Havana Bay

gruesomely irrevocable way, then strange things happen. You wander around looking for a car to hit you so you won't have to go home in the evening. So this incident with Rufo is interesting to me because I don't mind a car hitting me, but I do mind a driver trying to hit me. A fine distinction, but there you are.'

In the night Ofelia awoke to find lovers gone, the moon becalmed. In the very lack of breeze she detected a faint scent, a perfume she traced to Renko's soft black coat, to the sleeve of a man who claimed he'd never been possessed.

Chapter Fourteen

Osorio left before dawn, and as soon as she was gone Arkady expected Luna to climb up the front of the building or crawl through the air shaft. It wasn't so much that Arkady didn't trust Osorio as that he didn't understand her. Why she would spend the night in a metal chair with the island's least popular Russian was a mystery to him, unless she was working with Luna and only insinuating herself into the apartment. If that was the case, all the locks in the world wouldn't help.

By eight o'clock the Malecon stretched like a floodlit stage. Boys crouched in the blue shadow of the seawall to spool loose fishing line. Men opened cases of homemade hooks and weights for sale. Bikes rolled by with a father on the pedals, a boy on the handlebars, mother and baby on a plank over the rear wheel, an entire family rolling by. Still no Sergeant Luna.

Arkady went downstairs, but instead of going out on the street he knocked on Erasmo's door, deliberately pounding out of rhythm with the music from the garage's radio until Tico answered and let him into Erasmo's private area with the cut-down bed and table.

'Erasmo's not here.' Tico was in his coveralls, with an inner tube over his shoulder and a Tropicola can in his hand.

Arkady shouted over the radio.» You speak Russian.'

'I speak Russian.' Tico sounded as if he'd just realized it. He was the same age as his friend Erasmo, but time seemed to have left his hair dark and thick as fur, no wrinkles or lines of care to mark his smooth, trusting visage, a boy's face on a middle-aged man.

'Do you mind if I go out through the garage?'

'I don't mind. You can go but you can't come back. The garage is closed.'

Arkady pushed through the beaded curtain. Tico told the truth. The doors of the garage were closed, the Jeeps inside parked bumper to bumper.

Tico said, 'The garage is closed because Erasmo doesn't want me selling any cars while he's gone.'

'I won't bother you, I just want to go out the back way.' And avoid any eyes out front, Arkady thought.

'Erasmo's with the Chinese. He's with the Chinese.'

'He is? What Chinese?'

'The dead Chinese. But he'll be there all day and I'm not supposed to sell any cars. He said, 'Radio silence!' I'm not supposed to talk to anyone.'

'Where are the dead Chinese?'

'Radio silence!'

'Ah.'

'I wasn't supposed to answer the door.'

'No, you were being polite.' Arkady dug a pencil from his coat and spread a piece of paper over a hood.» Can you write it?'

'I can write as well as anyone.'

'Don't tell me, but write where I can find Erasmo and the Chinese.'

'They're dead, that's a clue.'

'Good.' As Tico bent over the paper and printed in block letters, Arkady threw in, on the off-chance, 'Do you know where Mongo is?'

'No.'

'Do you know what happened to Sergei?'

'No.' Tico returned the pencil with an anxious expression.» Are you going to see Erasmo now? If you see him right away he'll know it was me.'

'Not right away.'

Tico brightened.» Where are you going?'

'The Havana Yacht Club.'

'Where is that?'

Arkady held up a map.» In the past.'

He went out the garage doors and walked the back street half a dozen blocks before returning to the Male- con. The boulevard had become familiar in a matter of days, the coughing of trucks, boys casting nets from the seawall, scruffy dogs chewing on a flattened carcass of a gull. A PNR at a corner gave all his attention to a bicycle cart weighted with teenage girls. No Luna at all.

In Arkady's hand was Sergei Pribluda's forty-year-old Texaco map, a foldout map that located the Presidential Palace and American embassy, Cuban-American Jockey Club and racetrack, Woolworth's and Biltmore Country Club of a vanished Havana. Not that the city wasn't still surreal. Houses on the Malecon were fantasies: Greek pediments on Moorish columns and crumbling walls with fleurs-de-lis in faded pinks and blues. Venice had merely the threat of sinking. Havana looked sunken and raised.

What surprised Arkady was how much Havana was the same as on a forty-year-old map. He walked by the colossal Hotel Nacional and the angled glass tower of the Hotel Riviera, both 'popular with vacationing Americans' according to the key of the map. Neumdti-cos rilled inner tubes with air at a former Texaco gas station 'with Fire Chief service!'

It took Arkady ninety minutes to walk the Malecon, cross the Almendares River with its small boatyards and sewer stench, and stroll westward the length of Mira-mar, past Erasmo's family house and the steps where Mongo disappeared. He could have taken a taxi at any point, and he knew by now that half the cars on the road were happy to be flagged down to earn a few American dollars. He didn't want to drive into the past, he wanted to sink into it step by step.

At Miramar's very end he approached a traffic circle with an at-one-time Texaco station, a stadium that had been the Havana greyhound track and, according to Pribluda's map, the Havana Yacht Club.

It wasn't the sort of place people just stumbled onto. There were no other pedestrians. Cars hurtled around the circle and spun away. Only someone looking for it would have noticed a driveway curving along a screen of royal palms and around a lawn to a classical mansion in white with heavy columns, twin grand staircases and broad colonnades. Over it lay the ghostly silence of a colonial governor's palace abandoned in a coup, occupants decamped, the first signs of decay visible in the split reflection of a broken window and a red tile missing from the hip of the roof. Carved above the pediment of a central porch was the design of a ship's wheel on a pennant. In the entire scene there was no movement at all except for the sway of palm fronds. It was easy to imagine Havana's social elite posing on the steps because he'd already seen it, in the photograph of Erasmo's family.

He climbed a stairway and walked through open mahogany doors into a hall of white walls and limestone floors. Under a wrought-iron chandelier an elderly black woman in an aluminum chair stared up at him through thick glasses as if he'd dropped from a spaceship. A red telephone sat at her side, and the sight of a visitor prompted her to call and talk to someone in slurred Spanish while Arkady went on through tall French doors to an empty hall. A line of reception rooms connected like a bright and airy tomb, and the sound of his footsteps preceded him in the direction of a bar with a dark, curving counter stripped of stools, chairs, bottles. A portrait of Che hung by an empty glass case that must at one time have displayed race trophies, sailing ladders, models. All that was left of a nautical theme were wall medallions of a ship's wheel. The bar opened to an outdoor area with a stage ready for a Cuban band that could teach even Americans the mambo.

He returned inside and climbed to the second floor. At the top of the stairway was a tall admiral's chair of black mahogany. Everything else had been carted away and nothing added except more metal chairs of the Revolution. He stepped out onto a porch facing the ocean for a view of a private cove.

A brick promenade as large as a city plaza spread out to a row of thatched umbrellas and fan-shaped palms