Havana Bay ar-4

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Ofelia shoved the door with her foot, slipped in and crouched against a wall. When her eyes adjusted she saw that the office had been stripped of desk, chairs, rug. All that was left were a bust of Lenin on a pedestal and horizontal red-and-black stripes spray-painted on the walls, windows, across Lenin's face. She heard something move in the hall.

  It occurred to Ofelia that perhaps she should have changed into her uniform. If the PNR found her dressed like this, what would they assume? And Bias? He'd think what fun they could have had in Madrid.

  She slid out of the office on one knee aiming left, then right. Whatever it was had stopped, although Luna could be coming from either direction. This was a time when target practice paid off just for holding a heavy gun steady for so long. Banana bread was a ludicrous item to be toting and she considered lightening her load. But the girls had helped bake it.

  The next office was empty except for corn kernels and feathers underfoot. She heard a step behind her again, tentative, hanging back, and she tried to get low enough to sight on a silhouette. She moved across the hall into what had been a meeting room with no table, no chairs, no windows, just a faint row of framed Russian faces and ships. She thought if there was more than one individual after her this was a perfect opportunity to lock the doors at each end and seal her in as effectively as entombing her.

  Slower, she told herself, although she was blinking through sweat, mouth breathing too, not a good sign, and her shoulders ached from the weight of the gun. She was in the dark until she opened a door to a linen room, where the light poured through unbroken windows onto shelves that once held sheets and pillowcases still white; even the dust was white as talc. On the floor a headless white chicken lay in a circle of dried blood. She left the door open to illuminate the hallway and followed a sign that pointed to "Buffet." Checked into a pantry with nothing except lists on the wall in Russian of meat, dairy and starchy goods expected six years before. There was a note to a certain Lena, "Russian potatoes, not Cuban potatoes." Historical documents that faded as the linen-room door shut.

  This was the darkest yet. Reentering the hall was like stepping into a pit. Nothing but black behind her, and nothing ahead but faint light tracing a buffet door. She could feel as much as hear the step behind her, it was that close. Her father had cut cane, she knew how cane cutters worked. First slice to the base, second high to lop off the cane head. Arkady had said Luna was right-handed, which meant that, constrained by the dimensions of the hall, a downward swing to the left. She got as small she could on the right side.

  She felt breathing on her. A hairy face pressed against hers and she reached out to feel two stubby horns. A goat. She'd forgotten about the goats. The rest were gone or this was the only one that had found a way down to the ground floor. A small goat with a stiff beard, sharp ribs and an inquisitive muzzle that pressed into her bag. The banana bread, of course, Ofelia thought. She laid her gun between her legs, unwrapped the bread and broke off half. She couldn't see the goat but she could hear it devour the bread as if it hadn't been fed for days. The scent of the bread must have been an irresistible trail through the building. She was glad her Russian hadn't seen this.

  When the goat tried to tear up the rest of the bread Ofelia gave it a not unkind kick, then scratched its scrawny neck to make amends. Growing up in Hershey, she'd had to deal with goats, chickens, voracious hogs.

  Discouraged, the goat backed away with a tremulous baa, and although Ofelia expected it to go the way it had come and return to the herd, something seemed to pull it in the opposite direction. She couldn't see the goat, but she heard its hooves tap closer to the buffet door, to the ghostly smell of food six years past. It was a swinging door. The goat nosed it open, there was a glimpse of dingy light, enough to invite the goat and it trotted through. The door flapped twice, settled, and then flew open to flame and smoke.

  Although she was shielded at the moment of detonation Ofelia's ears rang, her face felt scoured. Cement dust filled the dark hall, and devoid of both sight and hearing she swung the gun one way and then the other until the air cleared enough for her to make out again the faint light that traced the buffet door. She crawled forward, felt a cord hanging slack on its lower lip and pushed the door open.

  It had only been a fragmentation grenade, Ofelia thought, but in close quarters it accomplished its mission 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 th
ink. 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 right on the wall, a clue no one as sharp as you was going to miss. Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't. We have to be careful. Remember, I have been the target of more police stings and entrapment than you could dream of. By the way, keep in mind that j all our friends here tonight still remember the Russian ', language. Watch what you say."

  Walls ran his eyes.over Arkady's new clothes.» Big : improvement.":The chefs lifted lobsters from a huge sack to a cutting board, where they sliced and cleaned the underside of I the tails before setting the lobsters alive onto the grill, poking them with wooden sticks when they tried to crawl from the flames. Arkady saw no menus, no African food. The two Cubans at Arkady's table shook his hand but offered no names. One was white, the other mulatto, but they shared the musculature, direct gaze and obsessionally trimmed fingernails and hair of military men.

