Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Paul said,” I said, “that she’d asked him for a job, just before she died. How come? If Hiroshi was taking care of her?”

  “Wendy wasn’t into Hiroshi taking care of her. It was just something that happened to her, like having parents or being born in the U.S.A. He had the apartment and he liked paying for things.”

  “It sounds like he was rich,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Carol said. “Aren’t they all rich now, the Japanese?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Wendy said she was, like, hip to his game. She never asked for any of it. Once he got her to ask, then he had her, so she wasn’t going to ask, but it was getting real tempting. She wanted a Burton board and she wanted a new pair of skis. Wendy was always real careful with her stuff, but this year’s been shit for snow—rocks everywhere—and the bottoms of her skis were shredded, I’m talking serious P-tex time, repairs every night. Hiroshi would’ve bought her new skis like a shot and she knew it. That’s maybe why she was talking to Paulie about work. If she started asking for skis maybe she was, like, getting into something she didn’t want to get into, it was getting into a place where it would be out of hand.”

  “So she was going to leave him?”

  “You probably got the wrong picture—like, totally wrong. Wendy was really sweet and together. She just wanted to get out there a little bit before she got, like, you know, married and pregnant and yelling at her children that they better study or they’ll end up at Burger King. And if she was a guy, you would really understand and say, ‘Hey, wow,’ ‘That’s cool,’ ‘A ski bum screwing all those snow bunnies,’ ‘Wish it were me.’ So I hope you understand, because I don’t want to be saying bad of the dead.”

  “Yeah, I think I understand,” I said.

  “She was just taking a break from the real world. Before she went back to college to become a cog in the American dream. She always knew just how far to go, to take things. That’s why it’s so weird that she bought it, you know.”

  Carol even had a copy of Wendy’s key to Hiroshi’s apartment. Because, she said, sometimes when Hiroshi was away she stayed there to get away from the slave quarters, the rather unkempt and undersized premises that Paul provided. She gave it to me.

  It was beyond the call of duty, but being handed the key made it just too easy to pass up.

  It was a frosty night; the wind was blowing, tossing crystal sparks of snow around—just a touch of mean. I like the winter. I like the mountains and the clean air. It’s a good life, being a petit bourgeois in a petit bourgeois country with time to ski and a newborn who’d turned into an infant who was turning into a baby. She could suckle, she could grasp, she was learning to sit up, and she certainly knew how to fill a diaper. She started with black muck, the consistency of beach tar. Then it became the color and consistency of Grey Poupon. Back in America Grey Poupon is advertised as the mustard carried by people who ride in Rolls-Royces. It was almost odorless, Anna Geneviève’s, much to my surprise. And relief. But as soon as she had anything but breast milk, her shit would smell, I was told, like shit.

  I could hardly wait to take her skiing.

  The real little ones ski without poles and with their own technique. Adult technique is very complicated. The kids just put their skis in a V and lean left or right. From the flats to black runs, they ski exactly the same, a bundle of clothes, a cap and goggles, arms out, legs spread, animated teddy bears in a department store window’s Christmas display.

  We have very few apartments in St. Anton, only a couple of apartment complexes, and no high rises at all. The tallest building, the seven-story Alte Post, has a chalet-style peaked roof and is also one of the oldest structures, dating back to the eighteenth century. This makes us very proud of ourselves. In France the ramshackle barbarousness of the real estate developers would make an American blush. Even the great Chamonix has lost its charm to unplanned traffic and unrestricted growth. The Italians are offhand. The Swiss have new resorts that look American. We are not like that. We have no developments, our establishments are small, we respect our Tyroleanisms by law and, even more, by community pressure. Pitched roofs, timber trim, plaster fronts are rules with no exceptions. Facade paintings are semioptional. When the tourists come they are entitled to their Austrian charm.

  When there’s snow on the ground and snow on the roofs, it works. When there’s no snow—as in the first half of this season—it doesn’t. The hollow heart is revealed. It is merely a place where someone passed a law defining what charm is, and the inhabitants, being Austrian and at least as law-abiding as Germans, thoroughly and charmlessly obeyed it. The old is so well kept it looks new. The new consists of such stolid and standardized imitations that the only way to tell the difference would be with a carbon-dated core sample. The sole exception is the shabby pension across the street from the Spar supermarket. Its half-submerged basement is a winter barn. You have to stoop to see the cows through the small ground-level window, but even standing absolutely upright you can smell their hide, their piss, and their shit. It is the only indication that there might be a real life that has nothing to do with Kevlar and carbon fiber multilaminates, Thinsulate, Hollofil, Gore-Tex, plastic boots, and cable cars.

  Hiroshi’s apartment was in a small, brand-new but traditional-looking complex up the hill to the left of the Galzigbahn, near the Krazy Kangaruh. It had ten apartments, a sauna, a plunge pool, and a solarium. It was ski in, ski out. Everything for the athlete and sybarite. Once I figured out which apartment was Hiroshi’s I walked around the building twice to see if there was any light on in the window or any sign of activity whatsoever. I stepped in drifts higher than my boots and got some snow down around my ankles, but all was quiet.

