Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  I turned around and saw Mike looking at me. He was half asleep and all drunk, but he knew I was searching the apartment. That was all right. I knew how to handle that.

  I went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a mineral water. Then I went back to the living room, opened the bottle, and poured it on him. He sputtered and tried to jump up. I pushed him down.

  “You lied to me.” I sounded terribly offended.

  “What?”

  “You’re no friend of the family.” J’accuse! “Did you even know this guy?”

  “Sure I knew him,” he said defensively.

  “What’d you do? Meet him once?”

  “No, no. We met several times. I was assigned …”

  “Assigned what?”

  “Never mind.”

  I got in his face. “You want me to help you?”

  “No. I don’t know. How can you help me?”

  “This is what I do, asshole. I find things. I fix things. The Laundromat is but a recent affectation.”

  “A what?”

  “I’m a detective. Gumshoe. A dick. Now, lemme guess—you were supposed to get something from Tanaka.”

  “No …”

  “An optical disc.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “And he was supposed to give it to you.” I stopped being the bad guy and became his friend.

  “Yes,” he finally admitted with a sigh.

  “What? The day he died?”

  “Yes,” Mike said.

  “But when you came to look, after he was dead, it wasn’t here. But the place had been searched. Turned upside down, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you made up that bullshit story, friend of the family, and who here knows anything about Japs, one looks like another, so no one argued with you.”

  “Yes,” he said, amazed. “That’s how it was.”

  “Then—then you did nothing,” I said. A funny thing happens, sometimes, when you’re questioning someone. It’s like when you’re really hot with a new girl. Suddenly you tune in, you get it, you read their face like it was a book. “You couldn’t figure out what to do next. You just sat and waited.”

  “What else was there to do?”

  “Shit,” I said. “Did you call his office? Did you go to his home, in Vienna? Did you call in the team?”

  “I—I have never done anything of this nature. I must succeed. I must. But how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. I was sent. By Musashi Trading Company. This is very important. I must succeed. You will help me?”

  “Can you really come up with a million D marks?”

  “Yes. I swear it.”

  “You’ll tell me everything you know about him and about what you’re looking for …”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “What it was. I was sent to get something—something vital, something valuable. Yes, it was on a disc. But I don’t know what.”

  “Could it have been financial records?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  I didn’t either. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’ll tell me what you do know and we’ll find it.”

  “Could you give me a towel,” he said.

  “No,” I said to Marie Laure as emphatically as I could through my hangover. “It does not mean that I’m a double dealer. It does not mean that I’m going to cut and run …”

  “If you do …”

  “… not necessarily.”

  “… you will be running alone.”

  “It’s what you call an option.”

  “It’s what you call le cop-out. Le bullshit. Le crap américain.”

  “It’s what you do when you’re walking into a trap,” I said. “You look for two ways out.”

  She picked up her daughter in one hand and held her close. She picked up my coffee in the other and hurled it at me.

  “Goddamn you!” I yelled.

  She glared at me and my raised hand, held our daughter as her shield, and dared me to strike back. My mother walked into the kitchen. She didn’t have her glasses on.

  “I smell coffee,” she said. “Could I have some.” Then she peered around. “Oh. Oh, dear. Am I interrupting?”

  “No, Mother, you’re not interrupting. I like coffee in my hair. This is the way we discuss things now.”

  “To have been with a lot of women,” my mother said, “does not mean that you understand women.”

  I grabbed a dish towel, dried my hair, face, and shirt. “I was just explaining to …” I groped for the proper word. I wanted an aspirin very badly. Two. And my coffee.

  “To me!” Marie Laure said. “But ’e doesn’t know who I am. His girlfriend with the baby? Maybe. ’Ow does ’e introduce me now? This is uh, oh, la je ne sais quoi, the mother of my daughter.”

  “That’s not what we were talking about,” I said.

  “He was talking to the Japanese man. He made a deal with him. For money.”

  “Don’t sneer,” I said. “It’s a lot of money. If you’re going to sneer at money, you don’t sneer at a million deutsche marks.” I picked up Marie’s coffee and rather stealthily took a sip. I know she uses sugar in her coffee, I know I hate coffee with sugar, so I don’t know why I expected to like it. I didn’t.

  “How much is that in real money?” my mother asked, her practical streak showing.

  “Deutsche marks are real money. D marks are considered hard currency these days. Six hundred sixty-six thousand dollars. But that’s only half the story. The rest of the story is that if I’m going to find the dingus for anybody—for Mike Hayakawa, for Chip Sheen, for you, for her”—I gestured at either my daughter or the mother of my daughter or both—“I needed someplace to start. The man from the IRS—he’s no help at all. This guy from Musashi—he’s useful. He’s the one that actually had a deal with Tanaka.”

  “And then?” Marie Laure said.

  “Then, if I find this optical disc, then I see if Chip Sheen is on the level. If he is, that’s great. We all go to America. Maybe Aspen, maybe Jackson Hole.”

  “Wyoming,” Marie Laure said, recognizing the name.

  “That’s a long way from me,” my mother said. “This is my first grandchild.”

