thought. All along the tape, onlookers clapped and laughed.
Rufo said, 'See, usually, our level of competence is fairly high, but Russians have this effect. The captain will never forgive you.»
The camera went on taping the debacle while another detective jumped into the water. Arkady hoped the lens captured the way the rising sun poured into the windows of the ferry. The inner tube was sinking. An arm disengaged. Shouts flew back and forth between Osorio and the police boat. The more desperately the men in the water tried to save the situation the worse it became. Captain Arcos contributed orders to lift the body. As the diver steadied the head, the pressure of his hands liquefied its face and made it slide like a grape skin off the skull, which itself separated cleanly from the neck; it was like trying to lift a man who was perversely disrobing part by part, unembarrassed by the stench of advanced decomposition. A pelican sailed overhead, red as a flamingo.
'I think identification is going to be a little more complicated than the captain imagined, ' Arkady said.
The diver caught the jaw as it dropped off from the skull and juggled each, while the detectives pushed the other black, swollen limbs pell-mell into the shriveling inner tube.
The rhythm was... what was the word? Arkady wondered. Unrelenting.
Across the bay a golden dome seemed to burst into flame, and the houses of the Malecon started to express their unlikely colors of lemon, rose, royal purple, aquamarine.
It really was a lovely city, he thought. Light from the high windows of the autopsy theater of the Institute de Medicina Legal fell on three stainless-steel tables. On the right-hand table lay the
'Captain Luna would rather you watched from here. The examiner is Dr. Bias.'
Rufo waited expectantly until Arkady realized he was supposed to react.
'The very one.'
Bias had a dapper Spanish beard and wore rubber gloves, goggles, green scrubs. Only when he appeared satisfied that he had a reasonably complete body did he measure it and search it meticulously for marks and tattoos, a painstaking task when skin tended to slide wherever touched. An autopsy could take two hours, as much as four. At the left-hand table Detective Osorio and a pair of technicians sorted through the deflated inner tube and fishnet; the body had been left tangled in them for fear of disturbing it any more. Captain Arcos stood to one side, Luna a step behind. It occurred to Arkady that Luna's head was as round and blunt as a black fist with red-rimmed eyes. Already Osorio had found a wet roll of American dollar bills and a ring of keys kept in a leaky plastic bag. Fingerprints wouldn't have survived the bag, and she immediately dispatched the keys with an officer. There was something appeal-ingly energetic and fastidious about Osorio. She hung wet shirt, shorts and underwear on hangers on a rack.
While Bias worked he commented to a microphone clipped to the lapel of his coat.
'Maybe two weeks in the water,' Rufo translated. He added, 'It's been hot and raining, very humid. Even for here.'
'You've seen autopsies before?' Arkady asked.
'No, but I've always been curious. And, of course, I'd heard of Dr. Bias.'
Performing an autopsy on a body in an advanced stage of putrefaction was as delicate as dissecting a soft- boiled egg. Sex was obvious but not age, not race, not size when the chest and stomach cavities were distended, not weight when the body sagged with water inside, not fingerprints when hands that had trailed in the water for a week ended in digits nibbled to the bone. Then there was the gaseous pressure of chemical change. When Bias punctured the abdomen a flatulent spray shot loudly up, and when he made the Y incision across the chest and then to groin, a wave of black water and liquefied matter overflowed the table. Using a pail, a technician deftly caught the viscera as they floated out. An expanding pong of rot-as if a shovel had been plunged into swamp gas- took possession of the room, invading everyone's nose and mouth. Arkady was glad he had left his precious coat in the car. After the first trauma of the stench-five minutes, no more-the olfactory nerves were traumatized and numb, but he was already digging deep into his cigarettes.
Rufo said, 'That smells disgusting.'
'Russian tobacco.' Arkady filled his lungs with smoke.» Want one?'
'No, thanks. I boxed in Russia when I was on the national team. I hated Moscow. The food, the bread and, most of all, the cigarettes.'
'You don't like Russians, either?'
'I love Russians. Some of my best friends are Russian.' Rufo leaned for a better view as Bias spread the chest for the camera.» The doctor is very good. At the rate they're going you'll have time to make your plane. You won't even have to spend the night.'
'Won't the embassy make a fuss about this?'
'The Russians here? No.'
Bias slapped the pulpy mass of the heart in a separate tray.
'You don't think they're too indelicate, I hope,' Rufo said.
'Oh, no.' To be fair, as Arkady remembered, Pribluda used to root through bodies with the enthusiasm of a boar after nuts.» Imagine the poor bastard's surprise,' Pribluda would have said.» Floating around, looking up at the stars, and then bang, he's dead.'
Arkady lit one cigarette from another and drew the smoke in sharply enough to make his eyes tear. It occurred to him that he was at a point now where he knew more people dead than alive, the wrong side of a certain line.
'I picked up a lot of languages touring with the team,' Rufo said.» After boxing, I used to guide groups of singers, musicians, dancers, intellectuals for the embassy. I miss those days.'
Detective Osorio methodically laid out supplies that the dead man had taken to sea: thermos, wicker box, and plastic bags of candles, rolls of tape, twine, hooks and extra line.
Usually, an examiner cut at the hairline and peeled the forehead over the face to reach the skull. Since in this case both the forehead and the face had already slipped off and bade adieu in the bay, Bias proceeded directly with a rotary saw to uncover the brain, which proved rotten with worms that reminded Arkady of the macaroni served by Aeroflot. As the nausea rose he had Rufo lead him to a tiny, chain-flush lavatory, where he threw up, so perhaps he wasn't so inured after all, he thought. Maybe he had just reached his limit. Rufo was gone, and walking back to the autopsy theater on his own, Arkady went by a room perfumed by carboys of formaldehyde and decorated with anatomical charts. On a table two feet with yellow toenails stuck out from a sheet. Between the legs lay an oversized syringe connected by a tube to a tub of embalming fluid on the floor, a technique used in the smallest, most primitive Russian villages when electric pumps failed. The needle of the syringe was particularly long and narrow to fit into an artery, which was thinner than a vein. Between the feet were rubber gloves and another syringe in an unopened plastic bag. Arkady slipped the bag into his jacket pocket.
When Arkady returned to his seat, Rufo was waiting with a recuperative Cuban cigarette. By that time, the brain had been weighed and set aside while Dr. Bias fitted head and jaw together.
Although Rufo's lighter was the plastic disposable sort, he said it had been refilled twenty times.» The Cuban record is over a hundred.'
Arkady bit the cigarette, inhaled.» What kind is this?'
' 'Popular.' Black tobacco. You like it?'
'It's perfect.' Arkady let out a plume of smoke as blue as the exhaust of a car in distress.
Rufo's hand kneaded Arkady's shoulder.» Relax. You're down to bones, my friend.'
