by Paul Levine
“I can’t figure it out. If you’re returning the art—”
“I never said I was returning it.”
He saw I didn’t understand, so he motioned me to follow him. We circled the deck and took a ladder into the hold. Below deck, the steel bulkheads rattled with engine vibrations, and the air stank of sweat, grease, and fuel. Soto turned a wheel at a steel hatch, and we stepped into the cargo compartment. One of the crewmen, a skinny, olive-skinned man who hadn’t shaved this week, sat at the wooden table. What looked like an oversize car battery was at his feet, a simple electrical panel in front of him. On the deck was a spool of white wire. Or rather, half a spool. The rest was strung across the deck and around the steel containers that held an unfathomable fortune. The other end was connected to the battery, which, in turn, was connected to the electrical panel. The crewman had a shotgun in his lap.
I know what it was, but I couldn’t say it. Soto did me the favor. “Plastiques.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. He was right. I had come to know him.
I could make a revolutionary statement the world would never forget.
It hadn’t meant anything then, but it did now. The crewman shifted in his chair and cradled the shotgun. I listened to a pump below us and Soto’s breathing next to me.
“I was wrong,” I admitted. “I figured there were only three choices: Give the art to the Americans, to the Russians, or to Fidel. I never thought you’d destroy it. But for you, it really is a double whammy. Castro gets the two hundred million to buy bicycles and bread, and you get to make the greatest revolutionary statement of all time.”
“Lo entiendes? So you understand?”
“Maybe not all of it. But it has something to do with destroying objects of bourgeois fascination. While the peasants were starving, the nobility had jewelers making diamond-studded clocks. Am I on the right track?”
“Yes, but that is not all. With one fiery blast, I will show the world the value of its gilded objects. I will blow asunder the worthless canvas and meaningless gold. I will turn your silver chalices and precious pearls into shrapnel. I will take five hundred years of decadence and vanity and turn it to silt at the bottom of the sea. And the two of us will join it there.”
Oh.
Just then, scuttling a couple billion dollars in baubles and adornments didn’t seem that important. Losing the semiprecious hide of Jacob Lassiter, ballplayer-turned-barrister, was another matter.
Footsteps above us. Two crewmen clambered down the ladder and stepped into the hold. Swarthy, lean men in their twenties in jungle fatigues wearing sidearms. Soto spoke to them in Spanish, then turned to me. “They will protect you until we reach our destination,”
Protect me. Communists and fascists alike always have such a cute way of twisting words into their antonyms.
The four of us climbed back to the top deck in silence. On the deck, my two protectors maintained a polite distance of five yards. The nighttime breeze had turned cool, so why was I sweating? The air was thick with diesel fumes. Again, Soto and I stood at the rail. From overhead, suddenly, a whompeta-whompeta drew our eyes skyward. A helicopter, its searchlight aimed at us, scanned the freighter. From the bridge, a crewman was shouting in Spanish at Soto, who simply nodded. My bodyguards edged closer.
With the wind from the east and the copter approaching from the west, I hadn’t heard it until it was nearly above us. Descending now. My first thought: the Coast Guard to the rescue. Or maybe Army Special Forces, rappelling down on undulating ropes, armed with automatic weapons. Hey, I’d settle for a Miami Beach SWAT team. But it wasn’t the authorities. A private chopper. Lower now, I saw it clearly. Beige, rounded nose. I’d seen it before. It used to sit on the deck of Yagamata’s yacht.
The noise deafening now, the helicopter was just a few feet off the stern. I squinted my eyes against the blast of wind. When it touched down, a door to the passenger cabin opened and out stepped Matsuo Yagamata. He turned back toward the cabin. A hand reached out, and he grabbed it. The hand belonged to Lourdes Soto, who hopped gracefully onto the deck of the freighter. The two of them ducked under the whirling blade and walked toward us. A moment later, the engine revved, and the helicopter took off, veering to the west, and disappearing into the night.
