[Jake Lassiter 03.0] False Dawn

by Paul Levine

  Charlie Riggs was as close as I had ever come to having a father, and my look must have betrayed some of the feelings I usually tucked deep inside, because he turned away and slid the glasses back down. Charlie limited his emotions to a healthy academic inquiry, and it wouldn’t do to give him a hug and get misty-eyed over personal feelings. But the truth for me was simple. I loved my Granny who raised me after my father was killed and my mom took off, and I loved Charlie who taught me just about everything worth knowing.

  Clearing his throat, Charlie adjusted the reading lamp, tilting the shade so that the light shined directly on a slightly musty copy of the book, French Paintings from the Hermitage. If I didn’t get anything else from the book, I could bench press it a few times and have a healthy workout.

  “Don’t you have the Cliffs Notes version?” I pleaded.

  “Read,” the doctor ordered.

  I groaned, stood up, did a few spinal twists and some deep knee-bends, then dropped to the floor, and just to get the blood flowing, powered through twenty-five one-armed push-ups with each arm. Except for my breathing, I didn’t make any noise, so the librarian didn’t say boo.

  Then I sat down, groaned again, and opened the book. I’d already gone through directories of the Pushkin Museum, the State Picture Gallery, the Museum of Modern Western Art, the Gorky Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, and the Petrodvorets Palace. I had seen gloomy paintings of ships on a stormy sea by a Dutch artist, some dead birds entitled Trophies of the Hunt by an artist from Flanders, which must be a place I missed in geography, more virgins with child than I could count, and some fine Italian noble ladies with graceful necks and melancholy pusses.

  I studied portraits of generals from the War of 1812, handsome bemedaled chaps with generous mustaches and muttonchops. I looked at Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, but couldn’t remember it fifteen minutes later. I saw The Madonna and Child by da Vinci and listened to a fine lecture by Charlie Riggs on the High Renaissance style.

  “Doesn’t the Madonna’s tender gaze reflect the humanist dreams of the ideal man and a harmonious life?” he queried.

  “Took the words out of my mouth,” I agreed.

  Now I was looking at a bunch of stuff by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, but I still didn’t find the painting I was looking for.

  “What style was it?” Charlie asked for the umpteenth time. “Try to describe it more completely.”

  “Green.”

  “Green?”

  “Like a lawn. And two figures, a man with large hands about to grab a nude woman. That’s all I remember. The faces were not well defined, sort of crude. Like I told you, Soto was going to say more about it, the name of the painter maybe, but Lourdes stopped him.”

  I was leafing through some haystacks by Monet, some ripe women by Degas, some

  still-lifes by Cezanne, and a bunch of Tahitians by Gauguin. Still, no husky guy about to pounce.

  I stretched my arms over my head, intertwined the fingers of each hand, and cracked my knuckles with the clatter of a cue ball on a break. “Damn, I’m tired,” I announced, a tad too loud, and a young woman in a ponytail working at a nearby carrel gave me a grad student’s indignant glare.

  Charlie didn’t notice. He was gazing into the stacks, his eyes unfocused. “The ugliness of murder and the beauty of art.” He sighed.

  “What?”

  “The irony, Jake, that the clue to man’s brutality may be buried in such works of beauty.” He pointed his empty pipe at the pile of books. “When I see all this, my first thought is how far we’ve come. Five million years ago, our ancestors were tree-dwelling apes in tropical rain forests. The strongest males ruled by either killing or banishing their rivals. When the climate cooled, the apes came out of the trees, stood erect, and foraged for food, mostly seeds. Still, the largest and fiercest controlled the others by force. Another two million years or so later, the climate cooled again, and the australopithecines developed. They were meat eaters, and despite their evolution and loose society, they were still violent toward one another.”

  I wasn’t sure where Charlie was going, but between his discussion of hungry apes and images of Cezanne’s fruit platters, I realized my stomach was growling. “I’m sure there’s a point to this, Charlie.”

  “They are the forebears of our genus, Homo. They developed into man.”

