False Dawn

19

I didn’t move in time, and a woman the size of Larry Csonka, but not as attractive, stomped on my feet and plop ped into the seat next to me, elbowing me in the ribs. Foley on one side of me, a Russian babushka on the other. Welcome to the Bolshoi Ballet, at least the touring version. The audience was an eclectic mix of South Florida society and Russian emigres. Foley and I were sitting in the balcony with the Russians. I was wearing a rented tux with an undersized shirt collar that felt like a garrote.

Foley owned a formal outfit, or was it government issue? He was practicing his Russian by silently reading the bilingual program. I tried to get his attention. “First, you said our government was trying to stop the art thefts, help out the reformers.”

Foley didn’t look up from his program. He was tracing under the words, moving his lips slightly, but he was reading Russian, and that’s more than I can do.

“Then, I learn you’re really behind the thefts. You were trying to get the goods on the hard-liners, protect the Yeltsin crowd, help make the country a colony of the West, or something like that. What’s your expression, ‘drive a coffin nail into the godless heart of communism.’”

“That was for the benefit of Soto and the Finns. Christ, Lassiter, do you believe whoever talks to you last? Don’t you have the ability to reason for yourself?”

“Yeah. All by myself, I figured you’re a lying scumbag, because now I know you’re the thief. You and Yagamata are stealing the art.”

Ordinarily, I am much more polite in ornate surroundings. But I doubted that many of our newest immigrants bustling into the gilded red velvet balcony of the Performing Arts Center would care, even if they could understand my poison-tipped whispers.

“Look, Lassiter, you don’t even know the players, much less the rules of the game.” Foley folded the program neatly and placed it in his lap. He leaned close enough for me to smell the tobacco on his breath. “Severo Soto is a rabid anticommunist. He’s crazy as a bedbug. All he cares about is overthrowing Castro. He figures that if the Russians can’t subsidize the bearded one, the Cuban government will fall. He wants to be the first president in a democratic Cuba, or maybe it’s a fascist Cuba, who the hell knows. Everybody hears what they want to, and Soto heard me talk about nailing communism. The Finnish girl, too.”

“So what the hell are you doing here?” I demanded. “What’s the U.S. interest in Russian art?”

“What I told you was true at one time. A couple of years ago, the Russians let us know they were starting to lose valuable artworks, primarily from churches, but then some of the less valuable artifacts from the museums were missing, too. It was part of the crime phenomenon all through Eastern Europe, once travel restrictions and other controls were eased. All the Russians wanted was a little help on our end, trace where the stuff was being sold in the West, make some arrests, get people to talk, and find the source here that was funding the flow.”

I used a finger to get some breathing room between my neck and my shirt collar. “Sounds like drug interdiction.”

“Same idea. Anyway, we help them out, pick up a stolen Rubens at an auction house in New York, track it back to some semiorganized crime types in Minsk who have Party ties, and everybody’s happy. But then, somebody at Langley’s talking to somebody at State about how perestroika is stuck, and the nomenklatura are getting itchy because Gorby is cutting off their caviar, and suddenly, everyone’s scared shitless there’ll be a coup. So, with the reformers’ blessing, we take the initiative. We target some of the real assholes in the army, the Foreign Ministry, the KGB, and set them up for a sting. We’re paying off these guys in return for some valuable pieces from the museums. We’re taping the transactions, tracing their deposits into foreign accounts, and pretty soon, we have enough evidence to send some important commies to Siberia for treason. It would have gotten some of the real hard-liners out of the way. Then, all of a sudden, way more art is coming out of the country than we need to hold the top Reds’ feet to the fire.”

“Yagamata,” I murmured.

“You got it. Stuff starts turning up in private collections in Japan, and KGB agents there get word back to their masters in Moscow. So our cover is blown, and-”

“Gorbachev gets a short vacation in the Crimea, all expenses paid by the guys who got caught.”

Foley finally looked at me. “Lassiter, you’re not as dumb as you look.”

I didn’t tell him I’d had a Finnish tutor. “But the coup fails, and you go into business for yourself with Yagamata.”

