Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Which country you going to?” Lime asked. “I want to see the address book.”

  “The TV said the Cold War is over. But the Pentagon is still in business. The CIA is still in business. I bet the KGB is still around and the Hungarian KGB and the East German Stasi and whatever the Czechs have and the Poles. Where do spies go when the Cold War is over?”

  “Did you show the address book to Peaches?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Let him see it. I want a copy.”

  “That’s my edge,” I said. “I don’t want to turn it over.”

  “Why is everything with you a problem?” he snapped. “I thought we taught you that we’re in this together. I can have you deported tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d wanted him to work for it so he’d think he’d achieved something. “I’ll give it to Chip.”

  “Put him on the phone,” Lime said.

  I handed Chip Sheen the phone.

  He listened intently, his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed, he said, “… East Bloc …” and beneath his trousers his loins girded to do battle with any remaining unbelievers. “… Cover, we need deep cover,” he said. “… Okay … shallow cover.… I remember the tradecraft courses. They were my favorite.… Yes, I know …”—he glared over at me—“… I can handle him.”

  I snickered. It was rude and I was wrong to do it. Chip flushed.

  “… Annulment,” Chip said.

  I figured that was the new jargon for terminate with extreme prejudice, sanction, wet work. Lime must have suggested that was excessive because Chip said, “… only if necessary.” Lime must have told him it shouldn’t be necessary to annul me because he looked frustrated. Then he listened some more, gave me a hard look, and handed me the phone back.

  “I’m giving you Peaches as backup,” Lime said. More like a keeper.

  “You mean little Chip here,” I said. “Or Chester or whatever his name is.”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “I have to tell you something, I’m having trouble with the funny names.”

  “You think you’re a tough guy, a wiseguy,” Lime said. “And I can see where Peaches is a real tempting target. But if I were you, I’d be careful, even respectful. He’s a true believer.”

  Mr. Lime rushed us passports by courier. The courier had a green-and-red woolly ski cap. We had a code phrase to greet him. “Hey, that hat looks like a mango.” He was to reply, “Mangoes are out of season.” The counter countersign was, “By the fruit you shall know the tree.” It was hard to tell with Lime, if he had a military man’s insistence on doing the absurd to prove he could enforce obedience for its own sake or if he had a sense of perverse humor.

  Chip handled the exchange. He insisted that I handle the dry cleaning. This was a piece of tradecraft that meant tailing him to the brief encounter to make sure that there were no minders watching him. As best I could tell, he was sterile. We received Canadian passports. They are real faves in the Co(vert)-Op(erations) world because Canadians are exactly like Americans except that they are cloaked in a certain obscurity that gives them an image of enhanced political innocence, a North American version of Norwegians. Mine was in the name of Andrew Applebaum. The photo was me. Which meant that Lime had had it standing by. He went up a notch in my estimation, from sadist to competent sadist. Chip became Charles Pêchier.

  I let him look at the address book. If you were a tourist in Central Europe it was very thorough. It listed hotels, favorite restaurants, car rentals, banks, Amex offices, cambios, taxis. Beyond that it was useless. Not a single business contact. Not a friend. All that time, all that effort, all that money, all the traveling—Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Mariánské Lázn?—and he kept everything he was really doing—the names, addresses, phone numbers—in his head.

  Marie found me studying the photos. She was not amused.

  “Who is that girl?” Marie Laure asked. In three of the twenty-three shots the subjects were nude. They had been shot on a balcony either in a tall building or on a house on a hill—a cityscape was behind and below them. There were patches of snow on old-fashioned roofs and smoke rising from chimneys. The first two shots were Wendy and another girl, nipples erect in the cold. Tanaka had gotten into the third. Marie Laure was referring to the unknown female with the swaybacked butt and oral-sex pout. The same people appeared with their clothes on in several of the other photos.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We see three people. Sometimes they appear one at a time, sometimes all together. I think there were two couples. I think there’s a fourth person. That’s who I’m interested in.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, disbelieving my focus, not denying the fourth person.

