Havana Bay

Pribluda is in trouble. You must come at once.' It was unsigned.'

'I was worried, and Sergei had spoken so respectfully of you.'

'How did you manage to send it? You must need authorization to send messages to Moscow.'

'Officially, but we're so understaffed. They rely on me to do more and more, and in some ways it's much easier to get things done. And I was right, wasn't I? He was in trouble.'

'Did you tell anyone else?'

'Who would I tell? The only real Russian at the embassy was Sergei.' Her eyes brimmed. She took a deep breath and glanced toward the door.» What Cubans don't understand is while we may not sing and dance as much as they do, we love just as passionately, don't we?'

'Yes, we do.'

Certainly Osorio would never understand, Arkady thought. It was a relief to be away from the detective's steamy mix of revolutionary zeal and Santeria spirits, to be in a more solid world where post-Soviet romance blossomed over pickles and vodka, and motive could be measured in dollars and bones were left in the ground and murder made logical sense.

The sight of chicken thawing in a plastic bag seemed to bring Olga Petrovna back to earth. She heaved a bosomy sigh, twisted out her cigarette in an ashtray and in a minute became a businesswoman again, checking a mirror for the proper image of a sweetly gray grandmother.

On the way out Arkady passed a file of people waiting on the steps. From the top of the stairs, Olga Petrovna had a second thought.

'Or, maybe I've been here too long,' she said, 'maybe I'm turning Cuban.'

Chapter Twenty

Ofelia parked the DeSoto near the docks for fear of blowing a tire. Havana had been the staging area for the treasure fleets of the Spanish empire. Over time silver and gold were replaced by American automobiles, which were replaced by Russian oil. All of this was handled in the warehouses of a barrio called Atares, and when the Soviet Union collapsed parts of Atares, like a half-empty vein, did too. One decrepit warehouse dragged down its neighbor, which destabilized a third and spewed steel and timbers into the street until they looked like a city that had undergone a siege, stone pulverized in heaps, garlands of twisted steel, not to mention the potholes and shit and doorways heady with the reek of urine. Ofelia had done invasion training in Atares and remembered how convincing it was to carry make-believe wounded across a landscape of collapse. It was no place you'd want to drive into.

The single building standing on its corner was the Centre Russo-Cubano. The center had served as a hotel and social meeting place for Soviet ships' officers in port and was designed like a three-story ship's deckhouse in cement with porthole-style windows and a red Soviet flag of glass set into the house at bridge height, although at this point the ship seemed to have sailed through bad weather and run aground, rubble piled around the steps, iron railings ripped off. Ofelia was surprised the doors opened as easily as they did.

Inside, faint rays of light fell from the windows into a lobby. A curved reception desk of Cuban mahogany was flanked by a girl in black marble cutting a brass sheaf of cane and, on the other end, a bronze sailor hauling a net. The cane cutter was barefoot, work clothes molded to her body. The sailor bore heroic Slavic features, and his net overflowed with fish. Russo-Cubano, indeed! Cubans had never been allowed in, this had been strictly Russians only. All the signs, reception, buffet, director, were in Russian. Through the dust Ofelia made out a floor mosaic of a hammer and sickle on a barely discernible pattern of blue waves. The only sign of recent life was in the middle of the lobby where a dull red ray of light reached down from the glass flag to a Lada with Russian diplomatic plates.

The sound of clicking drew her eyes up to a lightbulb hanging on a cord, to busts of Marti, Marx and Lenin decorating a mezzanine balcony and finally to a goat moving along the balcony rail. The goat stared down with disdain. Nothing but a goat could have climbed the stairs, blocked as they were by the ripped-out and abandoned cage of the elevator. No great loss, Ofelia thought. Since power outages began, people didn't trust elevators anyway. An extension ladder reached from the lobby to the balcony. More goats appeared.

At the steering wheel of the Lada sat a black man, his head twisted toward her, staring. When he didn't answer her or get out she pulled her gun and opened the door. Out sagged a rag doll, Chango, with a half-formed face and glass eyes, dressed in pants and shirt, a red bandanna around his head. She looked into the car. Red candles were burned down to waxy tears on the dash. From the rearview mirror hung a shell necklace and a rosary. The sound of a bell drew her attention back to the balcony, where a Judas goat pushed its way to the forefront of the other goats and stretched its neck to stare down. As a group they stiffened and, in a clatter of hoofs, scattered not at the sight of her, she realized, but someone else behind her.

Ofelia wasn't so much aware of being hit as plunging to the floor and then waking in a burlap sack, blind as a rabbit bagged for market. She'd lost her gun and a large hand wrapped tight around her throat as a suggestion not to scream. When the fingers relaxed, the sweet, milky scent of coconut burst into her mouth.

Sometimes, not knowing was better than knowing. Isabel's long-awaited E-mail from Moscow glowed on Pribluda's screen.

Dear Sergei Sergeevich, what a pleasure to hear from you and what a surprise! I should have written you long ago and told you how sorry I was to hear of the passing of Maria Ivanova, who was always so kind to everyone. You were blessed to have such a wife. I remember the day we came in off an assignment and were so cold we couldn't speak. We had to point at the frostbite on each other's nose. She made practically a banya in the bathroom with herbs and birches and steaming water and a cold bottle of vodka. She saved our lives that day. All the best people are gone, it's true. And now there you are in the tropics and I am still here but not much more than a librarian. But busy, every day someone wants to declassify this or that. Last week I had a visit from a lawyer of a Western news organization demanding I open the most sensitive archives of the KGB as if they were nothing more than a family album. Is nothing sacred? I say that with tongue in cheek but also seriously. We can no longer simply say, 'Those who know, know.' Those days are gone. However, promises made must be promises kept, that is my watchword. Where society and historical truth are served by disclosure, where traitors will not be lionized or honorable reputations destroyed, where innocent people who thought they were doing their duty in often hazardous circumstances are not victimized by new standards then, yes!, I am the first man to drag facts to the sunlight.

Which brings me to this inquiry of yours about a former leader of the Cuban Communist Party, Lazaro Lindo. In particular, you ask whether Lindo was involved in a so-called Party conspiracy against the Cuban state. As I remember, Castro claimed that a circle within the CCP, feeling that he had led his countrymen down a path of adventurism, was conspiring with the USSR against him. True or not, the consequences were severe: strained relations between the Cuban and Soviet states, arrest and imprisonment of some of the most devoted Cuban Party members, Lindo among them. Naturally, this was and remains a most sensitive matter. What you ask for is documentation that.no such conspiracy existed or that, if it did, Lindo was not part of it. I understand this might allow his daughter to gain permission to travel. Unfortunately, I cannot satisfy you. But it was a wonderful surprise to hear from an old friend.

By the by, the entire country is a cheese full of maggots these days. You're well out of it.

Roman Petrovich Rozov

Senior Archivist Federal Intelligence Service

[email protected]

Arkady printed the letter out to give Isabel, but it was clear that Rozov, Pribluda's old comrade-in-arms, as good as admitted both the plot and Lindo's part in it, and although Arkady didn't know Isabel well or even like her, he dreaded passing the letter on because he had recognized the desperation in the kiss she had given him the night before. Why kiss him otherwise?

The kiss angered him because it was a parody of real desire, her hard mouth clinging to him until he pushed her away. All the same, he asked himself, would a Cuban have rejected her? Would any warm-blooded man?

The other answer he dreaded was in the photograph he had extracted from Olga Petrovna, the picture that could conclusively identify the body in the morgue as Sergei Pribluda, yes or no. It was revealing how relieved he