Havana Bay (4 page)

"What is that?"

"Change."

"Change?"

"A Santeria spirit."

"Right. And why would Pribluda have it?"

"I don't know. That's not what we came for," Osorio
said. What they had come for, apparently, was to see how thoroughly she had dusted the apartment for
fingerprints, every door, jamb, knob and pull. Some
prints had been lifted, leaving the transfer tracks of tape.
But many more prints were visible as brown whorls
expertly brushed.

"You did all this?" he asked Osorio.

"Yes."

"Brown powder?" He hadn't seen that before.

"Cuban fingerprint powder. In this Special Period,
imported powders are too expensive. We make powder
from burned palm fronds."

She hadn't missed any opportunity. Under the lamp
 
was a small turtle, armored and obtuse in a bowl of
sand. A perfect pet for a spy, Arkady thought. The shell
was branded with a brown fingerprint.

She said, "Pribluda could have had a protocol house, but he rented here illegally from the Cuban who lives
below."

"Why do you think he did that?"

For an answer she opened the balcony doors, their
curtains lifting like wings with the breeze that rushed
in. Arkady stepped out between two aluminum chairs
and the balcony's marble rail and looked out on the
vault of the night sky and the Malecon, displayed as an
elegant curve of boulevard lights. Beyond the seawall
was the flash of a lighthouse and deck lights of a
freighter and pilot boat entering the bay. As his eyes
adjusted he made out the fainter gunwale lamps of fishing boats and, nearer in, a widespread candle
glimmer.

"Neumdticos"
Osorio said.

Arkady imagined them, a flotilla of inner tubes riding
black swells.

"Why wasn't there a police seal on the front door?"
he asked.

"Because we are not investigating."

"So, what
are
we doing here, then?"

"Putting your mind to rest."

She motioned Arkady inside through the parlor and
to a corridor, past a laundry room and into an office that held an ancient wooden desk, computer, printer
and bookshelves crammed with binders from the
Cuban Ministry of Sugar and photo albums. Under the printer, two briefcases, one of brown leather, the other
of extraordinarily ugly green plastic. The walls were
covered with maps of
Cuba
and
Havana
.
Cuba
was a
big island, Arkady realized, twelve hundred kilometers
long, marked with X's on the map. Arkady opened an album to pictures of what looked like green bamboo.

"Sugarcane fields," Osorio said.» Pribluda would
have visited them because we foolishly depended on
Russia
for harvesters."

"I see." Arkady put the album down and moved on
to the map of
Havana
.» Where are we?"

"Here." She pointed to where the Malecon swept east toward the Castillo de
San Salvador
, where the seawall ended and Havana Vieja and the bay began. West lay
neighborhoods called Vedado and
Miramar
, where Pribluda had scribbled "Russian embassy." "Why do you
ask?"

"I like to know where I am."

"You are leaving tonight. It doesn't matter if you
know where you are."

"True." He looked to see that the power button of
the computer was dusted and prints lifted. Nice.» You're
finished here?"

"Yes."

He turned the machine and monitor on and the
screen pulsed with an electric, expectant blue. Arkady did not consider himself computer-adept, but in
Mos
cow
murderers moved with the times and it had become
a requirement of investigators to be able to open the
electronic files of suspects and victims. Russians loved
E-mail, Windows, spreadsheets; paper documents they
burned at once, but incriminating electronic infor
mation they left intact under whimsical access codes: the name of a first girlfriend, a favorite actress, a pet
dog. When Arkady clicked on the icon for Programs the
screen demanded a password.

"Do you know it?" Osorio asked.

"No. A decent spy is supposed to use a random
cipher. We could guess forever."

Arkady went through the desk drawers. Inside were a
variety of different pens, stationery and cigars, maps and magnifying glasses, pen knives and pencils and brown envelopes with string ties for the diplomatic
pouch. No passwords hidden in a matchbox.

"There's a telephone but no fax machine?"

"The telephone lines in this exchange are from before
the Revolution. They're not clear enough for fax trans
mission."

"The telephone lines are fifty years old?"

"Thanks to the American embargo and the Special
Period—"

"Caused by
Russia
, I know."

"Yes." Osorio snapped off the computer and shut the drawer.» Stop. You are not here to investigate. You are here only to verify that it has been examined thoroughly
for fingerprints."

Arkady acknowledged the track of prints on door-
iambs and desk surfaces, ashtray and telephone. Osorio
motioned him to follow her farther down the corridor
where there was a bedroom containing a narrow bed,
nightstand, lamp, bureau, portable radio, bookcase and,
hanging on the walls, a tinted portrait of the deceased
Mrs. Pribluda. Beside it was a photograph of the son in an apron looking up at a levitating disk of pizza dough.
In the top bureau drawer was an empty frame of
snapshot size.

"There was a picture in here?" Arkady asked.

