by Paul Levine
“Why the cover-up?” I demanded. “Why no mention of the art?”
“What art?”
“C’mon, Abe, don’t pee on my leg. Granny was fishing off the rocks at South Pointe day before yesterday. She told me the place was crawling with federal marshals, and a barge was in place, dredging the spot where the freighter blew up.”
“All true.”
“So what’d you find? Did anything survive?”
“Sure.” He allowed himself a snicker. “A couple tons of rocks.”
I propped myself onto one elbow and leaned toward him. There’d been a ringing in my ears and I wasn’t sure I’d heard him.
Socolow pulled a cigarette out of a pack, watched me scowl, and slipped it, unlit, into his mouth. “What was supposed to be the coins turned out to be rocks. Like in your head, Jake. The statues, slabs of concrete. Paintings, just newspapers stuffed into wooden crates.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Outside my window, old mimus polyglottos, the mockingbird, was chirping his song. In my bedroom, Abe Socolow was pacing and berating me. “You’re an okay guy, but a half-assed lawyer, Jake. Where was your due diligence? You never inspected the goods. How’s your malpractice coverage, anyway? If I was in charge, I’d have the government sue you for the two hundred million that’s in Fidel’s bank account.”
Suddenly, there wasn’t anything wrong with my hearing. “You’ve got it backwards, Abe. I didn’t represent the government. I represented Foley. Your guy was Soto. If he hadn’t been so wound up in his revolutionary rhetoric, maybe he would have taken inventory. The last time I saw the art, it was in a convoy of trailer-trucks headed east on the Airport Expressway.”
“Right. Foley went straight to the port, where he intended to put everything on a ship to Cuba. Unfortunately for him, Nikolai Smorodinsky and some pals from the Russian Agency for Federal Security were waiting. They’re all ex-KGB agents still trying to atone for Krvuchkov taking part in the coup. They relieved Foley of the contents of the trailer-trucks, which by now ought to be under lock and key in St. Petersburg.”
“Then you knew all along that Foley didn’t have the art.”
“No way.” Socolow pulled out a pack of matches and lit his cigarette. “The Russian government didn’t want to admit that things were so far out of control, so they never told Washington that Kharchenko had gotten out with the biggest load of treasure anyone had ever seen. Of course, we knew it from our sources in Finland and from tapping Yagamata’s phone here. But in the eyes of Yeltsin’s people, the art was never officially stolen, so it was never returned. They simply clammed up and didn’t tell us a thing. Hey, regardless of the form of government, the Russians are still a secretive bunch who hate to be embarrassed.”
“Foley,” I said. “What about Foley?”
Socolow paused long enough to blow smoke in my direction. “Picture him, Lassiter. For an hour or so, he was the richest man in the world. Then he’s left holding nothing but his dick. On one hand, he’s lucky to be alive. The Russians could have killed him. But he looks at it differently. He’s going crazy, figuring how close he came. He has a freighter at the port, but no cargo, at least not until he gets a bright idea.”
I shook the cobwebs out of my head. “He pulls a scam. Even if he doesn’t have the art, he can pretend he does. He loads the freighter with rocks and newspapers and heads to Havana.”
“Right. Foley tried using his contacts with Cuban intelligence to worm his way onto the island, but they thought he was full of shit, a guy saying he had billions of dollars of art on a Polish freighter that could barely float. So they call their most valuable double agent, one Severo Soto, who confirms Foley’s story because the CIA tells him it’s true. The CIA, of course, was relying on information provided by one Jake Lassiter, who reported that Foley had the art on trucks leaving the warehouse. When Foley turned up in Havana, everybody just assumed he had it, can you believe it?”
The mockingbird was growing louder. Its tune reminded me of a piano concerto. Tchaikovsky maybe. “Of course,” Socolow continued, “by this time, Soto had his own plans.”
“A revolutionary statement,” I said, “a funeral pyre of capitalist treasure.”
“Yeah, turns out he blew himself up on a garbage scow.”
“So, the Russians get their art back, and except for giving two hundred million in foreign aid to the bearded dictator, the mission was accomplished.”