  “Maybe New York,” I said. “On the other hand, if Chip is not on the level, then we have another exit. A backdoor.” I had to at least get them to consider the alternative. “A very rich six-hundred-thousand-dollar backdoor that will get us out of Austria into new identities, pretty much anywhere we want.”

  “You see,” Marie Laure said, enraged, to my mother.

  VIENNA

  THERE ARE MANY REASONS to go to Vienna. Music. Museums. Shopping, shopping, and shopping. I went because that’s where Hiroshi Tanaka had his home and his office. If I’d know that everyone was coming with me I’d have stayed home and gone skiing.

  “Of course I want to go to Vienna,” Marie Laure said.

  “I’m not going for pleasure,” I said.

  “I ’ave to shop for baby clothing. Anita will watch the Laundromat.”

  “Do you want to take the train with me?”

  “Of course not—we will take the car,” she said.

  “I’m not going to have time to do things with you. I’m going to try to get into this guy’s apartment.”

  “You don’t have to spend time with me. I have Anna for company.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re not leaving the baby at home, but I don’t know if she’ll be much fun to dine with.”

  “I speak of your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  “Of course.”

  “What are you going to do when you want to rest? Never mind when the baby wants a nap, when you want a nap. And my mother …”

  My mother, who apparently never misses a cue anymore, appeared with her little blue suitcase, her day bag, and said, “I’m ready.”

  “… and my dear mother, who is not as young as
she used to be, wants to rest, what will you do then?”

  “We will go to our ’otel room,” Marie Laure said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I am packed,” she said. “The baby is ready. Will you ’elp me take our things to the car?”

  But of course they weren’t ready. Neither was I, now that I was taking the car and the family. There is a law of family time ratios. The length of time it takes to leave the house is multiplied sequentially by the number of people involved. If it takes one person five minutes, then it takes two people ten minutes, three people thirty minutes, four people two hours. Forgive me if I exaggerate. An hour and a half after my train was scheduled to leave—in which I would have traveled at leisure, enjoying solitude, reading the International Herald Tribune, perhaps the London Times or the Economist, sipping a glass of wine—I was finally behind the wheel with one Anna beside me and the other in the baby seat in back. My mother has never appreciated my driving. I have never appreciated hers. The only alternative was for me to ride in back with the baby, but the baby is only truly comfortable close to the breast. I used to be a tough guy. Really. I worked the mean streets of New York. I messed with wiseguys, guys doing time, and violence-prone drug abusers.

  “Where are you going?” Mike Hayakawa cried.

  I didn’t really hear what he said. My window was closed, the heater fan was on, the baby was crying, my mother was warning me to drive carefully, and Marie Laure wanted to know if I’d brought enough cash. But I did see that he was running toward the car, waving. So I said, “Wait a minute!” to everyone inside and I rolled down the window. Mike slipped in the snow, crashed into us, and repeated himself.

  “To Vienna,” I said. “My favorite city. To get you know what.”

  “I am going with you,” he said.

  “You are not,” I said. “Everybody, this is Mike Hayakawa. This is my mother.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Cochrane,” Mike said politely. He even bowed a little, but he was jiggling with impatience like a man who has to urinate twenty minutes ago.

  “You know, you could use a little more Oriental composure,” I said.

  “It’s not Cochrane, it’s Cassella,” my mother said.

  “Ma!” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said to me. “That was my maiden name,” she said to Hayakawa, thinking quickly.

  “And this is my daughter Anna. And Marie Laure, her mother, the woman I love.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you. Ohhh, she’s so cute,” he said to Marie Laure.

  That had become true. Her head had lost its point. In skulls, roundness is considered attractive. She drooled from time to time, but not that often and with a certain restraint. She wasn’t one of those steady spit-up babies. Each day she filled out more. Her wrists looked like they had rubber bands around them. So did her ankles. Her belly was round and full and healthy, which looks as good on babies as it looks bad on adults.

  “Anyway, Mike,” I said, “I have to say good-bye. Everybody, say good-bye to Mike now.”

  “I cannot let you out of my sight,” he protested.

  “Not even for toilet functions?”

  “I know what you took from Hiroshi Tanaka’s things.”

  “Yeah? So? Remember you want me to find the dingus. The CD. Whatever it is. It isn’t here. So maybe it’s there. In his office, or his apartment. That is why I have to go there. That’s in Vienna. I need the address. That’s why I took the license and business card. Then I need to get in. That’s why I took his keys. You could’ve done it. You didn’t even think of it. Now that I’ve told you about it, maybe you should do it. I don’t mind. I’d just as soon stay home.” I opened the car door. “Vienna’s perfect. I hate Vienna.” I got out and dug in my pocket for Hiroshi Tanaka’s keys. “So take the keys, guy. You go!”

  “No. We are a team now. We go together.”

  “There’s no room. I’m sorry. Much as I would like to, I won’t kick my mother out of the car to make room for you.”

  “This is too important. Much too important. I must stay in touch all the way. I have spoken to the home office. Those are my instructions and I will follow them.”

