Martin Smith - Havana Bay

"But you were friends."

"My wife didn't like him."

"Why not?"

"An old score. Why would the captain turn down the picture of Pribluda and his friends?" Arkady asked.

"He must have his reasons," Osorio said in a tone that suggested she didn't fathom them either.

Jasmine lay like snow over walls, Dumpsters overflowed with the sweet stench of fruit skins.

Binding the ocean was what Osorio called the Malecon, a seawall that protected a six-lane boulevard and an oceanfront line of three-story buildings. The sea was black, and traffic on the boulevard consisted of the running lights of cars a block apart. The buildings were the gaudy group Arkady had seen at daybreak from the other side of the bay; without their colors, dimly lit by lamps, they were occupied wrecks. In the shadow of a long arcade Osorio unlocked a street door and led him up worn stone stairs to a steel door which let them into a living room that could have been delivered complete from Moscow: subdued lamps, stereo, chess set, upholstery on the front door, lace curtains on the balcony doors. Homey Soviet hammer and sickle in silk tacked to a wall. A table and tray of water glasses, dish of salt. Whittled nostalgia-roosters, bears, St. Basil's-on the shelves. Plastic ivy and carnations trimming a kitchenette with a two-burner range, refrigerator, butane tanks.

Bottles of Havana Club rum and Stolichnaya stood under the sink.

The only element out of place was a black man in a white shirt with a red bandanna around his head and Reebok basketball shoes on his feet sitting in a corner chair and holding a long, straight walking stick. It took a moment without breathing for Arkady to realize that the figure was a man-sized effigy. The face had a crudely molded brow and nose, mouth and ears, making its glass eyes glitter all the more.

"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 Moscow 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 information 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 transmission."

"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.