We both thought about it a moment. “What about Foley?” I asked.
Socolow looked for an ashtray and couldn’t find one. He tapped his cigarette into the neck of an empty Grolsch bottle. “Yeah. The last we heard, that shithead was swinging a machete in one of Fidel’s cane fields. As you can imagine, the boys at Langley didn’t shed any tears. Hey, we even recovered a load of stuff from Yagamata’s house. All of it in perfect shape except for some fancy egg that was supposed to have a train inside.”
“Fabergé’s Trans-Siberia Railway Egg.”
“Right. You know about it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, with less than complete candor.
“The egg was in Yagamata’s gallery, but the insides were missing, and so was Yagamata. I don’t suppose you know anything about that.”
When given a choice, I prefer not to lie. Sometimes I stall. “About what?”
“About the train …”
Sometimes I evade. “What would I know?”
“. . . and Yagamata.”
And sometimes I just tell the literal truth. “His love for the art was obsessive. I always thought he might lose his head over it.”
Socolow scowled, told me he had work to do, and left.
I swung my stiff legs over the side of the bed and tried to sit up straight, fighting off the dizziness. I reached under my mattress and pulled it out, a shiny twenty-four-carat gold choo-choo train. There was an engine, a tender, and five coaches. Each car was connected to the next by a tiny gold hinge, and they folded together like a penknife. A pretty piece, all right. It took a brilliant artist to conceive it, great craftsmen to execute the handiwork. It was one of a kind, and probably could not be duplicated today. But I couldn’t imagine killing for it, and I wouldn’t want to die for it. Enough people already had.
***
Two weeks later, Charlie Riggs said I’d been an invalid too long. He wanted to get me out on the water. I said no thanks.
He tried to entice me with an invitation to chase bonefish in the flats off Key Largo. I declined because of the lobster mobsters. For two days each summer, just before the commercial season begins for the spiny lobster, every jerk with an outboard motor gets to trample the coral and shoot spears at all living creatures in our shallow waters. Not that it’s legal to spear, hook, or trap the little crustaceans. You’re supposed to catch them by hand or hand-held net. You’re not supposed to take egg-bearing females and undersized lobsters of either sex. But these bozos don’t care, and I wasn’t about to get speared, shot, or just plain annoyed while fishing.
So why did I let Charlie talk me into a ride on his old Boston Whaler?
To talk.
We said to heck with the flats and headed into the ocean in fourteen hundred feet of water, seeking a measure of solitude. Charlie had the binoculars out looking for osprey and frigate birds feeding on small fish at the surface. In the food chain hereabouts, the dolphin—the bluish gold fish, not Flipper the marine mammal—chase tiny fish to the surface where the birds eat them.
We follow the birds and find the dolphin, which, with any luck, will be in Granny Lassiter’s frying pan by sundown.
I used a light spinning rod baited with a yellow feather and came up with some seaweed. Charlie used mullet and got a strike from a five-pound dolphin. It jumped, fought, ran, fought some more, skipped along the surface, then gave up. Charlie hauled it in, wriggling, and tossed it into the cooler. “A magnificent animal. Fast and full of fight.”
I was still casting when Charlie pulled in his second one, a blu
nt-headed iridescent blue female. I leaned back and rested awhile, watching Charlie enjoy himself. After a moment, I said, “I still can’t figure it out.”
“A little more wrist,” Charlie advised.
“Not that. What was I doing, trying to help Francisco Crespo or find out something about myself?”
“Either way, you tried to make a difference.”
“And either way, I still couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Every time I thought I knew, they changed the players or the rules.”
Charlie chuckled. “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream. The new world order makes it even more confusing, Jake. It’s hard to realize, but old enemies are on the same side now. Still, there will always be loners like Foley and Yagamata, who are just in it for themselves, and an occasional throwback like Soto who thinks he can change the world by force. Most everybody else seems willing to let individuals control their own destiny.”
“But I didn’t do anyone any good. I didn’t save Crespo or Eva-Lisa. I didn’t save anyone.”
“Sure you did, Jake. You saved yourself.”