  Charlie withdrew a packet of cherry-flavored tobacco from a

  buttoned shirt pocket and tamped a wad into the bowl of his pipe. “We’ve come so far as a species,” he said. “We’ve built bridges and machines that fly out of the solar system. We compress a billion bits of information onto an infinitesimal wafer. We produce ageless works of beauty, such as you see before you, and yet …”

  I was starting to catch on. “We still kill each other. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Charlie?”

  My old friend didn’t say a word, so I must have gotten it right. I thought about Vladimir Smorodinsky and Francisco Crespo, two men descended—like all of us—from Charlie’s tree-dwelling apes. I thought of Francisco’s body lying face up, bound and bloodied, on the bed. I was the one to tell his mother, hold her as her knees gave out, sit with her as she cried, and listen all night as she remembered Francisco as a niño in Cuba, when the air was still sweet with future promise.

  “Can you find who did this to my son?” she had begged me.

  I told her the truth. I didn’t know, but I could try. I showed her the gold rabbit. She had never seen it before.

  Now I thought of Smorodinsky, too. Somewhere, did he have a mother crying in the night? Or a brother. What was it Matsuo Yagamata had said? Something about Smorodinsky’s brother being well versed in Russian art. And Severo Soto knew something, too. He told me the two brothers ran Yagamata’s St. Petersburg operation.

  Only he had used the old name, Leningrad. An operation that had to do with art. Then Soto proudly showed me a painting his daughter didn’t want to talk about.

  Which is why we were in a library looking at pretty pictures.

  Because you have to start somewhere.

  “Do you think, Charlie, that your line of work has made you cynical?”

  “Why? Because I have concluded that evolution of our species stopped somewhere short of true civilization?”

  “That, for one thing.”

  Charlie Riggs produced an old-fashioned wooden match maybe six inches long and flicked it with a brown thumbnail. The tip burst into a flame of red phosphorous, and Charlie lowered it into the bowl of his pipe, while drawing air through the stem. Nearby, the grad student raised her head and squinted at us from above the top of her carrel, a turtle peeking out of its shell.

  “Really!” she whisper-shouted. “You’re not allowed—”

  “The smoking ordinance doesn’t apply to him,” counseled the lawyer who lurks inside of me. “He’s grandfathered in.”

  Charlie exhaled a cloud of sweet tobacco and said, “We kill, and like the apes, not only for food. We kill our own kind. We kill for greed and anger and lust. Five million years of evolution, and the beast is still within us.”

  “C’mon, Charlie. Don’t be such a curmudgeon. Enjoy what we have. Life’s too short.”

  He smiled and jabbed at me with the bowl of his pipe. “Hippocrates said it first,” he told me.

  “Said what?”

  “Ars longa, vita brevis. Then Longfellow picked up the expression.” Charlie dropped his voice into a deep rhythmic chant:

  “‘Art is long, and time is fleeting,

  And our hearts, though stout and brave,

  Still, like muffled drums, are beating

  Funeral marches to the grave.’”

  I was just about to applaud when a shadow crossed the table.

  “I’m going to report the both of you,” the grad student hissed at the county-approved decibel level. “Talking and smoking! Why don’t you go to a tavern?”

  “Excellent idea,” I agreed.

  She huffed off, cl
utching a book to her breasts, and Charlie puffed on, oblivious, still thinking about homicidal apes and the brevity of life, I supposed.

  “Hey, Charlie. We can’t solve mankind’s problems. Let’s just figure out who murdered Francisco Crespo.”

  The old wizard’s eyes cleared. “Cui bono? Who stands to gain?”

  “Somebody who couldn’t let him reveal who ran that forklift through Smorodinsky, and why.”

  “And what is there that links Crespo and Smorodinsky?”

  I walked through it. “Both men worked for Yagamata, a guy who likes Russia and collects priceless art. Or maybe steals it. Crespo attacked Smorodinsky, but somebody else finished him off. Somebody killed Crespo using a fairly ridiculous Russian method of silencing the gunshot. A lady P.I. with black hair and molten eyes offers her help and her body without the usual preliminaries . . .”

  Charlie raised his bushy eyebrows.

  “The P.I.’s father is Severo Soto, who also employed Crespo and once did business with Yagamata and happens to be a Russia-hater. So Crespo is linked to both Yagamata and Soto.”

