"It conceivably might."

"But to a Cuban a skull and an ax covered in animal blood may be a religious shrine. The detective can tell you all about it if you want." Osorio squirmed at the suggestion and Bias went on.» So when we make a psychological analysis of a person we use the Minnesota profile, of course, but we also take into consideration whether a person is a devotee of Santeria."

"Oh." Not that Arkady had ever used the Minnesota profile.

"Nevertheless"-Bias lifted the cloth-"let me prove that, in spite of superstitions, Cuba is still abreast of the world."

Unveiled on a desk was a 486 computer hooked up to a scanner and printer, each running, and an 8-mm video camera mounted lens down above a stand. Resting in a ring on the stand and tilted up to the camera was a skull with a hole in the center of the forehead. The cranium was wired together. Missing teeth made for a gaping cartoon smile.

Arkady had only read about a system like this.» This is a German identification technique."

"No," said Bias, "this is a Cuban technique. The German system, including software, costs over fifty thousand dollars. Ours costs a tenth as much by adapting an orthopedic program. In this case, for example, we found a head with teeth hammered out." Bias touched the keyboard, and on the screen appeared a color picture of a Dumpster stuffed with palm fronds topped by a decapitated head. At a keystroke the police and Dumpster were replaced by four photographs of different men, one getting married, another dancing energetically at a party, a third holding a basketball, the last slouching on a swaybacked horse.» Four missing men. Which could it be? A murderer might have been confident once in believing a face in advanced decay with no teeth could not be matched to any photograph or records. After all, here in Cuba nature is a very efficient undertaker. Now, however, all we need is a clear photograph and a clean skull. You are our guest, you choose."

Arkady chose the bridegroom, and at once the man's image filled the screen, eyes popping from nervousness, hair as carefully arranged as the frills on his shirt.

Dragging a mouse on the pad, Dr. Bias outlined the groom's head, hit a key and erased his shirt and shoulders. At the tap of a key, the head floated to the left of the screen, and on the right appeared the skull as it stared up at the video camera like a patient waiting for the dentist's drill. Bias repositioned the skull so that it gazed up at the camera lens at precisely the same angle as the face. He enlarged the face to the same size, enhanced the shadows so that flesh melted and eyes sank into hollows, placed white darts on the skull at jaw and crown of the skull, at the outside points of the brow, within the orbital and nasal cavities, across the cheekbones and the corners of the mandible. In comparison to the laborious reconstruction of faces from skulls that Arkady knew in Moscow, the tedious application of plastique to plaster bone, this was manipulation at the speed of light. Bias added arrows at the same points of the photograph and, with a tap, brought up between each pair of corresponding markers their distance measured in pixels, the screen's many thousand phosphors of light. A final keystroke merged the two heads into a single out-of-focus image with an overlay of numbers between the arrows.

"The numbers are discrepancies in measurement between the missing man and the skull when they are exactly matched. So we prove, scientifically, they could not possibly be the same man."

Bias started over again, this time with photo no. 3, a boy smiling proudly in a Chicago Bulls shirt, one hand weighing a basketball. Bias sliced off, enlarged and enhanced the boy's head, then brought up and positioned the skull on the screen. The distances between marker darts came 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 insufficient 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 contradictory 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, perhaps, 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 dealership in the world was in Havana. When the Revolution came, the road to the airport was lined with Cadillacs and Chryslers left behind. Imagine being a rebel in a free Cadillac."