***
We stayed the night at a rundown motel on the Gulf side, then got up at four A.M. for a second try. Except for the slap of water against the hull, it was quiet as a tomb as we headed out the channel. A velvet black sky was filled with diamonds, and a feathery breeze blew from the southeast. Charlie and I sat looking at the heavens in the silent comfort that two good friends can savor without self-consciousness.
When we reached what Charlie promised would be a hot spot, I baited my hook. Charlie tamped tobacco into his pipe and scratched at his beard. “You see my matches?”
“Too dark,” I said.
After a few moments, on the horizon to the east, an orange glow cut through the darkness.
“False dawn,” I said.
“No. That’s the real thing. Sun’s coming up.”
“Too early, Charlie. That’s the phony one. I remember.”
“Twenty bucks,” Charlie said, goading me.
“You’re on. In the meantime, tell me one of your stories I haven’t heard in a while.”
Charlie harrumphed. “Ever tell you about the Doomsday Rock?”
“What’s that, an engagement ring?”
“An asteroid big enough to cause an explosion a billion times bigger than Hiroshima.”
“Where is it?”
“Nobody knows. But theoretically, it has to be out there, hurtling toward us right now. The Earth gets hit by one every five hundred thousand years or so. The blast causes a dust cloud that changes the climate, kills off the plant life. It’s probably what did in the dinosaurs. To demonstrate the effect, imagine my bait box is an asteroid.” He leaned over and picked up the box. “You see this, Jake?”
“Of course. Clear as day.”
“Thought so,” he said, laughing.
I reached for my wallet, handed the old buzzard two tens, and told him to finish his story.
###
“MORTAL SIN” SNEAK PREVIEW
Here’s an excerpt of “Mortal Sin,” the next Jake Lassiter thriller (after “False Dawn”). For more information or to purchase, please visit the “MORTAL SIN” AMAZON PAGE.
Chapter 1
Thy Client’s Wife
On a sweltering August day, the Coast Guard plucked seven Haitians from a sinking raft, the grand jury indicted three judges for extorting kickbacks, and the county commission inadvertently named a street after a convicted drug smuggler.
And Peter Tupton froze to death.
Tupton was wearing Speedos and a terry cloth beach jacket. His body was found in the wine cellar of a Gables Estates mansion. Two empty bottles of Roederer Cristal Champagne lay at his feet.
His very blue feet.
Two thousand other bottles—reds and whites, ports and sauternes, Champagnes and Chardonnays—were stacked neatly in their little wooden bins. A high-tech air-conditioning system kept the wine cellar at an even 56 degrees. Hardly life-threatening, unless you wandered in from the pool deck sopping wet, guzzled two liters of bubbly, and passed out.
Cause of death: exposure due to hypothermia. Which didn’t keep the Miami Herald from seizing on a sexier headline:
ON YEAR’S HOTTEST DAY,
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST
FREEZES TO DEATH
The medical examiner reported that Tupton’s blood contained 0.31 percent alcohol. If he’d been driving, he could have been arrested three times. But he’d been swimming, then sipping mimosas on the pool deck. When he stumbled into the wine cellar, he must have kept drinking, this time leaving out the orange juice.
Cheers.
The mansion – and all the booze – belonged to my client, Nicky Florio, who any day now, would be sued for millions of dollars for wrongful death.
Me? I’m Jake Lassiter. I’m a pretty decent trial lawyer for a guy who suffered multiple concussions, first as a Penn State linebacker, then as an unguided missile on the Miami Dolphins suicide squads.
At the moment, I was reading the newspaper account of Tupton’s death in the comfort of my bed. A couple of things I should say about the bed. First, it had a bullet hole in the headboard. Why? The bed had been Exhibit A in a case involving a jealous husband and a .357 Magnum, and I picked it up cheap at a police auction of old evidence.
The second item about the bed. I was not alone. Next to me was Gina Florio, my client’s wife.
No, I’m not proud of that. My excuse: I knew her first. Lame? Sure. And given the bed’s bullet-ridden history, I was not unaware of the danger of the situation.
