Martin Smith - Havana Bay

He'd gone a block before he realized that a man in a wheelchair was catching up with him at a determined pace. Not an easy task in such weather, he thought, with the wheels of the chair slipping on the slick pavement and detouring around the bodies in bedrolls who had taken up residence along the embankment. Arkady had stepped aside for the chair to pass when he saw who it was.

"Spring in the Arctic." Erasmo was packed into a parka, ski cap, damp leather gloves. He brushed snow off his beard and watched his breath with disgust.

"How can you stand it?"

"You keep moving."

Erasmo looked massive in the parka and vibrantly healthy as only Cubans could in Moscow. When he offered his hand, Arkady waited until it dropped.

"What are you doing here?" Arkady asked.

"Renegotiating the sugar contract."

"Of course."

"Don't be that way," Erasmo said.» I'm in Moscow for one day. I called your office, and they said this was the route you were most likely to take. Please."

"Come on, then, I'll give you the Russian perspective." Arkady went at a slower pace while Erasmo rolled at his side.» '98 Jaguar, a banker who flies dollars out of Moscow in a Gulfstream jet. '91 Mercedes, a deputy minister or lesser mafioso. That homeless man under the streetlamp, well, he may be harmless or he might be an intelligence officer, you never know."

"Of course I was," Erasmo said.» Where else would we let a Russian spy live except over a spy of our own? It's elemental. I tried to warn you off at the graveyard. At the restaurant I told you to drop it. After you found Mongo you could have stopped."

"No."

"There's never any reasoning with you, no middle ground. How is the arm?"

"Nothing broken, thank you. It's my Cuban tattoo."

"I almost didn't recognize you. Here you are in a parka like me. What happened to the wonderful coat?"

"It is a wonderful coat, but I decided I was wearing it out. I still wear it on special occasions."

"Well, you're still alive, that's the main thing."

"No thanks to you. Why did you do it, Erasmo? Why lead your friends into a trap? What happened to my intrepid hero of Angola?"

"I had no choice. After all, the officers were already plotting. When the threat is from men I served with and loved, I mitigate the damage, channel them and do as little harm as possible. At least no one was killed."

"No one?"

"Very few. O'Brien and Mostovoi did some things I knew nothing about."

"But you tossed me to them like bait."

"Well, you proved to be more than just bait. Poor Bugai."

"He's still alive."

"For God's sake, do you have a cigarette?"

The snow was thicker. Arkady put his back to the wind, lit a couple of cigarettes and gave one to Erasmo, who inhaled and coughed at the insult to his lungs. He took in a wider scope of the street to include figures stirring the flakes with brooms.» Russian women. Remember that day we drove the Jeep down the Malecon?"

"Of course."

"How long do you think that's going to last? Not very. You know, sometime we're going to look back at the Special Period and say, well, it was a ridiculous mess

but it was Cuban. It was the sunset, the last Cuban age. Miss it?"

They had come to a halt under a lamp. Flakes sparkled on Erasmo's beard and brows.

"How is Ofelia?" Arkady said.» I tried to reach her through the PNR and there was no reply. I don't have a home address for her. That night they just wrapped up my arm, threw some clothes on me and put me on the plane with Pribluda. I never saw her."

"And you won't. Keep in mind, Arkady, you left a lot of confusion behind you. Detective Osorio will be kept busy for quite a while. But she sent this." Erasmo removed his gloves and felt inside his parka until he pulled out a color snapshot of Ofelia. She was in an orange two-piece on a beach with her two girls and a tall, light-brown, handsome man. The girls looked up at him with adoration and clung proudly to his hands. A conga drum was slung over his shoulder as if music might be called for at any moment, and on his face was a smirk somewhere between penitence and self-satisfaction. Behind this domestic tableau, planted on a towel by the weight of her horror, was Ofelia's mother.

"Which father?" Arkady asked.

"The smaller girl's."

Arkady couldn't see anything coerced about the photograph, no ominous shadows on the sand or signs of anxiety besides the family tension. Ofelia, however, seemed to be totally apart from the others. Her hair was damp, combed into ink-black waves. Her lips open, on the point of speaking. Her expression said, yes, this is the situation, but the intentness of her eyes had nothing do with anyone else in the picture, as if she were looking not from the photograph but through it.

Nothing was written on the back.

"You don't seem particularly moved," Erasmo said.

"Should I be?"

"Yes, I would think so. I wanted to reassure you that all in all, things came out pretty well for the detective."

"Yes, they look happy."

"I wouldn't go that far. Anyway, you can keep the picture. That's the reason I came out in this blizzard looking for you just to give it to you."

"Thank you." Arkady unzipped his parka so he could put the photograph safely away without bending it.

Erasmo blew on his hands before pulling his gloves back on. Suddenly he looked miserable.» Cold people for a cold climate, that's all I can say." Snow started to clump on his brows and under his nose. He swung his chair and gave Arkady half a wave.» I know my way back."

"Just follow the river."

Going back, the wind was against Erasmo. He leaned into it, bucking the oncoming current of headlights, his wheels losing a little friction on the melting snow but maintaining the speed of a man who knows where a warm room waits.

Arkady's apartment was in the opposite direction. Headlights fanned his shadow ahead of him. Like pachyderms, trucks stepped in and out of potholes. In true

winter the reflection of lights off river ice made an illuminated path through the city, but a late snowfall merely dissolved in sheets into black water. Traffic police waded between cars, pulling aside that luckless soul whose lights were deemed malfunctioning until dollars, not rubles, passed hands. It was the sort of evening, Arkady thought, when each individual apartment window looked like a craft tossing in a dangerous sea. The Kremlin was out of sight but not its bonfire glow. Snow outlined lampposts, gutters, sills; packed against truck tarps and wing mirrors and on the collars people clutched up to their eyes; melted at the wrist and neck, trickled down the arm and chest; flew down one flagstone wall of the river and up the other like sparks from a chute; turned the trees of the park into white-caps; made each step a visible memory and then covered it over.