Havana Bay

As Mongo resettled his cap and i

Arkady took Pribluda's photograph from under his coat and asked, "Who took this picture?"

"Elmar."

"Elmar who?"

"Mostovoi," Mongo said as if there had been only one photographer in the group.

Confession was always short-lived and always conditional, and both men knew it wasn't as if Arkady had the authority to question anyone. Just for the sake of a reaction, though, Arkady read the reverse of the picture.» 'The Havana Yacht Club.' Does that mean anything to you?"

"No."

"A joke?"

"No."

"A social club?"

"No."

"Do you know what's happening there tonight?"

That was pressing too hard. The elusive Mongo backed into the street and broke into a gliding sort of trot, a one-man caravan, his headgear undulating with every step. He slid by a blue wall, pink wall, peach and the shadow of an alley seemed to reach out and swallow him up.

Ofelia had not been at the embassy apartment since she had seen Rufo spread out on its floor. She remembered the building's blue walls and Egyptian decoration of lotuses and ankhs, that hint of the Nile. In the dusk even the car sitting on the porch had some of the silent grandeur of a sphinx in residence. Flecks of paint made a red skirt around the car. Salt pitted once proud chrome, windows were open to the elements, upholstery cracked and split and the hood ornament was missing, but hadn't the sphinx itself lost a nose? And although they sat on wooden blocks the wheels were caked in grease, a promise that someday this beast would cough and rise again.

Ofelia was looking for Rufo's phone. Arkady had said that in Moscow a hustler like Rufo would have as likely stepped out of his house without a leg as without a cell phone. If this were a real investigation she could have taken a laundry list of names associated with Rufo to CubaCell and worked backward from their calls. Instead, she'd have to find the phone itself. It was somewhere. For killing someone with a knife, work that could get messy, Rufo had taken the precaution of changing shoes and wearing over his clothes a one-piece silvery ru

The door knocker to the ground-floor apartment was answered by a white woman in a drab housedress and flamboyantly coiffed and he

"Figures," the woman said.

"I'm here to see the murder scene upstairs. Do you have a key?"

"No. You can't go in there anyway. That's Russian property, no one can go in. Who knows what they're doing?"

"Show me."

The woman led the way in slippers that snapped against the stairs. The lock on the apartment door was shiny and new even in the poor light of the hall. Ofelia remembered making a search of the sitting room, pulling out Fidel y Arte and other books, a sofa and sideboard, performing a more hurried look into the other rooms for fear that the confrontation between Luna and the Russian would get out of hand. There was a chance the phone was inside the embassy apartment, but not likely. She reached on tiptoe to the dark underside of the stairs above for any ledge that Rufo could have set the phone on. No.

"You didn't find anything here?" Ofelia asked.

"There's nothing to find. The Russians don't put anyone there for weeks at a time. Good riddance."

As Ofelia went back down the stairs she let her hand trail on the risers above. She stepped out onto the porch with nothing but a dirty hand.

"I told you," the woman said.

"You were right." The woman was starting to remind Ofelia of her mother.

"You're the second one."

"Oh? Who else?"

"A big negro from the Ministry of Interior. Really black. He looked everywhere. He had a phone, too. He called on it and didn't speak and just listened, but not to the phone, understand?"

Naturally, Ofelia thought, because Luna was calling Rufo's number and was trying to hear it ring. That was the trouble with trying to hide a phone, sooner or later someone would call the number and the phone would a

"Did he find anything?"

"No. Don't you people work together? You're like everything else in this country. Everything has to be done twice, no?"

Ofelia walked out to the middle of the street. It was a block of old town houses transformed by revolution, idealism followed by fatigue and lack of paint and plaster. One front yard a parking lot for bicycles, another an open-air beauty salon. Collapsing buildings but busy as a hive.

She tried to imagine a reconstruction of the facts. The same street late at night. Arkady upstairs, Rufo outside in his freshly do

Ofelia remembered Maria, the police car and Rufo's cigars. She returned to the porch.

"Whose car is this?"

"My husband's. He went to get some windows for the car, and the next thing I know I got a letter from Miami. I'm keeping the car till he gets back."

"Chevrolet?"

"'57, the best year. I used to get in and pretend Ruperto and I were driving to Playa del Este, a nice cruise to the beach. I haven't done that for a long time."

"Car windows are hard to find."

"Car windows are impossible to find."

The upholstery was more a rat's nest than seats. From her bag Ofelia took a pair of surgical gloves.» Do you mind?"

"Mind what?"

With gloves on, Ofelia reached through the open window and opened the glove compartment. Within was a wooden cigar box with a broken Montecristo seal of crossed swords. Inside the box were ten aluminum cigar tubes and an Ericson cell phone set on vibrate instead of ring.

Ofelia heard a click and looked through the car at a man taking her picture from the sidewalk. He was a large, middle-aged man with a camera bag over a shoulder and the sort of vest with many pockets that photographers wore, all topped by an artistic beret.

"I'm sorry," he said, "you just looked beautiful in that old wreck of a car. Do you mind? Most women don't mind if I photograph them-in fact, they rather like it. The light is awful but you looked so perfect. Do you think we could talk?"

Ofelia put the phone in the cigar box and the box and gloves in her bag before she straightened out.» What about?"

"About life, about romance, about everything." Despite his size he made a show of coming shyly through the gate. His Spanish was fluent, with a Russian accent.» Arkady sent me. Even so, I'm a great admirer of Cuban women."