Havana Bay (49 page)

Mongo rested his chin on his chest. Sweat poured off
the man as if he were a fountain, not the sweat of fear
like Bugai's but sweat that came from the heavy work of guilt. It was late in the day. Arkady got more beers
so Mongo could sweat some more.

"He said it was like ice fishing for sharks," Mongo
said.» He used to tell me all about ice fishing. He said I
should come to Russia and he would take me ice fishing.
I said 'No, thanks, comrade.'"

"What time did you go into the water?"

"Maybe seven. After dark, because he knew how that
would draw attention if people saw a Russian in a tube. Voices travel on water, so even when we were out there
he would whisper."

"What was the weather like?"

"Raining. He still kept his voice low."

"Is that a good time to fish, when it's raining?"

"If the fish are biting."

Arkady considered that fisherman's truth and asked, "Where did you go in?"

"West of Miramar."

"Near the Marina Hemingway?"

"Yes."

"Whose idea was that?"

 
 
"I always said where we were going to go, except that
time. Sergei said he was tired of Miramar and the
Malecon. Sergei wanted to try somewhere new."

"Once you were in the water you stayed there. Or
did you go west? North? East?"

"Drifted like."

"East because that's the way the current runs, by
Miramar and the Malecon and towards
 
."

"Yes."

"And, on the way, the marina? Whose idea was it to
go in there?"

Mongo slumped against the wall.» So, you already
know."

"I think I do."

"We really fucked up, huh?" Mongo beat nervously on the bench, stilled his hands and let the rhythm drop.»
I said, Sergei, why would we want to fish in the marina
with the
guardia
to chase us and maybe a boat moving
through? That's an active channel, and it's night and
the boats won't see us, I said, it's crazy. But I couldn't
stop him. The
guardia
was in their office out of the
rain. If you come in close they can't see you anyway,
not at night in a tube. I followed Sergei up the channel,
that's all I could do. He seemed to know where he was
going. They have lights there, but they don't reach
down to the water so well. No one was fueling. The
disco was shut down because of the rain. We could hear
people at the bar, that's all, and then we were in a canal where boats were docked one after the other and Sergei
headed for this one I couldn't even see at first, it was so
low and dark. Very sleek, an old boat but fast, you
could tell. There were lights in the cabin and Americans
on board, we could hear them but we couldn't see who.
Right away, I knew that this was some kind of business
of Sergei's he was getting me into. I told him I was
going, but he wanted to climb up and see who was in
the boat, which is difficult because there is an overhang
on the dock. I was leaving when the lights on the boat
went out. My whole body vibrated. Sergei was about
five meters away between the boat and the dock and he
was shaking, shaking, shaking. They let those rucking
power leads lie in the water. I couldn't get any closer.
Then I saw flashlights come up on deck and I hid."
Mongo nodded in doleful self-judgment.» I hid. They came up to see if it was just their boat or everyone and
while they talked back and forth to the person in the
cabin Sergei drifted out. He wasn't shaking anymore. They didn't see him and they didn't see me because I stayed in the dark.

"As soon as his tube's clear, I told myself, I'd pull
Sergei over, but before I could get to Sergei another
boat came up the canal. There's not a lot of room. The
boat went by and then Sergei went by. Sometimes, you
know, boats trail tackle in the water, they shouldn't but they do, and Sergei was hooked by the net of his tube.
He went by faster than I could keep up. I knew he was
dead by the way he sat. They went out the canal
together, the boat and tube. I knew once they cleared
the
guardia
dock and opened the throttle they would
feel the line and find Sergei or the hook would cut the
net.

"Or maybe they would find Sergei and just cut him loose, because who needs to get involved with a dead
neumdtico,
no? That would be a story they could tell in
a bar in Key West about a crazy Cuban they caught one
time. I don't know, I just saw my friend being towed in
the dark until I couldn't see him anymore. By the time
I got past the
guardia
I couldn't even see the boat."

"Did you see its name?"

"No." Mongo drank the last of his beer and stared at
the pail offish.» I didn't even do that."

"Who did you tell about this?"

"No one until you showed up. Then I told Erasmo
and Facundo because they're my
compays,
my good
friends."

The water was flat and glassy enough for pelicans to
skim their reflection. Despite the accumulated heat of
the day Arkady felt oddly comfortable, balanced by beer
and overcoat.

"The men who came on deck of the boat that lost its power, did you recognize them?"

"No, I was looking for Sergei or trying to hide."

"Did they have guns?"

"You know," Mongo said, "it doesn't matter. Sergei
was dead by then and it was an accident. He killed himself, I'm sorry." Mongo looked at the fish.» I have
to go keep these fresh. Thanks for the beer."

An accident? After all this? But it made sense, Arkady
thought. Not only the heart attack but the general
confusion. Murders had much better cover-ups. Then he had arrived from Moscow the same time the body
was found in the bay. Small wonder why Rufo had
rushed to be his interpreter, and why Luna had been so
badly surprised by the photograph of the Havana Yacht
Club. No one had known what happened to Pribluda.

