“Help me, Comrades!” he shouted into the gap.
The door crashed as two men broke the back of the fragile chair. Tarp would remember their faces after — sweating, intense, the faces of good men trying to do good — and then he looked beyond them and saw the poet.
“Fire!” Tarp bellowed, and he threw the pail of liquid over the heads of the first two men and directly at the slender intellectual.
The smoke and the smell in the room were bad, and the first two men covered their noses with one hand while they grabbed him with the other and pushed him out; one of them stayed long enough to look around so that he could make a full report of it later.
“Fire, fire!” Tarp was shouting as he came rushing out of the room, trailing wisps of plastic poison, and as he came past the poet he brought his left fist up solidly into the abdomen and felt the young man fold up like an ironing board. Tarp wrapped his arms around him and dragged the young man along. “Victim of the fire,” he cried. “Make room — make room!”
He was looking for the other man, the thick one, the capable one; but he was not there. Perhaps he had called for help. There were a dozen other people in the room, however, and more looking in the doorway from the balcony. Tarp shoved through them. With his left hand, he was trying to find his gun on the young man. “Make room!” He pushed people back, but nobody seemed to care; they wanted to get past him so they could see what was going on.
He laid the young man down on the floor of the balcony, just under the big bulletin board of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.
“Victim of the fire,” he said to half a dozen people who came out of nowhere to stand around. “Smoke inhalation.”
“You were inside, Comrade?”
“The first to arrive. He was smoking in bed.”
“In la ciderista’s bed?” They began to look wide-eyed at each other at the thought of the young man in Juana’s bed.
“Open his shirt,” Tarp said. The young man was still unconscious. Tarp took off his shoes. “Make him cool!” he said. He backed away down the balcony with the shoes in his hands. The crowd went on growing; when he reached the stairs, there were people coming from the floors above and below, and the sick-animal wail of a fire truck was rising from the street. Tarp crouched in a doorway and put the shoes on without tying them and then bounded down the stairs feeling the shoes pinch and trying to ignore the discomfort.
He cleaned himself at a tin wall fountain and shaved at a public restroom, where an old black attendant found a discarded razor for him in the trash.
“On the move?” the old man said.
“Waiting for my ship to load.”
“A sailor. You are not from Havana, I can tell.”
“From Camagücy.”
“Ah.” He took a cigarette butt from a plastic bag. “I was in Camagücy once. That was before Fidel.” He lit the butt. “It was hard to be a black man in Cuba then. Now it is all right to be a black man.” He puffed. “You were very drunk last night?”
Tarp tried to smile. “Do I look it?”
“Too much rum and just enough woman, that is how you look.” He laughed, coughed on the smoke, drew the butt down to a fiery circle between his dark fingers. He wore a sweat-stained old T-shirt, and hanging around his neck was a string with a little bag that rested just in the hollow of his clavicle. Santerría, Tarp thought. The old religion. Magic. It must be interesting, believing in both santerría and the revolution. “You are happy in Havana now?” Tarp said as he wiped his hand on a paper towel.
“Very happy.”
“Nowhere you want to go anymore?”
Tarp made a move to throw the towel away, but the old man took it and smoothed it over his thigh. “I was in Florida once. That was in 1937. No, there is nowhere I want to go.”
“What was Florida like?”
“It was another place where it was not good to be a black man.” He put the smoothed-out towel to dry with half a dozen others.
“I have no money to give,” Tarp said.
“I know. You are a sailor.”
“I will trade shirts with you, if you like.”
They traded T-shirts. The old man studied himself in Juana’s bright-colored shirt and was pleased.
Tarp made his way to the harbor and stayed on the move, not lingering in one place for long and never going back over the same route because he feared the police would notice him. Idle men stood out in Havana. At seven o’clock he had located the Angolan Memories Cafe, and he walked along opposite it. There was Repin, sitting on a bench and reading a Russian newspaper so that nobody would doubt that he was Russian. When he saw Tarp he made no sign, but he got up and walked along the promenade and then turned up a street of very old merchants’ houses and went into a yard full of trucks. Tarp followed him and found him sitting in a big black car.
“Get on the floor,” Repin said. Tarp got in and crouched down; Repin signaled to the driver and they headed for the center of the city. After ten minutes Repin let him get off the floor and sit back with him.
“Two things,” Repin said. “First, the beautiful woman you were with at the ballet. Her name is Juana Marino.”
“I know.”
“She is a lieutenant in the KGB.”
Tarp watched a water sprinkler playing like a fountain over a beautiful lawn. “She acted as if she were anti-Castro.”
Repin shrugged. “Her father is a niño — Spaniard from their civil war. She is Moscow born. Moscow educated. She could have a great future.” His eyes glittered at Tarp. “She has great breasts.”
Tarp watched as they drove slowly past lovely old houses set back from the street, their lawns tended, their plantings brilliant with flowers. “You think she is one of Maxudov’s?”
“I do not know. I do not know her father. He might be Telyegin’s man, but maybe not. She is a KGB probe in an anti-Castro cell; whether she is also an agent for Maxudov remains to be found out.”
“She can identify me. Fingerprints in her apartment. On my gun.”
“She has your gun?”
Tarp nodded.
“You spent the night in her apartment?”
He nodded again.
Repin breathed deeply. A self-satisfied little smile appeared.
“When I was young… Well. You understand. We have our nights, eh?” He put his hands on his knees and sat upright, as if he wanted to make it clear that they should stick to business. “What do we need to do?” he said.
“We need to cover my tracks.” Tarp looked out at the pleasant streets, the color, the sedate old houses. “You said there were two things. What’s the second?”
“My agent thinks he has something. I have a message from him. He thinks he will have something tomorrow.”
“About what?”
“About the plutonium, he thinks.”
“Here in Cuba?”
“He would not say. He does this for the money, you understand. He is very close-mouthed.”
They rode without speaking for some minutes. Tarp roused himself and said, “This is what I need. First, a gun like the one I left in her apartment — a Colt twenty-two Woodsman. Second, a team to go in and sanitize her place, wipe out every trace of me. Third, a safe house where I can interrogate her.”
“Oh, that is all?”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Me? Sarcastic? Why should Repin be sarcastic, when all an American wants is a gun in a Socialist country, the use of a team of experts who are not supposed to exist, and permission to enter a nonexistent but secret location?” He sat back and folded his hands over his expensive waistcoat. “When?”