Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Yes, Peaches, he did.”

  “I want a little respect. Mr. Lime warned you.”

  “Who is Peaches?” Marie Laure asked.

  “I think we need to sit down and have a meeting,” Peaches said.

  “About what?”

  “This is not a secure line. We need a face-to-face.”

  “Of course it’s not a secure line,” I said.

  “Who is Peaches?” Marie Laure asked. “And why do you need a secure line to talk to her?”

  “Mr. Lime said I should have a face-to-face with you and plan your next move. If you don’t come up with something I’m to call him and he says he will lower the boom. I’m talking about making applesauce. Cored, boiled, and mashed.”

  “I thought it meant you wanted to eat me with sugar and cinnamon,” I said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Chip said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Marie Laure said.

  “It has to be alone,” Chip said. “Shake off you know who.”

  “You mean Cherry?”

  “Who is he calling chéri?” Marie Laure’s mother, who had also wandered into the conversation, asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marie Laure said, “but it is someone he calls Peaches.”

  “Yeah, it would be a good idea to be alone,” I said.

  “Good, when can we meet?” Chip “Peaches” Sheen asked.

  “And why do you need to be alone?” Marie Laure asked.

  “Pourquoi seules?” Marie’s mother asked. “Pourquoi une tête-à-tête?”

  “How soon can we do it? I need to get out of here,” I said.

  “Quel dommage,” Marie’s mother said.

  Marie just sat down and sighed. Anna Geneviève made some new baby noises.

  “Right now is fine,” Chip said.

  “Same place as last time,” I said.

  “Oh, God,” Marie Laure said.

  “Mon Dieu!” her mother said.

  “I want to know who Peaches is,” Marie Laure said as I hung up the phone.

  “I’m sorry. I never got around to telling you. We all have code names. That was just Chip. He’s Peaches. There’s also Lime, Apple, and Cherry.” As my mother walked in I said, “We’re all fruits.”

  “Oh, no,” my mother said.

  “That’s better,” Marie Laure said.

  “Je ne comprende pas,” Geneviève la grand-mère said.

  As I opened the door to leave, our hero, Mike Hayakawa, was raising his fist to knock.

  “Am I intruding?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. “You’re welcome, I’m leaving.”

  “What are we going to do now?” he asked.

  “I’m going grocery shopping,” I said. “Why don’t you go in and meet Marie’s mother.”

  “We are defeated, are we not?”

  “Stay for dinner,” I said. “You’re our honored guest. One of them anyway.”

  “You’re going to the supermarket?” he said, worried that I might be going somewhere that he should be following me to. Which I was.

  “Look, you can’t follow me every minute of every day. I’m not going to let you follow me to bed. You can’t keep up with me on skis. And I can lose you if I put my mind to it. So relax. You saved my baby. I owe you. You can trust me. Two things I promise you. One is that we are not yet defeated. And two”—I looked him square in the eye. I was my most Caucasian sincere—“if I find the disc, the very first thing I do is put it in your hands. Trust me.”

  “Okay, Tony,” he said. “I’ll trust you.”

  “Great. Go make nice to the grandmothers.”

  With Cherry diverted I made my way to Peaches. There was no reason that Cherry couldn’t have come along since I had nothing to report. No ideas. No plans. It was just that it would have changed a double game into a triple and I was already having trouble keeping my prevarications straight.

  Peaches made me call his boss. He had a portable scrambler built into a genuine pigskin attaché case that interfaced with any phone system in the world. It was very James Bond.

  “I want action,” Lime said, his voice distorted by being deconstructed and then imperfectly reassembled. Something like Darth Vader without the rolling elocutions.

  “What do you want me to do, jump up and down in place?”

  “Understand something. You are a wanted fugitive. I am holding off your extradition and arrest. I am giving you a week to find this thing …”

  “Where do you suggest I start?”

  “… or I will let matters proceed.”

  “It’s a dead end,” I said.

