Havana Bay (31 page)

Ofelia felt that Cubans should be allowed to fight their enemies because the gangsters in Miami would stop at nothing: assassination, bombing, propaganda.
For Cuba to even exist took vigilance. However, the role of Rufo and Facundo in these cases made Ofelia uneasy.
She turned off the computer half wishing she hadn't turned it on in the first place.

On her way out, she discovered the officers who had been working at the table were gone. Sitting alone was
Sergeant Luna. She was surprised he had left the Casa
de Amor already. His arms were crossed, stretching his
shirt across his chest. His face hung in the shadow of
his cap as he worked his jaw from side to side. His chair
was turned, half blocking the way to the door.

Suddenly she was back in Hershey, in the cattle fields
where the egrets came from their roosts along the river. The birds were as white as shavings of soap, and as they
crossed the carbon-black smoke that lifted from the
chimneys of the sugar mill her anxiety was for the
egrets' purity. Nevertheless they would float in and stalk
the cattle fields, impervious to dirt. She was so busy
watching them that she didn't notice that the bull had
been let into the field, and the person who had led the
bull in hadn't seen her. The bull saw her, though.

The bull was the largest animal she'd ever seen. Milky
white with downward twisting horns, creamy curls
between the horns, shoulders bloated with muscle, a
pink sac down to his knees, eyes red with the indolent
torpor of a violent king. Not dumb, however, not in
this situation. Because he ruled. And he waited for her
to make her move.

But something distracted it. Ofelia turned her head
and saw a figure in black that had jumped the fence and
was waving and hopping from foot to foot. It was the
town priest, a pale man who had always seemed so sad.
His cassock flapped around him as he laughed and
goaded the bull, ran in a circle around it and threw
clods until it charged. Lifting his cassock, the priest took
the longest strides Ofelia had ever seen. He dived over the fence ahead of the bull, which drove a deep-rooted
post half over and went on savaging the wood in
frustration while Ofelia raced to the part of the fence
nearest her. She remembered her first gulp of air from
the safety of the other side and how she didn't stop
running until she was home.

Luna said, "Captain Arcos asked if you gave us all
the evidence you found in the motel?"

"Yes."

Luna shifted so that his bulk blocked her even more
and let his thick arm hang slack.

"Everything?"

 
 
"Yes."

"You told us everything you know about this?"

"Yes."

The sergeant looked toward the carrel.

"What were you looking for?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe something I can help you with?"

"No."

The sergeant didn't move. He made her press by his
arm as if it were a line that would define just where she
stood.

 
Chapter Seventeen

Arkady's route to Chinatown passed by the aquarium
stillness of deserted department stores, a
perfumeria
window with nothing to display but a can of mosquito
repellent, the staff of a jewelry store with elbows glued
to empty cases, but around the corner of Calle Rayo,
life: red lanterns, a roasted whole pig, fried plantain and
fried batter, mounds of oranges, lemons, coral peppers,
black tubers cut to white flesh, green tomatoes in papery cowls, avocados and tropical fruit for which Arkady had
no name, although he understood by the dollar signs that this market in the very center of Central Havana was for private vendors. Flies spun dizzily in sweet
smells of ripening pineapple and banana. Salsa from a
hanging radio vied with tapes of wistful Cantonese five-
tone scale and customers with obscured but still-
discernible Chinese features drilled vendors with Cuban Spanish. At a corner stall a butcher chopped a cow skull
open, and a cotton-candy vendor with her hair fes
tooned in blue, sugary wisps that rose from a tub read
Arkady's note and pointed to a walk-up with the sign

KARATE CUBANO.

Arkady had come in a rush. He had gone from the
Chinese Cemetery to Pribluda's flat and from there to
Chinatown because his mind was finally functioning.

 
 
Abuelita, the eyes of the CDR, had said that on Thursday afternoons Pribluda left the Malecon with his ugly
plastic Cuban briefcase. The girl Carmen had claimed
that Thursdays were when Uncle Sergei practiced karate.
According to his own spreadsheet, Thursday was the
day of Pribluda's unexplained hundred-dollar expendi
ture. Didn't it all fit together? Wasn't it possible that
every Thursday, carrying in a common Cuban briefcase
not a black belt but an envelope stuffed with money,
the spy Sergei Pribluda had met his "Chinese contact"
at a karate dojo in Havana's Chinatown? Most likely the
colonel kept a sweatsuit or karate gear in a dojo locker,
reason enough for him to stop in the changing room,
where, as Arkady imagined it, not a word to the contact
had to be said, not if he had a similar briefcase. The
two briefcases could be switched in a moment, and the
anonymous contact would be headed down the stairs
before Pribluda untied his shoes to practice those deadly
kicks he showed to Carmen. The entire business would be swift, silent and professional. Arkady had the briefcase and this was Thursday.

The only problem was that when Arkady ran gasping
up the stairs the door where the dojo was supposed to be now read
evita
—
el salon nuevo de belleza.
Inside, two women wearing masks of blue mud reposed
in barber chairs even as workmen bolted a third chair
to the floor. Arkady retreated to the market and went
through the process with the same piece of paper and received the same misinformation.

