Havana Bay

cottages from the fifties with air-conditioning and kitchenette, television and potted plants, clean sheets and towels at a price only the most successful jineteras could afford.

The first thing Ofelia did once they were inside was to shower the burlap and shag off her body. Wrapped in a towel, she asked him to pick nuggets of glass from her hair. He'd expected her curls to be stiffer, but they were as soft as water and his fingers never looked more thick and clumsy. Between the wings of her shoulder blades the skin was rubbed raw and seamed with grains of glass. She didn't flinch. In the bathroom mirror he saw her eyes on him and the natural kohl of their lids.

She said, 'You were right about the photograph Pribluda took of you. I found it when I dusted his rooms for prints just as you said. I was the one who gave it to Luna.'

'Well, I never told you that what Luna wanted from me was the photograph that Pribluda called the Havana Yacht Club. We're even.'

'Claro, we're both liars. Look at us.'

He saw an unlikely pair, a woman smooth as soap-stone with a ragged man.

'What was Luna saying when he came back?' he asked.

'He said Rufo's television was warm, so he knew you were there. Why didn't you think of that?'

'Actually, I did.'

'You followed him anyway?'

Arkady wondered, 'Are you possible to please?'

She said, 'Yes.'

Chapter Twenty-One

She was a dark sprite, except that in bed she was a woman. Her breasts were small, tipped in purple, her stomach sleek down to a triangle of sable. He laid his mouth on hers, and it was so long since he had been with a woman that it was like learning to eat again. Especially when the taste was different, heady and strong, as if she were coated in sugary liqueur.

He was helpless in his own greed, working his way through the exquisite unfolding as Ofelia, his new measure, drew him in. There was something convulsive in this feast for the starving, who had taken the vow of hunger.

He would have said he cared for people, wished them well and did his best by them, but he had been dead. She would raise Lazarus and close her legs around him so as not to let him go. She kissed his forehead, lips, the bruises on the inside of his arm as if each kiss healed. She was hard and lithe and soft and certainly more artful and vocal than he was. This seemed to be allowed in Cuba.

Outside, he heard the ocean say, This is the wave that will sweep away the sand, topple the buildings and flood the streets. This is the wave. This is the wave.

On the bed Arkady arranged Pribluda's photograph of the 'Havana Yacht Club,' the AzuPanama documents, his chronology of Pribluda's last day, list of dates and phone numbers from Rufo's wall. While Ofelia sorted through them Arkady took in a cement floor painted blue, pink walls with paper cupids, plastic roses in ice buckets and an air-conditioner that gasped like an Ilyushin taking off. They had placed Change in a corner chair, the doll's head resting heavily against a kitchen counter, hand balanced on his stick.

'If these documents are real,' Ofelia said, 'entonces, I can see why a Russian would think AzuPanama is more an instrument of the Cuban Ministry of Sugar than a genuine Panamanian corporation.'

'It would seem that way.'

Arkady told her about O'Brien and the Mexican truck parts, the American boots and the real Havana Yacht Club.

'He's a charmer, an intriguer, he goes from one story to another. It's like being led down a path.'

'I'm sure it is.'

He was distracted by the fact that all she wore was his coat and a glimpse of yellow beads. He hadn't noticed when she had put on the necklace. The coat was huge on her, and the sight was like rinding a photograph of one woman in a frame that had always held a picture of another. Every second that it clung to her, it was exchanging auras of scent and heat and memory.

Ofelia knew. It was not totally true, but the charge could be made that once she had detected his grief she had suspected his loss, and once she had observed the tenderness with which he treated his coat and discovered the faint history of perfume on its sleeve, from that moment on she was determined to wear the coat herself. Why? Because here was a man who had loved a woman so deeply he was willing to follow her right into death.

Or it might be he was just the melancholy sort-in short, a Russian. But it had to be said that when she was in the trunk of the car, trussed, bagged and barely breathing, the one person she thought might save her was this man she hadn't even met a week before. Muevete! Ofelia told herself. Get your clothes on and run. Instead, she said, 'In Panama almost anything can happen. O'Brien's bank is in the Colon Free Trade Zone of Panama where everything happens. Still, he has been a friend to Cuba and I don't see what sugar has to do with the Havana Yacht Club or Hedy or Sergeant Luna.'

'Neither do I, but you don't try to kill a man who is leaving in a week unless whatever is going to happen will happen soon. Then, of course, everything will be perfectly clear.'

In his disheveled way, in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, long fingers cupping a cigarette, he was Ofelia's picture of a Russian musician. A musician sitting by a bus stalled on the side of the road somewhere in the Urals.» Let me get this right. You're saying that Rufo, Hedy, Luna, everything that has happened so far is to cover up a crime that took place not in the past but hasn't even taken place yet? How are we going to find that?'

'Think of it as a challenge. The biggest advantage a detective usually has is that he knows what the crime is, that's his starting point. But we're two professional investigators. Between the Russian Method and the Cuban Method let's see if we can stop something before it happens.'

'Okay. For the sake of argument, somebody's planning something and we don't know what. But you force their hand when you come here with a picture of Pribluda with his friends, the two car mechanics, at the old Havana Yacht Club, which, incidentally, since the Revolution, is the Casa Cultural de Trabajadores de Construction, but that aside, Rufo tries to kill you for this picture. It would have been much easier to ignore you, so we will give some weight to that. Second, you force someone's hand again when you visit the Havana Yacht Club and Walls and O'Brien come out to take you off the dock and offer you some sort of employment, which, by the way, is too ridiculous to consider. Again it would have been easier to pay you no attention at all. Third, Luna beats you with a bat, but he doesn't try to kill you, maybe because he can't find that picture. Meanwhile, is anyone trying to kill you over AzuPanama? No. Trying to put the smallest hole in you over AzuPanama? No. Forget about AzuPanama, it's all about this picture,' she said and stabbed it with her finger.

'That's one way to look at it.'

'Good. But what this picture has to do with the future I don't know and neither do you. You just like to play games with time.'

She was all too accurate about that, Arkady thought. She was right about a lot.» There are two ways back to whatever happened to Pribluda. One is Mongo and the other, I think, is through O'Brien and Walls.'

'Well, your friend O'Brien is nuts if he thinks he's going to start a casino. Not while Fidel is alive. No casinos. That would be complete surrender. And let me tell you something else, two men like O'Brien and Walls are not going to share their fortune with someone who lands in a plane from Russia.' Ofelia hesitated to ask, 'Do you have a plan?'

'According to a note on Rufo's wall something about Angola is happening at the Yacht Club tomorrow night.' He looked at his watch and corrected himself.» Tonight. We might drop in.'

'Angola? What has Angola got to do with this?'

'Rufo wrote 'Vi. HYC 2200 Angola.''

'This is some plan.'

'I'd also like to find Rufo's cell phone.'

'He didn't have one. In Havana cellular phones come from CubaCell, which is a joint venture between Mexico and Cuba. Anyone with dollars can get one, but I called CubaCell myself and they have no listing for Rufo