False Dawn

7

I parked the old convertible under a bonsai banyan tree that had been there a lot longer than any of us and would be there long after we are gone. When the top is down on the 442, I avoid Spanish olive trees. Same for bottlebrush and a few others whose leaves, seeds, and blossoms leave stains on the ancient upholstery. Only trouble I ever had with a banyan was when a green iguana dropped from a branch as I was tooling south on Old Cutler Road. It didn’t bother me, but the young lady into whose lap it fell-a humorless lass whose idea of getting close to nature was suntanning topless on her condo balcony-refused to see me again.

Lourdes Soto lived in an old section of Coral Gables just off Alhambra Circle. It was once a neighborhood of grand homes in the Mediterranean Revival style, full of columns and courtyards, Spanish tile and loggias. Many of the houses have been razed and modern concrete creations erected in their place. Oddly, though, the postmodern trendy architects are borrowing from the older Florida styles. Curved eyebrows above windows and doors are derived from the Art Deco hotels and apartment buildings of South Beach. Arches are distinctively Mediterranean. The sloping roofs with steep overhangs and deep porches recall the old Florida cracker houses of the 1800s. So the old neighborhood is a hodgepodge of styles, some combined in the same house.

Next to the Soto home, workmen were putting finishing touches on one of the new models. It was designed by a young Argentinian architect. I knew this because of the tasteful sign with his name, address, and phone number plus a history of his obscure design awards, all indicating he’d be ever so willing to perform the same feats of mishmash postmodern tropical-Deco neurotic construction on your lot, if you were so inclined. Other signs adorned the front yard, fastened there on stakes driven into the fresh sod. The grass, as well as the bougainvillea, coco plum, and sweet acacia, were courtesy of Manuel Diaz Landscaping. Burglars were kept away by Advanced Security. Bugs were gassed by Truly Nolen Fumigation, and the pool was cleaned by Sparkling Waters, Inc. While I learned all this, a black Labrador retriever was relieving himself on the mailbox post. The dog was apparently not part of the marketing plan; at least, he didn’t have a sign.

The Sotos lived in one of the few remaining Spanish-style villas. By the time I rapped twice on the double doors of Dade County pine, Lourdes was there. She was wearing a baggy white T-shirt and chocolate-colored twill slacks with a web belt and lots of pockets. The brown velvet eyes seemed to warm up at the sight of me. She touched a finger to her forehead, adjusting the bangs of her jet black hair the way women do when they’re taking their own inventory while in the presence of a man.

Instead of inviting me in, she guided me around back on a path of pink terrazzo. We were nicely shaded by a loggia of Roman arches, Spanish tile, and wood-beamed ceiling. We emerged in a courtyard with a tinkling fountain, molded columns with pockmarked stucco, and a rose garden surrounded by jasmine hedges.

A small, wiry man sat in a turquoise wrought-iron chair at a matching table covered with papers, clipboards, and ledgers. He wore a white guayabera and had thick black hair swept straight back and a bushy black mustache. He held a fountain pen in his left hand. There wasn’t another hand. The right arm ended in a stump just inside the guayabera sleeve. The left arm was heavily veined with a ragged scar just below the elbow. An unlit cigar was clamped into his teeth. He was weathered around the eyes, his face comfortably creased and lived in.

“Papi, this is Mr. Lassiter,” Lourdes said.

The man nodded but didn’t stand up. He placed the pen carefully into a white marble holder, and extended his left hand. I shook it awkwardly with my right. “Mr. Soto, I’ve heard a lot about you.” It was true. A folk hero to the Cuban refugees, Severo Soto’s fame had spread through the Anglo community as well.

Soto released my hand, nodded, and removed the cigar. “I understand Francisco Crespo has finally killed someone. Not that it surprises me.”

So much for a character witness.

“He’s accused of murder,” I said, taking a seat opposite him. “Lourdes tells me he once worked for Soto Shipping Company.”

The dark eyes locked on mine. “Some years ago, in the freight-forwarding division. It is all in there.”

The voice was remarkably free of an accent. He gestured toward a manila folder. I riffled through some meaningless payroll records and company medical exams. Lourdes Soto had teased me with the concept of inside information. In the week since we first met, she had given me three written reports that didn’t tell me anything new. If she had something useful, she was keeping it to herself. At the same time, she plied me with questions about my progress and strategy. I told her everything I knew, which was nothing, other than my suspicion that Crespo wasn’t nearly as guilty as he claimed to be.

“Could Crespo have been involved in any anticommunist groups?” I asked.

“Crespo is a peasant,” Severo Soto said, “too young to remember Cuba antes de Fidel.”

“Did he have any political leanings?”

“Of course, he was against the comunista s. But was he active? Not that I am aware.”

Lourdes placed a hand on her father’s forearm. “The man he killed-”

“-Allegedly killed,” I reminded them. We all know about the presumption of innocence; we just don’t believe it.

“-was Vladimir Smorodinsky.”