  “You’ll think of something …” Lime said.

  “I can’t do anything …” I said.

  “… because you’re cunning and because you’re motivated …”

  “… if there is nothing to do.”

  “Because you know that I can see to it that it’s a long, long time before you see your new baby girl again.”

  “You motherfucker,” I said to the dead telephone line.

  “You shouldn’t speak like that to Mr. Lime,” Chip “Peaches” Sheen said. “He is working for America and America is God’s chosen country. I can’t understand people who don’t respect that.”

  I went to the supermarket to cover the lie to Hayakawa and because we needed food. It was almost closing time and all the best bread was already gone, which annoyed me no end. There were no good bananas either, and since everything closed at the same time I was too late to hit one of the other two markets. When I got home Cherry was still there. My mother had convinced him to stay for dinner. I was a preoccupied and sour host.

  When we finally got to bed, Marie Laure moved close to me. “I love you,” she said with great warmth. “I don’t want anything to happen to any of us.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked, politely inquiring about her bruises.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said.

  I put my arm around her. Her body was warm and womanly against me. I stared at the ceiling as if the plan I didn’t have would appear there. I wanted my woman and my child and to go from day to day free of worry. No more than everyone else wants. I was in a box and inside that box I was wrapped in chains and those chains had weights on them.

  In the morning I went down to the laundry. Machine number 5 was acting up. The mounting bolts that hold the section that actually spins have thick rubber washers that act as shock absorbers. There is something asymmetrical about number five and it destroys them far more frequently than it should. Once that happens, it’s metal against metal, bouncing almost a quarter inch per spin. With fifteen pounds of laundry soaked with ten pounds of water it sounds like Soviet tanks are on parade through the center of town. I fixed it and collected the money from the change boxes.

  Anita was handling everything else with reasonable competence.

  I didn’t particularly want to get back to the House of Women, though I should have with Marie in a loving mood. I spent the afternoon skiing. We were back to rocks and gravel again. I tore up the bottoms of my beautiful Atomic 733SLs. I skied until they shut the mountain and chased me off. I skied like they were going to take it all away from me tomorrow.

  Then I went to Down Under for a drink.

  Paul was sitting alone at a table in back. He looked unusually bitter for an Australian. He failed to say “Goo’day, mate.”

  “What the hell’s the matter?” I asked.

  “What’s your poison, mate?” he said.

  “Wine,” I said. “Something light and white.”

  He gestured for the waitress. “You got it sussed,” he said. “One good Sheila and a kid. That’s the way to go.”

  “What happened, have your heart broken?”

  “I wish it were my heart. You can break my heart any day,” he said to the waitress as she appeared with a Williams and a beer. “Can’t you, love? And I bounce right back.”

  “Yes, Paul.” She said to me, “His heart hangs between his legs.”
/>
  “Oh, God, it’s true,” he said, full of rue. “Bring the lad here some vino.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Okay. Tell me about Wendy and Tanaka,” I said.

  “You’re still on that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m still on that.”

  “What were you? In love with her?”

  “It’s gotten complicated,” I said.

  “It does do that. You won’t believe this story.”

  “What story?”

  “Never mind. It was Wendy that I wanted. She had a certain appeal. More than an appeal. There was something very like a schoolgirl about her. Like, she would be bald as a peach once you got up under her dress. Yet at the same time she knew what it was all about. Twisty little fantasy there. She was as tasty as her pal Carol is dull. The two of them together were like a pastry next to the dough. I only took on the dough because I thought the pastry would follow along. Like I said, mate, the wandering cock will get you in trouble. Stick with your Sheila and keep your willie in your trousers. Do you know what happened to me?”

  The waitress showed up with my drink and another Williams for Paul. He downed the pear schnapps in a swallow.

  “Maybe I should talk to Carol again,” I said.

  “Wendy stayed over often enough. She might even have left some of her stuff here. There was this Belgian girl …”

  “Belgian girl?”

