Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  It was time to make my move. If my family would let me.

  “You have to know that I love you,” I said to Marie Laure. We were walking along the Danube. We were watched, but at least we weren’t being listened to. Which was more than I could hope for in our hotel room.

  “Do you?” she said. “I think you do not like the weight of family, baby, grand-mère, grand-mère, and me. You would rather be like Paul at Down Under and fucking every new jeune fille in St. Anton. I think so.”

  “You’re making me crazy,” I said, “but for the first time in my life I know what I’m living for.”

  “I like to hear that,” she said.

  “You have to trust me,” I said. “You have to let me go now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I turned her to face me and lifted her face to kiss her mouth, but her lips were still and dry. Her body was stiff.

  “I mean that our car is wired with a directional finder—so is Hayakawa’s, so is Chip’s. I don’t even know who all the players are. I just know that they’re not on my side. None of them. I also know that I can’t do what I have to do with at least six people looking over my shoulder.”

  “Yes, I know that,” she admitted.

  “I’m being used,” I said. “I’m a pig sniffing for truffles. And whoever the hunters are, they’re going to take away whatever I find. So if you want to go to America, we have to cut our deal with Mr. Lime, in writing, through an attorney in Washington or New York, before it goes down.”

  “You think so?”

  “They’ll pay what they have to pay and deliver exactly as much as they’re forced to. Not a schilling more. Not a dime, not a deutsche mark, not even a florint.”

  “What about Mike Hayakawa? I think you can trust him.”

  “I don’t want to believe that. If I believe that, I don’t know that I can do what I have to do. Unless you’re ready to never see the States again. Unless you’re ready to live on false papers for the rest of our lives. And what if this patriotic tune that Mr. Lime is playing is for real? What if this is in the interests of America? Hey, on some level I can’t quite rationalize that away.”

  “Vraiment?”

  “Yeah, truly,” I said.

  “You talk so cynical. You said it did not matter a good goddamn if you went back or not.”

  “It doesn’t. Unless the skiing here is this bad again next year.”

  “Why do you do that? The cynicism. The … what do you call … flippers.”

  “Flippancy. Flippers is a flounder.”

  “No,” she said, “Flippers was a dolphin. When I was a girl, I watched it. Reruns.”

  “Will you help me?” I said. I meant—Will you let me get out of here without you?

  “Who are you going to make a deal with?” she said. “Which one?”

  “I am going to do what makes you happy,” I said.

  She started to cry. I took her in my arms and she came in close to me. “Since the baby, I am scared and I get angry. I get angry at you and you make me crazy.”

  “Hush, baby, hush. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. I should be more patient.”

  “I am so scared. Don’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Do I ever?”

  “Yes, you do. She kissed me. It was soft and tender and caring. But there was no ignition. No sex in it. I was disappointed. She knew it. She blamed herself and felt guilt about it. That made her angry at me. But she didn’t want the anger. Neither did I. So we held each other. Softly and tightly.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Je t’aime. Tu es ma vie,” I said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Distract them while I disappear. Then keep things in motion like I haven’t left. Then act like I’ll be right back.”

  “With Mike Hayakawa,” she said, “I think it is better if you make him part of it.”

  “No,” I said. “Underneath that nice-guy thing he does, he’s driven, almost hysterical, and very literal. He has orders to stay with me. He’s going to insist on it. He’ll get nuts when I’m gone. But show him the beeper in our car. Tell him there’s one in his. Tell him that the opposition is planning to rip us off as soon as we find it.”

  “And Chip Sheen?”

  My gut twisted. I wanted to stay close to them to protect them. My worst fear, far more disturbing than any threat to my fate, was that something would happen to Anna Geneviève or Marie. “He and Lime want something,” I said. “This disc. They want it bad. Lime, at least, understands that if something happens to you he doesn’t get the disc. And Lime controls Chip Sheen. So it should be all right.” I believed that with my head. My heart had trouble with it.