Soto raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word.

“You knew him,” I said.

“A Russian who worked for Yagamata. We have met.”

“Yagamata apparently got him an exit visa.”

Soto nodded. “Yagamata could do that. He has made much money with the Russians. He would do business with the devil if the price was right.”

“He did business with you,” I said evenly.

Soto took a moment to consider whether I had intended el insulto, or whether I was just clumsy at conversation. His eyes were placid. After what he had endured, he had all the time in the world. “ Lo hecho, hecho esta. What’s done is done. I did not realize that the man’s only principles were in his wallet. Claro, I did business with him. We had, Lourdes, what was it, not a partnership, an adventure?”

“Joint venture,” she helped out.

“We shipped cargo for him from Helsinki to Miami. It was supposed to be Finnish wood products, textiles, furniture.”

“But it turned out to be smuggled Russian artifacts,” I chimed in.

Soto appraised me. Who was it who said I wasn’t as dumb as I looked?

“I do not make a habit of speaking of these things to strangers.” Severo Soto looked toward his daughter.

“It’s all right, Papi. My loyalty is to Mr. Lassiter.”

That was news to me, but I nodded my approval.

“I have spent years building the reputation of my firm,” Soto said. “My honor as a businessman is paramount. My relationship with customs, all my import licenses were jeopardized by Yagamata.”

“How?”

“It took me a while to understand just what he was doing. He began his dealings while there was a Soviet Union, prospered through Gorbachev’s perestroika, and now continues with the Commonwealth under Yeltsin. Principles don’t matter. Not when the almighty dollar is your god. With a wrecked economy and political turmoil, his business thrives. Chaos and conflict are honey and wine to Yagamata.”

I waited for him to continue. Sometimes silence is the best question. Overhead, a meadowlark was singing its spring song. I hoped Severo Soto would keep talking.

“He had an entire network inside Russia,” Soto said finally.

“Museum curators, bureaucrats, customs officials, members of various ministries and the Supreme Soviet. Hardliners, reformers, it didn’t seem to matter. For hard currency, his contacts would have dismantled the Kremlin and sold it by the brick.”

“And Smorodinsky?”

“His aprendiz de todo.”

“Jack of all trades,” Lourdes translated.

“Yagamata didn’t tell you Smorodinsky was just a laborer, did he?” Soto asked me.

“No. He said the Russian was a man of culture and a patriot.”

Soto allowed himself a humorless laugh. “Smorodinsky and his brother ran Yagamata’s Leningrad operation. Artifacts would be gathered from all over the Soviet Union and stored in safe houses they arranged. Then somehow-and this was their genius-they managed to ship the goods in small boats from Leningrad across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki. It is not, I assure you, like sailing from Miami to Bimini. How they were able to bribe enough officials to avoid capture by the police, the military, and the KGB is something that always baffled me. Even with Yagamata’s contacts, it was still an impressive feat.”

A wooden door creaked open and a short, swarthy woman in a colorful print dress appeared, carrying a tray that held a silver pot and three espresso glasses.

“Then why bring him here? What good could a Russian do at this end of the operation?”

Soto shrugged. “That is for you and my daughter to determine, though I don’t know what it has to do with your client killing… allegedly killing the man.”

“It might help explain why Yagamata seems willing to have an innocent man convicted of the murder,” I said.

The woman left her tray, and Lourdes poured the hot, syrupy drink for each of us.

“About that, I have no idea,” Soto said.

While the sugar and caffeine were jump-starting my dead batteries, Severo Soto told me about his business and his life. It was a story I already knew. When they were both students, Soto and Fidel Castro were friends with similar ideals. Together, they plotted the doomed July 26, 1953, attack on eastern Cuba’s Moncada Barracks. Soto spent two years in prison, but it did not shake his will. Again he joined Castro and they stood side by side during the revolution, until he became disenchanted with Castro’s brand of socialism. “I did not plan for my country to be the bastard child of the Russians,” he told me.

He commandeered a Cuban patrol vessel and fled to Key West and then to Miami, where he became a major in Brigade 2506 and returned to Cuba, landing on the beach at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The betrayal and cowardice of the United States had stranded him and his men without air support. His friends died around him, bleeding into the sand. He was wounded, captured, imprisoned, and tortured by Castro’s matones. “I did not see the sun for three years,” he said. “The only sound was a high-frequency wail broadcast into my cell twenty-four hours a day at a volume that broke both my eardrums. They gave me comunista propaganda, which I tore up and ate and gave back to them as mierda.”

Lourdes’s mother didn’t know if her husband was dead or alive. Then one day Severo Soto was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter, drifting north on a raft of inner tubes in the Gulf Stream due east of the Fontainebleau Hotel. It had taken four years to claw and chew through a limestone wall in his cell. His teeth were reduced to nubs, but he clambered through an eighteen-inch hole and made his way to the sea.