  Then I went up to the second floor, where the apartment was. I knocked at the door next door. A fair and British type came to the door, slightly fey—whether he was homosexual or just public school I couldn’t tell. I told him in a quite straightforward way that I was inquiring about the girl’s last days. He told me that he had just arrived, after the now notorious avalanche. I asked him if anyone had moved into the now vacant apartment next door. He asked if I thought it was dangerous on the mountain. I told him that this sort of thing was very rare. He, of course, remembered that he’d almost lost one or two of his royals that very same way in Klosters. He spoke as if he were a royal cousin, some once or twice removed. I doubted that he’d even been buggered by a cousin twice removed, but I didn’t say so and the conversation remained polite. He was kind enough to inform me that the apartment next door seemed to be quite unoccupied, and if I was interested I might be able to pick up the lease from a Herr Himmner in Innsbruck or through an estate agent on Mumble High Street, London. He invited me in to use a pencil and paper if I needed to write it down. I thanked him, but I said I would remember, my wife always remarked about how good I was about remembering. He nodded. He closed the door.

  I went to Hiroshi Tanaka’s apartment. I knocked. There was no answer. I opened the door with the key that Wendy had given Carol. There was a light switch by the door. I turned the light on. Ski house furniture tends to the utilitarian and disposable because skiers tend to be drunk and disorderly and abuse it. This stuff was very good. Real Tyrolian antiques. I also expected it to be neat. A stereotype, I suppose. I think of the Japanese as living in tiny spaces, cheek to buttock with their own family and separated only by paper walls from the next, people who have to stow things as neatly and ingeniously as submariners, keeping their surfaces as clean as a sushi bar. This place looked like it had been ransacked.

  I checked the bedroom next.

  “And who are you,” said the Japanese man sitting in the armchair beside the bed. He spoke in bad German, even worse than mine.

  I told him I was a cousin of the family of the landlord here to check on conditions because there was a security deposit. I spoke in German as rapidly as I could in the expectation that our combined incompetence with the Teutonic tongue would confuse the situation suffic
iently to distract from the fact that even though I had the key I was engaged in an act of at least illegal entry.

  “Sprechen ze English?” he said with a certain desperation.

  “Yeah,” I said before I thought about it.

  “Ahh,” he said. He was slender and intense, with thick glasses. “An American.”

  “No,” I said. “Richard Cochrane, County Clare, Irish Republic.”

  “I was definitely expecting an American,” he said.

  GLACIER

  “MIKE,” HE SAID, “MIKE Hayakawa,” and held out his hand in a frank, straightforward manner that promised a firm and manly handshake, which he delivered. Then he gave me his card. It was an essay. In addition to his name—Mikio Hayakawa—in English and Japanese, his position—field executive with the international division of the Musashi Trading Company—a list of offices—Tokyo, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, London—it had all four prestigious addresses, phone and telex and fax numbers.

  I didn’t have a card. I explained that I was there for the parents of the poor dead Wendy, who, I was given to understand, had virtually lived in this apartment.

  “I too,” Mikio “Mike” Hayakawa said, “am here for a family in mourning.”

  “It’s very sad,” I said.

  “A terrible tragedy,” he said.

  “Struck down in the prime of life.”

  “By a force of nature.”

  “Yes,” I nodded, solemn as a Lutheran mortician.

  “Nature is a great and terrible thing. This is something we Japanese have a feeling for.”

  “We feel it here in the mountains too,” I said.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, as if giving real thought to a comparison between the Austrian experience and the Japanese.

  “I was wondering if you found anything that belonged to the girl,” I said.

  “Most of her things,” he said, “have already been given to her parents by the police. There are one or two items that clearly belong to a girl. I suppose they are hers.”

  “You speak English very well,” I said, “like an American.”

  “You too,” he said.

  “I spent some years there,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said.

  “Bit of a mess,” I said, referring to the apartment.

  “Yes.”

  “He was a messy man,” I said.

  “Hiroshi Tanaka was a very well organized person. Everything in its place.”

  “Like a sushi bar,” I said.

  “Like a well-organized home or office,” he said. “Perhaps something that belonged to Hiroshi Tanaka was given to the girl’s family in error.”

  “You really, really sound American,” I said. I looked around the apartment again. “I guess you must be going through it for the family.”

  “I think someone else must have done this. Perhaps to steal something,” Hayakawa said. “You don’t sound Irish at all. Of course, I don’t know what Irish people sound like, except in the movies.”

  “Oh, really?” I said with a stage brogue. “What are you thinking there was here for them to steal? A pot of gold belongin’ to the wee people?”

  “Yes,” he said, “they spoke like that. In Darby O’Gill and the Little People. A Walt Disney film, I think.”

  “Yeah, well now, I’ll tell you what I think you remind me of,” I said, still with a brogue you could put in the hole in the sole of your shoe to keep your sock from touching ground—it was that thick. “You remind me of a movin’ picture from the grrrreat war—World War II, it must’ve been—where there’s a Japanese fella who’s interrogatin’ some American who’s heroic and bare chested, and this Jap officer—he appears so civilized, they’re all astounded by it, until he explains that he went to UCLA.”

