Havana Bay

Castle and fed three separate inner bays: Atares, west and nearest to downtown Havana, Guana-bacoa in the middle and Casablanca east. Arkady followed with his finger the tracery of shipping lanes, ferry routes, depths, buoys, the very few hazards, and understood why the bay of Havana had been the great marshaling yard of Spain's American possessions. But it was all one 'bag bay' to Andres.

'What floats in can float out, he says. Depending on the tide: in during high, out during low. Depending on the wind: northwest in, southeast out. Depending on the season: in winter winds were generally stronger, in summer hurricanes drew water out to sea. If everything is equal a body can spin forever in the middle of the bay, but usually the wind is steady from the northwest and drives bodies right to his boatyard, which was why you find live neumaticos in Havana and dead neumaticos in Casablanca.'

Arkady tested the spindly dock and for some reason felt promise. Andres's own boat, El Pinguino, was a coquettish blue with room for two if they could shift around an engine box, floats, buckets, gaff and tiller. Forward, a sail was furled between outrigged fishing poles. Aft, rope and wire lay on a transom crosshatched from braining fish. No satellite uplink, sonar, fish finder, radar or radio.

Osorio followed.» Looks are deceiving, Andres says. It's enough boat, he claims, to reach Key West and get arrested for taking American marlin.' As a note of her own she added, 'In Havana the first Hemingway deep-sea fishing tournament was won by Fidel.'

'Why am I not surprised?'

Drawn to the boat, Arkady crossed planks spaced widely enough for him to follow his reflection in the water. What he didn't understand were the floats, each numbered and skewered so that at least three meters of orange pole would stand free above the water.

'This,' Andres explained through Osorio, 'is the Cuban system.' The fisherman turned the chart over and, with a pencil stub, drew a wavy surface of the water and then, at regular intervals, the poles floating upright. A 'mother line' connected them in a long string of poles.» The problem with fish is that they swim at different depths at different times. At night with a full moon, the tuna feed deeper. At the same time, red snapper or grunts feed closer to the surface. And turtles, too, though you can only catch them while they're copulating, a season that only lasts a month. Of course, they're illegal, so he never would. But with the Cuban system you can fish for them all by hanging hooks from different sections of the mother line at different depths: forty meters, thirty meters, ten. Everybody sets out different lines and this way they comb the whole sea.'

'Ask him about a current that would have carried a drifting neumatico from the Malecon into the bay.'

'He says that is where boats concentrate because that's where fish are found, in the current. Boats don't fish the entire bay, just that corridor with mother lines and a gamut of hooks.'

'Now ask him what they found, not here at the dock but out on the water. I don't mean fish.'

Andres stopped for breath like a man outrun by his mouth. A Cuban who poached in Florida, after all, Arkady thought, was a man given to overreaching.

'He asks, something snagged in the bay? Around the time that poor man was found at the dock?' As if to aid recollection Andres glanced back toward the two men who had been working on the propeller shaft but his friends had vanished.» Trash maybe, hooked accidentally?'

'Exactly.'

By now Osorio understood the drift, and when Andres retreated to his shack she went with him. They returned with a plastic bag and perhaps fifty sheets of what looked like lottery tickets that had obviously been soaked through and then set out to dry. In green on white, a barely legible pattern said 'Montecristo, Habana Puro, Fabrica a Mano' over and over again.

'These are official state seals before they're gummed and cut for cigar boxes,' Osorio said.» With these, ordinary cigars could have been labeled expensive Mon-tecristos. This is very serious.' Andres became a torrent of explications.» He says the seals snagged on someone's line, he can't remember whose, a week or more before the body was found. The bag had leaked, the seals were ruined, besides that was when the weather changed, no one came to their boats and the seals were forgotten. He dried them but just to read them and see if they were worth reporting. He was about to himself.'

Arkady was entertained by the idea of such valuable cigars. Sugar and cigars, the diamonds and gold of Cuba.

'Could you ask exactly where the bag was found?'

Andres marked the chart five hundred meters off the Malecon between the Hotel Riviera and Pribluda's flat.» He says only a lunatic would steal government seals, but he thinks a neumdtico is desperate to begin with. To sail on a ring of rubber and air? At night? The tide goes out or a current carries him to sea? One little puncture? Sharks? A man like that makes all fishermen look bad.'

Osorio was disgusted with Casablanca. In the village's PNR station, so dark that a portrait of Che was an undusted ghost, the officers stirred just enough to take a signed statement from Andres and give a receipt for the seals to her.

Arkady was content, having done something remotely professional, and on the ferry ride back bought a paper flute of peanuts roasted in sugar that he induced Osorio to share.

Her attitude had changed a little.» That man Andres only showed us the cigar seals he found because he looked into your eyes. You knew he was hiding something. How did you do that?'

It was true that from the moment Arkady walked into the boatyard he felt guided to the flimsy dock and the spear-shaped floats of the 'mother line.' He could say it was the way the workmen avoided Osorio, but no, it was as if El Pinguino had called his name.

'A moment of clarity.'

'More than that. You saw through him.'

'I'm highly trained in suspicion. It's the Russian method.'

Osorio gave him an opaque, humorless gaze. He had yet to figure the detective out. The fact that Luna had backed off when Osorio arrived in the santero's yard suggested as much that they were working together as on opposite sides. She could just be a smaller version of the man who had beaten Arkady with a bat. Yet there were moments when Arkady would spy an entirely different, unrevealed person stirring within her. The ferry engines reversed and threw the deck into vibrations as it coasted to the dock.

'Now we should go to a doctor,' Osorio said.» I know a good one.'

'Thanks, but I finally have a mission. Your Dr. Bias needs a better photograph of Sergei Pribluda. I volunteered to find it. At least, to try.'

The address Isabel had given him the night before was an old town house that, like a dowager in a once fine but tattered dress, maintained an illusion of European culture. Wrought-iron railings guarded marble steps. Lunettes of stained glass cast red and blue light onto the floor of a reception room staffed with women sitting in white housecoats.

Arkady followed strains of Tchaikovsky, bright and brittle notes from a badly tuned piano, into a sun-filled courtyard, where, through an open window, he saw a class in progress, dancers who balanced the upper bodies of starving waifs on a powerful musculature that started at the small of their backs, sculpted the haunches and flowed down through the legs. While Russian ballerinas tended to be doe-like and softly blonde, however, Cubans had whippet-thin faces trimmed in black hair and eyes and lit with the arrogance of flamenco dancers. In their leotards they combined poverty and chic, moving on point in stiffly elegant, birdlike steps in taped toe shoes across a wooden floor patched with squares of linoleum.

As a Russian, he took a moment to adjust. He had been brought up with the attitude that great dancers- Nijinsky, Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov-were, per se, Russian, that they graduated from schools like the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg and that they danced with the Kirov or Bolshoi until they escaped. Even now, although they were free agents like ice-hockey players, the tradition was still Russian. Yet here was a room of dancers as exotic as hothouse orchids. Especially Isabel, who had the classic line, who made every move seem effortless, whose arabesques were infinitely smooth, whose grace even from the last row stole the eye until the mistress clapped her hands and dismissed the class, at which point Isabel gathered her sweatshirt and bag, joined Arkady and demanded in Russian, 'Give me a cigarette.'