'If you can't go, you can't go.' Bias pushed aside the microscope and camera as if they were dinner gone cold. Ofelia's eyes, however, were fixed to the monitor, to a magnified terrain of warring blood cells where she saw a new answer.
Chapter Nine
There were more PNRs stationed on the Malecon than Arkady had expected. Taking the first street from the water, then avoiding a patrol car at the next corner, he found himself behind the block he had just left and at an alley with a flat-faced, vintage American Jeep in house-paint red. Behind it were two more Jeeps, green and white, each with new roll bars and upholstery. They shone under lamps strung out from a humming generator set inside open garage doors where a man in coveralls inspected an inner tube he held in a tub of water. He raised a white, amiable face and carried the tube to an air hose.
'Needs air,' he said in Russian.
'I suppose so,' Arkady said.
Inside, under a caged bulb hanging on a cord, a Jeep sat on ramps over a mechanic working on his back. As the engine revved a rubber hose taped to the exhaust pipe funneled white smoke to the alley. There were other signs of the garage's makeshift nature, the lack of work pits and hydraulic lifts. An engine hung on chains from an I beam above garage disorder, tanks, tool cabinets, oilcans, ammeters, tires, tire lever and well, a folding chair behind a worktable of mallets, a board of car rings on hooks, vises and clamps and greasy rags everywhere, a beaded curtain marking off a personal area, and Arkady realized that he was directly below Pribluda's parlor. A boom box vied for volume next to the Jeep. Since the hood was open, Arkady could see a transplanted Lada engine resonating like a pea in a can. A knit cap, smudged face and dirty beard rolled out from under the car to study Arkady from an upside-down angle.
'Russian?'
'Yes. Everyone can tell?'
'It's not so hard. Have an accident?'
'Kind of.'
'In a car?'
'No.'
The mechanic looked up at the object of his labor.
'If you need a car you could do worse than this. A '48 Jeep. Try to get parts for a '48 Jeep. The best I can do is a Lada 2101. I had to eliminate the differential and adapt the brakes. It's just the seals and valves now that are driving me crazy.' His eyes strained to watch something he was reaching for under the car. The engine raced and he winced.» What a shit rain.' He rolled back under and shouted, 'See any tape?'
Arkady found wrenches, goggles, welding gauntlets, buckets of sand, but reported no tape.
'Mongo isn't there?'
'What is a Mongo?' Arkady wasn't sure he heard right because of the music.
'Mongo is a black man in coveralls and a green baseball cap.'
'No Mongo.'
'Tico? Man working on a tire?'
'He's there.'
'He's looking for a leak. He'll be looking all day.' After what Arkady had to assume were strong words in Spanish the mechanic said, 'Very well, we'll perform heart surgery by going in through the ass. Find me a hammer and a screwdriver and get a pan ready.'
Arkady handed him the tools.» You like Jeeps?'
The mechanic rolled under the car.» I specialize in Jeeps. Other American cars are too heavy. You have to put in Volga engines and Volgas are hard to find. I like a tough little Jeep with a little Lada heart that goes
'No.'
'Don't be put off by appearances. This island is like a Court of Miracles, like in medieval Paris, where the lame could walk and the blind could see because all these cars are still running after fifty years. The reason is that the Cuban mechanic is, by necessity, the best in the world. Could you turn the radio up?'
Unbelievably, the volume had another notch. Maybe this was a Cuban-made radio, Arkady thought. Meanwhile, the violent whacks from under the Jeep made his head throb.
'So you sell cars?' Arkady shouted.
'Yes and no. An old car from before the Revolution, yes. To buy a new car requires approval from the highest level, the very highest. The beauty of the system is that no car in Cuba is abandoned. It may look abandoned, but it's not.' One more whack.» The pan, the pan, the pan!'
Arkady heard a glutinous gush. In a single move, the mechanic swung the pan under the Jeep in his place and shot out on his cart, rolling across the floor until he backhanded a column of tires and swung to a stop and sat up, grinning. He was a robust specimen with the smirk of near disaster, and looked so much like a test pilot after an interesting landing that it took Arkady a moment to notice that the mechanic's coverall legs ended at leather pads at the knees. When he wiped his face and removed his cap his hair rose into a salt-and-pepper mane too unique for Arkady not to recognize the short man from Pribluda's photograph of the Havana Yacht Club, simply far shorter than Arkady had expected.
'Erasmo Aleman,' he introduced himself.» You're Sergei's friend?'
'Yes.'
'I've been waiting for you.'
Erasmo pushed his cart with wooden blocks edged in tire tread to maneuver around his garage at full speed, washing at a cut-down sink, wiping his hands at a barrel of rags. The radio was down to half throat.
'I saw a policewoman take you upstairs a couple of nights ago. You look ... different.'
'Someone tried to teach me baseball.'
'It's not your sport.' Erasmo's eyes went from the bruise on Arkady's cheek to the Band-Aid on his head.
'Is this Sergei?' Arkady produced the snapshot of Pribluda with the Yacht Club.
'Yes.'
'And?' Arkady pointed to the black fisherman.
'Mongo,' Erasmo said, as if it were self-evident.
'And you.'
Erasmo admired the picture.» I look very handsome.'
'The Havana Yacht Club,' Arkady read the back.
'It was a joke. If we'd had a sailboat we would have called ourselves a navy. Anyway, I heard about the body they found across the bay. Frankly, I don't think it's Sergei. He's too pigheaded and tough. I haven't seen him for weeks, but he could come back tomorrow with some story about driving into a pothole. There are potholes in Cuba you can see from the moon.'
'Do you know where his car is?'
'No, but if it were around here I'd recognize it.'
Erasmo explained that diplomatic license plates were black on white and Pribluda's was 060 016; 060 for the Russian embassy and 016 for Pribluda's rank. Cuban plates were tan for state-owned cars, red for privately owned.
'Let me put it this way,' Erasmo said, 'there are state-owned cars that will never move so that private cars can run. A Lada arrives here like a medical donor so that Willy's Jeeps will never die. Excuse me.' He turned down a salsa that threatened to get out of hand.
'The reason for the radio is so the police can say they don't hear me, because you're really not supposed to make a garage out of your apartment. Anyway, Tico likes it loud.'
Arkady thought he understood Erasmo, the type of engineer who labors happily below the deck of a sinking ship, lubricating the pistons, pumping out the water, somehow keeping the vessel moving while it settles in the waves.
'Your neighbors don't complain about the noise?'
