Havana Bay

by Martin Cruz Smith

  "I have one," Osorio said.

  Arkady stood corrected.

  Blas asked, "You can't shed any light on this syringe?"

  "No."

  "Understand I am not a detective, I am not the PNR, I am only a forensic pathologist, but I was trained by my Russian instructors of long ago to think in an analytical fashion. I believe we are not so different, so I will show you something to build your confidence in us. And you may even learn something from us."

  "Such as?"

  Blas rubbed his hands like a host with a program. "We will start where you came in."

  The morgue had six drawers, a freezer and a glass-faced cooler, all with broken handles beaded with condensation. Blas said, "The refrigerators still work. We had an American pilot from the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He crashed and died, and for nineteen years the CIA said they never heard of him. Finally his family came and got him. But he was in good condition in his own humidor right here. We called him the Cigar."

  Blas rolled out a drawer. Inside, the purple body identified as Pribluda was rearranged: skull, jaw and right foot between the legs, a plastic sack of organs where the head should be. Left open, the stomach cavity released a zoo-like bouquet that made Arkady's eyes smart, and the whole body had been placed in a zinc tub to keep the liquefying flesh from overflowing. Arkady lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. That was reason to smoke right there. So far, Arkady's confidence was not rising.

  "We did have funding promised from our Russian friends for a new refrigeration system. You can understand how important refrigeration is in Havana. Then the Russians said we had to buy it." Blas turned his head this way and that to study the corpse. " Are you aware of any characteristics of Pribluda that are different from this body?"

  "No, but I think that after a week in the water and having body parts switched, most people look alike."

  "I was instructed by Captain Arcos not to perform biopsies. However, I think I am still the director here and so I did. The brain and organs show no evidence of drugs or toxins. That is not conclusive because the body was in the water such a long time, but there was another aspect. The heart muscle displayed definite signs of necrosis, which is a strong indicator of heart attack."

  "A heart attack while floating in the water?"

  "A heart attack after a lifetime of eating and drinking like a Russian, an attack so massive and so quick he had no time even to thrash, which was why all the fishing gear was still on board. Did you know that life expectancy is twenty years less in Russia than in Cuba? I will give you samples of the tissue. Show them to any doctor in Moscow and they will say the same."

  "Have you ever seen neumáticos die of a heart attack before?"

  "No, mostly shark attacks. But this is the first time I've heard of a Russian neumático."

  "Don't you think that's worth an investigation?"

  "You must understand our situation. We have no crime scene and no witnesses, which makes an investigation very discouraging, very expensive. And no crime. Worse, he's Russian and the embassy refuses to cooperate. They say no one worked with Pribluda, no one knew him and that he was merely an innocent student of the sugar industry. For us even to visit the embassy requires a diplomatic note. All the same we asked for a photograph of Pribluda, and since we didn't receive that, we have matched him and the body to the best possible certainty. There is nothing more we can do. We must consider him identified and you must take him home. We will have no more 'cigars' here."

  "Why ask the embassy for a photograph? I showed you one."

  "Yours wasn't good enough."

  "You can't match anything to the way he looks now."

  Blas let a smile win his face. He rolled the body drawer shut. " I have a surprise for you. I want you to return home with the right idea of Cuba."

  On the second floor Blas led Arkady and Osorio into an office with the faded title antropologia on the door.

  Arkady's first impression was of a catacomb, the remains of martyrs assiduously sorted by shelves of skulls, pelvises, thigh bones, metacarpals lying hand in hand, spines tangled like snakes. Dust swam around a lampshade, the light reflected by case after case of neatly pinned tropical beetles iridescent as opals. A fer-de-lance with open fangs coiled within a specimen jar topped by a tarantula on tiptoe. What looked like dominoes were burned bones in gradations from white to charcoal black. On the wall the baroque jaws of a shark outgrinned a jawbone of human teeth filed to points. The cord for the ceiling fan was the braided hair of a shrunken head. No catacomb, Arkady changed his mind, more a jungle trading post. A sheet covered something humming on a desk, and if it were a great ape going philosophical Arkady wouldn't have been surprised.

