False Dawn

21

The street was dark, the pavement potted with craters. Overhead, a jet whined on final approach to Miami International Airport. It was an area of warehouses, loading docks, freight-forwarding companies, and import-export firms servicing Latin America. In the middle of the night, the buildings were dark as tombs, locked and shuttered.

We looked for a warehouse painted army green with a sign that said simply, Inter-American Casket Company. Maybe the name was Kharchenko’s little joke. Was he burying communism here, or merely discouraging thieves? Foley drove the Plymouth with Yagamata in back and a dog-tired me riding shotgun. Without a shotgun. Foley kept swinging the car over the curb, shining his headlights on the darkened buildings. Finally, he spotted something, hit the brakes, and killed the lights.

Foley was out of the car first, running his hands over a corrugated metal door secured by a padlock. That was it. No guards, no alarm system. Just a padlock I wouldn’t trust to keep my Schwinn from being kidnapped at Bayfront Park.

Foley opened his trunk and dug out a flashlight and tire iron. He popped the padlock, and I pulled up on the handle. The door rumbled open, and a blast of cool air hit us. Pitch black. From somewhere inside, the whirr of a massive air-conditioning system.

Foley shone a flashlight on the wall, found a switch, and hit it. Overhead, bright lights blinked on, blinding me. I jumped when I heard the sound behind me, but it was only Foley closing the door.

Along one wall were wooden cartons of various sizes, sheets of Styrofoam packing material, rolls of twine and brown wrapping paper. Lettering in Spanish indicated the cartons contained Peruvian pottery. Some of the cartons were already filled, others open and empty. Waiting.

The rest of the warehouse was a jumble of colors and textures, gilt and glitter. It was filled from floor to thirty-foot ceiling with gold and silver, paintings and artifacts, statues and coins, icons and gems of all descriptions. The treasure spilled out of boxes and overflowed onto the floor, in cartons, on the walls, and on makeshift tables made of sawhorses and plywood. A czar’s ransom in riches.

“One of my favorites,” Yagamata said, pointing at a painting. “Cezanne’s Lady in Blue.” He stepped closer and spoke to it. “Why are you so sad, pretty lady? Don’t you want to return to the homeland?”

“How many trucks will it take?” Foley asked.

Yagamata ignored him. He was studying a painting of dusky-skinned women eating fruit by a lake. “ Sacred Spring. Gauguin offered it for sale in Paris, and no one would buy it, not for twenty francs. Foley, have you ever been to Tahiti, or is there too little mendacity there to interest you?” He chuckled and walked slowly along a table where paintings lay scattered like brilliant playing cards. “Perhaps this is more to your liking.” He gestured to an oil painting of dead, bloodied birds, surrounded by riding gear. “ Trophies of the Hunt by Hamilton. On the other hand, for my taste, there is nothing lovelier than a full-bodied nude.” He pointed again, this time to a dim, greenish painting of a woman toweling off a bare, ample hip. “ After the Bath, by Degas. Contrast that, for example, with Three Women by Picasso.”

Foley looked at the Picasso dispassionately. “I like my babes a little rounder,” he said. “I’ll take the Degas.”

Yes, you will, I thought.

Yagamata roamed across the warehouse, touching this and that, talking mostly to himself. “Look what the fools have done. They’ve mixed the French with the Russians. Malevich’s Flower Girl next to Matisse, and Goncharova’s Laundresses, about to be packed with a Chagall.” He clucked his disapproval and moved on. “Foley, do you know what Khrushchev said the first time he saw the avant-garde art of the modern Russian painters? That was thirty years ago, and there was the tiniest breeze of liberalization blowing through Moscow. At an exhibition in the Manezh, the czars’ old riding school, Khrushchev spat at the paintings. ‘Dog shit,’ he called them. ‘A donkey could do better with its tail.’ Ah, how long ago it seems. The dark ages. Do you know that Gorbachev was the Russians’ first leader since Lenin to have a university education? A lawyer by training.”

“I’ll bet Gorby never watched a chicken autopsied in a courtroom,” I said.

Yagamata looked puzzled. “Perhaps not, but he and Yeltsin carved up the bear, didn’t they?” His laugh seemed full of regret. “I shall miss my trips there. I could spend a month just touring the Hermitage and never grow tired.”

“Then you decided to bring it all here,” Foley said.

“Yes, I think I did, without quite knowing it.” Yagamata stopped in front of a small painting propped against a metal rack. A woman in a red-and-blue robe stared with adoration at a naked baby in her arms. “Da Vinci’s Madontia with Child, one of his early works. Do you sense that the perspective is off, the child far too large?”

Foley grunted. He seemed to be taking inventory. Yagamata moved on, and we followed him through the cavernous room. On the floor, jewelry filled a huge, dark pot. Emerald bracelets, diamond pins, gold cuff links and chains, pearl buttons, ruby brooches jumbled together. “What is more valuable,” Yagamata asked himself, “all these trinkets or Tamburlaine’s bronze cauldron which holds them?”

Yagamata stooped to study the writing on a box. “ Tauride Venus, Russia’s first classical statue. A gift from the Pope to Peter the Great. The Hermitage alone has twelve thousand sculptures and a million coins. Do you know I still get lost there? I never enter the buildings without a compass. Foley, even if we tried, none of us could live long enough to steal it all.”