  Marie Laure looked at me and saw right past the words, into my heart. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I will handle him.”

  “You are so very, very smart,” I said.

  “Don’t forget it,” she said. “This time if you mess around …”

  “Who me—mess around?”

  “This time, I won’t take you back.”

  “You won’t, huh?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where the pictures were taken, of course.”

  “When do you leave?” she said.

  “In the morning,” I said.

  She woke me before dawn. Her teeth were brushed and my stiff cock was in her hand. It was ninety days since my daughter had been born. According to the medical profession the passage was supposed to be ready for love again.

  I touched her, she was dry. More than that, her whole body was stiff.

  “We don’t have to,” I said.

  “I want to,” she said.

  I tried to caress her breast. The baby hadn’t nursed yet so it was heavy with milk and painful. I knew it was not a sexual area anymore, but I had foolishly reached back into old ways looking for the new ones. She brushed me away before I had a chance to pull back. That made both of us angry, but we tried to continue anyway.

  I thought to warm her with my mouth and began with kissing her belly. The lower I got, the more she got rigid rather than yielding. “I think I smell different,” she said. “Don’t do that. Just put it in me.”

  I wet myself with saliva and began to rub the head of my penis against her labia. She was so afraid. “I can stop,” I said. Though I wanted her to be better and to be able to ram it in again. To take her and have her and make her belong to me, like it used to be.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked, going slow.

  “No,” she lied.

  Then she began to cry.

  I held her. “It’ll be better next time,” I said. I tried to pull out.

  “Finish,” she said.

  I did. It hurt her. I was quick about it.

  BOHEMIANS

  IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO exaggerate the limitations of working out of your own environment. When I worked in New York I knew the game, I knew the people, I knew the law, I knew where traffic was one way, and I could read the street signs. Even in Austria I had a sense of what was going on. But with place names like Salgótarján, Müegyetem Rakpart, Németyvolgyi, the eye ceases to scan, the ear can’t hear.

  The only thing I had going for me was dollars, which, in the winter of 1990, was the best thing anyone could bring with them to Eastern Europe.

  By ’91, even, it might be different. Currencies can go hard. Yugoslavia had managed. The dinar, which had been Weimar Republic money through 1989, new values daily, printing bills in ever higher denominations weekly, had been pegged to the deutsche mark at 8:1, just like the Austrian schilling, and it held there.

  But in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary anything could be had for hard currency. Dollars were favored because on the other side of The Line they were both sentimental and a trifle unsophisticated. They remembered the dollar as the Other Great Power. The one of the shining light. When the world was ripped in half they got the darkness, where nothing grew, nei
ther crops nor industry, where they just changed the locations of the concentration camps instead of tearing them down. And they didn’t know that we were a declining power while new powers and old enemies where on the rise. But D marks would certainly do. Also ÖS, £, ¥, FF, SF, lire—real money that would buy Italian shoes, German cars, American jeans, brand-name running shoes, cameras that worked, foreign travel, vegetables in February.

  The photographs and where they led were the only edge I had over Sheen and Hayakawa. I meant to use it.

  I told Chip Sheen we would be getting an early start and I promised him we would use both cars. That made him happy. I told Mike Hayakawa to follow me in his luxury Élégant, that I wanted to talk to the morning man at the Intercontinental and then at the Hilton. Then we were going to a posh riding resort out in the country that I had been told Tanaka might have visited. Marie Laure drove. I rode in the passenger seat. I would have preferred to leave the baby at home, just this once, but the distance between breast and babe was three hours maximum. I would have preferred to leave the grandmothers behind, but the permissible distance between them and the granddaughter was five meters and in any case, no farther than the other grandmother. Off we went. The wagon train. In truth, the shuffle was going to work better that way anyway.

  We pulled up at the Intercontinental. I jumped out. My gang waited. I was inside ten minutes. I came out. We went across the river and up the hill to the Hilton. I jumped out.