  "This is our anthropological laboratory," said Blas. "Not a large one, but here we determine by bones and teeth the age, race and sex of a victim. And different poisonous or violent agents."

  "The Caribbean has a number you won't see in Moscow," Osorio said.

  "We are deficient in sharks," Arkady said.

  "And," Blas said, "by insect activity how long the victim has been dead. In other climates, different insects start at different times. Here in Cuba, they all start at once, but at different rates of progress."

  "Fascinating."

  "Fascinating but perhaps not what an investigator from Moscow would call a serious forensic laboratory?"

  "There are different laboratories for different places."

  "Exactly!" Blas picked up the jawbone of pointed teeth. " Our population is, let's say, unique. A number of African tribes practiced scarification and sharpening teeth. The Abakua, for example, was a secret leopard society from the Congo. They were brought here as slaves to work on the docks and in a short time controlled all the smuggling in. It took the Comandante to turn them into a folkloric society." He set down the teeth and directed Arkady's attention to an exhibit of a skull and two-edged ax spattered in dried blood. "This skull might look to you like evidence of trauma."

  "It conceivably might."

  "But to a Cuban a skull and an ax covered in animal blood may be a religious shrine. The detective can tell you all about it if you want." Osorio squirmed at the suggestion and Blas went on. "So when we make a psychological analysis of a person we use the Minnesota profile, of course, but we also take into consideration whether a person is a devotee of Santeria."

  "Oh." Not that Arkady had ever used the Minnesota profile.

  "Nevertheless" – Blas lifted the cloth – "let me prove that, in spite of superstitions, Cuba is still abreast of the world."

  Unveiled on a desk was a 486 computer hooked up to a scanner and printer, each running, and an 8-mm video camera mounted lens down above a stand. Resting in a ring on the stand and tilted up to the camera was a skull with a hole in the center of the forehead. The cranium was wired together. Missing teeth made for a gaping cartoon smile.

  Arkady had only read about a system like this. "This is a German identification technique."

  "No," said Blas, "this is a Cuban technique. The German system, including software, costs over fifty thousand dollars. Ours costs a tenth as much by adapting an orthopedic program. In this case, for example, we found a head with teeth hammered out." Blas touched the keyboard, and on the screen appeared a color picture of a Dumpster stuffed with palm fronds topped by a decapitated head. At a keystroke the police and Dumpster were replaced by four photographs of different men, one getting married, another dancing energetically at a party, a third holding a basketball, the last slouching on a swaybacked horse. "Four missing men. Which could it be? A murderer might have been confident once in believing a face in advanced decay with no teeth could not be matched to any photograph or records. After all, here in Cuba nature is a very efficient undertaker. Now, however, all we need is a clear photograph and a clean skull. You are our guest, you choose."

  Arkady chose the bridegroom, and at once the man's image filled the screen, eyes popping from nervousness, hair as carefully arranged as the frills on his shirt.

&nbs
p; Dragging a mouse on the pad, Dr. Blas outlined the groom's head, hit a key and erased his shirt and shoulders. At the tap of a key, the head floated to the left of the screen, and on the right appeared the skull as it stared up at the video camera like a patient waiting for the dentist's drill. Blas repositioned the skull so that it gazed up at the camera lens at precisely the same angle as the face. He enlarged the face to the same size, enhanced the shadows so that flesh melted and eyes sank into hollows, placed white darts on the skull at jaw and crown of the skull, at the outside points of the brow, within the orbital and nasal cavities, across the cheekbones and the corners of the mandible. In comparison to the laborious reconstruction of faces from skulls that Arkady knew in Moscow, the tedious application of plastique to plaster bone, this was manipulation at the speed of light. Blas added arrows at the same points of the photograph and, with a tap, brought up between each pair of corresponding markers their distance measured in pixels, the screen's many thousand phosphors of light. A final keystroke merged the two heads into a single out-of-focus image with an overlay of numbers between the arrows.

  "The numbers are discrepancies in measurement between the missing man and the skull when they are exactly matched. So we prove, scientifically, they could not possibly be the same man."

