Havana Bay

by Martin Cruz Smith

  "I stand corrected."

  Osorio recrossed her legs. Arkady leaned back to release a long plume of smoke.

  "If there were an investigation," she finally said, "what would you do?"

  "Start with a chronology. Pribluda was seen first at eight in the morning by a neighbor, a dancer. He was seen last by a co-worker at the embassy between four and six in the afternoon. She said he was talking on the street here to a neumático, a black man. If I could speak Spanish I'd go up and down the Malecón with this picture until I found everyone who saw him that day."

  "I suppose we can talk to the block CDR."

  "I know who that is."

  "Okay, we'll do that."

  "And take another look where the body was found."

  "But we found it across the bay in Casablanca. You were there."

  "Not in the daylight."

  "This is not an investigation."

  "No, absolutely not."

  "You're not afraid of being attacked again?"

  "I'll be with you."

  Her eyes seemed get even darker. "Qué idiota."

  That seemed to be her name for him.

  Finally, he fell asleep in the chair, although he was aware of her perfume, a faint scent of vanilla that tinged the air like ink in water.

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  Predawn lent the Malecón an underwater light, as if the sea had covered the city overnight. Arkady and Osorio followed the faint glow of Abuelita having a morning cigar at her windowsill. She invited them into an apartment with walls as worn as old clothes, with layers of color, offered them café cubano in dark, heavy glasses and seated them by a statue of the Virgin that had a peacock feather at its back and at its feet a copper crown stuffed with sandalwood and dollars. Arkady felt fine, virtually rejuvenated by the fact that Luna had not returned in the middle of the night with a baseball bat or pick. Detective Osorio was back in her blue uniform and dark mood. Abuelita showed no burns from having juggled live coals the night before. In fact, she had the manner of a young girl only pretending to be old and at once was flirting with Arkady, thanking him for coming to her aid the night before, allowing him to relight her cigar, and although the smoke, the scent and golden hues were disorienting, he managed to explain to her that while there was no official investigation into Pribluda's death, there was curiosity about his life and asked whether she as a vigilant member of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution could describe his routine.

  "Boring. Sometimes your friend would be gone for weeks, claro, but when he was here it was always the same. He would leave at seven with his briefcase and come back about seven at night. Except Thursdays. Thursdays he would be back in the middle of the afternoon and out again and back again. Saturdays, he shopped at the Diplomercado, because he always found a little something for me. Chocolates or gin. A kind man. Sundays, he went fishing with Mongo off the seawall or tied inner tubes to the car to drive somewhere else."

  "You're very observant."

  "Is my duty. I am the CDR."

  "Thursday was his busy day?"

  "Oh, yes." Her eyes and her smile widened.

  He was aware of missing an insinuation but he pressed on.

  "Besides his extra trip, did anything else make his Thursdays different?"

  "Well, he took the other briefcase."

  "'Other'?"

  "The nasty green plastic one. Cuban."

  "Just that day?"

  "Yes."

  "When was the last time you saw him?"

  "I'd have to think. Hijo, let me think."

  Arkady may have been confused but he was not stupid. "What is the money in the crown for?"

  "Offerings from people who want spiritual advice, to cast the shells or read cards."

  "I need advice about Pribluda." He added five dollars to the crown. "It doesn't have to be spiritual."

  Abuelita concentrated. "Now that I think about it, maybe two Fridays ago was the last time? Yes. He left a little later than usual and came back a little earlier, around four."

  "Four in the afternoon?"

  "In the afternoon. Then he left again around six. I remember because he changed into shorts. He always wore shorts when he went out with Mongo on the bay. But Mongo wasn't with him."

  Osorio was unable to contain herself. "See, everything points to Pribluda being the body."

  "So far."

  Arkady was pleased, too, because everybody had something. He had a version of Pribluda's final day. Osorio had her moment of triumph. Abuelita had five dollars.

  Outside the day approached more as distinguishable shadow than as light. As Arkady and Osorio walked up the Malecón a huddled mass proved to be four PNRs stealing smokes. They approached Arkady out of curiosity until they registered Osorio's uniform and the detective gave them a heavy-lidded look that sent them stumbling in retreat. In her uniform and cap, heavy belt and holster, she constituted a small armored column, Arkady thought. Or a little tank with laser eyes.