  I had a stand-in waiting. I got him for ten dollars American. Budapest was like an old-time detective movie where people did things for a deuce, a fin, a dime. He was a student named Miklòs. He spoke English. He wanted to be a banker, make a lot of money, and go shopping in Vienna. He was about my build and height.

  He walked out of the Hilton wearing my denim jacket and my cap. He jumped into the passenger seat beside Marie Laure. She drove off. I looked out the front window of the hotel. Mike Hayakawa followed Marie. Chip Sheen followed Hayakawa. I didn’t see anyone follow Chip.

  I took a cab to the airport. The first flight out was to Munich. It was full. For twenty dollars American, someone got bumped and I got on.

  In Munich I rented a car and drove north, past Dachau, and northeast. The change from West Germany to Czechoslovakia was both more abrupt and more extreme than crossing from Austria to Hungary. It looked different, sounded different, smelled different.

  It had a warm and homey aroma, smoky and intimate, like the peat they burn in Ireland. It’s soft coal. It makes acid rain. It kills. Trees, animals, people, the soil itself. Not quickly, but you wouldn’t want to spend your life breathing it.

  There was just one radio station. The music was a very special time warp, as if a box of records had fallen out of the back of an American tank back in 1945 and they hadn’t gotten their hands on anything since. I heard Benny Goodman and Big Bill Broonzy and somebody who sounded just like the Andrews Sisters if the Andrews Sisters could sing in Czech.

  There were no Western cars. Even the roads were smaller, the pavement was potholed and pitted. No one wore Western clothes. The stores were tiny, few and far between. In winter there were no fresh vegetables at all.

  Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1990 was all things that we wanted Eastern Europe to be. Looking backward through its eyes, America was all things we wanted America to be. In Czechovision the U.S.A. was rich, powerful, and the ideal to aspire to. There were three rates for the Czechoslovakian koruna. The low official rate was 14:$1, the “special” official rate—if you stayed at a hotel and used a credit card for your bill, you could then change your cash at the special rate—was 28:$1. The real exchange rate was 42:$1. On the street people would offer you better—100:1, 200:1, even 500:1. But that, of course, was a scam. You would never see a koruna. They might snatch your cash and run. Give you counterfeit. Or you might get zlotys—Polish money—which were worth more than nothing but probably less than counterfeit.

  I pulled into town around dusk and began the tedious business of looking for a hotel. If they had a room it was only available for one night, or didn’t have a bath, or shared a toilet. Until I showed the desk clerk at the Paris Alexander Hamilton’s face. He tipped me the wink. “Yes, sir, room with a private bath, and how long will you be staying?”

  “A couple of days, a week,” I said, “I have no way of knowing.”

  “Well, sir, whatever you need, you just see me,” he said in German. It is the second language of Eastern Europe. After all, Teutons—as the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, the Austrian Empire, the Thousand Year Reich—have owned it all or in part throughout the centuries and probably will again.

  “I’m looking for a girl,” I said.

  “No problem, sir—not with hard currency.” He tipped me the wink.

  “Actually, I’m looking for this girl,” I said, and showed him the photo.

  He looked and his face worked some changes. “Never seen her,” he said.

  As sure as Vaclav Havel will never write a play better than his own life, I was that sure the clerk was lying. So I showed him old Ben Franklin. That was 2,100 koruna in a land where 50 koruna paid for dinner; 5 koruna bought a liter of good beer, and two could get you discount brew. He kept on lying.

  That scared me.

  It scared me so much, I changed hotels. It was another ten bucks to get through the next desk clerk. This time I didn’t ask about the girl in the picture. I had a feeling that I should keep my search and my home base separate.

  I called Paul at Down Under and I asked him to drop in on Marie Laure, say hello for me, and make sure she and the baby were all right. He didn’t ask why, which I thought was very tasteful indeed. I told him I would call back the next day to see how she was.

  Then I went out into the night.

