"Erasmo's with the Chinese. He's with the Chinese."
"He is? What Chinese?"
"The dead Chinese. But he'll be there all day and I'm not supposed to sell any cars. He said, 'Radio silence!' I'm not supposed to talk to anyone."
"Where are the dead Chinese?"
"Radio silence!"
"Ah."
"I wasn't supposed to answer the door."
"No, you were being polite." Arkady dug a pencil from his coat and spread a piece of paper over a hood. " Can you write it?"
"I can write as well as anyone."
"Don't tell me, but write where I can find Erasmo and the Chinese."
"They're dead, that's a clue."
"Good." As Tico bent over the paper and printed in block letters, Arkady threw in, on the off-chance, "Do you know where Mongo is?"
"No."
"Do you know what happened to Sergei?"
"No." Tico returned the pencil with an anxious expression. "Are you going to see Erasmo now? If you see him right away he'll know it was me."
"Not right away."
Tico brightened. " Where are you going?"
"The Havana Yacht Club."
"Where is that?"
Arkady held up a map. "In the past."
He went out the garage doors and walked the back street half a dozen blocks before returning to the Malecón. The boulevard had become familiar in a matter of days, the coughing of trucks, boys casting nets from the seawall, scruffy dogs chewing on a flattened carcass of a gull. A PNR at a corner gave all his attention to a bicycle cart weighted with teenage girls. No Luna at all.
In Arkady's hand was Sergei Pribluda's forty-year-old Texaco map, a foldout map that located the Presidential Palace and American embassy, Cuban-American Jockey Club and racetrack, Woolworth's and Biltmore Country Club of a vanished Havana. Not that the city wasn't still surreal. Houses on the Malecón were fantasies: Greek pediments on Moorish columns and crumbling walls with fleurs-de-lis in faded pinks and blues. Venice had merely the threat of sinking. Havana looked sunken and raised.
What surprised Arkady was how much Havana was the same as on a forty-year-old map. He walked by the colossal Hotel Nacional and the angled glass tower of the Hotel Riviera, both "popular with vacationing Americans" according to the key of the map. Neumáticos filled inner tubes with air at a former Texaco gas station "with Fire Chief service!"
It took Arkady ninety minutes to walk the Malecón, cross the AlmendaresRiver with its small boatyards and sewer stench, and stroll westward the length of Miramar, past Erasmo's family house and the steps where Mongo disappeared. He could have taken a taxi at any point, and he knew by now that half the cars on the road were happy to be flagged down to earn a few American dollars. He didn't want to drive into the past, he wanted to sink into it step by step.
At Miramar's very end he approached a traffic circle with an at-one-time Texaco station, a stadium that had been the Havana greyhound track and, according to Pribluda's map, the Havana Yacht Club.
It wasn't the sort of place people just stumbled onto. There were no other pedestrians. Cars hurtled around the circle and spun away. Only someone looking for it would have noticed a driveway curving along a screen of royal palms and around a lawn to a classical mansion in white with heavy columns, twin grand staircases and broad colonnades. Over it lay the ghostly silence of a colonial governor's palace abandoned in a coup, occupants decamped, the first signs of decay visible in the split reflection of a broken window and a red tile missing from the hip of the roof. Carved above the pediment of a central porch was the design of a ship's wheel on a pennant. In the entire scene there was no movement at all except for the sway of palm fronds. It was easy to imagine Havana's social elite posing on the steps because he'd already seen it, in the photograph of Erasmo's family.
He climbed a stairway and walked through open mahogany doors into a hall of white walls and limestone floors. Under a wrought-iron chandelier an elderly black woman in an aluminum chair stared up at him through thick glasses as if he'd dropped from a spaceship. A red telephone sat at her side, and the sight of a visitor prompted her to call and talk to someone in slurred Spanish while Arkady went on through tall French doors to an empty hall. A line of reception rooms connected like a bright and airy tomb, and the sound of his footsteps preceded him in the direction of a bar with a dark, curving counter stripped of stools, chairs, bottles. A portrait of Che hung by an empty glass case that must at one time have displayed race trophies, sailing ladders, models. All that was left of a nautical theme were wall medallions of a ship's wheel. The bar opened to an outdoor area with a stage ready for a Cuban band that could teach even Americans the mambo.
