False Dawn jl-3

by Paul Levine

  It sounded better than being chased by Robert Foley, so I said fine, and we turned onto Fifth Street, which led us to the MacArthur Causeway. The ferry to Fisher Island was just pulling out, taking home all the rich folks who need a moat to protect them from the realities of life. We passed the real estate developers’ dreams of Star Island and Palm Island, dredged landfills transformed into million-dollar lots. On the Miami side of Biscayne Bay, we swung onto 1-95 and headed due north. Lake Worth is a few miles south of Palm Beach, a straight shot on the expressway. If I were looking for me, it would be the last place I would look. But then, I wasn’t looking for me. Somebody else was.

  D espite its substantial Finnish population, Lake Worth is not Helsinki. At midnight, the sun was not hovering on the horizon. The air was not crisp and cool. There was no lemon glow across the water. Instead, mosquitoes hummed around the mercury vapor lamps on the patio behind the large flagstone house. Still, it was pleasant enough, a quiet, placid place unlike Miami. Beyond the patio, a lawn sloped toward a lake. A three-quarter moon hung in the eastern sky, casting a pearly glow on the dark water. A hint of a breeze kept the temperature tolerable, though the air was soggy with tropical humidity. From the rear of the house, a stone path led down the lawn to a small building made of pine. The building sat at the edge of the lake on a wooden dock, and a chimney poked out of the roof. The sauna, my hostess told me, pronouncing it sow-na.

  She looked across the water toward a small island. A band played what I took to be Finnish folk songs. Children’s voices carried across the bay. On an outcropping of rock at the island’s shoreline, dozens of trees were lashed together in a pyramid. A dinghy was tied on top, fifty feet above the water.

  “It is almost time for the bonfire,” Eva-Lisa said. She had changed into khaki shorts and a matching blouse, and was reclining in a chaise lounge made of light wood and covered with a blue cushion. I sat in a matching straight-back chair looking at her pale, muscular legs.

  She told me her father, Reino Haavikko, was in Finnish intelligence, an expert on what used to be the Soviet Union. Then she gave me a quick history lesson. Since the end of World War II, living in the shadow of the Russian bear, Finland has walked a tightrope. It was a Western democracy toeing a line of neutrality while paying homage to its massive, dangerous neighbor. She said something in Finnish and then translated. “The only good thing from the east is the vodka.” The Finns scorn the Russians for their inefficiency and laziness but dread their armaments and temperament. “Finlandization” became a catchword for the way to get along with the Soviets when the U.S.S.R. was a fearful entity. When the Union broke apart, Finland and the other Scandinavian countries were the first to recognize the independent Baltic states. Now, after more than forty-five years of tiptoeing around the Russians, Finland was ready to profit from them. Along with the rest of the West, the Finns were queuing up to build factories and apartment buildings, to sell tractors and hamburgers and VCR’s to a nation starving for decent shoes, microwave ovens, and Nintendo games.

  She poured a red drink from a pitcher. I took a sip. Syrup with a kick. “ Poron kyynel,” she said, hoisting her glass.

  “Cheers,” I returned.

  “No. What you are drinking is Finlandia with lingonberry juice. We call it poron kyynel, tears of reindeers.”

  Earlier, she had fed me a platter of four different kinds of herring, a Finnish favorite, plus salmon soup with vegetables and a casserole of potatoes, ham, eggs, and anchovies. Sturdy country fare. While I ate, she apologized again for practicing her placekicking against my ribs. I had looked vaguely familiar, a Russian perhaps, someone dangerous who hadn’t been bought by Yagamata. When I asked what she meant, she clammed up. She seemed to be bursting with the desire to tell me what I wanted to know and more, but something was holding her back.

  I had showered and changed into a pair of her father’s gray pants that were too big and a white short-sleeve shirt that was too small. The drink was too sweet but bearable. The company was attractive but evasive. I wasn’t getting anywhere except slightly potted. I like to think of myself as an astute questioner. I can be deft and subtle, can parry and thrust. But sometimes I just wade right in.