“Wrong! I spoke too soon. Just listen. After those bozos fuck it up-hey, they let Lesley Stahl interview Yeltsin when Parliament was surrounded-everybody at State is so happy they’re walking around with hard-ons. If you know anything about history, you know that when the Russians are unified-no matter what form their government takes-their neighbors aren’t going to get any sleep. It’s in the West’s interest to break down the Union into individual republics with no strong central authority. What the hell does Estonia have in common with Tadzhikistan, anyway?”

I didn’t know, but Foley wasn’t looking for an answer. “The trick, Lassiter, was to separate the republics from central authority without fostering civil war. It wouldn’t do to have the Russian army in Georgia tossing nuclear warheads at rebel troops in Azerbaijan. We have to support the reformers, the nationalists in each of the key republics. They don’t need tanks and mortars. They need food for their people. Central planning kept the country from feeding itself. Jesus, you wouldn’t believe the inefficiency and corruption. There’s a city on the Volga called Astrakhan. The biggest industry is fishing-huge sturgeon from the river, excel lent caviar. But you couldn’t even buy a stinking herring in the city. The central planners ordered it all to be shipped elsewhere.’’

Below us, the orchestra was tuning up. The strings and the horns seemed to be at war with each other. “So send them foreign aid,” I said. “Send them some of our surplus wheat.”

“Not that simple. Who gets to distribute it, the old incompetent bureaucrats or the new incompetent bureaucrats? And how will they pay for it? They have no hard currency.”

“Gold,” I suggested. “They have stockpiles. I’ve read about it.”

“ Had. A few years ago, their reserves were probably thirty-five hundred tons. If they have two hundred tons left, it’d be news to us.”

“Where’d it go?”

“Some was traded for credit with the West, some for dollars and pounds and marks that ended up in Swiss accounts of Party bigwigs. Hey, we’ll never know. The last two Party treasurers, Pavlov and Kruchina, threw themselves out windows before anybody could ask them questions. Lassiter, the fact is, their goddamn country is broke. So what’s our government to do? Give them easy credit? Forget it, might as well give the money away, but that’d never fly in Washington.”

I was beginning to understand, but I didn’t know if it was true. How could you tell with Foley? I said, “So instead of going through diplomatic channels, our government supports a bunch of burglars, just like Watergate, only on a bigger scale. You borrowed Yagamata’s idea. You steal the Russians’ art, sell it to Japanese and German collectors, and use the money to send Wheaties back to Moscow. Is that what you’re telling me? Instead of arms for hostages, art for wheat?”

The lights were beginning to dim, and the music came up. Foley chuckled. “An oversimplification, and I would object to your characterizing us as burglars. Russian officials with the appropriate credentials authorize the sale of the art. We can be considered legitimate brokers. Look, Lassiter, we’re not bad guys. We’re doing the reformers a favor. We’re feeding their people and keeping them in power. Of course, it’s all surreptitious, and we spread some dollars around, but that’s a cost of doing business with the Russians, always has been. Under the communists, everyone who could swing it was vzyatka, on the take. Why should it change now? Besides, it suits our purposes.”

“What purposes?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. But he didn’t have to. I was catching on. “You’re doing the same thing again, aren’t you?”

Still, he was silent.

“Do the new bureaucrats in the republics know you’re setting them up, too? Do they know you’re wired when they make the deals?”

“What we do is in the American national interest. We have bought a certain amount of loyalty there, and we take precautions to assure that our friends stay that way.”

The curtain went up, and on the stage, some European peasants in a colorful village were dancing up a storm. “You’ve bought the whole country,” I said, “just like you used to do in Latin America and Africa and Asia and anyplace else that was for sale. You’ve turned the Soviet Union into just another banana republic.”

From behind us, a loud “Shuush!” I turned around and smiled at a large woman who was slicing a salami and wagging her finger at me.

On the stage, a guy in a brown vest and tights seemed to have a thing for a pretty village woman in a blue dress. “So what went wrong?” I whispered.

“Yagamata got greedy.”

“Again! Why were you still using him?”

“All was forgiven. As it turned out, the coup attempt was the best thing that could have happened for us. So Yagamata was sort of an inadvertent hero, and we needed him as the middleman for the Japanese buyers. But the bastard wasn’t satisfied with his broker’s commission, and with the country in chaos, he smelled an opportunity. He started skimming the artwork, making his own deals with the Russians for unauthorized pieces, selling to collectors who are security risks.”

