Havana Bay

'Right here. Who can say exactly when with Renko?' Mostovoi unzipped his bag for a camera and a flash unit that he tightened into the camera shoe. The unit made a warm-up whine.

'No pictures.' Ofelia wanted to keep eyes adjusted to the night sky, the arc of sand, the dark of the water. The last thing she needed was a flash.» You keep looking at your watch.'

'For Arkady.'

The white light blinded her. She was unprepared because Mostovoi shot without raising the camera and she saw nothing but a fixed image of flash unit's faceted lens and the photographer's smirk until she blinked her way back to normal.

'If you do that again,' she said, 'I will break your camera.”

'Sorry, I couldn't resist.'

'Was that a signal?' Arkady noticed that with the flash from the casino Walls eased the throttle forward, bringing the Gavilan even closer to the beach. Why wasn't the patrol boat at the dock responding?

Walls said, 'When my friend John O'Brien plans something the z's are dotted and the t's are crossed.'

'Thank you, George. The devil, as they say, is in the details. Speaking of whom ...'

Ahead in the water was a neumdtico with a hand shielding a candle. As Walls slowed the boat to idle again, the neumdtico snuffed the flame with his fingers, spun his tube and paddled backward to the stern of the Gavilan, where Walls helped him on board and tied the tube to a transom cleat. Luna stood dripping in the cockpit. Wet, he had the dank look of a body disinterred and he stared at Arkady with anticipation.

'Now you'll know what it feels like,' Luna promised.

'What feels like?'

'I'm sorry, Arkady,' O'Brien said.» It's time to give up the coat now. In fact, everything. You can do it yourself or we can do it for you.'

While Walls took the coat and the rest of Arkady's clothing, too, Luna went below to change clothes, a modesty that surprised Arkady. The sergeant reappeared in uniform swollen with a menace kept in thin control, and Arkady wondered how he had ever managed to throw Luna into a wall. He was, himself, past lifting weights or fattening up. Then it was Arkady's turn to put on Luna's sodden shorts and shirt. Up to the point of pulling on flippers Arkady considered himself relatively safe because they were so difficult to put on the feet of a dead man. With the flippers on he felt both unsafe and ridiculous. Still, a patrol boat had to be coming.

Holding the binoculars by the strap, O'Brien returned them to Arkady.» See how it ends.'

Onstage, a melee of golden dancers moved to a quickening pace. Daughters of Oshun, Arkady thought. Well, he'd learned that much. It wouldn't be a detonation set by a timer, he thought, because there were too many variables in public events. The back two rows of the stands had thinned out. Erasmo backed his wheelchair from the stage. An ecstasy in rays of sweat flew from the dancers. Change leaned. By the side of the stage a dozen men looked at their watches. In the front row, the leader himself and Chango seemed to look straight through the frenzy of the dancers. How the dancers could turn faster Arkady didn't know, but they did, their golden skirts spread and spinning at the runaway pace of the congas. He braced for the flare of explosion.

Instead, plainclothes men started to appear. They came in pairs, quietly taking away the man in aviator glasses, Bias and, one by one, the other men Arkady recognized from the paladar. Each man reacted with the same sequence of surprise, bafflement and resignation. Their military training showed. No one ran or called out at the moment of his arrest. Arkady looked for Erasmo being wheeled away. Instead, Erasmo seemed to be in charge of this new phase. Hardly anyone else in the audience seemed to notice, fixed as they were on blurred hands on drums and the golden skirts of sensuous Yemayas, every eye transfixed except for the old man in too much uniform in the front row. He dropped his head by small degrees until Arkady realized that under the bill of his cap the nation's leader was checking his own watch.

'He knew,' Arkady said.» He knew about the plot.'

'Much better,' O'Brien said.» He helped start it. He does it every few years to weed out malcontents. The same as he did with Isabel's father. The Comandante didn't last this long by waiting for a conspiracy to come for him.'

'Erasmo helped, too?'

'In spite of himself, Erasmo is a Cuban patriot.'

'You took care of the details?'

'More than mere details.'

'The talk about the Havana Yacht Club?'

'All true to a degree. The fact is, Arkady, revolutions are chancy things, you never know how they're going to turn out. I prefer to bet with the house, whoever the house is. The glasses?' He took the binoculars from Arkady by the strap and lowered them into a plastic Ziploc bag, which he placed in the seabag that was supposedly Pribluda's.» There's nothing trickier than an assassination, especially an assassination that's not supposed to succeed. You have to keep the means and trigger of destruction in your own hands. And you have to undermine the conspirators in the public eye. These are highly regarded men, military heroes. It helps paint them black if the man who actually tries to set off the blast isn't Cuban at all but a generally unpopular figure as, say, a Russian. A dead Russian, to be precise.'

Walls and O'Brien weren't just waiting to explain how brilliant they were, Arkady knew. There was more to come. Luna opened a cockpit bench to take out a speargun. He placed the butt against his hip, cocked the power bands and slid into the muzzle a shaft with a spearhead with folded wings for barbs. No patrol boat, Arkady understood, was on the way.

'Why would anyone connect me to the blast?'

Walls held up another Ziploc bag so that Arkady could see inside a television remote control.» Remember the monitor you turned on for John at the Riviera? We modified the remote, it's a radio transmitter now, but it still has your fingerprints. Then, people saw the doll in Pribluda's apartment while you were there. We may have lost Sergei, but John said you were so bright you'd serve even better.'

O'Brien answered his cell phone. Arkady hadn't heard a ring. After a word of satisfaction, O'Brien folded the phone up.

Luna fished in the pockets of Arkady's coat and found the snapshot of Pribluda, Mongo and Erasmo.» Fuck your Havana Yacht Club.'

He tore the picture into pieces that he threw onto the water. He kicked the inner tube off the transom after the bits of paper.

'Get in.'

Standing at the carved doors of the old gambling hall, Ofelia caught the button tones and soft fluorescence of Mostovoi's cell phone. The call was over in a second.

'Who did you call?'

'Friends. Have you ever posed?'

'What friends?'

'At the embassy. I explained that I was helping somebody, which I certainly am trying to do. I meant it about posing.'

'For what?'

'Something different.'

Her attention was half on Mostovoi talking to her in the dark interior of the hall and half on the pale strand of the beach. Music played on the other side of the beach wall. A rumba for Yemaya.

'How different?'

'I mean very different.'

She couldn't tell what was in the room, but its large space magnified sound, and she heard Mostovoi swallow in a way she found unpleasant. All she could see of him was the oily eye of his camera and she talked mainly to keep track of him.

'What was in this room?'

He slipped sideways from the moonlight at the door.

'What was here? It was the main casino. Chandeliers from Italy, tiles from Spain. Roulette tables, craps,