Lourdes looked toward me and then directly at her father. She was wearing an all-white warm-up suit and running shoes. Her dark hair was windblown. Yagamata, short and chunky in a dark suit, looked tense. As he approached, he shot nervous glances at the armed crewmen. When Yagamata and Lourdes reached us, there was a brief moment of silence. Soto looked impassively at them both, then angrily shouted, “Lourdes, no deberías estar aquí!’”
“Por qué no? How else would I save you?”
Yagamata looked Soto squarely in the eyes. “Señor Soto, you have proved your point. You are a great patriot. But what you intend is a great waste of both human resources and irreplaceable objects of beauty.”
Soto turned to his daughter. “You should not have told him.”
“I did it to save you, Papi.”
It hit me then. Lourdes knew. She knew everything, including the fact I’d be on board.
Yagamata reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a black velvet pouch from a pocket. Loosening a drawstring, he poured something into his open palm. It looked like a thick gold chain. “Have you ever seen such magnificence?” he asked, holding it up in the light from the bridge.
The surprise from inside the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg. Yagamata’s favorite toy, the little gold train by Fabergé. It sparkled in the glare of the deck lights, the intricate details of the engine and cars nearly surreal.
“What you have on board is several hundred thousand times what I hold in my hand. You must comprehend that!”
Soto nodded. “It makes my statement all the more significant. The treasure of the pigs destroyed.”
“The art belongs to the world!” Yagamata thundered.
Funny, Yagamata had acted as if it belonged to him.
Soto was expressionless. “What I have begun cannot be halted.”
“Spare the artwork,” Yagamata pleaded, gesturing toward the hold. “Spare yourself and the lives of your men.”
Yagamata replaced the train in the velvet pouch and slipped the pouch back into his suit pocket. His little game of show-and-tell didn’t seem to have the desired impact. “Individual lives are meaningless,” Soto said.
“I can broker the sale of the art,” Yagamata said. “You will have hundreds of millions more for your cause. Let me help you. “
“The money,” Soto said, “is important, but the principle even more so. The socialist revolution cannot be financed by the slavery of the masses. Your so-called works of art will die a death far more glorious than that of the peasants whose blood gave birth to such gluttony, such excess.”
Soto turned to Lourdes and said something in Spanish. Lourdes responded angrily. Her father spoke again, softly, apologetically, his eyes moist. He moved toward her to embrace, but she turned her back to him. Severo Soto walked away, pausing only to bark a command to a shotgun-toting crewman who stood straighter, his eyes Hashing from Yagamata to me and back again.
I went to Lourdes, who moved toward me and stepped close. “I didn’t come back just for Papi. I came back for you, too.”
I put my arms around her. Our faces touched, and I caught the sweet scent of her hair, the fresh-scrubbed womanly essence of her skin. “Your father won’t do it now, will he? Not with you on board.”
“There’s a lifeboat. It was intended for any of the crewmen who change their minds. They’re all handpicked disciples of Fidel and Che Guevara. They want to die for a glorious cause.”
There is a time for a man to be a man, and another time to look for a soft place to land. “Much room in that lifeboat?”
“Plenty, but Papi wants you en una pira fúnebre.”
My look told her I didn’t understand.
“Có
mo se dice en Inglés … on the funeral pyre. Papi says the revolutionary act is enhanced by destroying a symbol of the reactionary colonialists.”
“Me?”
“Papi wants to make the largest possible statement. That’s why we’re going to anchor off South Pointe Park, just a few hundred yards from the beach.”
“Why?”
“What’s tomorrow, Jake?”
“Sunday.”
“Cuatro de julio, the Fourth of July. Papi wants to blow up the richest cache of art ever assembled during the celebration of what he calls your counterfeit freedom. It’s his poetic side. If he could, he’d like to have people singing ‘the rocket’s red glare’ when he pulls the switch.”
Bombs bursting in air, I said to myself.