  In the entire harbor the only craft in motion was the Casablanca ferry approaching its Havana landing. The windows of the ferry burst into flame, and then, as the sun slid off, faces of morning commuters squinted through the glass. Churning through backwash the boat rubbed against a pier fendered in tires, and the instant a gangway was laid passengers emerged, some equipped with briefcases for a day at the office, others pushing bikes laden with sacks of coconuts and bananas, by a sign that asked distinguished users not to bring firearms on board and into the warming, yellowing day.

  A countersurge of new riders pushed onto the boat, carrying Arkady and Osorio with them. The interior was set at pre-swelter, seats along the sides, bike riders to the rear, bars to hang from crisscrossing the ceiling. Arkady's coat drew stares. He didn't care.

  "Do you love boats as much as I do?"

  "No," Osorio said.

  "Sailboats, fishing boats, rowboats?"

  "No."

  "Maybe it's a male characteristic. I think the appeal is the apparent irresponsibility of boats, the sense of floating anywhere, while the opposite is true. You have to work like a dog to keep from sinking." Osorio gave him no response. " What is it? What's bothering you?"

  "It is contrary to revolutionary law for a tourist to rent rooms. Abuelita should have reported him. He was hiding among the people because he was a spy."

  "If it's any comfort, I doubt that Pribluda ever passed as a Cuban. He wanted a view of the water. I can understand that."

  The more Arkady saw of the harbor the more impressed he was by both its size and inactivity, a panorama of torpor: Havana's docks and cargo offices on one side and on the other Casablanca's verdant bluff with a pink weather station and a white statue of Christ. On the inner bay Arkady saw a few isolated freighters, a motionless herd of cargo cranes and the raw torch and smoke of refineries. Heading to sea was a black Cuban torpedo boat of humpback Russian design with automatic cannon on the rear deck. He noticed Osorio studying his head.

  "How do I look?"

  "Ripe. Your embassy should lock you up."

  "I'm safe with you."

  "The only reason I'm with you is because you want to go to Casablanca and you don't speak a word of Spanish. Viejo, I have other things to do."

  "Well, I'm certainly enjoying myself."

  The village of Casablanca looked as if it had started at the top of its hill at Christ's feet and then rolled down to the water's edge, piling shanties of cinder block and sheet steel on top of more dignified colonial houses. Scarlet bougainvillea tumbled over walls and the air warmed with the sticky smell of jasmine. From the ferry landing, Arkady and Osorio climbed up to a depot for trolleys equipped with cow catchers for rural duty. They walked a main street with shutters closed against the morning heat, including the closed door and boarded-up windows of a tiny PNR station, and down the remains of a circular stairway to a park of weeds, a cement curb, a panorama of the bay and the tar-black water and pilings, refuse and cans where the neumático had b
een found three days before.

  The scene was different in the daytime, without klieg lights, a crowd, music and Captain Arcos shouting urgent misdirections. The sun picked out the details of a waterfront row of elegant houses so gutted they looked like Greek temples gone to ruin, and defined just how flimsy was the dock that reached over the water to a half-dozen fishing boats. The craft all had long poles raised like antennae and "Casablanca" bravely painted on the stern in case they set out for the larger world.

  "This is where he ended up, not where he started. There's nothing to find," Osorio said.

  The dock disappeared behind a barricade to a shack Arkady hadn't noticed at all on his first visit. He went around to a back gate that opened to a yard that could have been on Devil's Island. An indiscriminate variety of wrecks and boats with patchwork hulls sat hauled up amid sleeping cats. A dog barked from a deck. Two men stripped to the waist straightened a propeller shaft while at their feet hens scratched for corn. Here was self-reliance, a boatyard that could run up a stout little vessel out of flotsam and supply eggs, besides. The two men kept their faces turned away, but maybe that was the effect of Osorio's cast-iron glare, Arkady thought. The Noah of this yard emerged from the dark of the shack. His name was Andres; he wore a captain's cap tipped confidently forward, and he produced what sounded like florid explanations before they were trimmed by Osorio.