“But you’re helping him! I heard you back in Yagamata’s warehouse.”

Foley dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I had to find out what he was up to if I was going to stop him. Now that the operation’s been canceled, my job is to terminate the transfers by any means possible and get the stuff back to Russia before any more damage is done.”

I was trying to watch the ballet and listen to Foley at the same time. After a while, I figured that the guy in the brown vest was really a nobleman traveling incognito. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell the village gal that he was engaged to a babe dressed in scarlet with a feather in her hat. The fiancee made quite an entrance, what with the blaring of horns and the approach of the hunters. At the same time, the nobleman had some competition from a local guy, a dude in Philadelphia Eagles green. While they were debating who gets the girl by doing some agility drills and pointing their lingers gracefully at each other, Foley leaned close. “Do you have any idea how much money is involved?”

“I’ve heard a billion dollars tossed around.”

He snickered under his breath. “A couple years ago, some amateurs walked into the Gardner Museum in Boston and used knives to slash a bunch of paintings out of their frames. They left behind Titian’s Rape of Europa and the best works of the Italian Renaissance. But they got Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee and some other first-rate work. It was a lousy thirty-minute heist. It was worth two hundred million.”

I let out a short whistle, and behind me, the large woman smacked my head with her forearm, or was it her salami?

“Peanuts, Lassiter. The Hermitage has hundreds of rooms, each more valuable than the entire Gardner collection. Add to that all the other museums in all the republics and figure what I’m talking about. Even with a discount if they glut the market, figure ten billion, twenty, nobody knows.”

On the stage, the scam was up. The brown-vested nobleman had left his fingerprints-actually his coat-of-arms-on a royal sword. The village girl didn’t care for the deception or the nobleman’s fiancee, so she committed hara-kiri with the sword. It made me think of Yagamata.

“What’s Yagamata want?” I asked Foley.

“Everything! He’s stripping the damn country bare. He makes Robert Vesco look like a shoplifter at K mart.”

The curtain fell, and the lights were coming up. “Halftime,” I said. “Let’s get a hot dog and a beer.”

W e had arrived at the theater early. I had stationed myself at an angle to the main entrance with Foley standing in front of me, his back to the door. It was supposed to look as if we were in deep conversation. In reality, I had a clear view over his shoulder of everyone entering the theater, while I was barely noticeable. I stood there in my striped pants and shiny black shoes, my strangling collar, my eyes darting back and forth looking for the stocky Russian.

We stood there, talking about the Dolphins, the Heat, and the new baseball team, the Marlins. Foley told me it was hard to keep up with sports, as he’d been stationed in Panama, Grenada, Managua, Guantanamo, and more recently Helsinki in preparation for Operation Riptide. I looked at him closely, the creased face, the stony eyes behind the rimless glasses. About forty-seven, forty-eight maybe. “I figure you were in the military during Vietnam,” I said.

“You can call me Major Foley, except Foley isn’t the name, of course. But you’re right. Army intelligence. I had a couple dozen VC working for me out in the bush. Troop movements, enemy strength, that sort of thing. Know what my cover was?”

“Stand-up comedian?”

“World Health Organization gynecologist. Really. I wanted to be a dentist, but we didn’t have the tools. Someone in the Saigon station came up with a whole set of OB-GYN tools, or at least enough for me to keep in the pocket of my smock. You know, you could take somebody’s eye out with the speculum.”

“Don’t tell me you delivered babies.”

“Nah. I’d do a cursory exam, nothing I hadn’t seen before, then let the nurse figure the rest out. When we moved the operation to Pleiku, I ran a whorehouse. Built a secure room for interrogations and made a profit for the Company.”

As I listened, my eyes scanned the sidewalk. I watched as the locals queued up, tickets in hand. I was looking for a brush-cut, husky Russian partial to brown suits. I didn’t see him. The patrons were turned out in what Granny Lassiter would call their Sunday best. On opening night, many of the locals wore their formal duds. Others, the trendy Miami Beach crowd, favored black leather, or black capes, or black silk. It didn’t seem to matter as long as the color was black. The Russians, many of whom worked in the new restaurants and clubs, were freshly scrubbed but not as flashy. I studied the crowd pushing toward the theater. No Kharchenko.

