[Jake Lassiter 03.0] False Dawn

by Paul Levine

  Kharchenko.

  He got a hand under my chin, and shoved me off. I collided with Eva-Lisa, who lost her footing on the sweat-soaked floor and slipped to one knee, crying out in pain or surprise, I couldn’t tell which. I was just getting my feet planted, ready to throw a punch, when I saw the hatchet.

  In the incandescent glow of the reflected moonlight and orange flames, the blade glinted with lustrous sparks. It moved in a downward arc toward my head. I dodged to the left, and it missed. I thought of Vladimir Smorodinsky playing tag with a grappling hook.

  Before Kharchenko could bring the hatchet up again, I came at him, shoulders square, knees pumping, ready to wrap him up and bring him down. I was never fast, but my form was always right out of the diagram. It should have been an easy tackle.

  The sauna was the size of a condo closet. There was nowhere for him to go, but he slipped to the side, turning gracefully as I charged. I still had a chance, one of my arms catching him by the shoulder. But I had no leverage, and my hand was slick with sweat, so I went past him, my shin banging the bench as I crashed into the wall headfirst.

  Little black dots floated across my eyeballs. Behind me, I heard a scream. I turned and saw Eva-Lisa grinding a hot lava stone into Kharchenko’s face. She had used the mat to pick it up, and her face was contorted, the heat searing her hands, even through the thick cloth. Kharchenko’s eyes were closed, his mouth frozen in agony, the stone crushed against his cheekbone.

  But he never dropped the hatchet.

  A crazy thought. Thinking about Charlie Riggs just then in the split second that I had to react. Almost as if I weren’t there, just watching these demented strangers trying to kill each other. I wanted to ask Charlie how a man blinded by pain could still hold a weapon. Charlie would probably tell me something about the synapses and neurons and the involuntary nervous system, and maybe even a prehistoric survival instinct that affects muscular reflexes.

  My own reflexes were fine. I lunged for Kharchenko, reaching toward the hand that held the hatchet by the short wooden handle. I caught him by a thick wrist. He tried to shake me off. My other hand went above his on the handle. That gave me two hands to his one on the hatchet, which meant he had a hand free. I discovered this when he hooked me in the ribs with his left. I held on, jerking at the hatchet, nearly tugging it free until his left hand arrived with reinforcements.

  We stood there, our four hands covering the length of the short handle, like kids choosing sides with a baseball bat. We each used the strength in our legs to get leverage. I was taller and maybe heavier, but he was powerful, and had a low center of gravity like a noseguard. I was pushing the hatchet toward his neck, leaning close, smelling the scorched skin of his face when he lifted a leg and brought his shoe down on my bare instep. I howled, lost my grip, and looked up to see the blade coming in a roundhouse right aimed at my chest. I jumped back, flattening against a wall, and it smashed the pine wall, sending chips flying. He yanked the hatchet out of the wall and came for me again.

  This time, Eva-Lisa grabbed him from behind, raking his face with her nails from over his shoulders. It slowed him down but left her midsection exposed, and he whirled effortlessly on his toes, the hatchet held at his hip, blade up. I lunged for his wrist, but missed. His fist was an uppercut filled with steel. The blade caught her just below the navel, dug in and caught. He had two hands on the handle and brought it up, tearing through her stomach and diaphragm, rupturing the aorta, snapping the sternum, embedding in her chest. Bending his knees, using the strength in his back and legs, his hands still on the handle, he lifted her off the floor. Then he spun and tossed her at me, a blond rag doll gushing red. I slipped to the floor wrapped in a jumble of limbs, and fell, face-first, into a puddle of warm blood. I was vaguely aware that the door had opened, and he was gone.

  I lay there a long moment before standing up, holding her lifeless body, pulling the blade from her chest. Blood spurted from the wound, spraying onto the rocks. Steam rose from the hot stones, pink and sticky sweet. I carried her out of the sauna and into the anteroom. I turned on the shower, letting the cold water cleanse her. I put her body on a wooden bench and covered it with a towel. Then I sat there, letting the water pour over me, silent and alone, just before dawn on the longest day of the year.