  Blas started over again, this time with photo no. 3, a boy smiling proudly in a Chicago Bulls shirt, one hand weighing a basketball. Blas sliced off, enlarged and enhanced the boy's head, then brought up and positioned the skull on the screen. The distances between marker darts came up virtually the same, and when Blas merged the two images the numbers ratcheted down to zero and a single face that was both dead and alive looked out from the screen. If ever there was a picture of a ghost this was it.

  "Now our missing man is not missing anymore and you see that even if things are supposed to be impossible in Cuba we do them anyway."

  "That's why you wanted a photograph of Pribluda?"

  "To make a match to the body we took from the bay, yes. But the photograph you brought was insufficient and the Russian embassy refuses to provide another."

  There was an expectant wait until Arkady picked up the cue.

  "I don't need a diplomatic note to go to the embassy."

  Blas acted as if the thought had never occurred to him. "If you want to. The Revolution always needs volunteers. I can write the embassy address, and any car on the street will probably take you there for two dollars. If you have American dollars this is the best transportation system in the world."

  Arkady was awed by the doctor's ability to put a good gloss on anything. His attention returned to the screen. "What was the head cut off with?"

  "In the Dumpster?" said Blas. " A machete. The machete cut is a distinct wound. No sawing."

  "Did you identify the murderer?"

  Osorio said, "Not yet. We will, though."

  "How many homicides a year did you say?"

  "In Cuba? About two hundred," Blas said.

  "How many in the heat of passion?"

  "Overall, a hundred."

  "Of the rest, how many for revenge?"

  "Maybe fifty."

  "Robbery?"

  "Maybe forty."

  "Drugs?"

  "Five."

  "Leaving five. How would you characterize them?"

  "Organized crime, without a doubt. Paid murders."

  "How organized? What were the weapons in those cases?"

  "Occasionally a handgun. The Taurus from Brazil is popular, but usually machetes, strangling, knives. We have no real gangs here, nothing like the Mafia."

  "Machetes?" To Arkady's ear, that did not have the ring of modern homicide. True, he remembered when any Russian murderer who wiped his knife after slicing a victim's throat was rated a smooth operator, back in the curiously innocent days before the worldwide spread of money transfers and remote-control bombs. Which left Cuba in terms of criminal evolution the equivalent of the Galapagos Islands. Suddenly, the Institute de Medicina Legal was put in perspective.

  "We have a ninety-eight percent homicide solution rate," Blas said. " The best in the world."

  "Enjoy it," Arkady said.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  The Russian embassy was a thirty-story tower with an architectural suggestion of squared chest and armored head looming like a monster of stone that had crossed continents, waded through oceans and finally stopped dead in its tracks ankle-deep among the green palm trees of Havana. Plate glass shone on its face, but overall the building stood in its own shroud of shadow and stillness. Inside, office after office was stripped to bare walls and phone jacks. Ghosts lingered in the bald spots and stains of hallway runners, in the hazy, unwashed bottles standing along the walls, in a ventilation system that spread an ancient reek of cigarettes. From the office of Vice Consul Vitaly Bugai, Arkady looked down at a world of white-colonnaded mansions, embassies French, Italian and Vietnamese, their roofs strung with elaborate radio dipoles and antennae, satellite dishes framed by gardens of pink hibiscus.

  Bugai was a young man with small features squeezed into the center of a soft face. He wore a silk robe and Chinese sandals and floated in a liquid atmosphere of air-conditioning, moving, it seemed to Arkady, by contradictory impulses; relief that another Russian national was not dead and irritation that he would have to deal with the survivor for another week. He was also, perhaps, a little surprised that any vestige of Russian authority had been able to defend itself.

  "Those houses were all from before the Revolution." Bugai joined Arkady at the window. "They were rich people. The biggest Cadillac dealership in the world was in Havana. When the Revolution came, the road to the airport was lined with Cadillacs and Chryslers left behind. Imagine being a rebel in a free Cadillac."

  "I think I've seen some of those cars."