Nearby were half a dozen other sculptures not yet boxed.

Yagamata ran his hand over the smooth white stone of one, a man and woman embracing. “Rodin’s Romeo and Juliet. Frankly, I prefer his Cupid and Psyche. Ah, there it is.”

He walked past the statues and picked up a solid gold dinner plate from a long table. The plate was on a stack with perhaps twenty others. Boxes of gleaming flatware sat under the table. “From the banquet hall at Petrodvorets, the White Dining Room. Gold dinnerware to serve four hundred.”

Stacked on a wooden platform was a variety of jewelry. Lockets of enamel and gold, a clock of different colored golds, a desk set of rock crystal. Small animals carved from agate, others shaped from nephrite and silver. Pendants and necklaces, rings, and pins, filling boxes three feet deep.

And then the eggs.

Inside a glass egg, a rider on a horse. Yagamata saw my expression. “Faberge’s Alexander the Third Equestrian Egg,” he said. “Nice, but compare it to the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg made the next year to celebrate Nicholas’s accession. Here’s the Madonna-Lily Egg and the Winter Egg, which everyone thought was lost during the Revolution. Good Lord, Foley, have you ever seen such beauty?”

Foley was still measuring the room with his eyes. “Eight trailers should do it. Maybe nine. C’mon, let’s go. This ain’t a museum tour.”

T he trucks were from a rental company, arranged for by Foley. I asked him why he didn’t use the U.S. Marshal’s Service, but he waved me off. The workers belonged to Yagamata. Some Russians, some Cubans, they were tight-lipped, dull-eyed, sullen-faced men who moved as if they were paid by the hour. There was little bantering, and the only bellyaching I heard was when Yagamata ordered one man to put out his cigarette.

The packing took most of the day and into the night. When it was done, the cartons filled eight trailers and part of a ninth. I stood there watching everything boarded and boxed, thinking about the nobility who commissioned the priceless cache, and about the peasants on whose backs the nobility walked. I wondered about the fate of these inanimate objects, given more value than that of human life. How many peasants died so the Romanovs could enjoy their gilded eggs and diamond-crusted snuff boxes? How many more would die even now to protect the art, or to steal it?

I thought of Smorodinsky, Crespo, and Eva-Lisa. And Kharchenko. He was dead, too. I took part, at least by omission. I was-how would Abe Socolow characterize it? — a coconspirator. I had stood silently and watched Foley kill the man, brutally and efficiently. I could have stopped him, but I didn’t.

Didn’t even try.

And now I thought about it. I wasn’t repulsed by the horror of it. I was fascinated by the cool, competent administration of pain by someone good at the job. It occurred to me then that Foley enjoyed the task. His creased face became flushed, his eyes hot behind the glasses. Yagamata had turned away from the coldblooded torture and murder, trying to lose himself in the artwork hanging on the gallery wall. But I watched, my pulse quickening, and now I knew that, like Foley, I enjoyed it, too.

I pushed the thought aside and remembered how it all began. Francisco Crespo. My debt was not repaid, never would be. But someday I would tell Emilia Crespo that the man who murdered her son was dead, and had died hard. What did it say about my character that the thought gave me a warm glow of pleasure?

Knowledge of self is a precious commodity, dearer than the finest gemstone. The mirror I held before me now was not laced with gold filigree. It was cold and flat and bared every shadow on my soul.

No, Foley, I didn’t stop you. I merely watched in feigned horror, and now I have only one regret. I wish I had killed the bastard myself.

I t was after midnight when Foley and I got into the cab of the lead truck with a driver who had not recently encountered deodorant soap. Foley was flipping through a folder of papers, reviewing the inventory, smiling to himself. The driver had a hard time clanking from first gear into second, but he finally got it after several Spanish curses and a tug-of-war with the shift. We rolled off into the night to points unknown.

I was just about to ask Foley where we were headed when he told the driver to pull over and pointed toward a Plymouth sedan sitting at the curb near the intersection of LeJeune Road and the Airport Expressway. The driver tugged at the wheel, the truck’s brakes squealing in protest.

“The keys are under the mat,” Foley said. “You’re outta here.”

I started to protest, but he hushed me. “It’s gonna get dangerous from here on out.”

“Really, what’s it been up to now, a day at the beach?”

“Lassiter, you’ve done a good job, better than I would have thought. But you’ve already seen and heard too much. You don’t have security clearance for this. Leave the rest to the Company. Go back to your torts and contracts.”

“Where are you going?”

He put a finger to his lips. “State secret. Hey, almost forgot. Yagamata wanted you to have this.” He reached into his coat pocket and handed me something metallic. I held it up to the light of an oncoming car.

“Opera glasses,” I said. They were heavy. I looked closer. Solid yellow gold with what looked like white gold lacework.

“Belonged to Czar Nick. Matsuo thinks they’ll help you see the truth. Go ahead. Take a look.”

When I hesitated, he laughed. “Go on. It doesn’t give you a black eye, and there aren’t any girly pictures inside.”

I held up the solid gold binoculars and looked at the waiting car in the glare of our headlights. Nothing but a blur. “I can’t see a thing. They don’t work.”

“How about that?” Foley said. “Isn’t that just like old Mother Russia?”