“Was it true what you said back at Nikki’s place?” Foley asked, as we kept up the patter.

“About what?”

“Your father was killed when you were a kid.”

“Yeah. I was raised by my Granny. She taught me how to fish, drink, and curse. Went up north on a football scholarship, saw mountains and snow the first time in central Pennsylvania, then made the Dolphins as a free agent. Hung on as a second-stringer and special teams player for a few years before I got into night law school.”

“My father was killed in Korea,” Foley said, his voice trailing off. “All I ever wanted to do was serve my country. Never thought I’d be breaking and entering museums. There he was fighting the communists, and here I am buying them off. At least they used to be communists. It’s getting confusing out there.” He moved closer to me. “You know what they do when you graduate from spy school?”

“Spy school?”

“Well, Foreign Studies School.”

“Give you a cyanide pill to put in the heel of your shoe,” I guessed.

“They hand you a diploma, just like getting your B.S. in phys ed, or whatever you studied…”

“Theater.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Except when you walk off the stage, you give it back. An agent takes all the diplomas, puts them in a trash can, and they burn them all. We are anonymous workers for democracy and our way of life, Lassiter. We’re the goddamned last best hope for mankind.”

I would sleep better knowing that.

I ntermission,” Foley told me, as the lights came up. “Not halftime. A theater major should know that.”

I knew. We continued our reconnaissance starting at the snack bar at the rear of the mezzanine. An attendant was selling little bottles of champagne and cellophane-wrapped shrimp cocktails. I followed the line of patrons to the end. No Kharchenko. Maybe if they sold borscht …

“We should try downstairs,” I said.

Foley’s face was screwed up in secret spy thoughts. “In Russia, Kharchenko was one of the verkhushka. He’d get special treatment.”

“So what?”

“He would never have come in the front door. Even now, some Ruskies are more equal than others.” He grabbed my arm and motioned me back toward our seats. “On a foreign tour, he would have gotten his tickets from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. He probably came in the stage entrance with the cast and crew. In Russia, he’d be in a reserved box. He would have made similar arrangements here.”

By the time we got to our seats, the orchestra was playing again. As the lights dimmed, Foley reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a pair of opera glasses. At least that’s what they looked like. He adjusted the focus, pushed a button, and handed them to me. Then he gestured with his head in the direction of the boxes at the mezzanine level to the right of the stage.

Below us, the curtain had opened, and the dead lady was in her grave, wearing white. I raised the binoculars and looked into the darkened boxes. Wow! Infrared. Power plus acuity. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me. A weasel-faced man had his hand on the bosom of a well-endowed woman. Two men snoozed in the next box, their wives chatting away, oblivious to the stage. Nearby, a skinny woman sipped greedily from a champagne glass. An empty seat came next, then a thick-necked man in a brown suit. I looked closer. A white bandage covered one eye, and his face looked as if a cat had dragged its claws across his cheek.

Bingo!

I handed the binoculars to Foley and gave him directions. He nodded and took a look.

“Stankevich!” he exclaimed.

“Gesundheit,” I replied.

Foley didn’t thank me. He withdrew a small camera from his other coat pocket. He screwed a telephoto lens into place, aimed, focused, and clicked off half a dozen shots at a slow shutter speed.

Below us, as the music swelled, the lady’s girlfriends, looking like angels in white, swirled around and raised her from the grave. Foley said, “When he was the number three KGB goon in Afghanistan, his name was Boris Stankevich. C’mon, let’s go.”

“Now?”

“Now.” Foley stood and motioned me to do the same. “Wherever he’s going, we’re following, and I don’t want to be stuck here when it’s over.”

“Damn, the show’s just getting interesting.”

The angels had tossed one of the guys into the lake and were after another one. I reluctantly stood and started down the aisle, tromping on toes, drawing curses in guttural Russian. Sure, I wanted to follow Kharchenko. But I wanted to stick around until the end, or at least until I figured out which one was Giselle.