  The boat being repaired, he said, was built in Spain, used as an auxiliary of a freighter, declared technologically obsolete and sold to Cuba for scrap. That was twenty years ago. Arkady suspected that suggestions of smuggling and storms at sea were lost in the translation. Osorio was different from other Cubans, who registered every emotion with a sweeping emotional needle. Osorio's needle never budged.

  "Has Andres heard about the body found here?"

  "He says that's all they talk about. He wonders why we came back."

  "Did they find anything else in the water where the neumático was found?"

  "He says no."

  "Does he have a chart of the bay?" Arkady picked his way to the dock around mounds of cans and bottles salvaged from the water and stinking of slime.

  "I told you before, the body just floated here. We don't have anything like a scene of the crime."

  "Actually, what I think we have is a very large scene of the crime."

  Andres returned with a chart that revealed as a channel that flowed between Havana the city and Morro Castle and fed three separate inner bays: Atares, west and nearest to downtown Havana, Guanabacoa in the middle and Casablanca east. Arkady followed with his finger the tracery of shipping lanes, ferry routes, depths, buoys, the very few hazards, and understood why the bay of Havana had been the great marshaling yard of Spain's American possessions. But it was all one "bag bay" to Andres.

  "What floats in can float out, he says. Depending on the tide: in during high, out during low. Depending on the wind: northwest in, southeast out. Depending on the season: in winter winds were generally stronger, in summer hurricanes drew water out to sea. If everything is equal a body can spin forever in the middle of the bay, but usually the wind is steady from the northwest and drives bodies right to his boatyard, which was why you find live neumáticos in Havana and dead neumáticos in Casablanca."

  Arkady tested the spindly dock and for some reason felt promise. Andres's own boat, El Pinguino, was a coquettish blue with room for two if they could shift around an engine box, floats, buckets, gaff and tiller. Forward, a sail was furled between outrigged fishing poles. Aft, rope and wire lay on a transom crosshatched from braining fish. No satellite uplink, sonar, fish finder, radar or radio.

  Osorio followed. "Looks are deceiving, Andres says. It's enough boat, he claims, to reach Key West and get arrested for taking American marlin." As a note of her own she added, "In Havana the first Hemingway deep-sea fishing tournament was won by Fidel."

  "Why am I not surprised?"

  Drawn to the boat, Arkady crossed planks spaced widely enough for him to follow his reflection in the water. What he didn't understand were the floats, each numbered and skewered so that at least three meters of orange pole would stand free above the water.

  "This," Andres explained through Osorio, "is the Cuban system." The fisherman turned the chart over and, with a pencil stub, drew a wavy surface of the water and then, at regular intervals, the poles floating upright. A "mother line" connected them in a long string of poles. "The problem with fish is that they swim at different depths at different times. At night with a full moon, the tuna feed deeper. At the same time, red snapper or grunts feed closer to the surface. And turtles, too, though you can only catch them while they're copulating, a season that only lasts a month. Of course, they're illegal, so he never would. But with the Cuban system you can fish for them all by hanging hooks from different sections of the mother line at different depths: forty meters, thirty meters, ten. Everybody sets out different lines and this way they comb the whole sea."

  "Ask him about a current that would have carried a drifting neumático from the Malecón into the bay."

  "He says that is where boats concentrate because that's where fish are found, in the current. Boats don't fish the entire bay, just that corridor with mother lines and a gamut of hooks."

  "Now ask him what they found, not here at the dock but out on the water. I don't mean fish."

  Andres stopped for breath like a man outrun by his mouth. A Cuban who poached in Florida, after all, Arkady thought, was a man given to overreaching.

  "He asks, something snagged in the bay? Around the time that poor man was found at the dock?" As if to aid recollection Andres glanced back toward the two men who had been working on the propeller shaft but his friends had vanished. "Trash maybe, hooked accidentally?"

  "Exactly."

  By now Osorio understood the drift, and when Andres retreated to his shack she went with him. They returned with a plastic bag and perhaps fifty sheets of what looked like lottery tickets that had obviously been soaked through and then set out to dry. In green on white, a barely legible pattern said "Montecristo, Habana Puro, Fabrica a Mano" over and over again.

