The sound of clicking drew her eyes up to a lightbulb hanging on a cord, to busts of Marti, Marx and Lenin decorating a mezzanine balcony and finally to a goat moving along the balcony rail. The goat stared down with disdain. Nothing but a goat could have climbed the stairs, blocked as they were by the ripped-out and abandoned cage of the elevator. No great loss, Ofelia thought. Since power outages began, people didn't trust elevators anyway. An extension ladder reached from the lobby to the balcony. More goats appeared.

At the steering wheel of the Lada sat a black man, his head twisted toward her, staring. When he didn't answer her or get out she pulled her gun and opened the door. Out sagged a rag doll, Chango, with a half-formed face and glass eyes, dressed in pants and shirt, a red bandanna around his head. She looked into the car. Red candles were burned down to waxy tears on the dash. From the rearview mirror hung a shell necklace and a rosary. The sound of a bell drew her attention back to the balcony, where a Judas goat pushed its way to the forefront of the other goats and stretched its neck to stare down. As a group they stiffened and, in a clatter of hoofs, scattered not at the sight of her, she realized, but someone else behind her.

Ofelia wasn't so much aware of being hit as plunging to the floor and then waking in a burlap sack, blind as a rabbit bagged for market. She'd lost her gun and a large hand wrapped tight around her throat as a suggestion not to scream. When the fingers relaxed, the sweet, milky scent of coconut burst into her mouth.

Sometimes, not knowing was better than knowing. Isabel's long-awaited E-mail from Moscow glowed on Pribluda's screen.

Dear Sergei Sergeevich, what a pleasure to hear from you and what a surprise! I should have written you long ago and told you how sorry I was to hear of the passing of Maria Ivanova, who was always so kind to everyone. You were blessed to have such a wife. I remember the day we came in off an assignment and were so cold we couldn't speak. We had to point at the frostbite on each other's nose. She made practically a banya in the bathroom with herbs and birches and steaming water and a cold bottle of vodka. She saved our lives that day. All the best people are gone, it's true. And now there you are in the tropics and I am still here but not much more than a librarian. But busy, every day someone wants to declassify this or that. Last week I had a visit from a lawyer of a Western news organization demanding I open the most sensitive archives of the KGB as if they were nothing more than a family album. Is nothing sacred? I say that with tongue in cheek but also seriously. We can no longer simply say, "Those who know, know." Those days are gone. However, promises made must be promises kept, that is my watchword. Where society and historical truth are served by disclosure, where traitors will not be lionized or honorable reputations destroyed, where innocent people who thought they were doing their duty in often hazardous circumstances are not victimized by new standards then, yes!, I am the first man to drag facts to the sunlight.

Which brings me to this inquiry of yours about a former leader of the Cuban Communist Party, Lazaro Lindo. In particular, you ask whether Lindo was involved in a so-called Party conspiracy against the Cuban state. As I remember, Castro claimed that a circle within the CCP, feeling that he had led his countrymen down a path of adventurism, was conspiring with the USSR against him. True or not, the consequences were severe: strained relations between the Cuban and Soviet states, arrest and imprisonment of some of the most devoted Cuban Party members, Lindo among them. Naturally, this was and remains a most sensitive matter. What you ask for is documentation that.no such conspiracy existed or that, if it did, Lindo was not part of it. I understand this might allow his daughter to gain permission to travel. Unfortunately, I cannot satisfy you. But it was a wonderful surprise to hear from an old friend.

By the by, the entire country is a cheese full of maggots these days. You're well out of it.

Roman Petrovich Rozov

Senior Archivist Federal Intelligence Service

Rozov@RRFISarch.org

Arkady printed the letter out to give Isabel, but it was clear that Rozov, Pribluda's old comrade-in-arms, as good as admitted both the plot and Lindo's part in it, and although Arkady didn't know Isabel well or even like her, he dreaded passing the letter on because he had recognized the desperation in the kiss she had given him the night before. Why kiss him otherwise?

The kiss angered him because it was a parody of real desire, her hard mouth clinging to him until he pushed her away. All the same, he asked himself, would a Cuban have rejected her? Would any warm-blooded man?

The other answer he dreaded was in the photograph he had extracted from Olga Petrovna, the picture that could conclusively identify the body in the morgue as Sergei Pribluda, yes or no. It was revealing how relieved he was that Bias had not been at the laboratory. Arkady had left the photograph rather than wait for the doctor to learn for a certainty that Pribluda was the body in the drawer.

Arkady folded the printout from Moscow to slip under Isabel's door.

How many sorts of coward could a man be?

She was inside a car trunk in a sack, arms tied at elbow level, more burlap sacking piled on top of her. Ofelia threatened and reasoned, but whoever put her in closed the lid and never said a word. A car door shut without the sagging of someone getting in. Steps walked away. White or black, she hadn't seen, but an inner part of her had registered his scent, the sound of his breathing, his speed and size, and she knew it was Luna.

She shouted until her throat was raw, but the sacks stuffed on top muffled her and she doubted she was heard more then ten steps away, let alone from the street. She decided to wait until she heard someone, although she didn't feel even the reverberation of a car passing the Centro Russo-Cubano. Well, who would drive there? She could as well have been at the bottom of the bay.

With every breath, sacking clung to her face, hemp and coconut shag filled her nose and mouth, and she became aware that with all the bags over her she'd already consumed most of the trunk's available oxygen. She'd never thought of herself as having an unusual fear of tight spaces. Now it took all her concentration not to hyperventilate and waste what air was left. She felt her gun under her but outside the sack, a particularly embarrassing tease. At least she didn't yet need to empty her bladder; she thanked God for small favors.

Irrelevant items came to mind. Whether the trunk was clean. What sort of dinner her mother was cooking for Muriel and Marisol. Something with rice. She started tasting tears as well as sweat.

Ofelia thought about the statue of the girl gathering cane. The hair was wrong, long and flowing instead of wiry, but the face was right, especially the eyes anxiously twisting up, surprised.

Depend on the Russians. There was no spare tire and the nut and bolt that usually held one down dug painfully into her back. She squirmed, trying to hook the bolt on the rope that pinioned her arms, but it was like twisting in a shroud.

He was more depressed by the possible identification of Pribluda's body than he would have expected. Originally he had refused the body simply to goad the Cubans into some sort of investigation, but now he found there was also part of him that at a more basic level irrationally and against all the evidence refused to accept the colonel's death. How could anyone so tough and ugly die? The man was a brute, and yet Arkady felt like a one-man funeral cortege, perhaps for selfish reasons. Sergei Pribluda was the person on earth he knew best and, in the colonel's way, one of Arkady's last connections to Irina.