  “Okay, Eva-Lisa, I’m getting different stories about what’s going on, so how about setting me straight. What were you doing in Miami, and what’s happening here? Who’s behind the theft of Russian art and what’s Yagamata really up to? What’s Kharchenko doing here, and what’s arriving on the freighter? Why did Kharchenko kill Crespo, and why am I being set up for his murder?”

  She looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know any Crespo…” If that’s all she didn’t know, what she knew could fill a book. “As for what is arriving on the freighter,” she continued, “the manifest says Finnish lumber.”

  “And what do you say?”

  She smiled enigmatically. “I will answer your questions if you will answer mine.”

  I nodded.

  “What is on the freighter is the most valuable collection of artwork ever assembled in one place. Ever! It is from the Hermitage and other museums in Russia. My job was inventory control in Helsinki. Today, Kharchenko gave me the bills of lading showing what arrived here. An exact match, the paintings, the jewelry, the historic artifacts. No pilferage, no damage. I always did my job well, except when Yagamata stole a little something here and there, and I had no control over that.” She looked toward the island. The sound of children singing drifted across the lake. “Tell me about Mr. Crespo.”

  “He used to hand out towels in a locker room, and lately he’d been working in a warehouse owned by Yagamata. First he gets charged with murdering a Russian named Smorodinsky, then-”

  “Who?” She spilled a drop of her blood-red drink.

  “Another guy who worked for Yagamata. Smorod-”

  “Vladimir or Nikolai?” she asked. Her voice cracked.

  “Vladimir.”

  She sighed and bit her lower lip. Across the bay, I heard what sounded like accordion music.

  “Is it a sin,” she asked softly, “for me to be happy that a good and decent man is dead?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nikolai is my lover. He works for Yagamata in St. Petersburg. Or at least, he did. He is with us, now. Vladimir is his older brother.”

  “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry for Vladimir. I’m glad it wasn’t your-”

  “Exactly. It is a tragedy, but not really mine.” On the island, hundreds of people gathered around the pyramid of trees. Excited shouts of children mixed with the music. “You think Kharchenko killed your friend?”

  “I saw him there. At least I think I did. Yagamata has gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like Crespo killed Vladimir. When Crespo was about to tell who did, he was shot.”

  She looked across the water, shimmering silver and black in the moonlight. She seemed to be considering how much to say. When she spoke, it was quietly, almost to herself. “Yagamata must have killed Vlad to protect the operation, and if he did, Nikki is in great danger, too.”

  “Where is Nikolai now?”

  “On his way here. He should be in Miami Beach tomorrow.”

  Everybody’s coming to town, I thought. No wonder Foley wanted me out of the way.

  “Nikki wanted to stop the thefts,” she said, “and when that became impossible, to gather the evidence against those responsible. I must alert Nikki to the danger, but I do not know where he will be staying. He is so afraid of telephones. There is a Russian saying, ‘Never trust anyone but your pillow.’ That is Nikki, so very suspicious. All he said was he would find me when he got to the place of the fish.”

  “The fish? Like a dock, a boat?”

  “Or a hotel. Are there any hotels named after fish?”

  “I don’t think we have a Hotel Herring, but I’ll look into it.”

  On the island, an orange torch flared at the foot of the bonfire. A second later, the trees caught fire, and the flames slowly worked their way to the top. Th
e scent of scorched pine carried across the calm water.

  “Eva-Lisa, tell me what’s going on. Everything.”

  “How do I know you don’t work for Yagamata now?”

  “Me?”

  “The last time I saw the two of you, it was lunchtime aboard the Yugen, and you were eating his caviar. Doesn’t he pay your legal fees, too?”

  “Look, I was trying to save somebody’s ass. Francisco Crespo was a guy who never amounted to much, but he didn’t deserve to die. He saved my life once, and I had a chance to return the favor but muffed it. Today you were playing post office with the man who put two bullets in him. I’m the guy they’re trying to frame for the murder. I need to bring Kharchenko in. There are witnesses who got a look at his face. Put him in a lineup, and maybe I could get him indicted for murder. Especially if I can show a link between the two deaths.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Motive. To know why Crespo was killed, I need to know why Smorodinsky was killed. You’ve got to tell me what Yagamata and the brothers Smorodinsky were up to.”