He returned inside and climbed to the second floor. At the top of the stairway was a tall admiral's chair of black mahogany. Everything else had been carted away and nothing added except more metal chairs of the Revolution. He stepped out onto a porch facing the ocean for a view of a private cove.
A brick promenade as large as a city plaza spread out to a row of thatched umbrellas and fan-shaped palms that led on to white sand and shallow water embraced by broad piers and, beyond, enough anchorage in bright blue water for a regatta. The only craft Arkady saw now were neumáticos, dots on the horizon, and the only figures on the beach were a dozen boys kicking a soccer ball back and forth.
Arkady couldn't resist the temptation. After he went back down the stairs he removed his shoes and socks to walk onto the beach and feel the warm fine-grained sand underfoot. The boys ignored him. He climbed the steps of a wide cement pier and walked fifty meters to its end. Havana had disappeared. The club dominated a hundred meters of waterfront, joined on the western side by the old dog track and toward the east by a white minaret rising over palms. Not a single person was on the beach before the Moorish tower, and although the sand ran to a point of wild scrub that could have been a desert island, it was familiar. From his shirt pocket Arkady brought out the photograph of Pribluda, Mongo and Erasmo with those same trees at the same size and angle in the background. He was standing where the picture had been taken. At the Havana Yacht Club.
The boys on the beach of the club waved, Arkady thought, at him and then he turned to the clapping of an inboard powerboat sweeping around a breakwater. It skimmed the waves, shooting rays off its windshield, then slowed with a skater's turns until Arkady could make out George Washington Walls in short sleeves and sunglasses. He swung the boat about and approached parallel to the pier, dropping the engine to a silken idle and keeping a safe distance from the pilings. The boat was low, long and angular, its hull and deck of gleaming, black mahogany, its bow sheathed in brass. In the cabin, black curtains were drawn. The dash had the glinting brightwork and deep patina that came only from age and infinite care. Fluttering from the transom pole was a pirate's pennant with crossed sabers.
"Hemingway's boat?" Arkady asked.
Walls shook his head. "Maybe Al Capone's. A seaplane tender turned rumrunner."
"Capone was here?"
"He had a place."
Once again, Arkady was impressed. "How did you know I was here?"
"The basic form of communication on this island is old women with phones. Why are you here?"
"Curiosity. I wanted to see the yacht club."
"Doesn't exist."
"I've always wanted to see someplace that didn't exist."
"Cuba's the place," Walls admitted. He looked at the club and back at Arkady and the shoes in Arkady's hand. "Yeah, you look like you're settling in. Do you have a couple of minutes? How would you like a cup of coffee with two men who have been on the FBI's Most Wanted List?"
"That sounds irresistible." Arkady hesitated. "Has Luna been invited, too?"
"Not to this party. No drums, no dancing, no Luna. Hop in."
Walls reversed and swung the stern to present the transom with the name "Gavilan" on the stern. Arkady jumped without breaking a leg, and as he slipped into a leather seat the boat scooped him up and moved away fro
m the dock.
The ride was brief, smoothly skimming the waves out of the cove to deeper, bluer water until Walls slowed as smoothly as a limousine driver to a stop, the sharp nose of the boat headed to the wind. Giving Arkady a sign to wait, he ducked down into the cabin and returned with a tray table that locked into the cockpit deck, ducked down and returned with a brass tray carrying a basket of sweet rolls, a pot of coffee and three china demitasses with "Gavilan" written on the side. The cabin doors opened again for a small, silver-haired man in black pajamas and slippers, who climbed the steps and sat himself across from Arkady. He wore the smile of a man who was both magician and the rabbit in the hat.
Walls said, "John, I want you to meet Arkady Renko. Arkady, John O'Brien."
"A great pleasure." O'Brien took Arkady's hand with both of his. He caught Arkady's glance at the pajamas. " Well, it's my boat and I dress as I please. Winston Churchill, you know, used to wander around in the altogether. I'll spare you that. And you wear this somewhat astonishing coat, George told me about that. I apologize for not coming up sooner, but when George winds up the Gavilan I stay below. Falling overboard would be fatal for my dignity. You like cafe cubano, I hope?"