  “Hey, they know what we are doing all way over there in Tokyo?”

  “Yes. In London too. They have approved my association with you. Rick, I told them that you are an American detective. They were impressed by that. Forgive me, I did not think they would be impressed by an Irish detective. Everyone knows America is still number one with detectives. It’s because you have so much drugs and violence.”

  “Did you learn this in Berkeley?”

  “I am sorry if I have offended you.”

  “Not me,” I said, “I’m Irish.”

  “But people in Tokyo only know America and detectives from television and movies. So I thought that was the best thing to say.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Since there is so much mysterious death already, we think it is good that there is someone who understands violence.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it when I come back.”

  “I have a car. I will follow you,” he insisted.

  “Why not,” I said. “Bring anything of Tanaka’s that I didn’t already take.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Mike said. “You will wait for me. I will only be five minutes.”

  The Japanese might have entered the auto market from the low end—smaller, cheaper, better gas mileage. But by 1990 everyone had figured out that the really good bucks were at the top end and to go after BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar. Honda developed the Acura; Toyota, the Lexus; Nissan, the Infiniti; and Musashi had the Élégant. There probably weren’t more than fifty of them in Europe and, import restrictions there being much tougher than in the States, they went for over $45,000 in Germany and $55,000 in Austria. Hayakawa had one. Twenty-five minutes later we pulled out. Me and the three women. Mike behind us. Whoever was following us behind him.

  The A12 from the Arlberg Tunnel east toward Vienna is a brand-new superhighway. There is something terribly sleek about it as it runs through the Alps, an elegance to the half-cylinder tunnels and cantilevered causeways that cover the road to protect it from avalanches. I’d been over here for a while, so I don’t notice it anymore, but my mother was shocked by how rich and new and clean it all looked. She was fresh from America, where even the interstates have potholes—fresh from imperial New York, where the elevated expressways are falling down and the bridges are being closed due to neglect. She wanted to know if it was all like this and why. And if, as it appeared, the Austrians were actually so much richer than Americans.

  They are and they are not the only ones. So are the Germans, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Danes, and of course, the Japanese.

  We’d left so late that after an hour and a half it was time for lunch. We stopped in Innsbruck, the capital of the Tyrol, which has been the site of two winter Olympics. In a year with good snow it is an enchanting place. In a wet and gray winter it still has a terrifically touristy automobile-free medieval center, a bad Chinese restaurant, and an excellent old-fashioned whorehouse.

  Marie Laure, my mother, my daughter, myself, and Mike Hayakawa went to the old town to eat something typical and charming. We found an inn with an Adler—Eagle—in its name and even a Goethe Stube—a room where Goethe once sat. It’s the equivalent of a “Washington slept here” in the States. Goethe lived for a long time a long time ago and got around a lot. Everyplace he stopped, from Heidelberg to Rome, has been marked. I suspect that it’s been done to make the German tourists feel comfortable, as if other groups recognize the Teutonic people for something besides having a lot of money and committing genocide. It had a classic Tyrolean menu, but fortunately it had a broader range of dishes than the usual St. Anton standard.

  We hadn’t decided where we were going to stay. I mentioned that a decent hotel room would run ÖS1,500 a night, per person, double occupancy more for the single person in the single room. This was a w
ay of complaining about going on a mission with an entourage of females. James Bond always liked a mission with women around, but that was Pussy Galore, not his mother, infant daughter, and a postpartum wife.

  “Yes,” Mike said, “Austria is a very good bargain.”

  I looked at Marie Laure, she looked back at me. Then she smiled and I did too. We both laughed and she took my hand. “A good bargain” is how the French boys translate a phrase that means good in bed. It’s been a pet phrase and a running gag in our lives for some time.

  My mother, who was reading the menu, said, “I don’t think it’s a bargain at all. I think it’s very dear.” She was quite serious.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mike said, sincerely embarrassed. It’s a faux pas for someone with yen to talk about the cost of things to someone whose reference point is dollars. “It must be difficult for you.”

  “That’s all right, Mom, let me order for you,” I said, knowing that she would order strictly by price. I have days like that too.

  “How do the people who live here afford it?” my mother asked. She comes from that generation that regards Americans as the richest people in the world and Europe as a place to send CARE packages. So did I, to a lesser degree. Schilling shock cures it fast.

  “They have a very strong work ethic,” Mike said enthusiastically. “They have a homogeneous population and a sense of the common good. There has not been a major strike here for many, many years. Technically this is achieved through the Parity Commission for Wages and Prices.”

  “I didn’t know this,” I said. “Ski bums are not included. There we deal in straight exploitation.”

  “The federal chancellor and all the important ministries are involved—the Austrian Trade Union Confederation, and the representatives of the employers and of the farmers. They settle all claims about wages and prices. The most interesting part, I think, is that their recommendations are not binding. Yet everyone follows them. This is like Japan. In Japan an agency like MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, does not rule by making laws, like an American government agency, but by leadership and suggestion. This is only possible if both sides believe they are on the same side ultimately and are willing to give priority to the economy as a whole.”