  She kept her eyes on the island. “You really do not know, do you?”

  “All I know is that my government is trying to stop the theft of art treasures from Russia. Something about our protecting the reformers from being embarrassed.”

  She laughed. “Who told you that?”

  “Robert Foley. He’s with the-”

  “CIA. I did not think Mr. Foley had such a delicious sense of irony.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  I hadn’t finished my first one, but she topped off the glass with the potent drink and gave herself one, too. “There is something very sweet about you,” she said, softly. Before I could thank her, she added a footnote. “But something so naive, too. Our job is not to stop the thefts.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not, Mr. Lassiter. We are the thieves.”

  I had put away two more glasses of the red stuff when Eva-Lisa told me she would cut the vaihtaa if I would chop the wood. She grabbed a machete and disappeared into the overgrowth at the side of the house, while I contented myself swinging a short-handled hatchet at some birch logs that had never hurt anybody. I luxuriated in the weight of the hatchet, the stretch in the muscles of my arm and back with each swing, the satisfying thwack of steel on wood. I chopped enough to keep the Haavikko clan toasty all winter, at least a Florida winter. A few moments later, Eva-Lisa walked out of a stand of pop ash trees. She was carrying a handful of leafy branches, maybe three feet long.

  She came up to me, shook the leaves in my face, and smiled. “It is a shame the white birch tree doesn’t grow here. Its branches have just the right amount of give for the vaihtaa.”

  I looked at her, not fully understanding.

  “You’d be surprised how some gentle switching can heat you up.”

  Actually, I didn’t think I would be surprised at all.

  I carried the wood into the sauna. The interior was light pine, sparkling clean. An anteroom contained a shower, wooden pegs in the wall to hold our clothes, white fluffy towels, and benches I carved from ash trees. I found some old newspaper for kindling and a box of foot-long matches. The fire began slowly, the dry wood crackling with flames under a pile of gray volcanic rocks. Eva-Lisa filled a bucket with cool water and brought it into the sauna, closing the door tightly, letting the heat build, while we sat in the adjacent changing room. Another bucket contained bottles of Finnish beer, olut, on ice. A horse frolicked on the label. The beer was for later. Good, the coach always told us to replace our bodily fluids.

  We sat on a bench studying each other. She started unbuttoning her blouse. “Do you believe the naked body is beautiful?”

  “I have a suspicion yours is, but mine has railroad track scars across both knees, a crosshatch over my rotator cuff, and one toenail that’s permanently purple from turf toe.”

  “In America, they believe we have sex in the sauna,” she said evenly.

  “Oh?”

  She had slipped out of the blouse and loosened the web belt on her khaki shorts. “But we don’t.”

  “No?”

  She let the shorts slide down her long legs, kicked them off in a graceful motion, and hung them on a wooden peg with her blouse. “No, it is far too hot. Besides, the sauna is a spiritual place. The heat will cleanse the body and the mind.” She unfastened her bra and tossed it aside, her creamy breasts tumbling free. She stepped out of her panties and smiled at me.

  I could feel the warmth from the other side of the pine walls. At least, I think that’s where it came from. In a moment, my clothing was crumbled in a corner of the room. I was ready to partake of the heat. I wasn’t sure about my body, but just then, my mind needed a good cleansing.

  W e were sitting on mats that covered the wooden benches inside the sauna. The fire glowed white hot. Eva-Lisa used a ladle to pour water on the rocks, sending waves of steam toward our faces. Each breath scorched the inside of my nose, each burst of steam seemed to melt my fingernails. But if she wouldn’t cry uncle, neither would I. A small window overlooked the bay. Outside, the orange flames of the bonfire glittered off the smooth surface of the black lake. The moon ducked behind silvery clouds.

  “I don’t understand why the CIA would be in the business of stealing Russian art treasures,” I said, exhaling the words in gasping breaths. “And why are they doing business with a crook like Yagamata?”