Osorio shrugged. The reading material in the bedroom was Spanish-Russian dictionaries, guidebooks,
copies of
Red Star
and
Pravda,
reflecting the interests of
a healthy, unreconstructed Communist. The bureau top
was clear but showed signs of dusting and collection. In
the closet were clothes, an ironing board and an iron
dusted for prints. Organized on the floor were rubber
sandals, work shoes and a thin, empty suitcase. Arkady
stopped for a moment when he heard drumming from
the apartment below, tectonic motion with a Latin beat.

Osorio opened the door at the corridor's end to a bathroom of crazed but immaculately clean tiles. A
loofah and soap on a rope hung from the shower rod.
The corner of the medicine cabinet mirror bore one
fingerprint in full bloom, and another peeked from
under the flush lever of the toilet.

"You don't miss anything," he told her.» But I
wonder why you bothered."

"You will accept that this is Pribluda's apartment?"

"It seems to be."

"And that the prints we find here are Pribluda's?"

"We haven't really checked them, but let's say I do."

"Remember at the autopsy you told Captain Arcos it
was a strange way for a Russian to fish."

"In an inner tube at sea? Yes, it was a first for me."

The detective led him back to the laundry room and
turned on a hanging bulb and this time he saw, besides
a stone basin and clothes line, reels of monofilament
and wire and, on rough shelves of orange crate, jars that
contained tangles of barbed, ugly hooks graded by size.
Each jar was dusted and covered with clear prints.
Detective Osorio handed Arkady an index card of lifted fingerprints. Immediately, Arkady saw a large print with
a distinctive loop crossed by a scar identical with prints
on the bottles. On a jar he found the same, carefully dusted print.

"He was right-handed?" Osorio asked.

"Yes."

"From the angles you can see, when he held the jar,
the prints on the jar are his right thumb and index
fingers and the prints on the glass are his left thumb
and index finger. They're over all the rooms, doors, mirrors, everywhere. So you see, your Russian friend
was a Cuban fisherman."

"The body, how long was it dead?"

"According to Dr. Bias, maybe two weeks."

"No one's been here in the meantime?"

"I asked the neighbors. No."

"That must be a hungry turtle."

Arkady returned to the front room, out of habit
memorizing the apartment layout as he went: balcony,
sitting room, laundry room, office, bathroom, bedroom. Inside the refrigerator were yogurt, greens, eggplant,
pickled mushrooms, boiled tongue and a half-dozen
boxes of color 35-mm film. He fed dillweed to the turtle and glanced at the black doll that filled the corner chair.»
I have to admit these are new aspects to the man I
knew. Did you find his car?"

"No."

"Do you know the make?"

"Lada." She shook her head a little for emphasis.» It doesn't matter. Your flight is in four hours. The body is being prepared for the plane. You will accompany it.
Agreed?"

"I suppose I will."

Osorio frowned, as if she glimpsed a nuance in the
answer.

On the ride back she asked, "Tell me, out of curiosity,
as an investigator are you any good?"

"Not particularly."

"Why not?"

"Various reasons. I used to have a fair rate of success,
as your captain puts it. But that was when murders in
Moscow
were amateur affairs with steel pipes and vodka
bottles. Now they're professional work with heavy artil
lery. Also, militia work never paid well but it paid. Now,
since the militia has not seen its salary in six months, men don't work with the same zeal. And there's the
problem that if you do make progress on a contract
homicide, the man who ordered the murder takes the
prosecutor to lunch and offers him a condominium in
Yalta
and the case is dropped, so my success ratio is no
longer something to be proud of. And, no doubt, my
skills are not what they used to be."

"You had so many questions."

"Habit." Going through the motions, Arkady
thought, as if his body were a suit that shuffled to the
scene of the crime, any crime, anywhere. He was more irritated with himself than with her. Why had he started
snooping? Enough! Osorio was right. He felt her eyes
on him. Only for a moment, though. Because they were
crossing a power blackout she had to proceed on some
streets as carefully as steering a boat in the dark. In
Arkady's mind, the syringe beckoned, the needle of a
compass.

When they halted for goats wandering over the road
the headlights illuminated a wall on which was written
"Venceremos!"
Arkady tried to say it silently but Osorio
caught him.

Venceremos!'
means
 
'We will win!'
 
In spite of
America
and
Russia
, we will win!"

"In spite of history, geography, the law of gravity?"

"In spite of everything! You don't have signs like that
in
Moscow
anymore, do you?"

"We have signs. Now they say Nike and Absolut."

He got a glance from Osorio no worse than the flame
of a blowtorch. When they reached the embassy apart
ment the detective told him that a driver would gather
him in two hours for the airport.» And you will have
your friend to travel with."

"Let's hope it really is the colonel."
Osorio was stung worse than he'd intended.» A live
Russian, a dead Russian, it's hard to tell the difference." "You're right."

Arkady went up alone. A rumba played either in the
house or out of the house, he could no longer tell
where, all he knew was that constant music made him
exhausted.