Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Mike said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d been alone.”

  “Gone to jail for breaking and entering,” I told him. Gently. He sat down. “You want to go back to the hotel? I can take care of things here.”

  “No,” he said resolutely, “my instructions were to stick by you.”

  Which he did. It was a great apartment. The paintings appeared to my untutored eye to be originals. The ceilings were a full fifteen feet high. The kitchen was as well equipped as Braun, Krup, and Toshiba could make it. The bedroom was sexy. The VCRs and TVs were Sonys. In addition to the wide selection of erotic tapes, polycultural and multilingual, there were complete collections of François Truffaut, Francis Ford Coppolla, Martin Scorsese, and John Huston. I switched on the VCR to see the last film that Hiroshi Tanaka had watched in bed. It was Across the Pacific, Huston directing the old gang from The Maltese Falcon—Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor, Humphrey Bogart. The Japanese were the villains. I wondered if Hiroshi and Wendy had found that titillating.

  I started looking through the CDs since this thing was supposed to look like one. “No,” Mike said, “it’s bigger.” I put on Clapton. “Layla.” It was an incredible sound system. “After Midnight.” “Cocaine.” America might die, but rock ’n’ roll is forever.

  The other bedroom had been made into a study. A home office. It had a desk and a computer, two phones, one to a fax.

  The bookshelves could have belonged to Tom Clancy. Someone was either researching high-tech thrillers or they were in the business of military aviation and aerospace. Jane’s Military Aircraft. Jane’s Aviation Armament. World Market for General Aviation Aircraft: Avionics & Engines. Export of Aerospace Technology: Proceedings of the Goddard Memorial Symposium. Aircraft Weaponry of Today. Aircraft Industry Dynamics. A Competitive Assessment of the United States Civil Aircraft Industry, from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Japanese Commercial Aircraft Industry Since 1945, Government Policy, Technical Development & Industrial Structure. Trade magazines. Computer publications. There were titles in German and French. There were volumes of U.S. government publications. Procurement manuals. Bid specifications. Aviation. Missiles. Helicopters. Satellites.

  “Oh,” I said, “we are in deep shit.”

  “I thought you knew that,” Hayakawa said.

  “How would I know that?” I said.

  “When I said yes to six hundred sixty-six thousand dollars,” he said.

  “I thought that was shuck and jive,” I said.

  “No. I was quite sincere.”

  “I should learn to be more trusting,” I said.

  It was late when we rode back to the hotel in Hayakawa’s leather-lined version of Japanese luxury.

  He was ferociously disappointed. “Where can the disc be?” he said.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s on the disc?”

  “If I told you that I didn’t know, would you believe me?”

  “Why don’t you call your office and find out.”

  “We must get into Hiroshi Tanaka’s office,” he said.

  “I could do the office,” I said. “If it was New York and I had some time to recruit some specialists. You’re talking about a high-grade burglary—you understand that. Like something out of the movies. With a team of specialists. The alarm guy, the wheelman, the lookout, the safecracker.”

  “You must find a way,” he said. “You must.”

  “There’s one slim possibility.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t even know if it’s worth trying.”

  “Tell me! I will decide.”

  “The big problem is the alarm,” I said. “There are several problems, but the big one is the alarm. It requires a number code. We don’t have it. You saw the response time of Austrian Polizei. So that gives us … ten minutes, if we’re lucky, once the alarm goes. More like five.”

  “I understand this,” he said impatiently.

  “But we don’t know where the optical disc is. So we need a hell of a lot more than five minutes.”

  “I understand this,” he said. “You told me this.”

  “So the trick is to be inside before the alarm is set. If you trip it on the way out, it doesn’t matter. You still have five minutes and all you need to do is leave.”

  “How do you do this?”

  “Well,” I said thoughtfully, “maybe you go in with the cleaners. Maybe it’s even easier. You hang around, wait till Helga goes to the John or for coffee or whatever, and just ease on in. Find the broom closet or an empty office and stay there until they shut the place down. Or if someone is working late. Maybe Helga goes home promptly at six. So the front door is open and unguarded.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “It’s a one-man job,” I said.

