Martin Smith - Havana Bay

"No, thanks." The idea of cracking open a lobster after an autopsy didn't sit quite right.

"Or a paladar, a private restaurant. They're small, they're only allowed twelve chairs but the food is much superior. No?"

Perhaps Rufo didn't get a chance to dine out often, but Arkady didn't think he could even watch someone eat.

"No. The captain and sergeant were in green uniforms, the detective in gray and blue. Why was that?"

"She's police and they're from the Ministry of the Interior. We just call it Minint. Police are under Minint."

Arkady nodded; in Russia the militia was under the same ministry.» But Arcos and Luna don't usually go out on homicides?"

"I don't think so."

"Why was the captain going on about the Russian embassy?"

"He has a point. In the old days Russians acted like lords. Even now, for Cuban police to ask questions at the embassy takes a diplomatic note. Sometimes the embassy cooperates and sometimes it doesn't."

Most of the traffic was Russian Ladas and Moskviches spraying exhaust and then, waddling as ponderously as dinosaurs, American cars from before the Revolution. Rufo and Arkady got out at a two-story house decorated like a blue Egyptian tomb with scarabs, ankhs and lotuses carved in stucco. A car on blocks sat in residence on the porch.

"'57 Chevrolet." Rufo looked inside at the car's gutted interior, straightened and ran his hand over the flecked paint. From the back.» Tail fins." To the front bumper.» And tits."

From the car key in the bag of effects Arkady knew that Pribluda had a Lada. No breasts on a Russian car.

As they went in and climbed the stairs the door to the ground-floor apartment cracked open enough for a woman in a housedress to follow their progress.

"A concierge?" Arkady asked.

"A snoop. Don't worry, at night she watches television and doesn't hear a thing."

"I'm going back tonight."

"That's right." Rufo unlocked the upstairs door.» This is a protocol apartment the embassy uses for visiting dignitaries. Well, lesser dignitaries. I don't think we've had anyone here for a year."

"Is someone from the embassy coming to talk about Pribluda?"

"The only one who wants to talk about Pribluda is you. You like cigars?"

"I've never smoked a cigar."

"We'll talk about it later. I'll be back at midnight to take you to the plane. If you think the flight to Havana was long, wait till you go back to Moscow."

The apartment was furnished with a set of cream-and-gold dining chairs, a sideboard with a coffee service, a nubby sofa, red phone, a bookshelf with titles like La Amistad Russo-Cubana and Fidel y Arte supported by erotic bookends in mahogany. In a disconnected refrigerator a loaf of Bimbo Bread was spotted with mold. The air conditioner was dead and showed the carbon smudges of an electrical fire. Arkady thought he probably showed some carbon smudges of his own.

He stripped from his clothes and showered in a stall of tiles that poured water from every valve and washed the odor of the autopsy off his skin and from his hair. He dried himself on the scrap of towel provided and stretched out on the bed under his overcoat in the dark of the bedroom and listened to the voices and music that filtered from outside through the closed shutters of the window. He dreamed of floating among the playing fish of Havana Bay. He dreamed of flying back to Moscow and not landing, just circling in the night.

Russian planes did that, sometimes, if they were so old that their instruments failed. Although there could be other factors. If a pilot made a second landing approach he could be charged for the extra fuel expended, so he made only one, good or not. Or they were overloaded or underfueled.

He was both.

Circling sounded good.

Osorio negotiated a white PNR Lada down a potholed street. Like her driving, she talked in a quick, surefooted way, deleting any s in the Russian language that she found superfluous. Since Arkady's Spanish consisted of gracias and par favor, he wasn't inclined to be critical even if she had appeared without warning in the early evening and gathered him in a rush.

She said, "You wanted to see your friend's apartment and so we will."

"That's all I asked."

"No, you asked much more. I think you are refusing to make an identification of your friend because you think you can force us to investigate."

"I assume you want to be sure you're sending the right body to Moscow."

"You think it's impossible for him to be out on the water the way we found him? Like a Cuban?"

"It does strike me as unusual."

"What I find unusual is that when a message comes to you from an embassy in Havana you drop everything to come. That's unusual. That must have been expensive."

The round-trip took half his savings. On the other hand, what was he saving for? Anyway, everything in Havana struck him as unusual, including the detective, although there was something about her small size and imperiousness he found endearing. Her features were delicate and sharply cut, dark eyes made darker with suspicion as if she were an apprentice devil handed a tricky soul. He also liked her sporty PNR cap with plastic visor.

"Tell me about this friend of yours," she demanded.

"You're interested?" He got no response to that. Oh well, he was fishing.» Sergei Sergeevich Pribluda. Workers' family from Sverdlovsk. Joined the Committee for State Security out of the army. Higher education at Frunze Party School. Stationed eight years at Vladimir, eighteen in Moscow, rising to colonel. Hero Worker, honored for bravery. Wife, dead ten years; one son, a manager in an American fast-food franchise in Moscow. I was unaware of Pribluda's ever being stationed abroad before or studying Spanish. Politically reactionary, a Party member. Interests, Central Army ice-hockey team. Health, vigorous. Hobby, gardening."

"Not drinking?"

"He made flavored vodka, that's part of gardening."

"Not culture, the arts?"

"Pribluda? Hardly."

"You worked together?"

"In a way. He tried to kill me. It was a complicated friendship." Arkady gave her the short version.» There was a murder in Moscow involving politics. As it happened, there was a woman who was a dissident that he suspected. Since I thought she was innocent, I became a suspect and Pribluda was given the job of delivering, as we say, a nine-gram letter in the back of my head. But we had spent time together by then, long enough for me to discover there was something strangely honest about him and for him to decide there was, as you say, something of the idiota about me. And when he was given the order to shoot me, he didn't. I don't know whether you could call it a friendship, but our relationship was built on that."

"He disobeyed an order? There's never an excuse for that."

"God knows. He liked to grow his own vegetables. When his wife died, I would go round to his place and drink his vodka and eat his cucumbers and he would remind me that not every guest got to dine with his executioner. Red tomato pickle, green tomato pickle, peppers and dark bread to eat. Lemongrass and buffalo grass to flavor the vodka."

"You said he was a Communist."

"A good Communist. He would have joined the Party coup if it hadn't been led, as he said, by imbeciles. Instead, he drank until it all blew over and then went into a decline. He said we weren't real Russians anymore, only eunuchs, that the last Russian, the last true Communist anywhere was Castro." Which Arkady had taken as drunken ranting at the time, a detail he decided not to share with Osorio.» He said he was looking for a post outside Moscow. I never knew he meant here."

"When was the last time you saw the colonel?"

"More than a year ago."