Here, I'd like to share a section of Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay. Arkady is in Cuba, following up on an obscure call for aid, feeling his way into a volatile situation with no knowledge of the language or culture. Haunting the investigator is the recent death of his beloved Irina, killed accidentally, negligently, in a Moscow clinic. I'll stop the plot summary, but I am drawn to the following passage because it exemplifies one of the writer's real strengths: portraying undercurrents in and between characters.
Here is the final section of Chapter 13 from Havana Bay, an exchange between Arkady and the PNR detective Ofelia Osorio (whose original assessment of this Russian investigator is quite succinct: "idiota"). The two characters are talking together late in the evening on a balcony above a Havana street busy with couples and commerce. Detective Ofelia Osorio's ostensible reason for spending time on that balcony is to protect Renko, if necessary, from being attacked or even killed before she can put him on a plane back to Moscow.
"We don't have to talk about it," Arkady said.
"It was the way you asked."
"I sounded smug? It's just my ignorance. I apologize."
"We will not talk about religions."
"God knows."
From the radio in the portal rose the deep beat of a drum that Ofelia knew had to be a tall iya with a dark red center on the skin, accompanied by the grinding rhythm of a belly-shaped gourd. A single horn insinuated itself, the way a man asked a woman to dance.
"Anyway, it's not a bad thing to be possessed," Ofelia said.
"Well, I have an unimaginative Russian mind, I don't think it's going to happen to me. What is it like?"
"Theoretically?" She watched him for the slightest hint of condescension.
"Theoretically."
"As a child, you must have spread your arms and put your head back and danced in the rain. You are drenched and clean and dizzy. If you are possessed, it's like that."
"Afterwards?"
"Your mind still spins."
An abwe, the poor man's triangle, joined in from below. It was nothing more than a hoe blade played with a stick of iron, but an abwe could sound like the ticking in the mind when a man's strong hand reached around your waist. As the saxophone tried to wrap around it, the gourd trembled, the drum stopped and started like a heart. These were the snares set for silly girls who lingered in shadows. Not Ofelia. She visualized a clear mind.
She looked toward his arm, the one she had found the bruises on. "You're sounding better. You were not in a healthy mood when you came here."
"I am now. I am curious about Pribluda and Rufo and Luna. I have a new purpose in life, so to speak."
"But why did you want to hurt yourself?"
She half expected contemptuous dismissal, but Renko said, "You have it backwards."
Ofelia sensed the next question so strongly she asked before she checked herself, "Did you lose someone? Not here. In Moscow?"
"I lose people all the time." He lit one cigarette from the other. "Most boats that go on the rocks really don't intend to go there. It's not a mood, it's just exhaustion. Exhaustion from self-pity." He added, "You're with someone and for some reason with them you feel more alive, on another level. Taste has taste and color has color. You both think the same thing at the same time and you're doubly alive. And if you manage to lose them in some gruesomely irrevocable way, then strange things happen. You wander around looking for a car to hit you so you don't have to go home in the evening. So this incident with Rufo is interesting to me because I don't mind a car hitting me, but I do mind a driver trying to hit me. A fine distinction, but there you are."
In the night Ofelia woke to find lovers gone, the moon becalmed. In the very lack of breeze she detected a faint scent, a perfume she traced to Renko's soft black coat, to the sleeve of a man who claimed he'd never been possessed.
--Martin Cruz Smith, Havana Bay.
