Havana Bay

a living room decorated with cinema posters. Arkady was interested in the decor because he realized that he had been in the same room. Down to the stacks of photo albums, collection of cast-bronze bells, ivory phalluses arrayed by size, he recognized the apartment of Mostovoi, the Russian embassy's photographer. On the wall between the posters were the same framed photographs of friends in Paris, London, waving from a boat. He paused the tape. There was one more photograph that hadn't been up when he'd visited Mostovoi, five men with rifles kneeling around what looked like a dead rhinoceros, too unfocused on the tape for him to make out faces. Big-game hunters in Africa, a Hemingway-style memento given center stage in Mostovoi's collection. Why would Mostovoi hide that?

Someone was trying to unlock the door. Arkady turned off the VCR and listened to a key trying to force its way through the cylinder, followed by a low curse in a voice he recognized. Luna.

Arkady could hear him thinking. The sergeant probably had the key Arkady had given to Osorio, which worked perfectly well on Arkady's apartment in Moscow. Luna wouldn't know that; all he'd know was that keys didn't stop working, and either the lock had been changed or this was the wrong key. He'd examine his other keys. No, this was the key the detective had given him. Maybe he hadn't had to use it before. On Arkady's first visit he had closed the door but not set the latch and anyone could have simply turned the knob to open it. Someone had, since some items were gone and the latch had been set by the time Arkady returned, although setting it didn't necessarily require a key, just pushing a button on the lock plate, and this might be the first time Luna actually had to try the key.

For his part, Arkady became aware that the Gimnasio Atares was silent, the riot of whistles and bells over. Luna had been annoyed to see Arkady merely venture to the santero's. How unhappy would he be to find Arkady in Rufo's room?

The door jumped as a fist hit it. Arkady could feel Luna stare at the lock. Finally, feet turned away, accompanied by the sound of metal scraping stone. When Arkady cracked the door open, Luna was a block away under a streetlamp that had faded to brown. Two fighters in sweatsuits shuffled painfully out of the arena gate, followed by a trainer mopping his face with a towel. As they reached his door, Arkady slipped out in front of them, close enough to screen himself from Luna and merge his shadow with theirs all the way to the far corner. Focused on their own aches, the trio stumbled on. Arkady stopped and looked back.

Luna was returning. The sound of metal was an empty cart with iron wheels that he pushed to the curb outside Rufo's. The captain was in plain clothes and this time, instead of relying on the niceties of a key, he jammed his ice pick into the latch, applied his shoulder and the door swung open. The captain seemed to know what he was after, carrying out the television, VCR and boxes of running shoes to the cart. He rolled the load away, the wheel's grinding reverberating on either side. Despite the dim lights, with the cart's slow pace and noise Luna was easy to follow.

Somehow the sergeant was able to find more empty and desolate streets as he went, maneuvering the cart around mounds of broken stone, the sort of scene that made Havana appear an earthquake zone. Some warehouses had fallen in so long ago that palm trees leaned out the windows. The two men traveled about ten blocks before Luna stopped at the darkest intersection yet and let the cart stand while he positioned a board on the steps of a corner building, then muscled the cart up the makeshift ramp and through outward-opening double doors. Arkady heard the cart roll on stone and what sounded like the bleat of goats.

He followed up the steps. Somehow power had been fed to the building because in the vaulted dark was the ember of a hanging bulb. Luna had moved out of sight to a deeper interior; Arkady heard the cart progressing through a hallway.

He felt as if he had uncovered a Soviet mausoleum. There were the floor design of a hammer and sickle under the dirt, unlit sconces of red stars, busts of Marx and Lenin along the balcony, the difference being that instead of a sarcophagus in the middle of the floor there was a Lada with plates that read 060 016. Pribluda's car. And some lighter touches: at opposite ends of a counter of dark wood were two statues, black and white. The black figure looked too frail for the sugarcane she had cut, but the white was a Russian superman who had scooped the bounty of the sea-flounder, crab and octopus-in a single net. A tapping led Arkady to look up toward the mezzanine again. Between Marx and Lenin shone the gunslit eyes of goats. Dust stirred around the bulb. Although no one was visible in the car it shifted from side to side and not just as a trick of the feeble light.