“Peter Tupton was a most disagreeable man.” Gina dismissed the decedent with a wave of the hand, which then returned to my bare chest. I listened to the ceiling fan whompety-whomp, while Gina traced figure eights with a blood-red fingernail across my pectorals. A crumpled bed sheet covered me from the waist down. Her clothing was simpler; there wasn’t any.
“Disagreeable how?” I asked.
“Despicable, really.”
In earlier times, she would have called him a dickbrain.
But Gina was a sponge that absorbed her surroundings, the good, the bad, and the pretentious. Lately, she’d been hanging out with the matrons of the Coral Gables Women’s Club. Finger sandwiches at the Biltmore, charity balls at the Fontainebleau, tennis at the club. Discussions of many disagreeable, despicable men. Mostly husbands, I’d bet.
“A swine, really,” Gina said. “A short, bald, lumpy swine who mashed out his cigarettes in my long-stemmed Iittala glasses.”
“Iittala, is it?”
“Don’t mock me, Jake. Finnish, top of the line. Nicky likes the best of everything.”
“That’s why he married you,” I said, without a trace of sarcasm.
“You’re still mocking me, you prick.”
Prick. Now, that was better. You can take the girl out of the strip club, but…
She made a motion with her head, and her butterscotched hair spilled across my chest, tickling me. I was a bench-warmer on the Dolphins when we met. She was a Dolphins Doll, jumping and squealing, all bouncing boobs on the sidelines. I never knew why she chose me over a host of suitors that included two first-round draft choices with no-cut contracts and a sports agent who flew his own Lear. Then again, maybe it explained why she left me.
We were together two years, or about half my so-called football career, before she dumped me. Since then, she’s had three or four husbands, depending if you counted a marriage performed by a ship’s captain on the high seas.
Now she was married to Nicky Florio, a wealthy real estate developer who had only hired me because Gina had asked him to. I could picture Gina cocking her head, asking Nicky if it wouldn’t be sweet to hire Jake Lassiter. You remember Jake, don’t you, darling?
Nicky probably balked at first. Your old boyfriend’s just an ex-jock with a briefcase.
Putting people down was Nicky’s default mode.
But who’s got Gina toda
y, Nicky?
Was that it, I wondered, my infantile way of striking back? What would the ethics committee say about taking money from Nicky Florio and bedding down his wife?
Good question. With all the single women available, what are you doing with a married one? South Beach is chock-full of unattached women, leggy models from New York, Paris, and Rome. Downtown is wall-to-wall professionals in their business-lady pumps, charcoal suits, and silk blouses. The gym has an aerobics instructor plus a divorcee or two who brighten up when you do your crunches and curls. So what’s with this destructive, nowhere relationship mired in the past?
Another thought, too. Maybe I was jealous of Nicky’s success. And maybe he was right about me. I don’t look like a lawyer, and I don’t act like a lawyer. I have a bent nose, and I tip the scales at a solid 236. My hair is too long and my tie is either too wide or too narrow, too loud or too plain, depending on the fashion of the times. I’ve hit more blocking sleds than law books, and I live by my own rules, which is why I’ll never be president of the Bar Association or Rotary’s Man of the Year. I eat lunch in shirtsleeves at a fish joint on the Miami River, not in a tony club in a skyscraper. And I do the best I can to inflict the least harm as I bob and weave through life. Which made me wonder just what the hell I was doing with Gina yet again.
“Jake, what are you thinking about?” Gina asked.
“The day you punched me and left town with a rodeo cowboy named Tex or Slim or maybe Texas Slim.”
“No way. The day I punched you, I went to Grand Cayman with the gold bullion salesman.”
Oh, jeez, she was right.
***
We’d been living together in my apartment on Miami Beach. She stepped out of the shower, her hair smelling like a freshly mowed field. She kissed me, soft and slow, then said she was leaving. I told her I’d miss the wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. She let fly a roundhouse right, bouncing it off my forehead, cursing as she broke a lacquered nail.
Good kiss, no hit.
She dressed quickly, then delivered her parting line, something I was to hear time and again. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said, heading out the door. “And maybe I won’t.”