  It was a time warp. The faces and the clothes belonged to the working people of Brooklyn, Cleveland, Scranton, Chicago the way they were three decades ago. It was like seeing our parents.

  The hipsters, the underground, who were now the leading edge, looked like the gang from Café Figaro on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal the year that Bob Dylan came east, out from Hibbing, Minnesota—the days when we had paperback Kerouacs in our back pockets and Ginsberg was growing his beard and sprouting “Howl,” when Ike had just left and Kennedy was just in. These Bohemians were Beatniks. Beards and longish hair, jeans and beat-up tweed jackets. Their drug was beer and their charm was talk. The pubs rang with capital letters. Freedom. God. Revolution. Atheism. Capitalism. Free Markets. Humanism. The Values of Socialism. The Triumph of Art.

  As it was in that time, women in public were scarcer than men. Those I did see with my sexist, sexualist, sensualist eye were a disappointment. After the healthy, bouncing, let’s-all-go-naked-in-the-sauna spirit of the Germans and Swedes of St. Anton, the long-legged, loose-breasted, erotic presence of the Hungarians, and my aerobicized memories of America, the Czechoslovakian women were drab. A lot like the Brits who’d been left out of Margaret Thatcher’s yuppie party: black and shapeless clothes, beer-formed bodies, cigarette-smoking squints, indoor pallor. The girl in the photo should have stood out among them like a diamond in the coal.

  I found some people who said they might have seen someone like her. But no one admitted to knowing her.

  No one particularly cared. There were so many other things that were important. There was passionate concern over a recent quasi-diplomatic incident. Since I was pegged as an American, I was asked to explain. Why had the American ambassador, Shirley Temple Black, snubbed Frank Zappa? She had even denied knowing his music. Didn’t she know how respected and loved Zappa was in Czechoslovakia?

  I spoke to Paul. He told me Marie Laure was all right.

  “And Anna Geneviève?” I said.

  “She’ll be skiing by next season,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Two days and two nights of pub crawling—best beer in the world at the best prices—I began to think I was wrong. The photos had been shot in Prague—there wa
s no doubt of that. But it just didn’t seem to be Her home. Perhaps they all—Wendy, Hiroshi, Her, and the unknown man who’d shot the shots—were all just passing through.

  Then Vaclav Havel came to town.

  He had just wowed them in the States. He was on his way to Russia to see Gorbachev. He was the hottest act on the world circuit. By golly, they turned out for him. The occasion was the anniversary of the death of a student who had died by self-immolation to protest the Soviet tanks that had rolled in back in 1968 to end the Prague Spring. It had been a futile gesture. The troops had come to stay. The experiment called Socialism with a Human Face was terminated. It was now a warm winter, eerily springlike, twenty-two years later. The economy of the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Soviet army had found its Vietnam in the hash and poppy Muslim land of Afghanistan, Havel was on his way to Moscow to negotiate, at last, the removal of that army.

  Václavské Námešti, Wenceslas Square, is not a square. It’s a five-block-long rectangle, the center planted and green like New York’s Park Avenue. It slopes gently down from the national museum at one end to a pedestrian area that enters into the old city at the bottom. It’s lined with shops, hotels, restaurants, cafés, and various tourist services.

  It was full. As it had been three months earlier during that astonishing week in November when Czechoslovakia walked and talked and sang its way into freedom. There were one or two hundred thousand people there. They were singing.

  Then I saw Her. I could have picked the cheekbones alone out of a crowd. She was dressed like the rest of the Central European avant garde. Black was the color of winter. But her clothes had been made in Milan. They hung on her like she’d been designed in Paris and groomed in New York. I swear she looked me in the eye. Her eyes were liquid and they were the kind of blank that invites a man to write his own story into her glance. Her attitude said that she was born to beauty—that was your problem, not hers. Her breasts were small, but there was something about them that suggested there was an inverse relation between their size and how much sensation they would create.