Havana Bay

Look, I have always been a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. You can't arrest me for being attracted to Cuban girls. They're very attractive.'

'Did you use a condom?'

'I think so.'

'We looked in the wastebaskets.'

'Okay, no.'

'I think for your own sake we will have you examined by doctors and send a medical report to your embassy.'

His smile sealed. As he pressed against the table his shirt opened to a gold chain, body heat, the smell of stale cologne. He whispered, 'You know, you're even better looking than Teresa.'

At that moment Ofelia suffered the fantasy that Renko was with her and that he picked up the German the way he had picked up Luna and rammed the German into the wall.

'The doctor will make a thorough examination,' Ofelia said and left the room.

The detective room wasn't as empty when she went back. The Sharon Stone poster was back on the wall, and Teresa looked sideways at the plainclothes detectives, Soto and Tey, sharply dressed men who bent over the paperwork on their desks and exchanged smirks. If Ofelia had any other place to question the girl she would have used it.

Teresa announced, 'Singa tu madre. I'm not saying anything against my friends.'

'Good girl,' Soto said.» With the right friends you don't have to say nothing.'

'Osorio has confused sex and crime,' said Tey.» She's against both.'

'It's been so long, right?' said Soto.

'I'd be happy to help her remember,' offered Tey.

'You can't touch me,' Teresa told Ofelia.» I don't have to tell you nothing.'

'Don't listen to them.' Ofelia felt her neck get hot.

'Don't listen to them? They're not on my ass, you are. You're the bitch, not them. I make ten times what you make. Why would I listen to you?'

'Congratulations, I am putting you on the official list of whores. You will be examined by a doctor and sent out of Havana.'

'You can't.'

'It's done.'

But when she went into the hall with Dora, all Ofelia could think of were her own daughters and she didn't have the heart to order Teresa's name onto the register.

'Tell her I did, though,' she said.» And have the doctor look at her. And have the doctor examine our tourist all over and draw some blood and make it painful.'

'So what is the point of what we're doing if we let her go?' Dora was sick of sweeping streets.

'I'm not after girls, I am after corrupt police.'

'Then you're after men, and in the PNR there are a couple of us and thousands of them. From the top down, everybody winks. They think you're a fanatic and you know what the real problem is? You're not.'

Ofelia returned to the Casa de Amor because although she might have lost Teresa it was just possible that Lohmann's Italian friend and his girl hadn't yet left the motel. This time, she decided, she would question them right in the room, not even go close to the station house. If that was against procedure, well, procedure guaranteed humiliation and failure. She didn't need Dora along, she didn't need anyone. This was on her own.

When Ofelia was angry she took steps two at a time. The rooms were set back between dividers for privacy's sake and hanging on the doorknob of the unit next to Lohmann's was a plastic tag that said do not disturb.

The two boys were playing their endless table tennis, but otherwise no one was around. Maybe she was in luck. Maybe she was stupid. She certainly wasn't going to be appreciated, not if the girl was anything like Teresa. What poor Cuban girl wouldn't think she was in heaven at a motel like this? Then shopping at a boutique for a swimsuit that would show off her cute bottom? Or trying on cat-eyed Ray-Bans or a Gucci scarf?

She knocked on the door.» Housekeeping.'

The radio still played. The pool was a blue lens. The boys played, the sound popping off their paddles. A breeze tugged on the lazy fronds. Ofelia took a deep breath and caught the faint smells of barnyard and butcher. There was no answer to her knock.

'Police,' she said.

The door was unlocked but blocked and she had to use all her strength to enter, and since someone had turned the air-conditioner off and the temperature was in the eighties, it was like gaining admission to an oven of ripe smells of blood and body waste. In opening the door she had rolled a body to the side, and she tried to pick her way across a floor covered with a fallen chair, emptied bureau drawers, clothes and sheets to the drapes on the other side. She drew them open and all the light in the world flooded in.

The body she had stepped over was a naked male, a dark-haired European with arms, back, flanks and scalp slashed. Ofelia had once seen the body of a man who had fallen into the blades of a combine, been chewed and spat out, which was what this man looked like, except that the wounds' individual lengths and curves were the unmistakable work of a machete. Lying on the bed was a naked female, arms and legs splayed, her head twisted like a dummy's and half sliced off. Bed and carpet were dark red as if someone had poured blood by the pail. A corona of blood spattered the wall above the headboard. But there was no broken furniture, no bloody smears of struggle on the walls.

To be first at an undisturbed homicide, Dr. Bias always lectured, was a gift. If you were not a willing investigator, if you could not take advantage of the unique opportunity of being first on the scene, if you were not able to engage sensorially and intelligently, if your eyes or your mind closed even a little to the fading, ineffable shadow of a murderer, then you should not open the door. You should raise children, drive a bus, roll tobacco leaves, anything but steal that gift from men and women with the discipline and stomach for the job.

Both bodies were hard with rigor mortis, thirty-six hours dead at least in Havana heat. The man's wounds looked defensive, administered while he crawled across the floor. If he was conscious enough to do that, why hadn't he cried out? Who had died first? Blood outlined the girl's legs. The hair of her head and pubis were the same honey color, and although her face was angled into the pillow, Ofelia recognized her as a smudged version of Hedy, the beautiful girl who had been possessed and danced through coals.

Having done as much as she could without rubber gloves, Ofelia went to the bathroom, stepping around blood scuffs on the floor, and threw up in the toilet bowl. When she flushed the water swirled and backed up, a rising gorge of vomit on pink water. Before it overflowed she thrust her hand into the toilet throat as far as she could reach and freed a blood-soaked ball of toilet paper from the trap. Between dry heaves she laid what she found on a towel: a wadded Italian passport for a Franco Leo Mossa, 43, of Milan, and Cuban papers for a Hedy Dolores Infante, 25, of Havana. Also half of a photograph torn badly. The picture must have been taken on impulse at an airport curb amid a blur of taxis and suitcases and harried Russian faces. The subject was Renko, wearing a rueful smile and his black coat. Ofelia didn't know why, but her instinct was to put the photograph in her pocket before she staggered out to the bedroom, to the fresh air of the oceanside balcony and a view of neumaticos plying the sea.

Chapter Sixteen

A pair of Chihuahuas led Arkady down the path, rolling soulful eyes at him, prancing around a poinsettia here, sniffing a headstone there, like a pair of tiny landlords until they led him under the hanging pods of a tamarind tree where three Chinese, stripped to the waist, were scrubbing a marble lid they had lifted off a sarcophagus. Erasmo perched inside the tomb with a sack of tools.

'There aren't a lot of jobs where having no legs is an advantage,' Erasmo said.» Working in a coffin happens to be one. You don't look happy.'

Arkady said, 'I've just come from the Havana Yacht Club. You told me the Havana Yacht Club was a joke, just a few fishermen, you, Mongo and Pribluda. But the picture was taken at the Yacht Club and you never mentioned