  She looked toward me, cheeks rosy, but vital signs apparently within normal limits. “Yagamata is a broker between your government and various Japanese and German millionaires who purchase the artwork.” She ran a hand through her sweat-streaked hair. “Originally, the plan was to eradicate the old hardline communists, to assure that the reformers have complete control. What was it Foley used to say? ‘To drive the coffin nail into the godless heart of communism.’”

  “Sounds like J. Edgar Hoover. But that stuff’s out of date now.”

  “It started a year or so before Yanayev and his friends attempted the putsch. The CIA never believed that perestroika would work. The old guard-the Party, the military, the KGB-would wait for near chaos, then overthrow Gorbachev and crack down. Operation Riptide was intended as a preemptive strike against the hard-liners so that the reformers could create a capitalistic state subservient to the U.S., Japan, and the European Community. Before it could happen, however, the eight little dwarfs tried their takeover.”

  “So the CIA was right.”

  “Sure,” she said, “except they never figured the coup would fail. In three days, those old Reds accomplished what the West couldn’t do in seventy years. They destroyed the Party, dissolved the Union, and freed the republics.”

  “I still don’t see what stealing Russian pictures has to do with politics. To me, it just looks like a burglary.”

  “You are missing the subtlety of it. The museums, the ministries of culture were appendages of the Party, which every Russian knew to be corrupt and self-serving. Long before Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, your CIA was trying to discredit the Communist Party. What do you think an aroused populace would have done when they learned that the Party elite and their appointed bureaucrats were on the payroll of the West?”

  My look must have told her she had lost me, so she continued. “How do you think we get the icons, the Faberge eggs, the French paintings, the diamond-studded artifacts out of Russia?”

  “Federal Express?”

  She whacked the vaihtaa across my shoulders. The blood rose to the surface. If I kept sweating, I could box bantamweight by morning.

  “Bribery, of course,” she said. “What the verkhushka didn’t know is that it was a gigantic sting operation. Some of the bribes got paid in cash, but the really large sums were deposited into numbered Swiss accounts. The accounts could be traced to government leaders, everybody from local officials in St. Petersburg and Kiev to bureaucrats in nearly every republic, to hard-liners who used to have lunch with Gorbachev. All the CIA operatives were wired. V
ladimir and Nikolai, Kharchenko, even Yagamata. They videotaped money changing hands, just like your… Amway.”

  “Abscam,” I said.

  “It went so close to the top you wouldn’t believe it. Does the name Pugo mean anything to you?”

  “A French car assembled in Yugoslavia?”

  “Boris Pugo was Gorbachev’s Interior Minister.”

  I remembered the stories. “Right, one of the clowns who took part in the coup. Didn’t he commit suicide?”

  “Now do you understand the significance of this?”

  I let out a whistle. “It ain’t borscht.”

  “But do you understand?”

  “Wait a second, are you saying some commie in the cabinet committed suicide because he was caught selling golden eggs, not because of the failed coup?”

  She looked at me with some tenderness. “You’re getting warmer.”

  Of course I was. Sweat was running down my face and dripping onto my chest. “The coup! You’re telling me these guys tried to grab control because Gorbachev found out they were on the take. He was going to have their heads, so they had to take power and cover it up.”

  She smiled conspiratorially, and my mind kept racing. I stood up and paced, two steps one way, two steps the other. I kept banging into the hot walls. “But the hard-liners are gone. Gorbachev is gone. The republics are free. The CIA operation should be over.”

  She shook her head and sweat dripped from her chin. “But it is not. It is no longer a surgical operation to discredit certain hard-liners. Now Foley and Yagamata aren’t interested in just bringing out a few paintings and icons. They want it all. They have discovered how easy it is to steal, and they just can’t stop. They already know how to bribe the lower functionaries, who are still there, and they don’t need the higher-ups anymore. Even if the leaders of the republics know what’s going on, they are powerless to stop it. They must cover it up because they are responsible now, and what’s happening is so big and their governments so fragile, it could topple them. That’s why Nikki and Vlad wanted to blow the whistle. They can’t let Yagamata and Foley rape their country, steal the legacy of the Russian people, and redistribute it to millionaires in the West. There has never been a burglary, as you put it, on this scale before.”