  “Actually, it was UC Berkeley.”

  “Good school, Berkeley.”

  “Too many hippies,” he said. “They weren’t very serious. You sound like some of the students from New York—that’s what you sound like. Yes. I think someone took something.”

  “Not something belonging to the girl?”

  “Maybe it got mixed up with the girl’s things. If you were to come across it,” he said, “I would be very interested.”

  “Of course you would,” I said.

  “The family would certainly be prepared to show their gratitude,” Mike said. “With the yen so strong we can afford to be generous.”

  “So this is a family heirloom we are looking for?”

  “Mr. Cochrane,” he said, coolly, “I come to the home of a family friend. I see that it is in a condition in which he would never leave it. I conclude therefore that someone came here looking for something. If so, it belongs to the family. I am trying to be polite and discreet. If you have knowledge of this situation or are a participant in it, I offer you a reward. If not, I do not know what we have to discuss.”

  “This thing,” I said, full of foolish and habitual curiosity, “is it bigger than a breadbox, or smaller than a video cassette?”

  “I am not playing games, Mr. Cochrane. If you know something that I don’t, you may help me. If it is the other way around, I have no reason to help you. Do I?”

  “This thing you’re looking for,” I said, at my most juvenile. “It wouldn’t be a black bird, about so high? It wouldn’t be … the stuff that dreams are made of?”

  “I like that movie. That was the best part of Berkeley, everybody was movie mad. But I am not interested in sarcasm or jokes. Do you really expect me to believe that you are from the family of the girl?”

  “Hey,” I protested, “don’t you know who I am?”

  “Who?”

  “I own the Laundromat. Rick’s. Short for Richard.”

  “The Laundromat opposite Johann’s Café?”

  “The only one in town,” I said. “Ask anyone about me.”

  “That place is a ripoff. Eleven hundred yen for one load of wash. Back at Berkeley it was a buck and a quarter.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  It always pleases me when someone gets it. We all have one simple discovery that to us is the key to life. For Ronald Reagan it came when he was a young sports announcer in Des Moines, Iowa. By adding creative color to the tersely coded box scores that came in on the teletype, he announced the Chicago games as if he were actually seeing them live. On one occasion the line went down in midgame. Ron had two choices—tell the listeners out there that he was not actually at the game, was never at the game, and that the teletype that he depended on had failed, or make up a game. The second choice seems to be by far the most dangerous. It was the sort of lie, however harmless—letting the batter foul off ball after ball after ball for the eternal six minutes until the wire came back—that would inevitably catch up with him, because it was impossible that the game he made up would be the same as the one that actually took place. And it was not. The great discovery was that a good story was a good story and reality did not matter. This lesson served him well through an acting career and two terms as president. There are people to this very day that think that he cut the size of the federal government, cut federal spending, cut the deficit, and made America strong again—just because he told them so. Even though the irrefutable public record is that he increased the size of the government, increased spending, increased the deficit beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, and turned the United States from the greatest creditor nation in the world into the greatest debtor nation—incidentally making Japan the world’s new economic superpower. But he was right—he made up his stories, told them to us on TV, and reality did not matter.

  George Bush’s primal lesson must have been something more subtle, yet much more ordinary—almost Japanese—“The nail that raises its head gets hammered down.” He proceeded to accumulate all the right credits—Phillips Academy, Yale, Skull and Bones, Phi Beta Kappa, Navy combat pilot, the oil business in Texas, congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, head of the CIA, chairman of the Republican Party, subservient vice-president—without d
oing a single thing that anyone actually remembers: When he became president he sent troops around the world to administer this lesson to other foreign leaders. My great revelation came late in life—had it come earlier I might have been a tycoon rather than merely a ski bum and proud new father—my revelation was that the self-service Laundromats had not come to Europe.

  I could see Mike relax as he understood the class of person he was dealing with. “That’s how I can afford to ski with next to no work,” I added.

  “Pretty cool,” he said. “You must make out like a bandit.”

  “What do the Laundromats get in Tokyo?”

  “In Japan we all have our own laundry machines. I have an Aisaigo Day Fuzzy machine,” he said with great pride.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “What happened is, I ran into the girl’s mother there, at my Laundromat.”

  “You do not know what an Aisaigo Day Fuzzy machine is, do you?”

  “It’s a washing machine.”

  “It uses fuzzy logic!”

  “Don’t we all?” I said.

  “It has fuzzy chips,” he said. “It reasons intuitively and approximately. It can determine the size of the load, how dirty the clothes are, how long to wash, to rinse, to spin. It has six hundred different cycles. I got one of the first twenty-five thousand made. It cost eighty-three thousand yen.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Five hundred twenty-five dollars. I was able to get it because Aisaigo is associated with my company, Musashi Trading Company.”

  “I meant in schillings.”

  “Six thousand three hundred thirteen schillings. America has nothing fuzzy yet. Japan is first with fuzzy.”

  “Does that include the twenty percent VAT?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The tax. We got a twenty percent sales tax here.”

  “I don’t think it includes the tax. We are not selling it in Austria anyway. Yet. It is just in Japan.”