[Jake Lassiter 03.0] False Dawn

by Paul Levine

  “How about a Boy Scout merit badge and a thank-you note from Yeltsin?”

  Above us, the dancers had changed costumes. The same amount of legs, breasts, and buttocks were showing, but now the band was playing “The Girl from Ipanema.” A table of what looked like Saudi sheiks behind us was humming along.

  “I’m not greedy,” Foley said, “and this is standard procedure. Insurance companies pay off all the time to get back precious art. I deserve to be compensated. First, get my expenses covered. That includes your fee plus what it cost me to get the stuff here. Bribes, shipping, something for Castro for letting me in. Figure forty million.”

  I used a pen to make notes on a cocktail napkin. “Forty million for shipping and handling.”

  “So my services got to be worth two hundred million, don’t you think?”

  “You’re the client,” I said. “It’s your call.”

  “Two hundred million,” he repeated, weighing the words, one at a time. He seemed to like their heft. “So start playing lawyer, Lassiter. You know how to structure the deal?”

  Unlike a lot of Miami lawyers, I don’t specialize in money laundering. Still, I know the basics. “I’ll set up a Cayman Island trust with ownership controlled by a limited partnership on the Isle of Man. A Bahamian corporation can be the general partner, with you owning all the stock. The money will be wired to the trust, and you can make transfers from there to Switzerland or wherever you want to live.”

  “Good. Get to it. I’ve got clerical help, word processors, fax machines, everything you need. The art will be on a ship in international waters. I get the money on execution of the documents, at which time I’ll give them the coordinates, so they can take immediate delivery. Nobody tries to screw anybody, all on the up-and-up. Make sure the paperwork is airtight.”

  “It will be. A confidentiality agreement, because the last thing you want is publicity. A waiver of the government’s right to seek injunctions against transfer of the funds. No frozen accounts, no civil liability of any kind, and of course, complete immunity from criminal prosecution.”

  Foley studied me. “Can it be done?”

  “Sure, on paper at least.”

  His laugh had no pleasure in it. “This isn’t make-believe, Lassiter. This isn’t some cute trick like getting a judge to sign an attachment order. This is real. This is money and power, life and death. Take it seriously, pal. Take it damn seriously. Understood?”

  “If you’re looking for a guarantee, you need a new lawyer. I can draft the prettiest contract you’ve ever seen. All the words will be spelled right, and every copy countersigned in triplicate. But if your old buddies in Washington or Moscow want to put a bullet in your head on the ski slopes someday, I can’t stop them. Understood?”

  “Just get me the money, Lassiter, and I’ll take my chances.”

  On the stage, a comedian was finishing his act, drawing respectful applause. My Spanish was just good enough to understand the setup and miss the punch lines. I finished my beer. The comedian took his bows, and bullfight music began, a matador waving his red cape at a scantily clad woman who must have been the bull. Foley signaled the waiter for the check, and almost immediately the black-haired young woman reappeared, slinking between tables into the seat next to him. “So, Lassiter, you know what I want?”

  “Two hundred million,” I said, figuring that was the answer to the question: Just how much money does one man need?

  ***

  It has been agreed by the bureaucrats,” Severo Soto told me, his voice dripping with disgust. “Your government will give Foley his money and the Russians their art.”

  Funny how he always called it my government, always distanced himself. From the beginning, he had planned to return to his homeland, had never become an American citizen.

  “Everyone should be happy,” I said. “In a roundabout way, the plan succeeded. The thefts have been stopped, the reformers saved from embarrassment.”

  We stood on a street corner in Old Havana near the ornate Grand Theater. Soto was leery of talking business in the hotel room. Hundreds of men and women on Chinese bicycles streamed past, headed for work. A skinny teenage boy in torn sneakers approached us, offering to exchange pesos for American dollars at triple the exchange rate. I picked up a few one-peso notes as souvenirs and studied one of them. Beneath the inscription, Entrcida a la Habana 8 de Enero de 1959, Fidel Castro rode triumphantly atop a tank, surrounded by his soldiers. One of Fidel’s compatriots, a bearded warrior, held a flag and wore crisscrossing bandoliers. To me, he looked like a young Severo Soto.