  19

  CHERRY BLOSSOM IN THE SNOW

  I called Charlie Riggs from a pay phone on Hypoluxo Road just east of the entrance to 1-95.

  I had only said hello when he asked, “What’s wrong, Jake?”

  “Can’t talk now. I need some help.”

  How many times had I used those words over the years? But it was always true. Whether I needed Charlie to solve a dilemma in a case or to sort out my personal life, he was always there for me. Like I should have been there for Francisco Crespo.

  When he was younger, Charlie used to ride the graveyard shift with homicide detectives. As a result, he knows the county like a mapmaker. He knows how to find Avocado Drive in Homestead and Satinwood on Key Biscayne. If you ask him to meet you on Anastasia Avenue, he’ll know it runs along the Biltmore Golf Course in Coral Gables. He knows Sedonia Road from Segovia Street, Paradiso Place from Paradelo Court. So, he was the one to ask about the place of the fish.

  “Now if it was a bird, there’s the Flamingo Hotel, the Pelican Place Apartments, and of course, the Meadowlark Motel,” he said.

  “Fish, Charlie.”

  I heard his friendly growl over the line. It meant he was thinking. “There’s Snapper Creek Apartments, but that’s out in Kendall, and all long-term rental,” Charlie said. “Fish, fish, what else can there be? Can’t imagine a hotel named after a grunt or hogfish. I do remember a Hotel Pompano in Surfside, but that burned down in fifty-seven.”

  “C’mon, Charlie, this is important.”

  “Fish,” he repeated. “I recall a dismembered body once at a place in South Beach. There was a marlin mounted in the lobby. Now what the heck was the name?” He thought about it some more. “The Blue Marlin. Rough place, even the palmetto bugs carried guns. Can’t say I’d want to stay there.”

  “Maybe you would,” I said, “if you didn’t want anybody to find you.”

  I got back into Eva-Lisa’s Saab and headed south on the expressway. Squeezed into one of Reino Haavikko’s diplomatic gray suits, I felt as anonymous as Robert Foley. In Miami, I took the flyover to the MacArthur Causeway where I got stuck at the drawbridge while a wooden sloop used its motor to put-put through. When the bridge came down, I headed toward South Beach, looking for Nikolai Smorodinsky.

  Hoping Kharchenko hadn’t found him first.

  ***

  The morning sun was playing hide-and-seek with heavy rain clouds, and the clouds were winning. A light sprinkle gave the causeway a silvery glow.

  Which made me think of St. Petersburg. Just as in Helsinki, it never got dark there this time of year. What was the name for it?

  I couldn’t remember. My brain was fuzzy from the endless night. I fought to keep my eyes open as I swung south on Alton Road south of Fifth Street. I yawned. I must have been operating on adrenaline and strong coffee ever since . . .

  I pushed it away again. My mind was slogging through the muck of a dozen haphazard thoughts, struggling to think of anything but . . .

  Try not thinking of a brick wall.

  Eva-Lisa.

  I had tried to push her out of my mind. She was still there, of course, tucked away in one of the dark corners, the sensations of heat and fear, the smell of the hot, sticky blood.

  Now, on the way to deliver hideous news to a man about his brother and his lover, I thought about it all. I tried to summon the right emotions. They wouldn’t come.

  Just dead, dumb numbness.

  It hadn’t registered yet, watching a woman gutted in front of me, seeing the life ooze out of her. I had been there, had tried to stop it, and had come up short.

  But had I tried to save her or me? I didn’t know. I just did what comes naturally: I hit somebody. But
when it counted, I missed, and a young woman was dead. I hardly knew her, but she was flesh and blood and brains and possessed of the great conceit of the young—an imagined immunity from harm. She had played a very rough game with some characters with too much to lose. Characters who found her expendable. She was one of the courageous, idealistic breed, risking all for her lover and her country. In the end, neither returned the favor.

  As usual, I hadn’t called the police. What could they have done, besides detain me for questioning and foul everything up? “You say the killer was a Russian who shot your friend?”

  I could see their cynical cop faces. The locals would call Miami, and who knows? Maybe Foley already had Socolow dancing to the tune that I killed Crespo. Palm Beach County would fight Dade County to see who would provide me room and board.