  “Who is the person who took the pictures but never has his picture taken? It’s wintertime. Some people are messing about, naked. They run out onto the balcony—you can see the giggles and the goose bumps if you look closely. They didn’t ask some stranger, ‘Hey, come snap this picture.’”

  “You ’ave to look very close for that,” Marie Laure said.

  “And they have their picture taken. It’s taken by someone that is playing with them. But is never in the pictures—not even in these private moments. A very careful man.”

  “Where are you going?” Marie said.

  “To look for the unknown photographer,” I said.

  “You are going to look for this girl?” Marie Laure asked.

  “Only insofar as she leads me to the guy.”

  “I see. You are going to look for this girl.”

  “Well, if you put it that way …”

  “I will ’elp you,” Marie Laure said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  Marie Laure selected one of the photos of the two naked girls. They were not the stolid masseuses of Viennese stone. Wendy was girlish and giggling. Très americaine, athletic and adolescent both, with, as Carol had described them, cupcake tits. The other girl was leaner, languid, sipping the liqueur of decadence.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “We don’t know what’s over there. Stasi. KGB. Secret Police. Smersh.”

  Marie showed the three-by-five to her mother and indicated which female I was looking for. Her mother looked at me. French women of all ages have very expressive faces. They are supralingual—not confined by the barrier of separate vocabularies and different syntaxes. Then Marie Laure showed the photo to my mother. My mother looked from the photo to me to Marie Laure. Her expression, in Sicilian-American, said much the same thing that the other mother had said in French.

  The road to Budapest is through Vienna and straight east. We went, en caravan. Marie and me in the front. Anna, Geneviève, and Anna Geneviève cramped in the back. The trunk loaded with baggage and bags around our feet full of the things we would need to get out hands on en voyage—diapers, mineral wasser, pills for her mother, eyedrops for mine, ointments and powder for the baby, tissues, makeup for three, maps, guidebooks, four apples, two bananas, an orange, a half kilo of good French mountain Gruyère, and a loaf of bread as close to French bread as the Austrians can make. Mike Hayakawa’s familiar Musashi was comfortably tacked onto the rearview mirror, our excess baggage in his trunk. Behind him, trying manfully to keep out of sight, was Chip Sheen. Obeying an agency directive to rent American, he was now in a lemon-yellow Opel, GM’s German subsidiary. It was entirely possible that there were other members of our wagon train, but I didn’t spot them.

  “Marie Laure est a girl jolie,” Marie Laure’s mother said, throwing the odd word of English in with her French as if it would make her understood. Sometimes it did. “Comprenez-vous?”

  “Yes, she’s very pretty,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said. “Very pretty.”

  “Arrête de la vous voyer!” Marie said. “Tutoyer.”

  “Pourquoi pas ‘vous’?” her mother said sharply.

  “What?” my mother asked.

  “There are two forms of you in Fr
ench. Vous is formal …” I said.

  “Pour les étrangers,” Marie Laure said pointedly.

  “… Tu is more intimate, friendly.”

  “My mother is being difficult,” Marie Laure said.

  “Ma fille …” her mother said.

  “Daw-ter,” Marie said. “And granddaw-ter.”

  “Ma daw-ter,” her mother said. “Elle est a good girl.”

  “Yes,” I said, “she is a good girl.”

  “Elle est …”

  “She is,” Marie said.

  “She is a bonne cuisinière.”

  “Yes, she is a good cook.”

  “Pourquoi vous ne l’épousez pas?”

  “Maman,” Marie said. A warning sound.

  “That’s a reasonable question,” I said, preparing to waffle.

  “Pourquoi pas!” she said.

  “I’m sure,” my mother said, patting the other mother-un-in-law, “that the young people have a good reason for doing things the way they are doing them.”