  I said, “I thought the money might have been a problem.”

  “They would have paid even more. Money is unlimited to bury mistakes.”

  “Cheer up. Mission accomplished. Castro won’t get his hands on the billion dollars that could save his economy. You can wait for him to fall.”

  Soto pulled a cigar from his guayabera pocket. A Partagas corona. I had watched him buy a handful in the hotel lobby. Most exilados refuse to smoke them until Fidel is toppled.

  “I have been waiting more than thirty years. How long can a man wait?”

  For a moment, I thought he was reading my mind. But he was talking about Castro, not the cigars.

  Soto said, “Returning the art, restoring the status quo, does nothing to aid the just cause of the Cuban people. “

  I remembered what Foley told me at the ballet. Soto was the one who wanted to drive the nail into the coffin of communism. “Hey, be happy with a wash. It’s better than Castro getting all that loot.”

  We walked past the Floridita Restaurant where, Miami Cubans say, a bartender first mixed rum with lime juice and sugar. The sign above the entrance read, La Curia del Daiquiri. We passed old stucco apartment buildings pockmarked with age and neglect. We crossed a street of wooden bricks that had to be three centuries old. A jacaranda tree blooming with purple flowers gave us an umbrella of shade at a street corner. Best I could tell, no drug dealers lurked under the branches. From a courtyard not fifty yards off a main street, a bare-chested man was pulling a bucket of water from an underground cistern.

  An open truck stopped in front of one of the restaurants that cater to hard-currency tourists. Skinned pigs gleamed yellow in the sun; hundreds of flies buzzed over the carcasses.

  “The people have no meat, but La Bodeguita del Medio can feed the turistas all the pork they want.” Soto puffed on his cigar and blew aromatic white fumes in my direction. “Do you care for lunch?”

  I wasn’t feeling hungry just then.

  We had walked several more blocks when Soto said, “It is a crime to return the art.”

  Funny, I thought it was a crime to take it.

  “Do you know what we could do with the proceeds from just a fraction of the paintings and gemstones?” Soto asked.

  “You could give this city a coat of paint.”

  “I could equip an army, or I could feed the island for a year. I could build factories and roads and hospitals. Or I could make a revolutionary statement the world would never forget.”

  Now what did that mean?

  The old dreamer. An errand boy, his daughter called him. Burned out, Foley said. But Soto wasn’t reminiscing about past glories. He was looking to the future, and again he was carrying a gun. When he closed his eyes, he must have seen sugar cane workers abandoning the fields and streaming into the mountains, lean men in fatigues cleaning their weapons in a tropical downpour. He heard rifle bolts clicking into place, smelled cordite and gun oil, felt the tingle of quickened heartbeats.

  “Do you have a sense of irony?” Soto asked. He tossed his cigar into the street. “The art was the product of corruption. The Russian peasants starved so that the Romanovs could have diamond eggs. Is it not ironic that the handiwork of such evil could now be used for the benefit of the people?”

  “But it won’t be used at all. It’s going back to the museums. No more art for wheat. No more sting operations. Socolow got the word, remember. The U.S
. doesn’t want to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.”

  Soto barked a humorless laugh. “Sí, just as your government didn’t want to interfere in Guatemala in ‘54, but that didn’t stop the CIA from overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz. Just as you didn’t want to interfere in Panama in ‘64, but U.S. troops still killed a score of protesters, to say nothing of the illegal invasion of that sovereign country in 1989 in order to kidnap General Noriega. How far does American respect for sovereignty extend? Not to Libya, Cuba, or Iraq. I am sure Sukarno of Indonesia and Nkrumah of Ghana would have been surprised to learn that the U.S. doesn’t interfere in their internal affairs. What would Allende say if he were alive to say it?”

  Nobody ever called me a knee-jerk patriot, but all this America bashing was getting on my nerves. I was also beginning to wonder if coming back to Cuba had jarred a screw loose in the old man’s head. “I’m no expert on world affairs, but you’re leaving out a lot of the good. My government also gave you a job and a home and the freedom to say what you want. Frankly, I’m worried about your priorities down here.”

