Havana Bay

well. Half the goat was close to the door, half well down the hall, like a botched job of being shot from a cannon. One wall was pocked from metal shards. Burn marks on the other showed where the grenade had been placed at floor level, the cord around its ring. Soft clots dripped from the ceiling.

Beyond, the hall opened to the buffet, where Russian sea captains and their officers had once been served cognac and cakes, and farther on she saw a large kitchen with a vent that someone from the outside had once tried to break through, bending a louver enough let a single finger of light pierce the murk.

She waited for the nerve to move forward. It would come any second.

Arkady missed the park rendezvous with Ofelia. He sat in Mostovoi's living room facing the door and flipped through the pages of an address book he had found in the nightstand. Pinero, Rufo. Luna, Sgt. Facundo. Guzman, Erasmo. Walls. No Tico that Arkady could find, but otherwise the old team was all accounted for. Plus, Vice Consul Bugai, Havana hotels and garages, French film labs, many girls' names with notes on age, color, height.

Eight o'clock. Mostovoi was taking a long time to reappear. The emergency was long over, fire engines gone and residents returned to their apartments. He'd expected Mostovoi to enter, be surprised and affect outrage at the sight of an interloper. Arkady would ask him questions about Luna and Walls and pose them in a manner designed to make Mostovoi resort to the gun in the refrigerator. It was Arkady's experience that people who were upset were much more talkative when they felt they had turned the tables. If Mostovoi actually pulled the trigger, that would be information too. Of course, this scenario depended on Mostovoi's not carrying another gun in one of his camera bags.

Arkady only had to close his eyes for images to appear. Pribluda's Havana Yacht Club. Olga Petrovna's Pribluda and Pribluda's farewell snapshot of him. The best demolition team in Africa. The images we carry. Tribal people seeing photographs for the first time thought they were stolen spirits. Arkady wished that were true. He wished he had taken more photographs of Irina, but he saw her all the time whenever he was alone. Of course, being in Havana was like living in a faded, badly tinted picture.

Nine o'clock. The day had disappeared while he had waited for a man who wasn't coming back. Arkady carefully replaced the address book where he had found it, refiled the photos in their boxes and slipped out the door to the balcony, where tots up late raced tricycles back and forth. From halfway across Miramar the lights of the Russian embassy stared back. He took the elevator down. The popcorn machine was gone and the stairs were charred; otherwise it was as if he hadn't come at all.

Following First Avenue along the water, he put one foot in front of the other in the manner, he thought, of a sailing ship towed by rowboats when the wind had died. Not until he passed Erasmo's family house did he realize his legs were taking him to the rendezvous with Ofelia at the Havana Yacht Club.» Vi. HYC 2200 Angola.' Tonight was the night.

Or maybe not. He was late when the royal palms of the Yacht Club's driveway came into view and Ofelia's DeSoto wasn't in sight at all. The club was black, the only lights two flashlight beams patrolling the long driveway. No sound except cars circling the rotary and the laugh of a bird nesting in a palm. This had been his brilliant idea, his chance to jump ahead of events. Whatever this event was, it was on a different Friday night. He looked for Ofelia on the other streets feeding the rotary. Although half an hour didn't seem very late in Cuba, she wasn't there.

A taxi stopped for him and Arkady dropped into the seat beside the driver, an old man with a cold cigar.

'A donde?'

A good question, Arkady thought. He had gone everywhere he could think. Back to Mostovoi's? To the Playa del Este and Ofelia? See, this was exactly the way he'd lost Irina, he reminded himself. Inattention. How else could a man miss not one but two rendezvous? In English he said, 'I'm looking for someone. Maybe we can just drive around.'

'A donde?'

'If we could drive around here, around the Yacht Club?'

'Where?' the old man took the cigar from his mouth, blew the word as if it were a ring of smoke.

'Is there an event nearby for Angola?'

'Angola? Quieres Angola?'

'I don't want to go to the embassy for Angola.'

'No, no. Entiendo perfectamente.' He motioned for Arkady to be patient while he pulled a stack of business cards from his shirt pocket, found one and showed Arkady a well-thumbed pasteboard card with an embossed tropical sun over the words 'Angola, Un Paladar Africano en Miramar.'

'Muy cerca.'

'It's near?'

'Claw.' The driver stuffed the card back in his shirt.

Arkady understood the routine. In Moscow when a taxi driver delivered a tourist to a restaurant, he had an arrangement by which he collected a little extra from the establishment. The same in Havana, apparently. Arkady thought they'd just drive by in case the DeSoto was there.

The Angola was on a dark street of large Spanish colonial homes only a minute away. Over a tall iron gate hung a neon sign of a sun so golden it seemed to drip. The taxi driver took one look and kept on going.

'Lo siento, no puedes. Esta reservado esta noche.'

'Go by again.'

'No podemos. Es que digo, completemente reservado. Cualquier otro dia, si?'

Arkady didn't speak Spanish but he understood completemente reservado. All the same he said, 'Just drive by.'

“No.”

Arkady got out at the corner, paid the driver enough for a good cigar and walked back under a dramatic canopy stof ragged cedar branches. Along both curbs were new Nissans and Range Rovers, some with drivers sitting almost at attention behind the wheel. Along the sidewalk were shadows within shadows and the orange swirls of cigarettes used in conversation, voices hushing as Arkady slowed to admire a white Imperial convertible reflecting the neon sun. When he pushed the gate open, a figure materialized from the dark to stop him. Captain Arcos in civilian clothes, like an armadillo out of his shell.

'It's all right.' Arkady pointed to a table inside the gate.» I'm with them.'

The Angola was an outdoor restaurant set in a garden of underiit tree ferns and tall African statues. Two men in white aprons worked an open-air grill and although Arkady had been told that a paladar could serve no more than twelve diners at a time there were, at tables arranged around the grill, easily twenty customers, all men, in their forties and fifties, most white, all with a bearing of command, prosperity, success and all Cuban except for John O'Brien and George Washington Walls.

'I knew it'-O'Brien waved Arkady in.» I told George that you'd show up.'

'He did.' Walls shook his head in wonder more at O'Brien than at Arkady.

'When I heard Rufo was so stupid as to write the place and time on a wall I knew you couldn't fail.' O'Brien had another chair brought. Even the developer was in a Cuban guayabera; the evening's uniform seemed to be graybeards. The two Cubans at the table looked to O'Brien for a lead; although they were hard, mature men, O'Brien seemed to have for them the status of a priest among boys. The entire restaurant had gone quiet, including Erasmo in a wheelchair two tables away with Tico and Mostovoi, their old comrade-in-arms, the only other non-Cuban. It was strange to see the mechanics so spruced.» It's perfect that you're here.' O'Brien seemed genuinely pleased.» Everything's falling into place.'

Walls said to the Cuban next to him, 'El nuevo bolo.'

Relief spread to every face except Erasmo's. He telegraphed Arkady a glum look from across the garden. Mostovoi saluted.

'I'm the new Russian?' Arkady asked.

'It makes you part of the club,' O'Brien said.

'What club is that?'

'The Havana Yacht Club, what else?'

Waiters poured water and rum, although coffee seemed as popular at the tables, an odd choice for the hour, Arkady thought.» How do you know I visited Rufo's?'

'You know George is a big fight fan. He went to see some sparring today at the Gimnasio Atares, and a trainer told him about a white man in a black coat he saw come out of Rufo's last night. George went in and there it was