Arkady was entertained by the idea of such valuable cigars. Sugar and cigars, the diamonds and gold of Cuba.
"Could you ask exactly where the bag was found?"
Andres marked the chart five hundred meters off the Malecon between the Hotel Riviera and Pribluda's flat.» He says only a lunatic would steal government seals, but he thinks a neumdtico is desperate to begin with. To sail on a ring of rubber and air? At night? The tide goes out or a current carries him to sea? One little puncture? Sharks? A man like that makes all fishermen look bad."
Osorio was disgusted with Casablanca. In the village's PNR station, so dark that a portrait of Che was an undusted ghost, the officers stirred just enough to take a signed statement from Andres and give a receipt for the seals to her.
Arkady was content, having done something remotely professional, and on the ferry ride back bought a paper flute of peanuts roasted in sugar that he induced Osorio to share.
Her attitude had changed a little.» That man Andres only showed us the cigar seals he found because he looked into your eyes. You knew he was hiding something. How did you do that?"
It was true that from the moment Arkady walked into the boatyard he felt guided to the flimsy dock and the spear-shaped floats of the "mother line." He could say it was the way the workmen avoided Osorio, but no, it was as if El Pinguino had called his name.
"A moment of clarity."
"More than that. You saw through him."
"I'm highly trained in suspicion. It's the Russian method."
Osorio gave him an opaque, humorless gaze. He had yet to figure the detective out. The fact that Luna had backed off when Osorio arrived in the santero's yard suggested as much that they were working together as on opposite sides. She could just be a smaller version of the man who had beaten Arkady with a bat. Yet there were moments when Arkady would spy an entirely different, unrevealed person stirring within her. The ferry engines reversed and threw the deck into vibrations as it coasted to the dock.
"Now we should go to a doctor," Osorio said.» I know a good one."
"Thanks, but I finally have a mission. Your Dr. Bias needs a better photograph of Sergei Pribluda. I volunteered to find it. At least, to try."
The address Isabel had given him the night before was an old town house that, like a dowager in a once fine but tattered dress, maintained an illusion of European culture. Wrought-iron railings guarded marble steps. Lunettes of stained glass cast red and blue light onto the floor of a reception room staffed with women sitting in white housecoats.
Arkady followed strains of Tchaikovsky, bright and brittle notes from a badly tuned piano, into a sun-filled courtyard, where, through an open window, he saw a class in progress, dancers who balanced the upper bodies of starving waifs on a powerful musculature that started at the small of their backs, sculpted the haunches and flowed down through the legs. While Russian ballerinas tended to be doe-like and softly blonde, however, Cubans had whippet-thin faces trimmed in black hair and eyes and lit with the arrogance of flamenco dancers. In their leotards they combined poverty and chic, moving on point in stiffly elegant, birdlike steps in taped toe shoes across a wooden floor patched with squares of linoleum.
As a Russian, he took a moment to adjust. He had been brought up with the attitude that great dancers- Nijinsky, Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov-were, per se, Russian, that they graduated from schools like the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg and that they danced with the Kirov or Bolshoi until they escaped. Even now, although they were free agents like ice-hockey players, the tradition was still Russian. Yet here was a room of dancers as exotic as hothouse orchids. Especially Isabel, who had the classic line, who made every move seem effortless, whose arabesques were infinitely smooth, whose grace even from the last row stole the eye until the mistress clapped her hands and dismissed the class, at which point Isabel gathered her sweatshirt and bag, joined Arkady and demanded in Russian, "Give me a cigarette."
They took a table in a corner of the courtyard, Isabel inhaling fiercely, looking Arkady up and down.» Eighty degrees and you're still in your coat. That's class."
"It's a style. I noticed that you're very good."
"It doesn't matter. I will never be more than corps de ballet no matter how good I am. If I weren't the best I wouldn't be in the company at all."
Arkady was struck again by the melancholy of her voice and the long line of her neck, with its nape of feathery black curls on milk-white skin. Also by her fingernails, which were bitten to the quick. She drew on her cigarette hungrily, as if it served for food.» I like that you're thin."
"There's that." Arkady lit a cigarette himself, celebrating an attribute he had been unaware of.
"You can see the conditions in which we have to work," Isabel said.
"It doesn't seem to stop you. Dancers dance no matter what, don't they?"
"They dance to eat. The ballet feeds us better than most Cubans see. Then there's the chance some infatuated Spaniard from Bilbao will set us up in an apartment in Miramar, and all we have to do is drop our pants whenever he's in town. The rest of the girls would say, 'Oh, Gloria, you're so lucky.' I would slit my throat rather than live like that. The others at least get to travel from Cuba and be seen while I rot here. Sergei was going to help."
"A ballerina who defects to Russia?"
"You're laughing?"
"It's a change. I was never aware of Pribluda's interest in the ballet."
"He was interested in me."
"That's different," Arkady conceded. Her selfabsorption was so complete she had yet to notice any scuff marks on him.» You were close?"
"On my part, strictly friends."
"He wanted to be closer?"
"I suppose so."
"Did he have any photographs of you?" Arkady thought of the frame in Pribluda's bureau, of Isabel's willowy pose in class.
"I believe so."
"Do you have any photographs of him?"
"No." She appeared to find the question ridiculous.
"Or the two of you together?"
"Please."
"Only asking."
"Sergei wanted a different relationship but he was so old, not the most handsome man in the world and not very cultured."
"He didn't know a plie from a ... whatever?"
"Exactly."
"But he was doing something for you."
"Sergei was communicating with Moscow for me, I told you. You're sure there was no E-mail or letter?"
"About what?"
"Getting out of this wretched country."
Arkady had the sensation that he was talking to a fairy-tale princess imprisoned in a tower.
"When did you last see Sergei?"
"Two weeks ago. It was the day of the first night of Cinderella. One of the principal dancers was ill, I was filling in as one of the ugly stepsisters and there was a problem with my wig, because here in Cuba the ugly stepsisters are blonde. So it was a Friday."
"What time?"
"In the morning, maybe eight. I knocked on his door on the way down. He came to the door with Gordo."
"Gordo?"
"His turtle. I named him. It means 'fat boy.'"
Arkady could see Pribluda opening the door. Had the colonel imagined himself a knight errant rescuing Isabel from her island prison?
"You lived right above Pribluda," Arkady saidr "did you ever notice who visited him?"
"Who would visit a Russian if they knew his home was watched?"
"Who is watching?"
She touched her chin as if such a delicate feature could sprout a beard.» He watches. He watches everything."
"The last time you saw Pribluda, did he mention what he was going to do that day?"
"No. He didn't boast like George, who always has big plans. But Sergei brought you."