  Soto looked away, pretending to admire an old church. “I have said too much. Do not fear. I am a good soldier.”

  I knew that. I just didn’t know in whose army.

  26

  THE FIDELISTA

  We were on Agramonte Street nearing the Maximo Gomez monument when the driver stopped and pointed to his left. Severo Soto nodded, rolled down his window, and spat in the direction of a baroque palace of arches and columns. “The antiguo palacio Presidencial, decorated by Tiffany, occupied by the pig Batista. How unfortunate he did not die there rather than in his bed in Spain. Now, it’s the Museo de la Revolucion.”

  The driver headed out of Old Havana on the Malecon just as the sun was setting. Behind us, the city was bathed in a pink glow, softening the focus, concealing the decay. We were on Fifth Avenue, the broad tree-lined boulevard of foreign embassies, when Severo Soto spoke to the driver in Spanish, and we took a sharp left turn in front of the Presidente Hotel.

  The setting sun was at our back. My sense of direction told me we were headed away from the ocean. “The marina is to the west,” I said, “and we’re headed east.”

  “There is something I want to see before we do our business,” Soto replied.

  I had left Foley sitting at his table at the Tropicana roughly twenty hours earlier. Soto spent the day at the U.S. Interests Section, fiddling with a satellite up-link telephone, speaking in coded English to his superiors at Langley. He conveyed my messages and gave me theirs as we worked on details of the agreement.

  I already had prepared the first draft of the paperwork. An assistant attorney general made some revisions, then I made some more. Soto sent and received the documents by fax. Later we would meet with Foley, review the papers, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Just another day of lawyering, but somehow it didn’t feel the same as settling a slip-and-fall at the Porky Pig market.

  Had Foley really said ten million?

  The taxi pulled into a large square dominated by a huge obelisk. “The Plaza de la Revolucion,” Soto told me. “Formerly, Plaza Civica.”

  “Folks do a lot of name changing around here,” I said. “Maybe after Castro’s gone, they’ll change it all back. Like Leningrad to St. Petersburg. How about ‘Parque Soto’ in Old Havana?”

  “I never had such ambitions. It is enough for me to be a lieutenant in the eternal war for justice. “

  He stared at the monument, and something nagged at the back of my mind. What was it?

  Present tense.

  It is enough for me . . .

  Soto was still a soldier. “What war?” I asked.

  “Do you know nothing of history, the struggle against neocolonialism, fascism, and racism?”

  “That sounds like Castro’s rhetoric.”

  “Rhetoric? Is that what you call it?”

  “What now, are you going to defend the guy who put you in prison and threw away the key?”

  “I don’t condone his Stalinist repression of dissent, but I have never disagreed with his philosophy or principles. Have you ever listened to even one of his speeches to the Movement of Nonaligned Nations?”

  “No, I seldom have six hours to kill.”

  “His are the words of a giant who has prevailed against the concerted efforts of eight American presidents to overthrow him. Fidel has been shaped by Cuba’s tragic past, four hundred years of domination by the Spanish, fifty years by the Yankees.”

  “And now thirty years of glorious independence.”

  He looked toward a statue of the Cuban poet Jose Marti at the base of the spire. “You are being sarcastic, are you not?”

  “Yeah, in case you haven’t heard, Marxism is dead, but here you are, the number-one fan of the All-Pro commie dictator.”

  “I told you I can see Fidel’s faults, but—”

  “But he’s the lesser of two evils, right?”

  “Sí, compared to the imperialists—both American and Russian—Fidel is a santo, a saint. He believes in Cuba for Cubans, an independent country free of control by outsiders.”

  “I don’t believe this. All this time, I thought you wanted to overthrow Castro.”

  “My philosophy has been consistent for thirty-five years. Am I not entitled to my beliefs, my freedom of expression you Yankees always speak about?”

  But where does philosophy end and action begin, I wondered.

  Soto motioned for the driver to get moving. “We were the children of the centenary, Fidel Castro Ruz and I. In 1953—the one hundredth birthday of Jose Marti—we attacked the Moncada fortress in Santiago de Cuba. You should have seen Fidel then. Rugged, clear-eyed, full of purpose. Did you know he was a lawyer?”

