Havana Bay (14 page)

"Do you want me to fuck you up?"

"No."

"Do you want me to seriously fuck you up?"

"No."

"Because you will stay fucked."

Although Arkady was pinned like an insect he did his
best to nod.

"If you don't want me to mess with you, you stay
here. From now on you're a tourist, but you will do all
your touring in this room. I'll send some food every
day. You don't leave. Stay here. Sunday you go home. A quiet trip."

That sounded quiet, Arkady got that.

Satisfied, Luna removed his foot from Arkady's neck,
 
lifted Arkady's head by the hair and clubbed him one
more time as if dispatching a dog.

When Arkady was conscious again it was dark, and he
was stuck to the carpet. He ripped his head off and
rolled to the wall to look and listen before he dared
move any more. New blood oozed around one eye. The furniture was a mass of shadows. Sounds of work had
stopped below, replaced by the unctuous strains of a
bolero. Luna was gone. Altogether, Arkady thought,
a hell of a vacation. And certainly the worst suicide he
had ever attended.

Just standing proved to be a feat of balance, as if the
sergeant's baseball bat had driven all the fluid from one
inner ear to the other, but he managed to drag a chair
to prop against the door.

With the blood washed off, the head in the bathroom
mirror wasn't so bad, one gash at the hairline he had to
shave around and pull back together with butterfly tapes from the medicine chest, otherwise just a new topologi-
cal feature at the back of the skull. A little broader
bridge of his nose, a knot on his forehead, a lasting impression of the rug on his cheek, some difficulty swallowing, but all teeth accounted for. His legs felt
broken, but on the other hand, they worked. Luna had
done a fairly good job of limiting the damage to bruises
and indignities.

He hobbled to the bedroom closet and found the
pockets of his coat turned out, but his passport with the
photograph of the Havana Yacht Club still rested in the
shoe where he had put them. Light-headedness and
nausea rose, signs of a concussion.

Muddy blood stained the parlor rug. Like any party,
he thought, cleaning up was the hard part. He'd do it
later. First things first. In a kitchen drawer he found a
whetstone and a narrow bladed boning knife that he
honed to a fine edge. On the seat of the chair propped
against the door he balanced a bag of empty cans as an
alarm and perhaps a little fun underfoot, and he
unscrewed all the lightbulbs in the parlor and hall so
that if Luna returned he would enter the dark and be
silhouetted by the light. The best Arkady could do for
the air-shaft window was ram it shut with a stick. The
best he could do for his head was stay flat. Which he
was about to do when he passed out.

He didn't feel refreshed. What time it was he couldn't
tell, the room was dark. What room he was in he
wouldn't have known except for the rough bristles of
the parlor rug on his face. Like a drunk, he wasn't
positive which way was up.

His body had set in a position of least pain, all things
being relative, and in the manner of a broken chair it
had no intention of sitting up again. He did anyway
because a little circulation was probably good for
bruised limbs. The turtle crawled by, practically trotting.

Arkady followed on all fours to the refrigerator, pulled out the water jar and luxuriated in the soft, unthreaten
ing nimbus of the appliance light.

On a purely objective basis it was interesting how much
worse he felt. Drinking water was painful. Touching his
head with a damp cloth combined agony and relief.

Irina liked to say, "Be careful what you wish for."
Meaning, of course, her. Having lost her, what he'd
wished for was an end to his guilt, but he really hadn't
meant being
beaten
to death. In Moscow you were left
alone to kill yourself. In Havana there wasn't a
moment's peace.

The phone cord was ripped from the wall, although
Arkady wasn't sure whom to call anyway. The embassy,
so they could cringe again at the trouble one of their
nationals was causing?

The dark was so quiet he could almost hear the
sweep of the lighthouse beam over the bay and feel the
brush of light across the shutters.

Don't leave, Luna had said.

Arkady didn't plan to. He laid his head in the
refrigerator and went to sleep.

He staggered down the hall to the bathroom mirror.
The nose was no better and his forehead had the dark hue of a storm cloud. He dropped his pants to see the
stripes of bruises on his legs.

Rest and water, he told himself. He ate a handful
of aspirin, but didn't dare shower for fear of slipping,
for fear of not hearing the front door, for fear of
hurting.

Two steps and he was dizzy, but he reached the
office. He had crawled from it when Luna began dem
onstrating his baseball skills to lead the sergeant away from the miserable list of Rufo's phone numbers. Oddly
enough, the list was where Arkady had left it, in the
Spanish-Russian dictionary, meaning that Luna either
didn't know how to search or that he had come only
for the picture of the Havana Yacht Club.

Since he had a little time now, Arkady thought that a
real investigator would use this opportunity to learn
Spanish and phone repair and try Daysi and Susy again.
Instead, he slid down the wall to a seated position with
the knife in his hand. He wasn't aware of sleeping until
a backfire from the street jolted him awake.

Not that he was scared.