***
Usually, at sea, I sleep the sleep of the innocent. Maybe it’s the gentle pitching, the faint whoosh of water against the hull. On the other hand, I sleep the same way in the woods or in a mountaintop cabin. So maybe it’s the sense of detachment, of being removed from the bustle of everyday life. So ordinarily, I am a two-hundred-twenty-six-pound slab of concrete in my bunk. Not tonight. I could have been worried that this was my last night on the planet Earth. And I was. But I also was sharing my bunk with a hundred-eighteen-pound lady who was lithe and warm and giving. We kissed and held each other, and I stroked the slopes and curves of her. We maneuvered into positions that stretched the cruciate ligaments of my bad knee, and she laughed when I fell with a thud to the deck. But she welcomed me back, and later, much later, I held and kissed and nuzzled her as the orange light of morning streaked through the porthole.
What would you eat for breakfast if you thought it was your last? Steak? Caviar and smoked salmon? I had huevos rancheros because that’s what was served in the small galley. Then Lourdes and I stood on the deck, watching the Florida Keys to our west. I recognized Big Pine, Bahia Honda, Molasses, and Fat Deer Key as we continued northeast in the Straits, keeping the Great Bahama Bank well to our east. It was a hot July day with wispy clouds on the horizon. It didn’t seem to matter if I got a touch of sunburn.
Lourdes and I were standing at the rail as we passed close to Sombrero Key where the earliest European to live in Florida made his home. Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked in the Keys around 1545 and spent the next two decades mapping the islands he called the Martires, or martyrs. He identified one Tequesta village called Guarugunbe, the place of weeping, and another, Cuchivaga, the place of suffering. Happy campers, those Tequestas. Soto would probably consider the Spaniards to have been plundering colonialists. And, of course, he would be right.
In the afternoon, Lourdes talked to her father, who stood sullenly on the bridge. When I tried to join them, a crewman waved a military .45 under my nose and gave me the impression I wasn’t wanted near the controls. Through the glass, I watched Lourdes argue with her father, gesturing with both hands. He listened grimly, shaking his head, occasionally saying something I could not hear. Then he turned his back to her and spoke to the captain. She flung her arms in the air one last time, then rejoined me on the deck.
“I guess you didn’t convince him to give up his ideals and join the Hialeah Rotary,” I said.
“This isn’t funny. I pleaded for your life and his.”
“What did he say?”
“That his life wasn’t worth saving.” She looked away. “He asked if I loved you.”
“To which you responded …”
“I told him no . . .”
Until now, I had always appreciated candor in a woman.
“… But that I liked you, that you were a good man who was not his enemy. He said you are meaningless as an individual but important as a symbol.”
I watched a wad of sea grapes and other flotsam ride the midget waves into the hull of the freighter. I watched the water change color from bright turquoise to deep indigo as the depth changed along our route. I watched three dolphins jump in unison off the starboard side where motor yachts and oil tankers crisscrossed the Straits.
I allowed myself some heroic imaginings. If life were a B-movie, I would break a mirror and, holding it to the sun, bounce messages to a Coast Guard cutter just waiting to rescue a few billion dollars in art and a halfway honest lawyer. But I didn’t know Morse code. Or I would dive off the side and swim to shore. Maybe two or three miles, nothing to it, except a couple of jellyfish stings. But my protectors would gun me down before I hit the water. Or I could overpower Soto and hold him hostage. But he would order his crew to blow us all up. That’s what he was going to do anyway, right? But what about Lourdes? Wouldn’t he want to save her? Maybe, but what had Soto said? Individual lives are meaningless.
“Jake, I’m sorry. I really am.”
Maybe it was the wind, but Lourdes had tears in her eyes. “It’s not your fault,” I told her.
“Not just about this. About ever getting involved with Yagamata and Foley. I did things . . .”
She let it hang there. So I helped her out. “You did what your father asked you to do.”
“Yes, he had this planned all along, I’m sure, that somehow he would help Fidel. So Papi asked me to provide him with information while I worked for Yagamata. And when the operation was threatened, when it appeared we would be stopped inside Russia . . .”
Again she couldn’t continue. Just like her father, she puzzled me with her riddles, the words unsaid. Sometimes the best way to get a reluctant witness to talk is to ask a pointed question. But often, it’s best to just remain quiet. Let the silence invite an answer to the unspoken question.
