Havana Bay Read Online Free PDF Page B

Irina was dead. The nurses tried to keep him from the examining room, a mistake. The doctors tried to bar his way to the sheet covering the table and that was a mistake, too, ending in gurneys being upended, trays scattered, the medical staffs white caps crushed underfoot, finally a call to the militia to remove the madman.
    Which was sheer melodrama. Irina herself hated melodrama, the demonic excess of a Russia where the Mafia donned evening clothes with Kevlar vests, where brides wed in see-through lace, where the foremost appeal of public office was immunity to prosecution. Irina loathed it, and she must have been embarrassed to die surrounded by Russian melodrama.
    There were five hours until his plane left. Arkady thought the problem with airlines was that they didn't allow passengers to carry handguns. Otherwise he could have brought his and shot himself with a tropical view of dark rooflines rigged with laundry as full as sails and whole new constellations.
    What was the final image Irina had in the clinic? The eyes of the nurse widening as she understood the depth of her mistake? Not too deep, only intravenous, but deep enough. They both must have understood. Within seconds, Irina's arm would have displayed a raised, roseate circle and her eyes begun to itch. Arkady was allowed to read their statements later, a professional courtesy. Irina Asanova Renkova opened the door to the hall, interrupted the doctor's conversation and held up the empty vial. Already her breath came as a wheeze. While the doctor called for the emergency cart, Irina shook and sweat, her heart accelerating to changing rhythms like a kite buffeted by gusts of wind. By the time the cart was located and rolled in, she was in deep anaphylactic shock, her windpipe shut and her heart racing, stopping, rac ing. However, the Adrenalin supposed to be on the cart, the shot that could have reset her heart like a clock and eased the constriction of her throat, was misplaced, missing, an innocent error. In a panic, the doctor tried to open the pharmacy cabinet and snapped off the key in the lock. Which was the same as a coup de grace.
    When Arkady ripped the sheet off the table at the polyclinic, he was amazed to see all they had done to Irina in the time it had taken him to walk to a kiosk and buy a magazine. Her face lay twisted in the disarray of hair that seemed suddenly so much darker she looked drowned, as if immersed in water for a day. Tangled and unbuttoned to the waist, her dress revealed her chest bruised by pounding. Her own hands were fists of agony, and she was still warm. He closed her eyes, smoothed her hair from her brow and buttoned her dress in spite of the doctor's insistence that he "not disturb the corpus." As an answer, he picked up the doctor and used him to crack a plate glass sold as bulletproof. The impact exploded cabinets, spewed instruments, spilled alcohol that turned the air silvery and aromatic. When the staff was routed and he had command of the examining room he made a pillow of his coat for her head.
    He'd never considered himself melancholy, not on a Russian scale. It wasn't as if there was suicide in his family—with the exception of his mother, but she'd always been more dramatic and direct. Well, there was his father, too, but his father had always been a killer. Arkady resisted the idea not out of morality but man ners, not wanting to make a mess. And there was the practical question of how. Hanging was unreliable and he didn't want to leave such a sight for anyone to discover. Shooting announced itself with such a boastful bang. The problem was that experts in suicide could teach only by example, and he had seen enough bungled attempts to know how often there was a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Best was simply to vanish. Being in Havana made him feel already half disappeared.
    He used to be a better person. He used to care about people. He had always regarded suicides as selfish, leaving their bodies to frighten