Walls poured. O'Brien might have been close to seventy, Arkady guessed, but he had a youthful voice, engaging eyes and an oval face as lightly freckled as a shorebird's egg. He wore a wedding band on his hand, a silver Breitling on the wrist.
"How do you like Havana?" he asked Arkady.
"Beautiful, interesting, warm."
"The women are unbelievable. My friend George here is smitten. I can't afford to fall in love because I still have family in New York, on Long Island, a very different island. I happen to be a faithful man and someday, God willing, I'll be home."
"There are problems now?" Arkady broached the subject delicately.
O'Brien brushed a crumb from the table. "A legal hurdle or two. George and I have been fortunate enough to find a home away from home here in Cuba. By the way, I am sorry to hear about your friend Pribluda. The police think he's dead?"
"They do. Did you know him?"
"Of course, he was going to do some security work for us. A simple man, I would say. Not a very good spy, I'm afraid."
"I'm not a judge of spies."
"No, just a humble investigator, to be sure." O'Brien added a touch of Irish brogue. He clapped his hands. "What a day! If you're going to be a fugitive from justice, where would you rather be?"
"Are you the only fugitives in Cuba?"
"Hardly. How many of us are there?" O'Brien cast a doting eye on Walls.
"Eighty-four."
"Eighty-four Americans on the lam. Well, it's better than a life in a federal minimum-security prison, where you get lawyers, congressmen, dope dealers, the usual cross-section of America. Here you get genuine firebrands like George. For a businessman like me, it's an opportunity to meet entirely new people. I never would have had the chance to become so close to George in the States."
"So you try to keep busy?"
"We try to stay alive," O'Brien said. "Useful. Tell me, Arkady, what are you doing here?"
"The same."
"By visiting the Havana Yacht Club? Explain to me, what has it got to do with a dead Russian?"
"A missing man at the place that doesn't exist anymore? That sounds perfect to me."
"He's sort of careful," Walls said to O'Brien.
"No, he's right," O'Brien said and patted Arkady's knee. "Arkady's a man who's just sat down to play cards and doesn't know the rules of the game and doesn't know the value of his chips."
O'Brien's black pajamas had pockets. He took out a large cigar that he rolled between his fingertips.
"You know the great Cuban chess champion Capablanca? He was a genius, thinking ten, eleven moves ahead. He smoked Cuban cigars, of course, while he played. One title match his opponent extracted a promise from Capablanca that he wouldn't smoke. All the same, Capablanca brought out his cigar, squeezed it, licked it, savored it, and his opponent went nuts, lost the match and said that not knowing Capablanca was going to light up was even worse than him smoking. I love Cuban cigars, too, although the joke's on me because the doctor says I'm not allowed to smoke anymore. Just tease myself, that's all. Anyway, what led you to the club, that's your cigar. We'll just have to wait for you to light it up. For the time being, we'll simply say you were curious."
"Or amazed."
"By what?" asked Walls.
"That the club survived the Revolution."
"You're talking about the Havana Yacht Club now," O'Brien said. "The French, you know, they beheaded Louis, but they didn't burn Versailles. What Fidel did was give the club, the grandest, most valuable single property in the entire country, to a construction union and charge Cubans, black or white, one peso to use the beach. Very democratic, communistic, admirable."
Walls pointed toward the Moorish tower. "La Concha, the casino on one side of the cove, they gave to the caterers' union and the greyhound track they turned into track and field."
"God knows, I respect idealism," O'Brien said, "but let me put it this way, as a result these properties have not been developed to their maximum. There's an opportunity here to create something of enormous value for the Cuban people."
"Is that where you come in?"
"I hope so. Arkady, I was a developer. Still am. George can tell you I'm not sneaky. Disney's sneaky. When they start buying up land they form a little corporation that sounds like your neighbors trying a little preservation, buying an acre here, an acre there and then you wake up one morning and there's a two-hundred-foot mouse outside your window. I'm up front. Every developer wants one great landmark development, his own EiffelTower or Disneyland. I want to make the Havana Yacht Club once again the center of the Caribbean, bigger and better than ever."