At a Chinese restaurant where no one was Chinese
 
and egg rolls came with a dab of ketchup Arkady found
a waiter who spoke enough English to say that there were
no more dojos in Chinatown, although there were maybe
twenty in the city. Four more days. He should call
Pribluda's son in case the boy wanted to meet the plane,
assuming the boy could leave his pizza ovens for a few
hours. Then Arkady had no plans. He had run out. He
had the clear eye of a man who had no plans at all.

Well, there was the picture of Pribluda he was
supposed to be finding, but for a moment Arkady had thought he'd caught sight of Pribluda's ghost slipping
between bright mounds of exotic fruit. The walls of the
restaurant were bordello red and had the usual picture of Che Guevara looking so much like Christ in a beret
it was unearthly. Arkady had noticed simply while
walking through the streets and passing open windows
that people hung more portraits of Che than of Fidel,
although Che's very martyrdom seemed to validate
Fidel. But martyrs had the advantage of staying roman
tically young, whereas Fidel, the survivor, came framed
in two ages: the passionate revolutionary with index
finger stabbing each oratorical point and the graybeard
lost in haunted reflection.

Arkady felt haunted by stupidity. It had been exciting
for a moment to believe in his revived powers of
deduction, like finding an old steam engine in a derelict
factory and thinking that a match held under the boiler
would bring the pistons back to life. No churning
pistons here, he thought. Thank God, Detective Osorio
hadn't been around to witness the fiasco.

 
On his way from the restaurant he pushed through
the market and skirted a group of boys pummeling one
another outside a theater. It was a shabby corner cinema
painted Chinese red with pagoda-style eaves and a poster
that showed a karate master in midair. The title of the
film was in Chinese and Spanish, and in parentheses at
the bottom of the poster in English, "Fists of Fear!". Arkady remembered the ticket stub in Pribluda's pants. That was what Carmen had been trying to ask him, not
"Did you see? Fists of fear!" but "Did you
see Fists of
Fear!?'
He joined the line at the box office, paid four
pesos for a ticket and climbed the red steps into the dark.

The interior was aromatic of cigarettes, joss sticks, beer. The seats were bald and taped. Arkady sat in the
last row, the better to see the rest of the audience, rows
of heads that bobbed and howled appreciatively for a
film that had already started and seemed to involve a
studious young monk defending his sister from Hong
Kong gangsters. The dialogue was Chinese with subtitles
in another form of Chinese, not even Spanish; the
laughing of the actors was hideous, and every kick
sounded like a melon being split. Arkady had barely
stood the briefcase on his lap before he was joined in
the next seat by a small, sharp-nosed man with glasses
and a similar briefcase.

A whisper in Russian.» Are you from Sergei?"

"Yes."

"Where have you been? Where has he been? I was
here all day last week and I've seen this film once
already today."

 
 
"How long has this film been playing here?"

"A month."

"Sorry."

"I would think so. I'm the one who's taking all the
chances. And this film is for cretins. It's bad enough I'm
doing this, but to treat me this way."

"It's not right."

"It's debasing. You can pass that on to Sergei."

"Whose idea was it?"

"To meet here? It was my idea, but I didn't intend to
pass whole days here. They must think I'm a pervert."
On the screen the gangster chief pulled on a glove
equipped with a power drill and demonstrated it on a luckless henchman.» Actually, in the old days this was
the best porno theater in Havana."

"What happened when they switched to karate films?"

"We brought our girlfriends and screwed. The Chi
nese never paid attention to what we did."

It was dark, and Arkady didn't want to examine
his companion too obviously, but what he could see
sideways was a bureaucrat in his sixties with a gray mustache, eyes bright as a bird's.

"So you have spent a lot of time here."

"I suffer from a certain personal history. Surprised to see Chinese in Cuba?"

"Yes."

"Brought in when the slave trade closed. There's no smoking," the man said to explain why he was cupping
his cigarette. He switched briefcases and, using the
cigarette as a little lamp, dipped his head into the one
he'd taken from Arkady to count the money, the same
hundred-dollar expenditure Pribluda had paid every
week.» You understand, I am under extraordinary pressure. If I had known what buying a car would entail, I
never would have agreed to any of this."

"You can buy a car?"

"Used, of course. '55 Chevrolet. Original leather."
On the screen, gangsters marched into a studio where
the girl had just finished sculpting a dove in white
marble. As they broke off the statue's wings her brother
flew through the studio window on a motor scooter.»
Where is Sergei?"

"Not feeling well," Arkady said, "but I'll tell him you
wished him a quick recovery."

The monk was a whirlwind, dispatching hoodlums
with a variety of leaps and kicks. With every blood-
spraying kick Arkady's head throbbed, and when the
gangster chief pulled on his glove Arkady stood.

"Aren't you staving?" his friend said.» This is the
good part."