  “Arrived last week. Pear-shaped tits, didn’t wear a bra. Lean. Beautiful tits. Rick, she had beautiful tits. Do I repeat myself? Yes, I do. It took me a week to get into this one’s pants. Just luscious. Worth the wait, too. That’s what I thought. Never mind.”

  “So I should go ask Carol about anything Wendy might have left.”

  “Carol’s a pain in the arse. You want to look around Carol’s room, come on—I’ll let you in. I’m ’er landlord, aren’t I? I’ve got the bloody key. Come on,” he said. When he got up, I followed him. Staff housing was around the back of the club. “Yvonne, her name was.”

  “The Belgian girl?”

  “With the tits,” he said.

  “I didn’t imagine she’d left ’em behind.”

  “We fooked our brains out,” he said. “Just fooked our bloody brains out. Up and down, sideways, backways, sitting, sliding, and standing up. Bloody lovely it was,” he said as he opened the door to Carol’s little room. It was fairly neat. There was a bed big enough to get laid in but not to spend the night. A chest of drawers. A closet. There was a window. If the room had a saving grace, that was it. I started going through the place. There was a truly cheap painting of an alpine scene on the wall. Paul sat on the bed. “You’ve done this kind of thing before,” he said.

  “Could well be,” I said.

  “So there we are, me and Yvonne, from Belgium. And do you know what she says to me?”

  “No, what?”

  “I’m talking about after fook number four. When my dick is bloody well raw, isn’t it, from trying me New South Wales best to make her satisfied. Do you know what she says?”

  “No,” I said, working my way from the bottom drawer up.

  “She says, ‘It’s fun to fook a white man again.’ “

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “Exactly what I says, exactly,” Paul said.

  “So what did she say?” I said, up to the next drawer, finding nothing of consequence.

  “She says, ‘I’ve had nothing but black men for the last six months.’ ‘And where’ve you been?’ I says. What do you think she says?”

  “I don’t know. What did she say?”

  Paul lifted the pillow from its place at the head of the bed and held it up as if it were the Belgian girl. He spoke in a falsetto, “‘Rwanda, I’ve been in Rwanda.’”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It was just two weeks ago I saw it on the telly. They did random blood tests in Rwanda. Random tests. Thirty percent positive for the AIDS virus.”

  “Oh, shit, Paul,” I said, looking over at him. He was hunched over the pillow, hugging it. At the head of the bed, where the pillow had been was a packet of three-by-five snapshots. The packet was folded open and Wendy Tavetian looked out at me from the top photo.

  I picked up the package. There was Wendy in an urban landscape. A city I couldn’t place. There was Wendy with another girl. There was the other girl, alone. Where Wendy had her appeal, this one was truly stunning. In this humble snapshot she looked ready for Elle or Vogue. She had the cheekbones and the slightly almond eyes and the lean languid provocative look. She had the big moist lips that have become the primary secondary sexual characteristic of models since they got too slender for breasts. There were several photos of Hiroshi Tanaka with the two of them.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my room,” Carol said, banging the door open.

  “It’s my fooking room,” Paul said, “in my fooking building, and if you don’t like it, get yourself another job.”

  “I’m looking for anything that’ll tell me about Wendy Tavetian. I’m sorry if I invaded your privacy,” I said, trying to be conciliatory.

  “Get out, get out, get out,” she yelled.

  “I’ll get out when I feel like it,” Paul said.

  I lifted him up. “Come on, Paul,” I said. “She has a point. Let’s go.”

  He more or less nodded and more or less came along. I had the pictures in my pocket. As we left, Carol threw herself on the bed weeping. It occurred to me that if Hiroshi Tanaka didn’t have the disc where he was when he died, perhaps it was where he’d been before he got here. That was a tale that would be quickly told by his passport and described, very probably, in the photographs.

  BUDAPEST

  “WHAT WAS HIROSHI TANAKA doing in Czechoslovakia?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Mike Hayakawa said.