  Charlie beamed. When a student passes his oral exams, the teacher is pleased. “What conclusions have you reached?”

  “None yet. You’re the one who taught me not to jump too fast. The wise man keeps his trap shut, et cetera, et cetera.”

  He nodded happily, and I kept thumbing through the book of French paintings when I stopped at two naked men on a lawn. The same green, the same muscular build with few facial characteristics. The men were rolling balls across the grass. “Charlie, there’s something about this one. It’s the same artist, I’m sure.”

  “A Game of Bowls by Henri Matisse,” he said. “Part of the French collection at the Hermitage.”

  I scanned the next few pages. Some nudes, a red room, a blue tablecloth, a bouquet of bright flowers. All by Matisse. And then there it was. The man, oversize hands extended, reaching toward the naked woman who tried, futilely, to crawl away.

  “Satyr and Nymph,” Charlie Riggs said, studying the page.

  “Russia and Cuba,” I told him.

  ***

  Charlie ordered his hog snapper broiled and well done. I chose yellowtail sautéed with a mess of onions and green peppers. We were at Tugboat Willie’s on the Rickenbacker Causeway, halfway between the city and Key Biscayne. The fish was fresh, the beer cold, and a breeze riffled the palm trees as we sat on the front porch, the sun a forest fire setting in the west.

  “We could tell Socolow,” I suggested weakly, hoping Charlie would veto the idea.

  “Tell him what?”

  “What we know from our research.”

  “Which is what?”

  I had drained my first beer and was working on the second. “The artwork, Charlie. Matsuo Yagamata shows off a gold choo-choo train inside an egg that’s supposed to be in a Moscow museum. It’s millions, based on the sale of the Pine Cone Egg in Geneva a couple of years ago, and the train is funkier. Then there’s Severo Soto, one of our town’s most famed anticommunists. He keeps a priceless painting by Matisse in his study. Only problem, the painting is owned by the Russians and, last time anyone checked, it was in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Francisco Crespo, whose idea of jewelry is a Timex watch, dies holding a miniature gold rabbit, which you say was made by the same artist who made Yagamata’s egg—”

  “Carl Fabergé.”

  “And was worn as a pendant by an empress …”

  I reached for one of the books Charlie had checked out of the library. He had marked the page. There was a photo of a small gold bunny holding an egg made of flecked aventurine. It was an Easter gift to Empress Alexandra in 1913. I was convinced that Crespo was not the empress’s distant cousin to whom the bunny would have passed.

  “So what does it all mean to you?” Charlie asked patiently.

  “It’s confusing. All this Russia stuff. Two men dead. Famous art popping up all over. I don’t know. It doesn’t add up.”

  Charlie sipped at a glass of wine. For the occasion, he had chosen something white, light, and French, believing, I supposed, that Matisse had joined us at the table. Between sips, he dug into his dried-out fish and asked, “Who’s in charge of the Crespo investigation?”

  “Socolow. You know that.”

  “Then, who was the gentleman in the trailer to whom Socolow showed such deference?”

  I love Charlie, but he can be a pain. Never comes right out and tells you anything. Always a bunch of questions, dragging it out of you. “I don’t know. He gave me his card.” I fumbled inside my wallet and found it. “Foley. He’s from out of town.”

  Charlie raised his chin, scratched his beard, and peered at me through the bottoms of his bifocals. I answered the question that wasn’t asked. “You’re right. We ought to find out who he is.”

  Tugboat Willie’s is not the kind of place to whip out a cellular phone at your table. It would interfere with the banjo music and peg you as an insufferable yuppie. I got up from the table, skillfully avoided two stray cats that hang around the porch, and made my way to the pay phone by the kitchen. I was greeted by steamy garlic smells and the clatter of pans. I studied the card again. Printed, not embossed. Black ink on white paper. Nothing fancy:

  ROBERT T. FOLEY (703) 482-1100

  It was after six o’clock. If it was an office, I might get the answering service. I dialed the number, putting the charge on a credit card. Where the hell was 703 anyway?

  “Good evening,” the sweet-voiced lady said. “Central Intelligence Agency.”