  White Nights. That was it. The phrase came to me through the haze in my skull.

  White Nights. It was a movie with Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was a Russian defector who ended up back in the U.S.S.R. after a plane crash, and he had to dance his way out. Something like that.

  My mind was dancing, too, playing a game of free association. Names and faces kept popping into my head. Charlie Riggs. Thanks for the help, you old coot, but it’s up to me now.

  Lourdes Soto. Her beautiful liquid eyes. The way she wheeled that forklift around, she could have killed me if she wanted to.

  Robert Foley. Where do you fit into this? Whose side are you on?

  Kharchenko. I have tasted the blood you spilled. We will meet again.

  ***

  The Blue Marlin Apartment Hotel was jammed between Commerce Street and an alley in a dingy neighborhood of South Beach that has yet to see the benefits of either restoration or redevelopment. In earlier times, it would have had a flashing neon sign with a couple of missing letters. Now that neon is trendy, it just has a painted sign that once could have been blue, but that was before years of sun and salt-laden air blanched it. A few blocks away is prime oceanfront real estate. Here, where a kid with a strong pitching arm could hit the cruise ships plowing through Government Cut, the neighborhood is a mini-ghetto of recent Russian immigrants sharing a few run-down buildings with Cuban Marielitos.

  To say the Blue Marlin was drab would be to exaggerate its charm. The building was a three-story brownish square box with not enough paint left on its hide to be considered peeling. Rusty air conditioners poked out of windows like boils on an unwashed back, oozing moisture and noise. A stuffed blue marlin minus its sword hung cockeyed in the lobby. There was a darkened staircase to the second floor and a single elevator that didn’t work, or so said a hand-lettered sign in English, Spanish, and what I took to be Russian, Cyrillic characters and all.

  A sallow-complexioned man of perhaps sixty sat in a blue haze of cigarette smoke behind a scarred counter. He wore a stained white T-shirt and was drinking what smelled like cheap whiskey from a Styrofoam cup. The clamor of a baseball game squawked from a black-and-white portable television on the counter. I asked him about Nikolai Smorodinsky. He squinted at me through the smoke, stared at my suit coat that wouldn’t button, and hacked up a wad of phlegm.

  “Friggin’ Russkies, who can tell one name from another?” A southern accent, Tennessee maybe. He spit into a metal waste can. “All commies and spicks here, never seen nothing like it. They sign the book, I cain’t even read it, and I read good. Spick writes down ‘Jose Delgado Diaz,’ somebody comes asking for Señor Delgado, I say he ain’t here. An hour later, Jose comes down from his room, all pissed off, but I figure it ain’t my fault they cain’t tell their daddies from their whore mommas. The Russkies, they just bark at you and go up to their rooms.”

  “I’m looking for a Russian man named Smorodinsky,” I repeated. “Maybe thirty. He would have checked in today.”

  “Couple of hours ago, one of ‘em came in.”

  I waited.

  “Talks English as good as you. Looks like a gypsy, but he’s a Russky. Room two-twelve.”

  He was hacking again as I made my way to the darkened staircase. There were three steps to a landing. I felt along a wall, found a light switch, and flipped it on. A bulb of maybe twenty watts went on overhead, and a slow ticking started. There was graffiti scrawled on the wall, Manuel boasting about his conquest of Rosa. I listened to the wail of a radio, one of the Spanish-language music stations.

  Somewhere overhead, two children were squabbling with an astonishing command of four-letter words. The light went out. It must have been on a thirty-second timer. By then, you should have completed your business. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, pushed another button, and was granted another half-minute of light. I climbed more stairs, finally emerging through a splintered door on the third floor.

  Here there was the smell of disintegrating plaster and steaming cabbage. Voices, two men, two women, who may have been playing cards. I headed toward a door at the end of the corridor.

  I knocked three times before getting a response. It sounded like a question, the voice deep and melodious, the words foreign.

  “My name is Jake Lassiter. I’m here to see Nikolai.”

  Nothing.

  “It’s about Yagamata.”

  “Do you work for him?” The words flowed easily and seemed to carry, like an actor on stage.

  “No.”

  “Whom do you work for?”

  I didn’t know whom.