  “I understand,” he said, not happy.

  I turned on the radio. There was a commercial for Sony, then the Theme from Peter Gunn. Stand-up bass and saxophones. Jazz for a rain-swept street reflecting neon lights while a hooker with a heart of gold hikes up her skirt, shows her leg, and says she’s never heard of crack, she’s waiting for a good-time gambling man who looks like Peter Lawford and sounds like Cary Grant. When the next commercial came on I said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you again.”

  SYMBOLS

  VIENNA IS PERFECT.

  The boulevards are wide. The sidewalks are immaculate. Traffic flows. Nothing is in disrepair. The lawns, the shrubs, the trees are groomed. The shops are full. There are lots of shops. Pedestrians never cross on a red light. There is a great deal of that which means capital Culture—public sculpture on imposing architecture, famous paintings, museums, and live music from dead civilizations.

  Vienna has several images.

  A living operetta: waltzing cavalry officers in gorgeous uniforms at balls with long-gowned ladies, high-hatted strollers, and an emperor.

  Fervent dreamers in cafés: Freud and revoltingly subconscious sex, subversive literature in the bookstalls, twelve-tone music, Art Nouveau, Utopian theories with cream, coffee, and Sacher tortes.

  Postwar intrigue: After World War II Germany and Austria were jointly occupied by all the Allied powers and divided into four zones. It happened that the capital cities of both countries were deep within Russian sectors. They were additionally divided, Berlin into four zones—French, British, American, Soviet—and Vienna into five, the fifth being the jointly run First District. The mark of this unwieldy arrangement—immortalized in Graham Greene’s The Third Man—was four men in a jeep, one from each Allied force, patrolling the streets. The Cold War had begun even before the old one was done and anyplace where the East and West were so closely entwined became a center of the trade in information, in contraband, papers, and people.

  In 1955 the Soviets agreed to end the occupation. They demanded two guarantees—there would be no repeat of Anschluss, the uniting of Austria and Germany, and an independent Austria would be permanently neutral. This was agreed to by treaty and neutrality was written into the constitution of the new Second Republic. This did not put an end to the business of espionage. Neutrality and geography guaranteed an ongoing boom for the Viennese spy. Switzerland was neutral, but deep in the heart of NATO. West Berlin was deep in the heart of the Warsaw Pact but had Checkpoint Charlies every which way you cross. Austria was the only neutral with borders both ways. To the west it touched Italy, West Germany, and Switzerland. To the east were Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia—countries that had once been administered from Vienna as part of the Hapsburg Empire.

  Even though we were being followed, spy capital was still not my personal image of Vienna. I think of the city as the Mall Without Walls. Move over, Rodeo Drive; sit back, Fifth Avenue. We were on Kärntnerstraße, heart and soul of a city of shops, a pedestrian street that runs from the Staatsopern on The Ring to Stephansdom, the church at the v
ery center of the Old City. So I said, “Let me buy you something,” to Marie Laure. I was thinking most specifically of Palmer’s. Satin things that clung and hung off of nipples. French-cut underwear with the wide legs that could be pushed aside. Perhaps an overpriced dress that would make her feel feminine, womanly, adored.

  “I know what I want,” she said.

  Instead of a lingerie shop we entered a Kinder Kaufhaus. In a matter of minutes we’d spent ÖS4,200 on a McLaren stroller. I didn’t understand the appeal. It didn’t matter. I enjoyed spending the money. I was happy that I was in a position to get things for my family. There are many different definitions of manliness, a wide variety of activities that make a male feel masculine. Climbing a mountain. Winning a wrestling match. Mugging a mugger. Earning a million dollars. Having sex with women who look like Viennese statues. Striving, battling, competing, scoring, winning! Then there’s buying Änsa baby bottles, deciding if the baby’s pajamas should be pink or blue, and picking out crib toys in nontoxic primary colors.

  Our watchers waited outside for us. I almost asked them to carry our packages. But it would have embarrassed them. And I wanted to pretend that we were alone.