  Geneviève, Marie Laure’s mother, asked Marie Laure what Anna, my mother, had said. Marie Laure translated into French. Geneviève replied. Anna asked what Geneviève had said—which was that I was not fulfilling my responsibilities as a gentleman and that I was a person without honor or that it was a condition without honor. Marie Laure replied to her mother that I was a good man and that she should stay out of it. My mother wanted to know what Marie Laure had said, so she repeated it in English. Anna thanked her for standing by Rick. I said she could say Tony when we were alone. Geneviève pointed out that only criminals don’t have names. Anna said that her son was no more criminal than Marie Laure’s mother, that in fact my problems occurred only because I was too honorable and that people who did not know the facts should cease slandering me. Marie Laure translated, ponging back and forth like a ball in a game with a net. My mother suggested that perhaps it was Marie Laure who didn’t want to get married. Geneviève sat up sharply and asked if that was true and before she got an answer announced that if it were true her daughter was a fool. What is more, her daughter had brought shame on the family and that was why Geneviève was here without her husband, who was at home and would have been contemplating suicide except for the fact that he was in the midst of negotiations with a Belgian food conglomerate who wanted to purchase the family grocery to put in a giant American-style supermarket and multicinema. My mother said that Marie Laure had nothing to be ashamed of, she had produced a beautiful child and should be proud, and that they, as grandmothers, should also be only happy and proud. Marie Laure told my mother not to get between her and her mother. My mother protested that she was only standing up for Marie Laure. I said it’s best not to get involved with family squabbles. My mother said to me that though she had refrained from saying so, perhaps it was time that I got married and, whatever reasons I might think I had for not being married, they didn’t stand up for one minute to the miracle of my daughter and I better rethink things.

  I put on the brakes. I pulled over. “You drive,” I said to Marie, “I’ll see you all in Budapest.” I got out. I flagged down Mike Hayakawa’s Musashi. When he pulled over, I got in.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Budapest,” I said, pointing.

  “Is something wrong?”

  I turned on the six-speaker sound system. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were singing “All You Need Is Love” in harmony.

  The great cinema images of the Iron Curtain—barbed wire, machine-gun towers, soldiers on patrol in no-man’s-land while snarling dogs with droolish fangs strained at their leashes—were all gone. We had two French passports, a baby on its mother’s passport, my mother’s American passport, Hayakawa’s Japanese, Chip and me on false Canadian documents, and we all crossed from Austria to Hungary more quickly and with more civility than if we’d been crossing from the Canadian side to the American at Niagara Falls.

  In Budapest Marie and I were reconciled. For two days, at least, it was a family vacation, a kind of honeymoon without sex.

  I’ve driven in New York, Paris, Rome. Anyone who drives his own car in Budapest is mad or owns an East German Wartburg burning gas-oil mix in its two-stroke engine and doesn’t care. I parked our car in a lot and left it there. We took trolleys and the metro and lots of cabs. They had meters that calculated in florints. Florints were officially 68:$1 at the bank, 92:$1 on the black market, and the average fare came out to three dollars. Budapest had all the imperfections that Vienna lacked. Where Vienna’s broad avenues seemed to have been a studied attempt to prove that the Hapsburgs were actually imperial, Budapest’s reminded me of Upper Broadway. Of home. Buildings were as flamboyant and eccentric as the Ansonia at 73rd Street or the Dakota on Central Park West, where John Lennon lived during his mushroom years.

  “I want to go back to New York,” Marie Laure said.

  I didn’t bristle or get my back up. My daughter was sitting on my shoulders, her fingers clutched in my hair. The streets were full of hustle and Romanians and gypsies and long-legged Magyar women who didn’t wear brassieres.

  “Don’t you?” she said.

  All of that, plus poverty and stress and embraceable disorder put variety on the faces, just as lack of cash and the peculiar fiscal policy of central planning left facades everywhere in crumbling disrepair.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to take you wherever you want to go.”

