by Paul Levine
“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. The 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.
***
We 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 Fabergé 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. Vladimir 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.”
She tossed the vaihtaa onto the floor.
I thought I saw a shadow pass by the small window. When I looked up, it was gone. The clouds had scudded away, and pearly moonlight streamed through the window. “Why did you get involved?”
“Just like Nikki, I was fooled in the beginning. I had no idea of the scope of the operation. Now, everything is out of control. It will come out, the thefts, the deception. There is a proverb: ‘In Russia, everything is a secret, but nothing is a mystery.’ The people are used to official corruption, but nothing like this. Selling their birthright, disowning the motherland, treason at the highest levels, the continued pillaging under the reformers. The Russians take such pride in their art, even when their cupboards are bare. When this story breaks, with the new freedom of the press and expression in the Soviet Union, what do you think will happen?”
“People will be pissed,” I guessed.
“Complete anarchy. Maybe not if everything else was stable. But it will be fueled by the economic crisis, by the reality that democratic reforms do not make life luxurious, that a change of government does not automatically eradicate corruption. There will be violence. The army will attempt to crack down, but it will not work. My father estimates desertions will run between thirty and forty percent. The borders will be opened, and the cork will be out of the bottle. Fifty percent of the population will try to flee to the west, untold numbers into Finland. Moscow itself is less than eight hundred kilometers from Helsinki. Imagine the consequences. Millions of impoverished Russians will overwhelm us. Many will want to travel to the U.S. or Israel or who knows where. But they will have no money, no prospects. The first ports of call will be the last for so many. Finland is a small country. Only five million people, fewer than in the city of St. Petersburg. Already, with the easing of the visa laws, we have criminals coming from Estonia. They smuggle everything from vodka to Kalashnikovs on the black market. Estonian prostitutes fill our streets on the weekends. But that is nothing compared to what is coming. We will drown in the dregs from the east.”
She stood up, and rivulets of sweat trickled between her breasts and down over her flat stomach. Outside the window, the bay again had turned to a black silk sheet, clouds covering the moon, before flitting by, leaving the calm water drenched in ivory light. It was impossible to determine the time. Sometime between midnight and dawn. I was exhausted from the tension of the last forty-eight hours, from the scorching heat, from the growing knowledge that this was more complex than anything I had imagined. I leaned back against the wooden wall of the sauna, closed my eyes, and let my mind wander.
***
I remembered a lazy night in a Boston Whaler, anchored beneath one of the bridges in the Keys, drinking bourbon and fishing all night with Charlie Riggs. Just before five A.M., the eastern horizon lit up with what I thought was a new day.
“Sun rises early down here,” I had told Charlie.
He laughed. “Just zodiacal light, my boy.”
“Huh?”
Charlie bet me twenty bucks it would be pitch black again before the sun came up. Of course, I took him on, and a few minutes later, it was so dark I couldn’t see if I was handing him Andrew Jackson or Ben Franklin.
“False dawn,” Charlie said, pocketing the money.
“Say what?”
“The orange glow you saw to the east. Particles of meteors reflecting the light of the sun that hasn’t risen yet. It’s called false dawn.”
Charlie said some more about the gegenschein, or counter-glow, and something about the F-
corona of the sun, but I forget it now. What I remember is Charlie spouting one of his Latin expressions, something about non teneas aurwn something-or-other, which he translated as “all that glitters is not gold.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked him.
“The first light is not always the dawn, Jake. Often it’s the reflection of something not really there at all.”
***
I stood and left an outline of sweat on the bench. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me for the plight of your country in all of this. You’re part of it, you’re responsible—”
“Until today. I gave Kharchenko a letter to take to Yagamata. It’s my resignation.”
“Your what?”
“You heard me. As you Americans say, ‘I quit.’”
“Look, I don’t know anything about this, but it doesn’t sound to me like you’ve got a Civil Service job that you can just—”
“It is a concern, surely, especially in view of what happened to Vlad. I know far too much. But Yagamata understands that my family is too highly placed to attempt anything that could risk his operation. Yagamata is a cautious man and a brilliant one. I am counting on that. As for Kharchenko, he is actually quite fond of me. He asked me to accompany him to the ballet tomorrow night.”
Kharchenko at the ballet? It didn’t quite compute. Eva-Lisa seemed to be reading my mind. “Like most Russians, Kharchenko loves his culture,” she said.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make him civilized. Maybe it’s my imagination, but you seem as if you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re not in danger.”
She shrugged her naked shoulders. She looked so vulnerable, standing with arms folded beneath her full breasts, slick with sweat. I took a step toward her, the floorboards squeaking under my feet. I put my arms around her, and she closed her eyes and rested her head on my chest. The floorboards squeaked again, which was strange because neither of us was moving. She cocked her head toward the door, eyes open and suddenly fearful. I started to ask something when the door burst open, a blast of light behind a bulky figure, framing him in silhouette.
I pivoted instinctively and went for him, ducking below a raised arm and slamming a shoulder into his chest. It drove him into the wall, which shuddered, and we stood there, jammed against each other. He snarled something guttural I didn’t understand, and I looked him straight in the eye.
