Havana Bay

blackjack. It was a different world.'

'Well, no one's here now.'

'I know what you mean. You think maybe Renko went to the plane?'

Would Arkady do that? she wondered. Slip away without a word? It was one of the things men did best. They didn't need planes, they just disappeared. Her mother could count them: Primero, Segundo and now Tercero. Bias would deliver Pribluda's body to the airport. Arkady still might wander in like a beachcomber or stroll down the portal of arches that framed the sea, but it was more likely with every minute that he had accomplished the classic retreat, the exit with no good-bye. She felt profoundly stupid.

'I could see you in any number of poses,' Mostovoi said.

But she thought about Arkady's black coat and decided, no, his problem was that he abandoned no one. One way or another, he was going to come.

'There in the moonlight,' Mostovoi said, 'is perfect.'

Ofelia heard the shutter of his camera click, although the flash failed. She heard two more rapid clicks before she realized they weren't from a shutter but from a hammer on the empty breech of a gun. She tried to dig her own gun out of her straw bag, but it was under Rufo's phone. The hammer clicked again. When Ofelia found her own gun, it was tangled with straw. She fired one wild round that exploded the bottom of the bag. Something crushed the plaster wall by her ear. She dropped to her back and held her gun with both hands more deliberately. Her second shot through the bag lit Mostovoi, a flash of him swinging his gun down like a club. The third tunneled into his mouth.

Arkady floated in the tube on a short rope from the stern of the Gavilan. The Caribbean was warm, the net a hammock, the rubber tube actually cushy, but he felt as if he were looking up from the bottom of a well at O'Brien, Walls with the gun and Luna with the spear-gun. They blocked the stars. Arkady would have liked to think at least he was stalling. No, they were only waiting, having outthought and outmuscled him all the way. One stunning accomplishment: he not only found out how Pribluda was duped but got to be the dupe too. Finally a neumdtico himself.

Their heads lifted at the sound of gunshots.

Walls said, 'The son of a bitch was supposed to use a silencer.'

'And why three shots?' asked O'Brien.

A cell-phone tone came from Luna's shirt pocket. He flipped the phone open and answered. As he listened he turned toward the beach.

'Who is it?' Walls said.

'It's her, the detective.' O'Brien followed Luna's eyes' turn to the casino; it really was wonderful to see how quickly the man calculated, Arkady thought.» She got Mostovoi's phone. Or Rufo's, and she's using the memory.' O'Brien told Luna, 'Hang up.'

Luna raised the speargun for quiet and pressed the phone tight against his ear.

'Take the phone from him,' O'Brien told Walls.

Luna pointed the spear at Arkady.» She says he never harmed Hedy. You told me he came looking for me. What she says is he wasn't after me at all.'

'How does she know?' Walls said.

'The night someone killed Hedy, she says he was with her.'

'She's lying,' Walls said.» They sleep together.'

'That's why I believe her. I know her and she knows me. Who hurt my Hedy?'

'Do you believe this?' O'Brien appealed to Arkady as one sane man to another.» George, will you please take his fucking phone away?'

'Your stupid Hedy,' Walls told Luna, 'was a whore.'

The speargun jumped and a steel shaft with a line of white nylon stuck out of Walk's stomach. When he looked down blood under pressure sprayed his face.

'George,' O'Brien said.

Walls sat down on the gunwale, raised his gun and shot Luna, who took a single backward step before moving forward. As Walls tried for another clear shot the two men fell over the side.

Arkady began climbing out of the tube. On deck O'Brien had pulled the second speargun from the cockpit bench and was trying to insert the spear and pull back the two stiff elastic power bands, not an easy task at the best of times, worse standing amid loose spear cable and blood on the deck. But as Arkady came up over the transom O'Brien managed to notch one band and pull the gun's trigger, and Arkady found himself on his back in the water, a spear through his forearm and the spearhead lodged shallowly in his chest, the spear's force spent on his arm. Spear cable led back to O'Brien, who had one tasseled shoe on the transom and was already, Arkady could tell, calculating ten or eleven moves ahead. With his free hand Arkady yanked the cable. O'Brien dropped the speargun overboard, but the line that tangled around his ankle stretched him over the polished mahogany. Arkady pulled with both hands and O'Brien slid all the way over the stern and in.

O'Brien shouted, 'I can't swim!'

The Gavilan was low-slung enough for O'Brien to try to claw his way back on, but Arkady towed him by the line away from the boat. O'Brien turned to the inner tube, but his splashing chased the tube more than it closed the distance. The speargun floated, but not enough to hold up a man.

The spear tip's wings had spread outside the muscle of Arkady's chest. He closed them under the spear's sliding collar and drew the shaft from the arm while it I was numb. With his good arm he swam underwater. The sea was a cave around a quarter-moon with glints of fish. On the other side of the boat Walls and Luna I still struggled, trying to climb over each other to the surface. Bubbles streaked from Walls's gun. Luna had wrapped the spear line around the other man's neck. Arkady came up for air and made his way back around the stern of the Gavilan. No more than a meter away the top of O'Brien's head bobbed in the water.

The patrol boat hadn't moved, although Arkady saw lights along the casino beach. The Yacht Club was still bright.

He could haul himself onto the Gavilan, but at this point Arkady was happy to rest, watch the stars swarm overhead and float on a blackness that held him up.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Snow fell again in April, enough to dust the streets and spiral in confusion around the intersections. Trucks hunched along the embankment road with lights on, a winter habit dying as hard as winter itself.

Arkady had left the prosecutor's office and walked down to the embankment hoping to find fresher air along the river, but there really was no escaping the pollution, the usual pall mixed with snow into a sharp, urban brew. Streetlamps were on and pools of light swayed overhead, tugged this way and that by the wind. Buildings along this stretch of Frunzenskaya were an institutional yellow, etchings of themselves behind lines of snow. The river, choked with water and ice, ground against stone walls.

He'd gone a block before he realized that a man in a wheelchair was catching up with him at a determined pace. Not an easy task in such weather, he thought, with the wheels of the chair slipping on the slick pavement and detouring around the bodies in bedrolls who had taken up residence along the embankment. Arkady had stepped aside for the chair to pass when he saw who it was.

'Spring in the Arctic.' Erasmo was packed into a parka, ski cap, damp leather gloves. He brushed snow off his beard and watched his breath with disgust.

'How can you stand it?'

'You keep moving.'

Erasmo looked massive in the parka and vibrantly healthy as only Cubans could in Moscow. When he offered his hand, Arkady waited until it dropped.

'What are you doing here?' Arkady asked.

'Renegotiating the sugar contract.'

'Of course.'

'Don't be that way,' Erasmo said.» I'm in Moscow for one day. I called your office, and they said this was the route you were most likely to take. Please.'