  After a moment, I said to the door: “No one.” It sounded like a lie, even to me.

  “Did Yagamata send you?”

  “No. Eva-Lisa sent me. It’s about your brother. It’s about Vladimir.”

  I heard a bolt slide, a chilly sound like the action on a Mauser thirty-ought-six. The door opened with a squeal, and I was looking into the face of an olive-skinned man in his early thirties. Nikolai Smorodinsky looked nothing like the corpse I had seen in the morgue. Unlike his brother, he had prominent cheekbones, a black mustache, and long, almost feminine eyelashes. He wore a black linen shirt open at the collar and regarded me suspiciously with piercing dark eyes. He had a strong neck and was wiry beneath the oversize shirt.

  “Please come in.” He extended an arm in a graceful motion to smooth my entry and held the door for me. He didn’t move back to let me in. I had to scoot in sideways, and as I did, the arm that had welcomed me so graciously swung around hard, driving a fist deep into my stomach. It was a right hook, and a helluva sucker punch. My gut was relaxed when it hit. I doubled over, gagging, and he grabbed a handful of my shaggy hair and yanked me to the floor. Then he spun behind me, dropped a knee into the small of my back, and pinned one of my arms against my spine in a half nelson. He had one hand against the back of my head and was using it to grind my nose into a hardwood floor that stank of oil.

  “Who are you?” He yanked my wrist higher, locking the half nelson even tighter. He was strong. “What’s happened to my brother?”

  I had a feeling that the truth could break my arm. “Let me go. I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Where is he? Why hasn’t he contacted me?”

  I was kissing the greasy floor and my shoulder was just about to pop out of its socket. Through the pain, I pictured Vladimir Smorodinsky on a cold metal tray.

  “He’s dead,” I said, my teeth scraping the wooden slats, a trickle of blood oozing from my lip.

  After a moment, Nikolai released the pressure on my arm, took the knee out of my back, and stood. I rolled over and rubbed the back of my shoulder.

  “Are you certain of what you say?” he asked.

  I remembered the young assistant M.E. tugging out Vladimir’s intestines, hand over hand. “I’m sure.”

  He let out a sigh and buried his head in his hands. “I knew. I just knew.” Then he looked back at me, his eyes asking the question.

  “I’m a lawyer. I represented the man accused of killing your brother. But my client didn’t do it. Yagamata had your brother killed, and I think you know why.”

  Nikolai studied me but didn’t say a
word. “Yagamata said something to me after your brother was killed, something about Vladimir being a patriot true to his principles. Too much so. That’s what he said, that your brother was too much the patriot.” Nikolai was nodding, taking in every word. “Vladimir was trying to stop Yagamata, wasn’t he?”

  Nikolai extended a hand, offering to pull me up. I’d had enough of his neighborly gestures. I got to my feet all by my lonesome. He gestured toward an opening. The kitchen. A narrow passageway with an ancient stove, a waist-high refrigerator, and against a wall, a wooden table with three chairs. I sank into one of the chairs. There was blood on my face, and my shoulder throbbed.

  Nikolai stood over me. He didn’t answer my question. “My brother loved the Hermitage,” he said finally. “Have you ever seen it?”

  “I’ve never been to Russia,” I admitted.

  “The Winter Palace of the Czars, more than a thousand rooms in just one of the buildings, all filled with irreplaceable art. Think of the magnitude of it.”

  I remembered what Yagamata had told me. Three million artifacts. How do they even keep track of it all? Or was that his point?

  “The czars could build great monuments,” Nikolai said, “but could not feed the peasants. Not much different from the communists or our new democrats, eh?”

  “The art,” I said, licking my torn lip. “That’s why Vladimir was killed. When he figured out what really was going on, who was getting the money, how much of your national heritage was being stolen, he wanted to stop it, and so did—”

  I never heard the footsteps in the hall. The voice came from behind me. “As usual, Lassiter, you’re half right.”

  I whirled around, nearly falling out of the chair. Standing there in his gray suit and white shirt, black tie knotted at the neck, was Robert Foley. He looked like a man who would rather be anyplace else. “But it’s the other half,” Foley said, “that’ll get you killed.”