  Just like Gorby and little old me. I wondered if the clear-eyed bearded one ever defended a condom-in-the-salad case.

  “The attack failed,” Soto said, “and we were both arrested. At the trial, Fidel gave a brilliant speech. He told the world, ‘History will absolve me.’” Soto pulled a Partagas from his guayabera pocket. He rolled the cigar under his nose but made no move to light it. “We were both imprisoned on Isla de Pinos, then exiled to Mexico. But we never gave up. We planned for a Cuba where every child could read and write and have doctors and nurses provided by the state, where we would get fair prices for the sugar and fair wages for the workers. We would burn the casinos and send the whore-mongering Yankees home. Eventually we sailed from Tuxpan on the Granma with eighty-two men. Eighty-two men to fight a war! Do you know what Castro said as the lines were cast off and we headed toward what I believed was certain death?”

  “Who brought the Dramamine?”

  Soto’s eyes were thirty-five years and hundreds of miles away. “‘If I set off, I arrive; if I arrive, I enter; if I enter, I win.’”

  “And he won.”

  “We won! Not that it was easy. Camping in the Sierra Maestra mountains, recruiting villagers for the rebel army. Fighting and running and fighting again until Batista fled like the coward he was, and eight days later, we rode triumphantly into Havana.”

  “And one dictatorship was replaced with another.”

  He shot me a look. “But the children can read, and there are doctors for all.”

  “And Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

  “Perhaps we should not speak of politics,” Severo Soto said, striking a match to his cigar, then puffing at it until an orange spark glowed at the tip. He exhaled a wisp of smoke toward the monument, and without turning to me said, “It is beautiful to behold, is it not?”

  “What, the statue?”

  “The art. You saw it, all gathered together.”

  I thought of the warehouse, the paintings and sculptures, the coins and jewels, the intricate eggs and ancient artifacts, the treasures of long-dead nobles and czars. I thought of the golden bunny in Crespo’s clenched fist. “Yes, I have seen it all.”

  Soto’s eyes glistened. “It is beautiful, is it not?”<
br />
  “It’s the stuff dreams are made of,” I said.

  ***

  Surrounded by Canadian yachts and luxury craft from South America, the rusty Polish freighter creaked against its lines and rested low in the water, its paint faded, an unlikely bearer of a priceless treasure. Maybe that was the idea. The Polonez was moored at Hemingway Marina, which sits on the shoreline of the Great Blue River, as Ernest Hemingway called the Gulf of Mexico. According to a sign near an outdoor restaurant, the writer started a marlin fishing tournament here in 1950.

  Soto and I followed Foley down a ladder. The freighter smelled of diesel fuel and stale air. Foley turned the wheel on a watertight hatch. We stepped over a metal rise and into the hold. Ten metal containers the size of trailer-trucks lined the bulkhead, five on each side. We sat at a wooden table bolted to the deck. A crewman brought us a pot of café Cubano, then left, sealing the door behind him.

  “Hey, Soto, you’ll be a big hero back at the Farm,” Foley said. “You’ll get a gold watch.”

  Severo Soto’s dark eyes flared. “You are a man without principles. You are a servant to expediency.”

  “Wrong, my friend. In the end, I’m loyal to my country, as you are to yours. I just gauge the way the wind is blowing and try to make a buck out of it.” Turning to me, Foley said, “Or two hundred million bucks, eh, Lassiter?”

  “I’m going to drink my coffee and let you boys play your macho spy games,” I said. “When you’re done wagging your dicks, let me know, and we’ll talk about the logistics for getting this old tug into the Gulf Stream.”

  Soto looked toward the steel containers. “Perhaps it is not too late for the wind to shift. What makes you think Fidel will let you take the art now that it is here?”

  Foley laughed like a man holding four aces. “What’s he going to do with the stuff, sell it at Sotheby’s? Become an international fence? He can’t take the heat. He’d lose the moral high ground. The few friends he has left would scorn him. The Russians would write him off if they haven’t already. The Chinese would stop sending bicycles, then where would he be, buying roller skates from the North Koreans for his great revolution?”