The Casa de Amor had emptied. At the sight of PNR Ladas and an IML forensics van with scales of justice painted on the door the Casa's guests returned just long enough to grab their overnight bags and run. At the bottom of the stairs Ofelia found a hose and washed first the soles of her shoes and then her face and hands.
The criminal laboratory of the Ministry of the Interior was in the Antiguo Hotel Via Blanca, a nineteenth-century brownstone palace erected in an erroneous burst of Spain's imperial confidence just before the first Cuban Revolution. A somber Iberian mood still resided in the building's dark walls and narrow windows.
While Bias's Institute de Medicina Legal carried out autopsies the laboratories of Minint analyzed drugs and arson, ballistics and explosives, fingerprints, documents and currency. The work was done for the PNR, but the uniform was military fatigues.
'Fidel loves uniforms,' her mother always claimed.» Put someone in uniform and you've created an idiot who watches his neighbors and says, 'How did he get that dollar? How did she get those chickens?'' Her mother would laugh so hard she'd have to waddle to the water closet.»
In the evidence room, weapons were labeled and kept on shelving that on the underside still bore stencils of the FBI. The rifles were farmers' shotguns; anything military was recirculated back to the army or militia. Enough machetes to clear a cane field, axes and knives and homemade curiosities: a mortar barrel made from bamboo, sugarcane shaved into spears. On opposite shelves lay incidental evidence: bagged clothes, envelopes of rings and earrings, centavos in jars, shoes, sandals, a freshly tagged black swimming flipper and an inner tube.
Someone had rinsed the flipper, and when Ofelia held it to the light she saw the faintest charring inside the strap, which could have been her imagination or Renko's influence. She replaced the flipper carefully, as if putting off a question.
She went to the records room, where a haze of paper dander hung under fluorescent lights. The two working computers at the table were being used, but in a carrel behind stacks of volumes tied with faded ribbon she found a third, where she pulled up the file on her friend i Maria.
Maria Luz Romero Holmes, age: 22, address: Vapor 224, Vedado, La Habana, charged with solicitation outside that address. Jose Romero Gomez, 22, same address, charged with assault. There was more: marital and educational status, employment, and the statement of the witness.
It was Rufo Pinero's name that had prodded her memory. A former boxer innocently headed to the university. For a lecture on poetry? Ofelia wondered. Nuclear science?
The police photograph of Maria showed her wet with tears but defiant. In his photograph her husband's eyes were dark slits, his nose split, his jaw swollen large as a gourd.
The statement of the witness is corroborated by this arresting officer, who was also threatened and assaulted by the Romero couple in the course of his duty.
Ofelia remembered how Maria had said a plastic sheet had been placed over the rear seat of the police car because Luna knew he would be transporting people covered in blood, and how Rufo had taken cigars out of the police car's glove compartment, cigars he had put in beforehand so they wouldn't be damaged during the scuffle. Luna and Rufo planned ahead.
She thought she knew what had happened at the Casa de Amor. Bias had suggested a crime of passion, a Cuban boyfriend who killed the Italian and the Cuban girl in a fit of uncontrollable anger. But what Ofelia saw in her mind was Franco Mossa and Hedy drinking in the dark, dancing to the radio, laughing. It wasn't likely Hedy spoke much Italian, but how much did she need? She retired to the bathroom, emerged undressed, a busty honey-colored girl. She slipped into bed, and as he took his turn in the bathroom she slipped right out again and opened the balcony door for a friend. The Italian turned off the bathroom light and, half blind, walked into the darkened bedroom. Hedy couldn't have seen much. She'd have heard the sucking sound of the ice pick as it was pulled from the Italian's neck, though. What had Hedy thought they were up to? Extortion was the usual game with tourists. She would have been silent and surprised when the machete whistled out of the dark and cut her head half off her shoulders. The killer must have been as bloody as a slaughterhouse wall when he was done. The question was, Why the photograph of the Russian? Who had carried it, Hedy or her friend? Was there a moment when he turned on the bathroom light and saw to his own surprise that he had butchered an Italian named Franco, not a Russian named Renko? Since she was on the machine already, she ran a search for other connections between Rufo Pinero and Facundo Luna. Besides Maria's case, two files showed up. Four years earlier a group of criminals had gathered to distribute drugs under the pretense of organizing a political opposition. When members of the community became aware of this plan, they burst into the ringleader's house and demanded he surrender the drugs. In a scuffle provoked by the ringleader and his family, two patriots who had to defend themselves were Rufo Pinero and Facundo Luna. More recently a cell of so-called democrats had staged a rally with the true intent of releasing infectious diseases, only to be physically barred by vigilant citizens, including the alert Luna and Pinero.
Ofelia felt that Cubans should be allowed to fight their enemies because the gangsters in Miami would stop at nothing: assassination, bombing, propaganda. For Cuba to even exist took vigilance. However, the role of Rufo and Facundo in these cases made Ofelia uneasy. She turned off the computer half wishing she hadn't turned it on in the first place.
On her way out, she discovered the officers who had been working at the table were gone. Sitting alone was Sergeant Luna. She was surprised he had left the Casa de Amor already. His arms were crossed, stretching his shirt across his chest. His face hung in the shadow of his cap as he worked his jaw from side to side. His chair was turned, half blocking the way to the door.
Suddenly she was back in Hershey, in the cattle fields where the egrets came from their roosts along the river. The birds were as white as shavings of soap, and as they crossed the carbon-black smoke that lifted from the chimneys of the sugar mill her anxiety was for the egrets' purity. Nevertheless they would float in and stalk the cattle fields, impervious to dirt. She was so busy watching them that she didn't notice that the bull had been let into the field, and the person who had led the bull in hadn't seen her. The bull saw her, though.
The bull was the largest animal she'd ever seen. Milky white with downward twisting horns, creamy curls between the horns, shoulders bloated with muscle, a pink sac down to his knees, eyes red with the indolent torpor of a violent king. Not dumb, however, not in this situation. Because he ruled. And he waited for her to make her move.
But something distracted it. Ofelia turned her head and saw a figure in black that had jumped the fence and was waving and hopping from foot to foot. It was the town priest, a pale man who had always seemed so sad. His cassock flapped around him as he laughed and goaded the bull, ran in a circle around it and threw clods until it charged. Lifting his cassock, the priest took the longest strides Ofelia had ever seen. He dived over the fence ahead of the bull, which drove a deep-rooted post half over and went on savaging the wood in frustration while Ofelia raced to the part of the fence nearest her. She remembered her first gulp of air from the safety of the other side and how she didn't stop running until she was home.
Luna said, 'Captain Arcos asked if you gave us all the evidence you found in the motel?'
'Yes.'
Luna shifted so that his bulk blocked her even more and let his thick arm hang slack.
'Everything?'
'Yes.'
'You told us everything you know about this?'
'Yes.'