Walls took over. "See, the government developed VaraderoBeach and Cayo Largo because they wanted to keep tourists as far from Cubans as possible. But tourists want Havana. They want the girls at the Tropicana and strolling in Havana Vieja and dancing all night at the Palacio de la Salsa. The government's finally getting the right idea, restoring the Malecón, rebuilding old hotels, because what tourists want is style. Fortunately, by a miracle, the Havana Yacht Club is in great condition."
"Its upkeep drains the state of half a million pesos a year. George, tell him it could be making the state thirty million dollars a year."
"It could," Walls said.
O'Brien pointed to the club and beach. "That's conference center, restaurant, nightclub, twenty suites, twenty rooms, time shares or condo that can be explored. Plus spa, berthing for boats, you want luxury cruisers. What I'm describing to you, Arkady, is a gold mine waiting for someone to pick up a shovel."
Arkady couldn't help wondering why two well-placed American fugitives would share their aspirations with him, although he sensed that O'Brien was the sort of salesman who enjoyed his own performance, like an actor who could deliver the most outrageous lines while he winked at the audience. Since Arkady's construction experience had been in Siberia, he felt at a loss at luxury cost projections. "To make the club into a hotel might be expensive."
"Twenty million," Walls took over. "We'd find the money and the Cuban government wouldn't put up a single peso or dollar."
"A lot of people," O'Brien said modestly, "would call that a gift."
"And what do you want in return?" Arkady asked.
O'Brien said, "Guess."
"I don't have the faintest idea."
O'Brien leaned forward as if sharing a secret. "Last year an Indian casino in Connecticut, in the – excuse my language – fucking north woods, with no sex, no style, no sun, cleared one hundred million dollars. What do you think a casino set among palm trees and cruise ships and million-dollar yachts and the famous, reborn Havana Yacht Club might possibly take in? I don't know, but I'd love to find out."
"We're asking for a twenty-five-year lease of the old La Concha casino and an even split of profits with the Cu
ban government," Walls said. "It's a no-risk situation for them, but there's a political problem in that they made such a big deal about closing casinos after the Revolution."
"Closing casinos and closing the Mafia," O'Brien said. "Which was why, with the CIA, the Mafia tried to kill the President."
"Castro, he means," Walls said. "And it's not easy to get Cubans to reverse direction. It would stop us cold if there was even a hint any Mafia, American or Russian, was involved. Our casino has to be absolutely clean."
"Any project at an early point," said O'Brien, "is like a bubble, anything can burst it. Your friend Pribluda was going to be our protection from the sort of Russians who are, I assure you, swarming into the Caribbean like the Visigoths. The wrong people showing up at the wrong time can burst the bubble. Which is why I told George we should take the boat and get a certain Russian investigator off the Yacht Club dock before anyone else heard you were there."
"And brings us back to the question," Walls reminded Arkady. "Why were you at the club?"
Arkady felt like a can between two expert can openers. The photograph of the Havana Yacht Club was in his pocket. However, he wasn't in the mood to offer to strangers what he had kept at some cost in blood from the sergeant.
"In four more days I'll be back in Moscow and it won't matter why I went to the club."
"Why go back?" O'Brien asked. "Stay here."
Walls said, "Pribluda's gone. I hate to put it this way, but there is an opening now."
Arkady took a moment to understand the new direction of the conversation. "An opening for me?"
"Maybe," O'Brien stressed. "You don't mind if we got to know you a little better before we offered you a position?"
"A position?" Arkady asked. "That sounds even better than work. You don't know me at all."
"Oh, I don't?" O'Brien said. "Let me guess. In your forties, right? Disappointed in your work. It's evident you're bright but you're still just an investigator? A little reckless, working too close to the edge, inviting disaster. Except for the coat, cheap clothes, cheap shoes, signs of an honest man. But the way things are in Moscow now you must feel like a fool. And personal life? I'm taking a stab in the dark, but I'd say you don't have one. No wife, maybe not even kids. Zero, dead end. And that's what you can't wait to get back to in only four more days? I'm not trying to suck you into a criminal endeavor, I'm opening you a door on the ground floor of the biggest project in the Caribbean Basin. Maybe you'd rather soak up vodka and freeze to some fucking miserable death in Moscow, I don't know. All I can do is offer you an opportunity for a second chance at life."