  "Still, this is not a Black Hole. A Black Hole would be a posting in Guyana or Suriname. There's the music, the beaches, shopping in the Bahamas an hour away." Bugai flashed a golden Rolex on his wrist. "Havana's sea level and for me that's important. Of course, it's no Buenos Aires."

  "It's not like the old days, either?" Arkady asked.

  "Not at all. Between technicians and military support we had twelve thousand Russians here and a diplomatic staff of another thousand in attaches, deputies, cultural liaisons, KGB, secretaries, clerks, communications, couriers, security. We had Soviet housing, Soviet schools and camps for Russian children. Why not? We put thirty billion rubles into Cuba. Cuba got from Russia more foreign aid per person than any other country in the world. You have to ask yourself, who did more to bring down the Soviet Union than Fidel?" Bugai caught Arkady's glance. "Oh, the walls have ears. The Cubans are excellent at electronic surveillance. We trained them. The only really safe lines are at the embassy. You just have to stop worrying. Anyway, now we have a diplomatic staff of twenty people. This is a ghost ship. Never mind that we drove ourselves into bankruptcy to pay for this floating circus, that our entire system came crumbling down while they danced the salsa. The point is, relations between us and the Cubans have never been worse and now you tell me that you can't identify Pribluda's body?"

  "Not conclusively."

  "It was conclusive enough for the Cubans. I've talked to a Captain Arcos and he seemed very reasonable, considering he pulled a Russian out of HavanaHarbor."

  "A dead Russian."

  "As I understand it, death was caused by a heart attack. A tragic but natural event."

  "There's nothing natural about Pribluda floating in the bay."

  "With spies these things happen."

  "Officially, he was a sugar attache."

  "Right. Well, all he had to do was drive around the island and visit some cane fields and see the Cubans won't make their sugar quota, because they never have. As for secret intelligence, the Cuban army is now moving missiles with oxen instead of trucks, that's all you need to know about that. The faster we get this little episode behind us the better."

  "There is the other lit
tle episode of Rufo and me."

  "Well, who knows what you are? We've lost a driver and an apartment thanks to you."

  "I'll stay at Pribluda's. It's empty."

  Bugai pursed his lips. "That's not the worst solution. I intend to keep this problem as far from the embassy as possible."

  Arkady discovered that talking to Bugai was much like trying to catch a jellyfish; every time he groped for an answer the vice consul floated out of reach.

  "Before the Cubans even found the body someone here at the embassy knew that Pribluda was in trouble and sent me a fax. It was unsigned. Who could that be?"

  "I wish I knew."

  "You can't find out?"

  "I don't have enough staff to investigate my staff."

  "Who assigned Rufo to me?"

  "The Cuban Ministry of the Interior assigned Rufo to us. Rufo was their man, not ours. There was no one else on hand when you arrived in the middle of the night. I didn't know exactly who you were and I still don't know exactly who you are. Of course, I've called Moscow, and perhaps they've heard of you but what you're really involved in I don't know. Crime is not my specialty."

  "What I'm involved in is identifying Pribluda. The Cubans asked for photographs of him and wanted to come to the embassy. You refused."

  "Well, this is my field. First, we had no photographs. Second, the Cubans always use any opportunity to gain access to the embassy and poke around sensitive areas. It's a state of siege. We were the comrades, now we're the criminals. Punctured tires in the middle of the night. Being pulled over for shakedowns when the police see Russian license plates."

  "Like Moscow."

  "But in Moscow the government has no control, that's the difference. I have to say we never had any trouble with Rufo until you."

  "Where's the ambassador?"

  "We're between ambassadors."

  Arkady reached for a notepad from the desk and wrote, "Where is the resident intelligence agent Pribluda reported to?"

  "It's no big secret," Bugai said. " The chief of guards is here, he's just muscle. But the chief of security has been in Moscow for the past month interviewing for a position in hotel management, and he made very clear to me that while he was gone he wanted 'no red flags.' And as for me, I do not intend to be recalled to Moscow over a spy who had a heart attack floating around in the dark."