When Soto showed up again on Calle Ocho, Lourdes was five years old and did not know her father. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Before long, Soto was gone again, leading Alpha 66 on its fools’ mission to stir up an anti-Castro rebellion. Captured in the Escambray mountains with grenades and automatic weapons, he was again imprisoned, the most famous of the plantados, the political prisoners.

When he was finally released and joined his family a final time in Miami, Soto was a legendary hero in Little Havana. Cuban millionaires, burdened by their guilt and awed by Soto’s steely determination, set him up in the shipping industry. With business funneled his way, it did not take long for him to prosper.

“You know the stories of our exilado s,” he told me. “The lawyers who spoke no English and began here pushing brooms in your banks…”

“Then ended up owning the banks,” I added.

He nodded. “The Cubans are an industrious people. But dreamers, too. We dream of a Cuba Libre.”

I didn’t think he meant a rum and Coke.

“Papi is president of the Cuban Freedom Foundation,” Lourdes said. I knew that from the newspaper. The Foundation was a middle-of-the-road organization, not as liberal as those dialogueros who would begin negotiations with Castro, not as fanatic as those Omega Sevens who would stick nitroglycerine in Fidel’s cigar if they could. “If Castro falls…” Lourdes caught her father’s sharp glance. “ When Castro falls, the Foundation will likely be installed as the first free government in Cuba. Since Papi is president of the Foundation…”

Soto dismissed the idea with a modest wave of his hand. “It will not be a position to be coveted, Mr. Lassiter. Cuba is in a state of complete economic collapse. The country faces what Fidel calls the zero option, now that the Russians can no longer furnish sufficient fuel and food. All consumer goods are rationed. So many of the industrious people have escaped the island, who is there left to rebuild? My friends all vow they will return. But will they? Like me, they are old men. And what of their children? Are they ready to forgo their shopping malls and their cable TV? I assure you, the president of a free Cuba will have his hands full.”

Soto sipped the rest of his cafe Cubano, then pushed his iron chair away from the iron table. When he stood, I figured it was time for me to go, but he didn’t seem in a hurry.

“I am proud of what I have accomplished here, Mr. Lassiter. And I will keep my vow to return to a free Cuba. But on my own terms and in my own way. The Cuba of my past is gone forever. The job of rebuilding will be a massive undertaking.”

“Our government will surely help,” I said.

He scowled. “We cannot base our recovery on American largesse. The politics are too uncertain. Who is to say who will control the White House and the Congress when the time comes? Who can forget the treachery at the Bay of Pigs? The Americans can never be counted on. They have allowed the butcher to remain in power for more than thirty years. We must be self-sufficient and prepare for every eventuality.”

With that he motioned toward the loggia and we began circling the house once again, this time with Soto leading the way. Before we turned the corner, he stopped and pointed to a small freestanding building in the shade of two live oak trees. At one time it would have been maid’s quarters. “Would you like to see my study?” he asked.

“Papi,” Lourdes moaned. “Mr. Lassiter is a busy man.”

Papi didn’t care. “Indulge an old man. I want to show your friend something of beauty besides my only daughter.”

The building was a one-story wooden box with pink Bahama shutters. Soto fished in his pocket and produced a key ring. It took three keys to unlock the door and a three-number combination to turn off the panel alarm inside the door.

Twelve, thirty-one, fifty-eight.

I don’t know why I watched him do that and immediately committed it to memory. Maybe it was something about the number. Or maybe I was a cat burglar in another life.

It was just one room, dark and cool. An old window air conditioner wheezed in the corner. A brown leather chair, its hide cracked, sat at a mahogany desk. A crystal decanter of cigars was perched on a matching credenza. The desk was cluttered with papers and photographs in brass frames. One was in black and white, a much younger Severo Soto and a slender, pale woman with full lips who had been kind enough to bequeath her complexion to her daughter. Next to it was a color shot of a teenage Lourdes in what looked like a prom dress. Her hair was longer, her smile innocent and hopeful.

“My quince party,” she said, catching me spying.

“Over here,” Soto said. He flipped on a light switch and pointed toward the wall facing the desk.

It was an oil painting of a nude man, practically featureless, bent over a nude woman on all fours, who was trying to crawl away. The man’s hands were large and grasping, the woman’s head bent in shame. The colors were vivid, the grass a deep green that seemed to stain the woman’s bare feet, the sea a rich blue. “Do you know much about art?”

No, I thought, but I’m learning. I shook my head.

“What does the painting say to you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s very powerful. Almost frightening in a way. I just don’t know enough to judge its quality.”

“It is a very well-known work, Mr. Lassiter. One of my favorites, in fact, by-”

“Papi!” Lourdes practically stomped her foot. “It is not like you presumir.”

“Forgive me. I am indiscreto, and I embarrass my daughter.” Severo Soto stared hard into the canvas. “What is important is the art itself, what it says, what we can learn from it. To me, the man in the painting is Russia. The woman is Cuba. And every day of my life, Mr. Lassiter, I force myself to watch what he is about to do.”