When she had been wrapped in white on a gurney, her hair brushed, her eyes meditatively shut, her mouth relaxed into a smile, the doctor reassured him it was normal to think that a loved one was still breathing. The cool chilled his sweat. He recalled Pushkin's lines how the lover ... counts the slow hours, vainly trying To hurry them: he cannot wait. The clock strikes ten: he's off, he's flying, And suddenly he's at the gate.

This was the gate that would never open. He would return again and again, race and pant like a schoolboy, strain to see her breathe one more time and the gate would stay barred.

Did people die of love? Arkady knew a man on a factory ship in the Bering Sea, a killer, who had fallen in love with a woman, a whore who died at sea. He erased himself from the face of the earth by stripping off his clothes and plunging through the ice. The shock of the water on bare skin must have been incredible, but the man was immensely strong and kept swimming away, away, away from the light. For murderers, senators, whores and good wives, love proved to be not the lamp at the ship's bow but the ship itself, and when the light was gone a person had no place to go but down.

Although Arkady was no expert in love he was an expert in death, and he knew the possibility of a relatively painless death for the diver. What killed expert swimmers practicing underwater laps in pools was not a strangling on water but the soft oblivion of oxygen deprivation. At the end they no more than gently stirred, even if in the last lit cell in their brain they were still stroking powerfully ahead, from the depths of her throat for the edification of new admirers. The image of herself naked on a steel table for the doctor's examination was bad enough, but she'd seen other bodies after a day or two in a warm car trunk, and the recollection was enough to make her saw the rope against the tip of the bolt whether it cut her or not.

She tried to think of music that would lend a vigorous rhythm to work to, but all that came to mind was a famous lullaby by Merceditas called "Drume Negrita" that whispered, "Go to sleep, my little black girl. If you sleep I'll bring you a new cradle and for your new cradle I'll bring a new bell. You are my favorite, my pearl, my beloved girl, so don't cry no more," though strangely enough the voice Ofelia heard was her mother's.

Ofelia prayed. There was a panoply of spirits and saints that might help her if they only knew. Sweet Yemaya, who saved men from drowning. Meek Santa Barbara, who changed in an instant to Change wreathed in lightning. Ofelia's patron, though, had always been Oshun, not that Oshun had particularly helped in the past if husbands were anything to go by. However, the gods picked you more than you picked them, and Oshun was the useless god of love. Ofelia saw herself sometimes as a little dark boulder in the middle of a river of useless love. What she needed was a sharp knife. Unless she got out of the car trunk soon, she would asphyxiate and Bias would be tweezering hemp threads

Floating in the dark above his bed the halo of the ceiling fixture put Arkady in mind of Rufo's white hat of woven straw, made in Panama with Rufo's gilded initials on the sweatband, which didn't mean anything to Arkady at the time because he hadn't connected it to AzuPanama S.A. Now he had to wonder what else he had seen in Rufo's room and not understood. The fact that neither Luna nor Osorio had come for Rufo's key suggested that they still hadn't tried the key Arkady had surrendered, and it was even possible that no one had been in the room since.

Was Luna waiting? Was Luna coming? Since the odds were even, Arkady slipped on his overcoat, his protective shadow, emptied the envelope of meager evidence into a pocket and went down to the street. He walked a block until he flagged a car. Arkady didn't remember Rufo's address, but he recalled the fading words on the wall next door and asked for the Gimnasio Atares.

"Te gustan los pugilistas?" The driver punched the air.

"Absolutely," Arkady said. Whatever they were.

Fighters. Next door to Rufo's the open-air boxing arena of the Gimnasio Atares had come to life, and Arkady got a glimpse over a line pushing through the gate of a ring illuminated by a hanging rack of lights. Spectators chanted, blasted whistles, rang cowbells under a layered atmosphere of smoke and orbits of insects. It was between rounds, and in opposite corners two black boxers shining with sweat sat on stools while their trainers convened like great minds of science. As the gong rang and every head craned to the center of the ring, Arkady unlocked Rufo's door and slipped inside.

There were some changes from his earlier visit. Bed, table and sink were in place. Rufo's Panama still hung on its hook, the photos of the boxing team still populated the wall and by the sofa was the same curious list of phone numbers for a man without a phone. The TV and VCR hadn't disappeared, nor the boxes of running shoes and cigars, but the minibar had disappeared.

With an eye for other souvenirs from Panama, Arkady once more went through the closet and drawers, shoes and cigar boxes. The Rogaine came from a Panamanian pharmacy and a cardboard coaster came from a Panama City club, but he didn't find anything significant.

It seemed possible to Arkady that a man who memorialized a visit to the Eiffel Tower might have taped a trip to Panama. He turned on the television, slid a cassette into the player and at once turned down the volume of hyperexcited Spanish as on the screen two fighters pummeled each other around a ring under the auspices of their national flags. The tape had the blotchy color of old East German film and the jerkiness of too few frames per second, but he could make out a young, lithe Rufo hammering an opponent and, a moment later, having his glove raised by a referee. The next fight on the tape featured Mongo, and it occurred to Arkady how boxers were basically drummers, each man trying to establish his rhythm as the beat: I am the drummer, you are the drum. A dozen tapes were of other international tournaments, and another half-dozen were instructional: proper ways to jump rope, work the bag, move without falling down.

All the other tapes had glossy sleeves with pornographic pictures and titles in different languages. Bringing sex films to Cuba seemed to Arkady like bringing pictures of pearls to an oyster bed. A couple of French videotapes had been shot in Havana and featured couples romping on deserted beaches-no one he recognized. One tape tided Sucre Noir had been shot on a rainy day. It featured interracial couples sporting in a living room decorated with cinema posters. Arkady was interested in the decor because he realized that he had been in the same room. Down to the stacks of photo albums, collection of cast-bronze bells, ivory phalluses arrayed by size, he recognized the apartment of Mostovoi, the Russian embassy's photographer. On the wall between the posters were the same framed photographs of friends in Paris, London, waving from a boat. He paused the tape. There was one more photograph that hadn't been up when he'd visited Mostovoi, five men with rifles kneeling around what looked like a dead rhinoceros, too unfocused on the tape for him to make out faces. Big-game hunters in Africa, a Hemingway-style memento given center stage in Mostovoi's collection. Why would Mostovoi hide that?

Someone was trying to unlock the door. Arkady turned off the VCR and listened to a key trying to force its way through the cylinder, followed by a low curse in a voice he recognized. Luna.

Arkady could hear him thinking. The sergeant probably had the key Arkady had given to Osorio, which worked perfectly well on Arkady's apartment in Moscow. Luna wouldn't know that; all he'd know was that keys didn't stop working, and either the lock had been changed or this was the wrong key. He'd examine his other keys. No, this was the key the detective had given him. Maybe he hadn't had to use it before. On Arkady's first visit he had closed the door but not set the latch and anyone could have simply turned the knob to open it. Someone had, since some items were gone and the latch had been set by the time Arkady returned, although setting it didn't necessarily require a key, just pushing a button on the lock plate, and this might be the first time Luna actually had to try the key.