"How do I look?"

"Ripe. Your embassy should lock you up."

"I'm safe with you."

"The only reason I'm with you is because you want to go to Casablanca and you don't speak a word of Spanish. Viejo, I have other things to do."

"Well, I'm certainly enjoying myself."

The village of Casablanca looked as if it had started at the top of its hill at Christ's feet and then rolled down to the water's edge, piling shanties of cinder block and sheet steel on top of more dignified colonial houses. Scarlet bougainvillea tumbled over walls and the air warmed with the sticky smell of jasmine. From the ferry landing, Arkady and Osorio climbed up to a depot for trolleys equipped with cow catchers for rural duty. They walked a main street with shutters closed against the morning heat, including the closed door and boarded-up windows of a tiny PNR station, and down the remains of a circular stairway to a park of weeds, a cement curb, a panorama of the bay and the tar-black water and pilings, refuse and cans where the neumatico had been found three days before.

The scene was different in the daytime, without klieg lights, a crowd, music and Captain Arcos shouting urgent misdirections. The sun picked out the details of a waterfront row of elegant houses so gutted they looked like Greek temples gone to ruin, and defined just how flimsy was the dock that reached over the water to a half-dozen fishing boats. The craft all had long poles raised like antennae and "Casablanca" bravely painted on the stern in case they set out for the larger world.

"This is where he ended up, not where he started. There's nothing to find," Osorio said.

The dock disappeared behind a barricade to a shack Arkady hadn't noticed at all on his first visit. He went around to a back gate that opened to a yard that could have been on Devil's Island. An indiscriminate variety of wrecks and boats with patchwork hulls sat hauled up amid sleeping cats. A dog barked from a deck. Two men stripped to the waist straightened a propeller shaft while at their feet hens scratched for corn. Here was self-reliance, a boatyard that could run .up a stout little vessel out of flotsam and supply eggs, besides. The two men kept their faces turned away, but maybe that was the effect of Osorio's cast-iron glare, Arkady thought. The Noah of this yard emerged from the dark of the shack. His name was Andres; he wore a captain's cap tipped confidently forward, and he produced what sounded like florid explanations before they were trimmed by Osorio.

The boat being repaired, he said, was built in Spain, used as an auxiliary of a freighter, declared technologically obsolete and sold to Cuba for scrap. That was twenty years ago. Arkady suspected that suggestions of smuggling and storms at sea were lost in the translation. Osorio was different from other Cubans, who registered every emotion with a sweeping emotional needle. Oso-rio's needle never budged.

"Has Andres heard about the body found here?"

"He says that's all they talk about. He wonders why we came back."

"Did they find anything else in the water where the neumatico was found?"

"He says no."

"Does he have a chart of the bay?" Arkady picked his way to the dock around mounds of cans and bottles salvaged from the water and stinking of slime.

"I told you before, the body just floated here. We don't have anything like a scene of the crime."

"Actually, what I think we have is a very large scene of the crime."

Andres returned with a chart that revealed as a channel that flowed between Havana the city and Morro Castle and fed three separate inner bays: Atares, west and nearest to downtown Havana, Guana-bacoa in the middle and Casablanca east. Arkady followed with his finger the tracery of shipping lanes, ferry routes, depths, buoys, the very few hazards, and understood why the bay of Havana had been the great marshaling yard of Spain's American possessions. But it was all one "bag bay" to Andres.

"What floats in can float out, he says. Depending on the tide: in during high, out during low. Depending on the wind: northwest in, southeast out. Depending on the season: in winter winds were generally stronger, in summer hurricanes drew water out to sea. If everything is equal a body can spin forever in the middle of the bay, but usually the wind is steady from the northwest and drives bodies right to his boatyard, which was why you find live neumaticos in Havana and dead neumaticos in Casablanca."

Arkady tested the spindly dock and for some reason felt promise. Andres's own boat, El Pinguino, was a coquettish blue with room for two if they could shift around an engine box, floats, buckets, gaff and tiller. Forward, a sail was furled between outrigged fishing poles. Aft, rope and wire lay on a transom crosshatched from braining fish. No satellite uplink, sonar, fish finder, radar or radio.

Osorio followed.» Looks are deceiving, Andres says. It's enough boat, he claims, to reach Key West and get arrested for taking American marlin." As a note of her own she added, "In Havana the first Hemingway deep-sea fishing tournament was won by Fidel."

"Why am I not surprised?"

Drawn to the boat, Arkady crossed planks spaced widely enough for him to follow his reflection in the water. What he didn't understand were the floats, each numbered and skewered so that at least three meters of orange pole would stand free above the water.

"This," Andres explained through Osorio, "is the Cuban system." The fisherman turned the chart over and, with a pencil stub, drew a wavy surface of the water and then, at regular intervals, the poles floating upright. A "mother line" connected them in a long string of poles.» The problem with fish is that they swim at different depths at different times. At night with a full moon, the tuna feed deeper. At the same time, red snapper or grunts feed closer to the surface. And turtles, too, though you can only catch them while they're copulating, a season that only lasts a month. Of course, they're illegal, so he never would. But with the Cuban system you can fish for them all by hanging hooks from different sections of the mother line at different depths: forty meters, thirty meters, ten. Everybody sets out different lines and this way they comb the whole sea."

"Ask him about a current that would have carried a drifting neumatico from the Malecon into the bay."

"He says that is where boats concentrate because that's where fish are found, in the current. Boats don't fish the entire bay, just that corridor with mother lines and a gamut of hooks."

"Now ask him what they found, not here at the dock but out on the water. I don't mean fish."

Andres stopped for breath like a man outrun by his mouth. A Cuban who poached in Florida, after all, Arkady thought, was a man given to overreaching.

"He asks, something snagged in the bay? Around the time that poor man was found at the dock?" As if to aid recollection Andres glanced back toward the two men who had been working on the propeller shaft but his friends had vanished.» Trash maybe, hooked accidentally?"

"Exactly."

By now Osorio understood the drift, and when Andres retreated to his shack she went with him. They returned with a plastic bag and perhaps fifty sheets of what looked like lottery tickets that had obviously been soaked through and then set out to dry. In green on white, a barely legible pattern said "Montecristo, Habana Puro, Fabrica a Mano" over and over again.

"These are official state seals before they're gummed and cut for cigar boxes," Osorio said.» With these, ordinary cigars could have been labeled expensive Mon-tecristos. This is very serious." Andres became a torrent of explications.» He says the seals snagged on someone's line, he can't remember whose, a week or more before the body was found. The bag had leaked, the seals were ruined, besides that was when the weather changed, no one came to their boats and the seals were forgotten. He dried them but just to read them and see if they were worth reporting. He was about to himself."