 
When he woke again morning light streamed into the
flat. Arkady lifted his head as carefully as a cracked egg.
The Malecon's backfires and shouts sounded loud and hot, amplified by the sun.

 
Two young uniformed policemen, one white, one black,
patrolled the seawall. Although they carried radios,
handguns and batons, their orders seemed entirely in
the negative: don't lean against the wall, don't listen to
music, don't fraternize with girls. Although they seemed
to pay no special attention to the house, Arkady thought
it would be a little wiser to escape in the evening.

He cleaned the carpet because it was too depressing to look at his own dried blood. The music below had
changed to a work-theme salsa accompanied by a power
drill; Arkady wasn't sure whether he was above a flat or a factory. Not all the blood came out of the rug; enough
remained to suggest a mottled rose.

Luna could scrub the bat and Arkady was sure that the entire ball team was willing to swear the sergeant
had been gamboling on a field with them. How many
players were there on a side in baseball? Ten, twenty?
More than enough witnesses. Bugai wouldn't lodge a
protest. Even if he did find the nerve, to whom would
he complain but Arcos and Luna? The only communication that Arkady could expect between the embassy
and Luna was the question "Do you have a Zoshchenko
working there? No? Thank you very much."

Arkady shaved for morale's sake, working around the
damage on his face, and tried to comb his hair over the
repair on his brow. When the nausea let up he cele
brated by changing into a clean shirt and pants, so that
he looked like a well-groomed victim of a violent crime.
He also tied another knife to a broom to use as a spear
and, giddy with achievement, peeked through the balcony shutters.

A PNR patrol car appeared about every forty min
utes. In between, the patrolmen fought their own war
against boredom, sneaking a cigarette, staring at the sea,
watching Havana girls in their variety strut by in shorts
and platform shoes.

In the late afternoon Arkady woke with an enormous
thirst and a headache aggravated by the noise below. He
had aspirin and water while he admired Pribluda's
variety of pickled garlic heads and mushrooms. He just
didn't feel like food at the moment, and when he turned
away from the refrigerator he realized that Change had
disappeared. The doll that had sat in the corner was
gone.

When? During Luna's lecture on the finer points of
baseball? With the sergeant or of Change's own voli
tion? The missing doll was reminder enough that a patrol car was due in a minute and that Luna was
overdue. Through the shutters he saw two black girls
dressed in matching pedal pushers of citrus yellow
teasing the PNRs.

Some vacations stretched and some seemed to fly by
in a moment, not even time for a tan. Arkady decided
that when man-sized dolls started walking around it
was time for him to go, too, and camp at the embassy
whether he was welcome or not. Or the airport. Mos
cow's airports, for instance, were full of people going
absolutely nowhere.

Arkady put on his precious coat with the phone list
and picture in one pocket and keys and knife in the
other, and cleared the chair and bag of cans from the
 
door. He still had Pribluda's car key. Who knew, he
might be able to drive. As he tottered down, the stairs pulsated underfoot.

From the street door he saw the girls and the two
PNRs bantering and posturing. Behind them the Cuban sky was gold edged in blue, more mixed day and night than a simple sunset. As a car limped by, my God, a
two-seater Zaporozhets belching black smoke, Arkady
slipped out into the long shadow of the arcade.

 
Chapter Eight

Wearing a cherry-red halter and denim shorts with a
Minnie Mouse patch on a back pocket, Ofelia sat in an
aquamarine '55 DeSoto outside the Casa de Amor and
asked herself: Was it cigar fumes? Something in the
rum? The two spoonfuls of sugar in
cafe cubano
that
made men crazy? If she saw one more young Cuban girl
on the arm of one more fat, balding, lisping Spanish
tourist, Ofelia would kill.

She'd pulled enough of them in. Some were family
men who had never before been unfaithful but suddenly
found it unnatural to spend a week in Havana without
a
chica.
More were the sort of human slugs who came
for Cuban girls, as before they had traveled to Bangkok
or Manila. It wasn't white slavery anymore, it was sex
tourism. More efficient. And it wasn't white, anyway.
What tourists in Cuba wanted were
mulatas
or
negritas.
The more northern the European, the more guaranteed
that he was after the experience of a black girl.

The Casa de Amor was originally a motel, ten units
with patios and sliding aluminum doors around a
swimming pool. A heavyset woman in a housedress read
a paperback in a metal chair on a lawn that had been
paved over and painted green. In the office was a register
and selections of condoms, beer, rum, Tropicola. The
tip-off that something wrong was going on was that the
pool water was clean. That was for tourists.

Traffic went in and out. At this point Ofelia was
expert at telling a German (pink) from an Englishman
(sallow) from a Frenchman (safari shorts), but what she
was waiting for was a Cuban uniform. The law was
useless. Cuban law excused a man for making sexual
advances, assuming it was a masculine given, and put
the burden of proof on Ofelia to prove that the girl
initiated the approach. Now, any Cuban female over the
age of ten knew how to incite a male into making the first overt proposal. A Cuban girl could make Saint
Jerome make the first advance.