The keys to Pribluda's car had been in Arkady's possession since the autopsy. He opened the trunk and felt a mound of burlap sacks. The bottom sack was heavy and tied with a rope. Arkady untied the sack and pulled it off while the goats bleated. Osorio raised her head, too stiff to stand. As he lifted her the front doors of the lobby swung open and a goat bell rang. Luna had returned not from the hall but through the same door Arkady had just used and the sergeant carried not a bat but a machete. He said something in Spanish that pleased himself enormously.

Osorio pressed her mouth to Arkady's ear.» My gun.'

He saw the Makarov in the car trunk. As Osorio hung on, he picked up the gun and cocked it.» Get out of the way.'

'No.' Luna shook his head.» I don't think so.' Arkady aimed over the sergeant's head and squeezed the trigger. He needn't have bothered, the hammer snapped on an empty breech. Luna pulled the lobby doors closed.» This is justice.'

Arkady put Osorio into the front passenger seat of the car and went around to the driver's side. Ladas were not known for their power, but they did start. In the coldest or warmest weather they started. Arkady turned on the engine and lights and, blinded, Luna stopped for a moment, then crossed the floor in two strides and brought the machete down on the car. Arkady reversed so that the blow landed on the hood, but Luna slapped the blade sideways and split the windshield into two caved-in sheets of safety glass. Unable to see, Arkady drove forward, hoping for a piece of the captain, only to hit the long counter head-on. The rear window crystallized as the machete swung through. Arkady backed up, cutting the wheel to sweep Luna away. The blade came straight down through the car roof, probed and vanished. Just when Arkady thought the Cuban was actually on the car, one headlight exploded. A ladder toppled, crushing Osorio's side of the car.

Arkady peeled off enough windshield to see. The falling ladder had grazed the bulb, and as the light swung, goats, stairs, statues swayed from side to side. He backed into a column hard enough to rock the balcony, shot forward and aimed at Luna, silhouetted by crystals on his shoulders. Missed him, but as the hanging bulb flared to life Arkady saw an electric highway of glass leading to the doors and followed. As the doors burst open, the Lada landed askew on the steps, righted itself and shouldered through debris. The left-front fender was crushed, and left turns seemed to be impossible. He drove toward the streetlamp, and when he was a block beyond he looked back through the gaping rear window to see Luna running after. Arkady pushed the car as fast as it could go until the sergeant was out of sight.

At last the streets ended at docks and the deep black and trailing lights of the harbor. Air blew through the windshield and windows and safety glass sparkled on their laps. The Lada limped over railroad tracks and finally swung into an alley, scaring the spangly green eyes of a cat caught in the headlight, and lurched to a stop.

A black hand swung around Arkady's seat and hit him in the chest. He grabbed its wrist and twisted in his seat to the figure of Change. The man-sized doll had been riding in the back of the car, still wearing its red bandanna, still holding its walking stick in its other hand, its dark expression the glower of a kidnap victim. Ofelia aimed the Makarov, loaded or not, at the doll.

'Dios mio.' She let the gun drop.

'Exactly.' Arkady got out of the car on weak legs.

He counted the gashes in the roof and sides of the car. The front was crushed, headlights empty sockets.

'If it were a boat it would sink,' he said.» It will get you to a doctor.'

'No,' Ofelia said.

'To the police.'

'To say what? That I've refused orders from the police? That I hid evidence? That I'm helping a Russian instead?'

'It doesn't sound so good when you put it that way. Then what? Luna will only follow us to Pribluda's.'

'I know where to go.'

Considering that Ofelia made the arrangements in the middle of the night, she didn't do badly. A switch from the Lada, Change and all, to her DeSoto and then to a room at the Rosita, a love motel on the Playa del Este just fifteen miles outside the city and a block from the beach. All the Rosita's units were free-standing white stucco