Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

"Oh, here she is." A girl of about eight in an outgrown school jumper of dull maroon stood at the threshold of the room. She glowered at Arkady from under a vee of brows.» Carmen, this is our friend Citizen Renko."
    The girl advanced in three deliberate steps, shouted "Hai!" and delivered a kick a millimeter short of contact with his chest.» Uncle Sergei knows karate."
    "He does?" Arkady had always thought of Pribluda as more a kidney-punch devotee.
    "He carries a black belt in his briefcase."
    "Did you ever see it?"
    "No, but I'm sure." She administered a karate chop to the air and Arkady stepped back.» Did you see? Fists of fear."
    "That's quite enough," Olga Petrovna said.» I know you have homework."
    "If he's a friend of Uncle Sergei's he'll want to see it."
    "That is enough, young lady."
    "Stupid coat." Carmen looked Arkady up and down.
    Olga Petrovna clapped her hands until the girl tucked in her chin and marched to the next room.» I'm sorry, that's children now."
    "When was the last time you saw Sergei Sergeevich?"
    "A Friday after work. I had taken Carmen for an ice cream on the Malecon when we ran into him talking to a Cuban. I remember Carmen said that she heard something roar, and Sergei Sergeevich said his neighbor kept a lion that ate little girls. She became so irritable we had to hurry home. Usually they did get on wonder fully." When Arkady had her show him on a map she pointed to the Malec6n in front of Pribluda's flat.» Sergei Sergeevich wore a captain's cap and the Cuban was carrying one of those enormous inner tubes they fish from. A black man is all I remember."
    "Did you hear a roar?"
    "Something, maybe." As she put the albums away she asked, "Do you think there's any truth to this story that Sergei Sergeevich is dead?"
    "I'm afraid there might be. Some of the Cuban investigators are very competent."
    "Dead of what?"
    "A heart attack, they say."
    "But you have some doubts?"
    "I just like to be sure."
    Olga Petrovna sighed. Even in her time in Havana the city had become another Haiti. And Moscow was overrun by Chechens and gangs. Where could a person go?
      He thought for a moment he had caught sight of a man keeping pace behind him in the dark of the arcade. Was he being followed? He couldn't tell. It was hard to single out a shadow when everyone knew which way the streets ran except you, when everyone looked in place but you, with the sea on one side and on the other a maze of demolition piles, cars hauled onto sidewalks, lines of people waiting for ice cream, a bus, bread, water.
    So he plunged on in his coat, drawing glances as if he were a monk wandered off the Via Dolorosa.
      Arkady took a taxi back to the Malecon and walked the last few blocks to Pribluda's apartment past boys demanding Chiclets and men offering mulatas, and beyond conversation starters of "Amiga, que hora es? De que pais? Momentico, amigo." Overhead hung balconies, arabesques of wrought-iron spikes and potted plants, women in housedresses and men stripped to their underwear and cigars, music shifting from window to window. Decay everywhere, heat everywhere, faded colors trying to hold together disintegrating plaster and salt-eaten beams.
     
      Chapter Six
     
    Ofelia was Arkady and Dr. Bias played Rufo. They positioned the tables and taped the floor of the IML conference room to indicate the perimeters of the walls, bookshelves and doors of the embassy flat so that they could—for their own information—"reconstruct the facts" of Rufo Pinero's death.
    "Reconstruction of the facts" distinguished Cuban forensic medicine from the American, Russian, German. In Cuban laboratories, in Nicaraguan rain forests, in the dusty fields of Angola, Bias had re-created homicides to the amazement not only of judges but of the criminals themselves. A reconstruction of the facts surrounding the death of the Russian neumatico might be impossible because of the drifting and deterioration of the body. Rufo's death, however, took place in an