  "These are official state seals before they're gummed and cut for cigar boxes," Osorio said. "With these, ordinary cigars could have been labeled expensive Montecristos. This is very serious." Andres became a torrent of explications. "He says the seals snagged on someone's line, he can't remember whose, a week or more before the body was found. The bag had leaked, the seals were ruined, besides that was when the weather changed, no one came to their boats and the seals were forgotten. He dried them but just to read them and see if they were worth reporting. He was about to himself."

  Arkady was entertained by the idea of such valuable cigars. Sugar and cigars, the diamonds and gold of Cuba.

  "Could you ask exactly where the bag was found?"

  Andres marked the chart five hundred meters off the Malecón between the Hotel Riviera and Pribluda's flat. " He says only a lunatic would steal government seals, but he thinks a neumático is desperate to begin with. To sail on a ring of rubber and air? At night? The tide goes out or a current carries him to sea? One little puncture? Sharks? A man like that makes all fishermen look bad."

  Osorio was disgusted with Casablanca. In the village's PNR station, so dark that a portrait of Che was an undusted ghost, the officers stirred just enough to take a signed statement from Andres and give a receipt for the seals to her.

  Arkady was content, having done something remotely professional, and on the ferry ride back bought a paper flute of peanuts roasted in sugar that he induced Osorio to share.

  Her attitude had changed a little. " That man Andres only showed us the cigar seals he found because he looked into your eyes. You knew he was hiding something. How did you do that?"

  It was true that from the moment Arkady walked into the boatyard he felt guided to the flimsy dock and the spear-shaped floats of the "mother line." He could say it was the way the workmen avoided Osorio, but no, it was as if El Pinguino
had called his name.

  "A moment of clarity."

  "More than that. You saw through him."

  "I'm highly trained in suspicion. It's the Russian method."

  Osorio gave him an opaque, humorless gaze. He had yet to figure the detective out. The fact that Luna had backed off when Osorio arrived in the santero's yard suggested as much that they were working together as on opposite sides. She could just be a smaller version of the man who had beaten Arkady with a bat. Yet there were moments when Arkady would spy an entirely different, unrevealed person stirring within her. The ferry engines reversed and threw the deck into vibrations as it coasted to the dock.

  "Now we should go to a doctor," Osorio said. " I know a good one."

  "Thanks, but I finally have a mission. Your Dr. Blas needs a better photograph of Sergei Pribluda. I volunteered to find it. At least, to try."

  The address Isabel had given him the night before was an old town house that, like a dowager in a once fine but tattered dress, maintained an illusion of European culture. Wrought-iron railings guarded marble steps. Lunettes of stained glass cast red and blue light onto the floor of a reception room staffed with women sitting in white housecoats.

  Arkady followed strains of Tchaikovsky, bright and brittle notes from a badly tuned piano, into a sun-filled courtyard, where, through an open window, he saw a class in progress, dancers who balanced the upper bodies of starving waifs on a powerful musculature that started at the small of their backs, sculpted the haunches and flowed down through the legs. While Russian ballerinas tended to be doe-like and softly blonde, however, Cubans had whippet-thin faces trimmed in black hair and eyes and lit with the arrogance of flamenco dancers. In their leotards they combined poverty and chic, moving on point in stiffly elegant, birdlike steps in taped toe shoes across a wooden floor patched with squares of linoleum.

  As a Russian, he took a moment to adjust. He had been brought up with the attitude that great dancers – Nijinsky, Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov – were, per se, Russian, that they graduated from schools like the VaganovaAcademy in St. Petersburg and that they danced with the Kirov or Bolshoi until they escaped. Even now, although they were free agents like ice-hockey players, the tradition was still Russian. Yet here was a room of dancers as exotic as hothouse orchids. Especially Isabel, who had the classic line, who made every move seem effortless, whose arabesques were infinitely smooth, whose grace even from the last row stole the eye until the mistress clapped her hands and dismissed the class, at which point Isabel gathered her sweatshirt and bag, joined Arkady and demanded in Russian, "Give me a cigarette."