As Mongo resettled his cap and inner tube on his
head, and picked up his flippers and fish, Arkady
thought of Pribluda's tow in his rubbery sleigh out of
the marina to deeper water—the Gulf Stream, O'Brien had said—where he either tore loose or was cut free by a no doubt exasperated fisherman.» Cubans are biting
tonight!" Would that have been the joke? Then the long
journey in the rain, drifting past Miramar, along the
Malecon to the mouth of the bay, a "bag bay," as
Captain Andres of the good ship
Pinguino
had said. Under the beam of the lighthouse on Moro Castle and
then a swing toward the village of Casablanca to gently
snag among the nest of plastics, mattresses and worm-
riddled piers, all sheeted by petroleum scum, where a body could comfortably rest in the rain for weeks.

Arkady took Pribluda's photograph from under his
coat and asked, "Who took this picture?"

"Elmar."

"Elmar who?"

"Mostovoi," Mongo said as if there had been only one photographer in the group.

Confession was always short-lived and always condi
tional, and both men knew it wasn't as if Arkady had
the authority to question anyone. Just for the sake of a
reaction, though, Arkady read the reverse of the picture.»
 
'The Havana Yacht Club.' Does that mean anything to
you?"

"No."

"A joke?"

"No."

"A social club?"

"No."

"Do you know what's happening there tonight?"

That was pressing too hard. The elusive Mongo
backed into the street and broke into a gliding sort of
trot, a one-man caravan, his headgear undulating with
every step. He slid by a blue wall, pink wall, peach and
the shadow of an alley seemed to reach out and swallow
him up.

Ofelia had not been at the embassy apartment since she had seen Rufo spread out on its floor. She remembered
the building's blue walls and Egyptian decoration of
lotuses and ankhs, that hint of the Nile. In the dusk
even the car sitting on the porch had some of the silent
grandeur of a sphinx in residence. Flecks of paint made
a red skirt around the car. Salt pitted once proud
chrome, windows were open to the elements, upholstery
cracked and split and the hood ornament was missing,
but hadn't the sphinx itself lost a nose? And although
they sat on wooden blocks the wheels were caked in
grease, a promise that someday this beast would cough and rise again.

Ofelia was looking for Rufo's phone. Arkady had said
that in Moscow a hustler like Rufo would have as likely
stepped out of his house without a leg as without a cell phone. If this were a real investigation she could have
taken a laundry list of names associated with Rufo to
CubaCell and worked backward from their calls. Instead,
she'd have to find the phone itself. It was somewhere.
For killing someone with a knife, work that could get
messy, Rufo had taken the precaution of changing shoes and wearing over his clothes a one-piece silvery running
suit; Goretex let in the air, kept out the blood. Likewise,
cell phones were delicate, dollars-only items, not some
thing a careful man placed in harm's way. Rufo thought ahead, the trick was to think like him.

The door knocker to the ground-floor apartment was
answered by a white woman in a drab housedress and
flamboyantly coiffed and hennaed hair. Half the women
in Havana, it seemed to Ofelia, spent their lives getting
ready for a party that never happened. In turn, the
woman made a sour study of Ofelia's
jinetera
gear until
presented with a PNR badge.

"Figures," the woman said.

"I'm here to see the murder scene upstairs. Do you
have a key?"

"No. You can't go in there anyway. That's Russian
property, no one can go in. Who knows what they're
doing?"

 
 
"Show me."

The woman led the way in slippers that snapped
against the stairs. The lock on the apartment door was
shiny and new even in the poor light of the hall. Ofelia remembered making a search of the sitting room, pull
ing out
Fidel y Arte
and other books, a sofa and
sideboard, performing a more hurried look into the other rooms for fear that the confrontation between
Luna and the Russian would get out of hand. There was a chance the phone was inside the embassy apartment,
but not likely. She reached on tiptoe to the dark
underside of the stairs above for any ledge that Rufo
could have set the phone on. No.

"You didn't find anything here?" Ofelia asked.

"There's nothing to find. The Russians don't put
anyone there for weeks at a time. Good riddance."

As Ofelia went back down the stairs she let her hand
trail on the risers above. She stepped out onto the porch
with nothing but a dirty hand.

"I told you," the woman said.

"You were right." The woman was starting to remind
Ofelia of her mother.

"You're the second one."

"Oh? Who else?"

"A big
negro
from the Ministry of Interior. Really
black. He looked everywhere. He had a phone, too. He
called on it and didn't speak and just listened, but not
to the phone, understand?"

Naturally, Ofelia thought, because Luna was calling
Rufo's number and was trying to hear it ring. That was
 
the trouble with trying to hide a phone, sooner or later someone would call the number and the phone would
announce itself.

"Did he find anything?"

"No. Don't you people work together? You're like
everything else in this country. Everything has to be
done twice, no?"

Ofelia walked out to the middle of the street. It was
a block of old town houses transformed by revolution,
idealism followed by fatigue and lack of paint and
plaster. One front yard a parking lot for bicycles,
another an open-air beauty salon. Collapsing buildings but busy as a hive.