  “I didn’t buy all that stuff because I feel guilty,” I said.

  “Why did you say that? Everything was okay.”

  “All right,” I said, “everything is okay.”

  “Now it’s not,” she said.

  “Look, I know you were mad at me because I didn’t show up for dinner last night.”

  “Or telephone. I was not mad. I was worried.”

  “I didn’t want to call from Tanaka’s apartment.”

  “You think I am wrong to say you should telephone? Talk to your mother. Your mother, she says I am right. She too had worry. She says you were always like this. Always irresponsible.”

  “Let’s get something straight—the only reason I’m dealing with these people is for you.” I held on to her. “No. Don’t look at them. Listen to me. I don’t think I can pull this off. I don’t know how the system works. I don’t have the language. I don’t have contacts. And no backup.”

  “I back you up,” my not-quite-wife said.

  “If I were alone,” I said, “I would tell them to fuck off. I’d sell the Laundromat and head for higher ground. I’m doing this just for you.”

  “Just for me? What about your daughter?”

  “I know you think you speak for Anna. But she might like Argentina or New Zealand. Or Australia.”

  “What about for you? Anthony Cassella did not like people who changed their names.”

  “That was in America.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means someone who changes their name to deny who they are and where they come from. Like from Guiseppe Ciccolini to Jonathan Charles, Jr. Or Isidore Lipshitz becomes Burt Lancaster.”

  “Was that Burt Lancaster’s real name?”

  “No. I was trying to make a point. That it’s different.”

  “Is it?”

  Why do I suddenly question what I know to be true just because a woman says, “Is it?” with a flick of the eyebrows and a bit of reverb in her voice? “Let’s let it go,” I said. “Let’s just try to enjoy the day.”

  “All right,” she said, “we will try.”

  But she did not throw her arms around me or kiss me in a manner that suggested that she was overcome with lust. So I was certain that she did not understand and that more explaining would make her understand and love me again, without reserve, the way she loved our daughter. “Let me explain. First of all, I was on a job. We spent eight hours taking that place apart. I’m the man in the middle. Both of them—Hayakawa and Sheen—know more than me. I have to shake both of them. Assuming this thing is found, I have to be the one to find it. I have to be alone or at least in control of the situation when I find it. I’m not going to let Chip Sheen take it off of me with his gun. That way he gets a big ‘Attaboy!’ at the Bureau or the Agency—wherever it is that he works—while I end up without our deal with the Justice Department and I don’t get Hayakawa’s Japanese money either. I can’t let Hayakawa find it first. Then I have to get it away from him. He wants it real bad. More than half a million dollars’ worth. That means someone is going to get hurt. Him or me, or both of us. Even if it’s him that gets hurt, that doesn’t mean that’s the end of it. Those things have a way of escalating. So if I’m searching that apartment with Mike Hayakawa, I don’t turn my back on him for a second. Because that’s the second that he finds the disc and it’s in his pocket before I see it and it’s ‘Oh, so solly, search is over, going back to Tokyo, too bad Mr. Cochlain. No money for you.’ Then it’s me and you and Anna against the IRS and extradition, without an extra six hundred thousand dollars to flee or fight. If I fight, a million D marks might just be enough for legal fees and back taxes. You get it?”

  “First you say to just forget it and enjoy the day. Then you tell me the whole story all over again.”

  “Right, right, sorry. Let me buy you something else. Like a dress.”

  “I want to go to a museum.”

  They had a lot of Flemish paintings at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There was a point in history when the Netherlands was ruled by Hapsburgs. Which is confusing because what Americans call Dutch are actually Flemings and what is now Holland was once shaped very differently and included Belgium, but it wasn’t either country at that point anyway.

  Peter Paul Rubens impressed me.

  This was carnal knowledge. Those great soft women lying there, fleshy and open, creatures of sensual appetites. Like my Marie used to be. Not very long ago. And surely would be again. I put my arms around her from behind, put my hips against her hips. I looked for a staircase or a screened area or a hidden nook, where, like lust-crazed teens, we could, at the very least, dry hump. And if we were lucky, do something truly dirty and daring.