  "What does this club do?" Arkady asked.

  "They can do anything," O'Brien said.» People wonder, what will happen to Cuba when Fidel dies? As a Caribbean North Korea? Will the gang in Miami march in and take back their houses and sugarcane fields? Will the Mafia swoop in? Or will there just be anarchy, another Haiti? Americans wonder how without a managerial infrastructure full of MBAs Cuba can even hope to survive."

  The lobsters were monsters, the largest Arkady had ever seen. They reddened among flares and sparks.

  "But the wonderful thing about evolution," O'Brien said, "is that it can't be stopped. Eliminate business. Make the army the preferred career route for idealistic young men. Send them to foreign wars, but don't give them enough money to fight. Make them earn it. Make them trade in ivory and diamonds so they have enough ammunition to defend themselves, and you end up with an interesting group of entrepreneurs. Then, because it works cheap, when the army comes home make it go into farming, hotels, sugar. Reassign heroes to run the tourism and citrus and nickel industries. Let me tell you, negotiating a contract with a construction company from Milan is as good as two years at Harvard Business School. The ones here tonight are the creme de la creme."

  "The Havana Yacht Club?"

  "They like the name," Walls said.» It's just a social thing."

  When the first lobsters were done, a chef stirred a glass bowl full of twists of paper, picked four twists, unrolled and read them before sending the lobsters to a table. It seemed to Arkady a better system for a lottery than a restaurant. How did the chef know who ordered what? Why were there only two choices, lobster or nothing?

  "I thought private restaurants weren't allowed to serve lobster," Arkady said.

  "Maybe tonight is an exception," O'Brien said.

  Arkady caught sight of Mostovoi again.» Why am I the new Russian? Why can't Mostovoi be?"

  "This is an enterprise that needs more than a pornog-rapher. You've replaced Pribluda. Everyone can accept that." O'Brien adopted a forgiving tone.» And you can keep the photograph Pribluda sent to you. It would have been nice if you'd offered it as a sign of trust at some point, but you're on the team now."

  "Rufo died for that picture."

  "Thank God, I much prefer you. I mean, it's worked out wonderfully."

  "Do some of these people work in the Ministry of Sugar? Are some of them involved with AzuPanama?"

  "We met some that way, yes. These are the men who make decisions, as much as anyone can make decisions besides Fidel. Some are deputy ministers, some are still generals and colonels, men who have known each other all their lives and now in their prime. Naturally, they're making plans. It is a normal human aspiration, the need to better themselves and leave something for their fam
ilies. The same as Fidel. He has one legitimate son and a dozen illegitimate children salted away in the government. These men are no different."

  "The casino fits somewhere in here?"

  "I hope so."

  "Why are you telling me all this?"

  "John always tells the truth," Walls said.» Just that there are a lot of layers to the truth."

  "Casino, combat boots, AzuPanama. Which is real and which is fake?"

  "In Cuba," O'Brien said, "there is a fine line between the real and the ridiculous. As a boy, Fidel wrote Franklin Roosevelt and asked for an American dollar. Later Fidel was scouted as a pitcher by the major leagues. Here was a man who could have been a model American, an inch away. Instead, he becomes Fidel. Incidentally, the scouting report was 'Fair fastball, no control.' At heart, my dear Arkady, it's all ridiculous."

  The body in the bay was dead, Rufo was dead, Hedy and her Italian had been slashed to death, Arkady thought. That was real. The Cubans at the table listened with half an ear as they watched lobsters continue to march off the grill and the curious ceremony of reading papers at random from a bowl. It didn't seem to matter who had lobster so much as that they all did. Arkady had the sense that if one anonymous twist of paper was blank, if one diner hadn't ordered lobster, the group to a man would have stood and left at once.

  "Do you mind…?" Arkady nodded toward Erasmo's table.

  "Please." O'Brien gave his blessing.

  Tico was happily dismembering his crustacean and Mostovoi was caught sucking on a claw.

  "You can't get lobster this succulent anywhere else in the world." Mostovoi wiped his mouth as Arkady dropped into a chair. There was no sign from the photographer that he had connected the fire at the Sierra Maestra to Arkady.

  Erasmo didn't say a word or touch his lobster. Arkady remembered him drinking ron peleo and swaying in his wheelchair to Mongo's drum at the santero's, leaning out the Jeep like a bearded buccaneer as they cruised the Malecon. This was a more subdued Erasmo.

  "So, this is the real Havana Yacht Club," Arkady said to him.» No Mongo, no fish."