“I had to help,” she said. “I was there when it unraveled. I knew he would ruin everything unless he was stopped, and when . . .”
Who was he? She didn’t say.
Unless he was stopped. Okay, let’s count the bodies, going backward.
One potato. Kharchenko, of course, but Foley did that.
Two potato. Eva-Lisa, who wasn’t a he.
Three potato. Crespo, dispatched by Kharchenko.
Four. Vladimir Smorodinsky.
. . . He would ruin everything unless he was stopped, and when . . .
I grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her close, and looked her hard in the eyes. “The reason you offered to help me in the Crespo case was to make sure I wouldn’t get too close to the truth—”
She turned her head away.
“—And to report to Yagamata if I got too smart. Of course, if I did, you could always run me down with a forklift.” I took a deep breath. “Just like you did to Vladimir Smorodinsky, who would ruin everything unless he was stopped.”
As I spoke, I pictured it. Lourdes and Yagamata watched from the offices overhead as Crespo lay unconscious on the floor of the warehouse and Smorodinsky, battered and woozy, headed for the exit. Lourdes raced down the stairs, hopped onto a forklift, and chased Smorodinsky down, spearing him like a fat olive on a toothpick. Oh, she can handle that forklift, all right. She could have killed me if she had wanted to. But she didn’t. It was her father who would have that honor.
“You and Yagamata cooked up those phony affidavits,” I said, “not to save Crespo, but to keep him quiet, to protect you. When it didn’t work because I wouldn’t use fabricated evidence, and when Crespo looked like he would crack, you had him killed.”
She began sobbing. “Not me, Jake. Yagamata ordered Kharchenko to do it. You must believe me. Yagamata did it for the money and his obsession with the art. Kharchenko did it for his politics. I only followed orders. To me, it was just a job.”
She collapsed in my arms, seeking comfort and forgiveness. Still holding her shoulders, I gave her a shove. She landed on her bottom, looking up at me with disbelief. “That only makes it worse,” I said.
28
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
The freighter stayed wide of Fowey Rocks and came up along Key Biscayne. I caught sight of the lighthouse at Cape Florida just as the sun was setting. Music blared from the outdoor bandshell at the marine
stadium, and a score of boats skimmed across the bay and into the open water. By the time we crossed Government Cut between Fisher Island and the southern tip of Miami Beach, it was dark, and the water was crowded with boats angling for good views of the fireworks. Offshore, half a dozen freighters and a cruise ship lined up, waiting for tugs to take them into port in the morning.
The two crewmen with sidearms had been my shadows for the past three hours. One stayed on each side of me wherever I went, except to the head, where one went in, and the other stayed outside the door.
“Want to hold it for me?” I asked the one who ventured inside.
“No comprendo.”
“You guys flip a coin, and you won, is that it, Jose?”
“Mi nombre no es José.”
I returned to the deck, and the two crewmen followed. I can understand a little Spanish if it’s spoken slowly. From the guy who wasn’t Jose and his friend who was Xavier, I learned that tomorrow’s edition of Granma, the Party newspaper named after Fidel’s boat, would carry the story of our heroic act, including the names of all the martyred crew members. Mine, too, I guess. My footnote in history. So these bozos were trading their lives for a half-inch of newsprint.
“I want to reason with you two,” I said to Xavier. “This is pointless. Ridiculous. Estupido!”
They exchanged looks and shrugged. I heard footsteps on metal stairs. In a moment, Lourdes appeared and walked quickly to me. On the deck, crewmen were preparing her lifeboat. The gray haze of dusk was backlit by a fiery pink glow to the west as the sun dipped into the Everglades.
Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I know what you think of me, Jake. Believe me, I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Now let me help you.” When I didn’t say a word, she lowered her voice even more. “I’ll be the only one in the boat. You could jump over …”
“What about Yagamata?”
“He knows all hell will break loose and doesn’t want to answer questions on shore. His helicopter will be back for him. He’s headed straight to the Bahamas. He has arrangements to return to Japan.”