  We were not, alas, on the same wavelength.

  We met the two Annas at Café Central, a Viennese coffee shop that is both typical and famous, a period piece from the days when Vienna was the center of an Empire and a place of intellectual excitement. My mother looked out the window and said, “What is that nice Mike Hayakawa doing out there?”

  “Oh, he’s following us, Mom.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible, standing out in the street like that. Ask him in.”

  He tried to look away when I approached, he tried pretending not to see me, then he tried to pretend that he was there because he liked leaning against walls to read the Herald Tribune. “Come in out of the rain and have a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “It’s not raining,” Hayakawa said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m trying to make it less embarrassing.”

  “This is embarrassing,” he said.

  “Did you enjoy watching me neck with Marie at the museum.”

  “A Japanese couple would never behave like that in public,” he said.

  “You should see Paris. Or Rome,” I said. “A park in Rome on a Sunday afternoon is a soft-core orgy. A voyeur’s dream.” An ongoing theme in the manga at Tanaka’s apartment was peeking and peeping. “Voyeurism seems to be a Japanese fetish, or was that just Hiroshi’s thing?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You have my deepest apologies. I am here because, as you know, I have been instructed to stay with you.

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Did you enjoy the Rubens?”

  “Do men really like women,” he said, “who are so … fat?”

  “While you were following me,” I said, “did you notice anyone following you?”

  He turned around reflexively. “No,” he said. He didn’t see them. Neither did I, at that moment. “Was someone following me?”

  “You know who keeps spotting you,” I said, as we entered the café, “my mother. She’s the one who said we should invite you in. I would have left you out there.”

  “Hello, Mike,” my mother said, beaming. “Are you enjoying Vienna?”

  “
It is a very cultural city,” Mike said.

  “Sit down and join us,” my mother said. “If you must keep track of my son, it’s easier to do it this way.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Cassella,” he said. “You will be here for several minutes, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You won’t go away, will you?”

  “No,” my mother said. “We’ll be here.”

  “Then you will excuse me. I must use the men’s room. I will be back shortly. Rick, you must explain to me what you do about that. It is by far the hardest part of tailing a person.”

  The other two were better at following people. My mother didn’t notice them at all. I was aware of them, but I didn’t get a good look at them. I assumed that Chip Sheen had brought in the backup team. But it could have been a whole new set of players. If they hadn’t been to Vienna before, then the day would have been a treat for them too.

  Wandering back to the hotel after coffee, we crossed the Judenplatz. Platz means square. Juden means Jew. “This was the center of the Jewish quarter,” my mother said. She was keeper of the guidebook.

  “You will go tonight,” Mike Hayakawa asked me, “to Tanaka’s office?”

  “Tonight,” I said. “They close at six. I’ll be there around closing time.”

  “I am part Jewish,” Marie Laure said to my mother. It was something that I was aware of, but rarely had reason to think of. “I was raised as a Catholic, but my mother was considered to have Jewish blood. When the Germans came they took my grand-père. Grandmama—she took my mother and they went to Algeria. That’s where my mother met my father. So your granddaughter— she too has Jewish blood.”

  I took my daughter—that beloved, innocent, and fragile person—from her mother’s arms. Forty-five years earlier they would have taken her. They would have put her on a train. A special train. In a cattle car. To an extermination camp. Because of who her great-grandfather was. She curled her hand around my finger. She looked at me. With complete trust. That war—the last great crusade where right was right, wrong was wrong—had seemed so faded and far away in the new Europe of the mighty Deutsche mark, with the Berlin wall falling down, communism collapsing from Budapest to Moscow, and 1992 coming. A war that they made movies of in black and white. A war so good that the actors who had played in it—the John Waynes and Ronald Reagans—thought they’d actually been in it. It had nothing to do with me. Suddenly it did. History telescoped. The past collapsed forward. Who would take my beautiful, precious Anna Geneviève and kill her? Who are the madmen who murder children?