Free Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith

up virtually the same, and when Bias merged the two images the numbers ratcheted down to zero and a single face that was both dead and alive looked out from the screen. If ever there was a picture of a ghost this was it.
    "Now our missing man is not missing anymore and you see that even if things are supposed to be impossible in Cuba we do them anyway."
    "That's why you wanted a photograph of Pribluda?"
    "To make a match to the body we took from the bay, yes. But the photograph you brought was insuf ficient and the Russian embassy refuses to provide another."
    There was an expectant wait until Arkady picked up the cue.
    "I don't need a diplomatic note to go to the embassy."
    Bias acted as if the thought had never occurred to him.» If you want to. The Revolution always needs volunteers. I can write the embassy address, and any car on the street will probably take you there for two dollars. If you have American dollars this is the best transportation system in the world."
    Arkady was awed by the doctor's ability to put a good gloss on anything. His attention returned to the screen.» What was the head cut off with?"
    "In the Dumpster?" said Bias.» A machete. The machete cut is a distinct wound. No sawing."
    "Did you identify the murderer?"
    Osorio said, "Not yet. We will, though."
    "How many homicides a year did you say?"
    "In Cuba ? About two hundred," Bias said.
    "How many in the heat of passion?"
    "Overall, a hundred."
    "Of the rest, how many for revenge?"
    "Maybe fifty."
    "Robbery?"
    "Maybe forty."
    "Drugs?"
    "Five."
    "Leaving five. How would you characterize them?"
    "Organized crime, without a doubt. Paid murders."
    "How organized? What were the weapons in those cases?"
    "Occasionally a handgun. The Taurus from Brazil is popular, but usually machetes, strangling, knives. We have no real gangs here, nothing like the Mafia."
    "Machetes?" To Arkady's ear, that did not have the ring of modern homicide. True, he remembered when any Russian murderer who wiped his knife after slicing a victim's throat was rated a smooth operator, back in the curiously innocent days before the worldwide spread of money transfers and remote-control bombs. Which left Cuba in terms of criminal evolution the equivalent of the Galapagos Islands . Suddenly, the Institute de Medicina Legal was put in perspective.
    "We have a ninety-eight percent homicide solution rate," Bias said.» The best in the world."
    "Enjoy it," Arkady said.
     
      Chapter Five
     
    The Russian embassy was a thirty-story tower with an architectural suggestion of squared chest and armored head looming like a monster of stone that had crossed continents, waded through oceans and finally stopped dead in its tracks ankle-deep among the green palm trees of Havana. Plate glass shone on its face, but overall the building stood in its own shroud of shadow and stillness. Inside, office after office was stripped to bare walls and phone jacks. Ghosts lingered in the bald spots and stains of hallway runners, in the hazy, unwashed bottles standing along the walls, in a ventilation system that spread an ancient reek of cigarettes. From the office of Vice Consul Vitaly Bugai, Arkady looked down at a world of white-colonnaded mansions, embassies French, Italian and Vietnamese, their roofs strung with elaborate radio dipoles and antennae, satellite dishes framed by gardens of pink hibiscus.
    Bugai was a young man with small features squeezed into the center of a soft face. He wore a silk robe and Chinese sandals and floated in a liquid atmosphere of air-conditioning, moving, it seemed to Arkady, by con tradictory impulses; relief that another Russian national was not dead and irritation that he would have to deal with the survivor for another week. He was also, per haps, a little surprised that any vestige of Russian authority had been able to defend itself.
    "Those houses were all from before the Revolution." Bugai joined Arkady at the window.» They were rich people. The biggest Cadillac