  14

  THE RABBIT JUMPED OVER THE MOON

  I spent all day Monday interviewing new clients, but my heart wasn’t in it. Some lawyers are great at bringing in business. Schmoozers and self-promoters, they are our rainmakers. They have an ability to terrify and mollify clients in the same conversation. First, in somber tones, they magnify the gravity of the harm if expert legal counsel is not immediately retained in this most complex and perilous of legal matters. Then they confidently explain how Harman & Fox recently extricated another wretched soul from a similar predicament, and for a small fortune, could work the miracle once again.

  A good lawyer is part con man, part priest—promising riches, threatening hell. The rainmakers are the best paid among us and have coined a remarkably candid phrase: We eat what we kill. Hey, they don’t call us sharks for our ability to swim.

  Bringing in business is not my strong suit. I have a small network of jailbirds, hospital interns, and bail bondsmen who send cases my way, but generally, I work for the firm’s clients. Like Atlantic Seaboard Warehouse and the legal problems therein. This morning, though, I was making a halfhearted attempt to build my own practice. Joaquin Evangelista, an ex-client who took a fall for grand larceny—parrot theft—had referred a young couple to me about a civil suit. A nice favor from a guy who was doing time, but Joaquin didn’t blame me for losing the case.

  After putting my virtuous client on the stand to swear that he’d never seen any cockamamie cockatoo, the prosecutor brought the bird into the courtroom for rebuttal. “Hello, Joaquin Evangelista,” the feathered witness announced brightly.

  Today I was staring out the window at a foamy three-foot chop curling across the reef at Virginia Key and pretending to take notes as Sheldon and Marilyn Berger told me they wanted to sue their rabbi. Sheldon owned a pet store, which probably explained how he knew Evangelista, who called himself an aviary consultant, rather than a bird thief. Sheldon was in his early thirties and had dark hair in that trendy short, brush look. He wore cordovan loafers with no socks, white slacks, a polo shirt, and a blue sport coat. Marilyn Berger, his bride of seven weeks, had streaked blond hair done in the wrinkled look. She let a cigarette dangle from the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t remind me of Lauren Bacall. I watched the cigarette flap up and down as she told me the story. As I listened, I drew two stick figures, a man and a woman, on my yellow pad.

  “The schlepp was an hour and a quarter late for the wed
ding,” Marilyn explained. “It was sooo embarrassing. I mean all our friends were just wondering, like was Shelly getting cold feet.”

  “I was getting drunk,” Sheldon said with a sly smile.

  “So were half the guests,” his bride chimed in. “Daddy calculated that, at the prices the country club charged, the rabbi cost us an extra five hundred twelve dollars in liquor.”

  “Plus the band’s overtime,” Sheldon reminded her.

  “Of course, darling.” She patted his arm as you might a puppy. “The band had to stay an hour longer. Another three fifty.”

  I drew a picture of a Beretta nine-millimeter semiautomatic. “Why was the rabbi late?”

  Marilyn leaned forward in her chair as if to share a secret. “He says we told him two o’clock, but I know we said one, because I told Sheldon to tell him one. If you ask me, the rabbi had another wedding at one. He just stacked us up, like the gynecologist.”

  I managed to draw fifteen miniature bullets streaking from the gun barrel toward the man and woman. “Anything else?” I asked. “Any other damages besides the liquor bill and the band?”

  Marilyn looked at Sheldon and exhaled a gray stream of smoke into his face. “Well, of course, it gave me a case of stress and severe mental anguish,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said sympathetically.

  Marilyn leaned toward me again. “I’ve read that stress can cause everything from wrinkles to bad breath.”

  “You don’t have wrinkles,” I said.

  Sheldon was fidgeting, crossing and uncrossing his legs. “It practically ruined the honeymoon.”

  “Cancun,” Marilyn said.

  I scribbled some more, drawing sombreros on each of the bullet-riddled stick figures. “Did you get off?” I asked Marilyn.

  “What?”

  “Your wedding night? Didja come?”

  The color drained from her face. Her mouth dropped open. The cigarette stuck to her lower lip. Bright red lipstick covered the top of the filter.

  “I see this as a lost consortium case,” I announced gravely. “Now, if you couldn’t get off on your wedding night, or if Shelly here was so bummed out he couldn’t get it up, I see some big bucks.”