  “What was he doing in Poland?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike Hayakawa said.

  “In East Germany?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike Hayakawa said. “If I did, I would tell you.”

  Complex visas with logos in a variety of colors marched through Hiroshi Tanaka’s passport marking his travels through all of Eastern Europe, up and back, Moscow to Berlin to Bucharest, right up to the week of his death. The photos of Hiroshi, Wendy, and the unknown girl had been taken in one of the East Bloc countries. I didn’t know if they mattered but they were all I had to narrow the field. I didn’t show them to Hayakawa. I said, “Do you have his address book?”

  “Yes,” he said. I knew he did. I’d seen it in the apartment the night I brought Hayakawa back there drunk.

  “Give it to me,” I said.

  “What was Hiroshi Tanaka doing in Hungary?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Chip Sheen said.

  “What was he doing in Romania?”

  “I don’t know,” Chip Sheen said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to know? Who does know?”

  Chip hooked up the Porta-Scramble and put me through to his boss in Vienna.

  “So you’re crossing The Line,” Lime said. “Parting the curtain.”

  “I thought the curtain was down. Last year, nineteen eighty-nine,” I said, “they changed the world. That’s what they said on TV.”

  “You have a lead?”

  “I have his passport. I have his address book.”

  “I told Peaches you were cunning,” Lime said. “All you needed was motivation.”

  “Have all those places really changed?” I asked Lime. “Or am I going to end up in a totalitarian prison?”

  “What’s in the address book?” Lime said.

  “Do they have due process? Lawyers? Bail? Or do they send me straight to the Gulag?”

  “Which country are you going to?”

  East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania had all stopped being communist. Even if you’d been hiding out behind false papers and a snow-covered alp you ha
d to know about it. Every TV crew in the world showed up the day the Berlin Wall came down. Gorbachev became everyone’s best friend because he was letting it happen. Lech Walesa taught everyone that you don’t pronounce Polish names remotely the way they are spelled and opened the Gdansk shipyards to capitalism at a time when no one in the West could compete with the shipyards of Japan and Korea anyway. Czechoslovakia made the cover of Life even though that was the issue in which the editors picked America’s cutest baby. A group of Romanian cleaning ladies had their pictures front page, top, center of the New York Times. It was the morning after the revolution and they were literally sweeping up, brushing the bloody stones with old-fashioned brooms made of twigs. The Hungarians didn’t get any major photo ops, but they regularly received a kind of honorable mention in every other country’s story for sort of starting the whole thing by opening their borders and letting East Germans go to Vienna to shop, that being one of the two things that all East Europeans want to do with their newfound freedom. The other is to find an ethnic minority to persecute.

  “It’s hard to believe anything could change that fast,” I said. “The question is, Has it changed so much that American spies are welcome now?”

  For forty-four years we all knew what the shape of the world was. For forty-four years we were eyeball to eyeball, over two million men at arms on each side, poised for the moment when someone would take the dare and cross The Line. The tanks were lined up. The artillery. The armored columns. The bombers and fighter support. The missile-bearing nuclear subs and the carrier fleets playing ocean chess, jockeying for position. Spy planes and satellite recons. Defectors, defectors in place, microwave listening devices, phone taps, wire taps, radio taps. Disinformation and assassination. Billions upon billions into building better weapons, maintaining them, deploying them, lobbying for the contracts to build them, encouraging other countries to arm so that the arms industries could export product and amortize the cost of the Cold War.

  “I went to the travel agency,” I said. “I asked what I need to cross the borders. A passport, they said. Just a passport. No visa. No special appointment. Just show up at the closest Checkpoint Charlie and cross over.” I had also showed the photos to the women at the agency and asked if they could tell where they’d been taken. I didn’t mention that to Lime. “But all those people, who used to run the police states, who ran the Cold War, they have an investment. Did they just fade away? Have they all disappeared?”