  At dinner that night—when we were almost alone, the baby with the grandmothers, Hayakawa discreetly on the other side of the room, Chip Sheen lurking outside in his car—when the gypsy band came to our table their leader looked at us closely and romantically—I don’t suppose it was anything but a professional mannerism, but he was good at it—and played a sweet and sad version of “There Is a Rose in Spanish Harlem.”

  The Hungarians lusted for high-tech sneakers, jeans with labels, and radios that plugged into their ears the way theologians crave proof of God. They lined up outside the Adidas shop like New Yorkers line up for a hit movie and Muscovites queue for food. It didn’t matter that almost everything inside cost a month’s wages in hard currency. The Big News in town was the opening of the Nike shop—the first twenty-four-hour-a-day store in Europe. Magyars who could speak nothing but their own Hungarian, a language that has neither root nor branch on the tree of Indo-European languages, went around reciting Nike’s advertising slogan in English—“Just do it!”

  It was Anna Geneviève’s kind of town. The Hungarians worshiped babies and respected mothers. Back in America no one loves children. Sometimes not even their own. In Germany and Austria they look at kids the way they look at any other material possession—a car, a pair of skis, or a house. How well made is it? How well turned out is it? Does it look like it cost more than mine?

  Chip Sheen insisted on using his lemon Opel to tail us. The Hungarians, like their ubiquitous gypsy violin music, are a romantic people full of melancholia and fate, which affects their driving. Chip had two fender benders in two days. The Opel was a rental car but he still had to stop and exchange paperwork. Exchanging paperwork in Magyar, a language with an agglutinative structure, derived from the Finno-Ugric group, was extremely frustrating for him. He signaled me through our “dead drop” for an emergency meeting. I left my mother and the baby to distract Hayakawa, pretended I was going off for some affectionate interaction with Marie, and met him in his hotel room.

  “Use your car,” Chip said. “No more taxis.” It was an order.

  “My mother,” I said, “won’t let me drive here.”

  Chip pushed his jacket back so I could see that he was armed. It was the Glock, or a replacement thereof, that had got him in trouble in Vienna. It’s very trendy among lower-level drug dealers in Brooklyn and the Bronx—like telephone beepers and gaudy jeeps—because they think it’s plastic and can pass through X rays and metal detectors. It’s not and it can’t.

  “Nobody’s making you drive that stupid car,” I said. “That’s not the way you tail someon
e. Do I have to teach you your job?”

  “What’s wrong with using your darn car?”

  “Why don’t you take cabs?” I said.

  “Or use the Jap’s car. That Musashi is easy to follow.”

  “So is a cab,” I said, “if you use a cab.”

  “Do what I say for once.” He took the Glock out.

  “You’re going to shoot me to force me not to take taxis?” We both silently agreed that he probably wouldn’t. “What difference does it make?”

  “I can’t expense both the rental car and taxis,” he said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. Because it was. Then I understood it. “You have me wired. Hayakawa too,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He was a bad liar. But I let the denial stand.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll use my car.”

  “How much longer is this going to take?” he said.

  “How do I know?”

  “We’re losing patience,” he said. “We better see some action. Or you’re going down the tubes, Cassella. Which would probably make me happy. You’re not a patriot.”

  I went to the parking lot to confirm my suspicion about an electronic device. I found it under the dash, drawing power off of the sound system. It was a Hitachi. Which didn’t mean the Japanese put it there. The CIA, I presumed, shops the same places we do. Chip’s Opel was parked three cars down from me. I stomped it for spite, right where it would hurt the most, in the recently bashed rear bumper. It was more gratifying than I had any right to expect—I actually bent the bracket more than it was already bent. So I stomped it again and almost broke it. It felt too good to stop so I kept stomping until it snapped.

  Then I found the surprise. There was a directional beeper mounted inside his bumper. Someone was following the follower. This one was attached by a magnet and ran off its own battery. A hasty arrangement compared to the practically factory-installed beeper in my car. It was a different brand. This suggested that the two had been done by separate parties. Which was one more party than I knew about.