Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  She turned away from me. As she began to move the crowd seemed to part for her and she glided away. When I tried to move the crowd seemed to thicken. I heard a wailing infant and there was a couple trying to squeeze through with a crying child. They couldn’t move either. When I looked back the girl from the photo had gone. Then I realized what the crowd was singing.

  What they sang, in Czech, was “We Shall Overcome.”

  No American of my age could fail to be moved by it. No matter whose side you were on, back then, back in the sixties, the diffusion filter of nostalgia puts a Hallmark greeting card sentimentality on our past. It was the song of the time when we were idealistic. When America was grappling with something more interesting than insider trading, junk bonds, and the retrograde voodoo of Reaganomics. It was the time of dreams of Peace and Justice, Freedom and Equality. In spite of my frustration at losing the girl, it held me and it touched me.

  Two nights later I found her. Then I went home with her.

  THE DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE

  THE HISTORY OF PRAGUE is a series of lessons about the stability of illusions and the illusion of stability. Castles and kings, cathedrals and cardinals, communists and governments—all came and went when least expected.

  The city is dominated by the castle that sits on a hill rising from the river. It’s been there, in one shape or another, for a thousand years. The head of government, frequently a king, makes his home there. Havel is entitled to, but doesn’t.

  It is where the Thirty Years War started. In the bad old days when there were poisoned popes and antipopes and even three popes at once, Bohemia had a Protestant reformation. While not strong enough to oust the Catholics, the Protestants were strong enough to survive, share in power, and force 150 years of official, though contested, toleration. Matters came to a crisis in 1618. A group of Protestant nobles, upset over the king leaning too far toward Catholicism, decided to express this by attacking two royal appointees. The nobles held an impromptu trial in the castle, declared them guilty of intolerance, and defenestrated them. That is, they threw them out the window.

  When it was over the map of Europe was redrawn and Czechoslovakia was Catholic again.

  Alongside the castle, still on the bluff above the town, is a park. In the center of the park is a place for a monument. Stalin’s statue used to be there. It was so big that, once they decided to take it down, it took two years to destroy it. The demolition budget would have built a small hospital.

  I knew all this and other scintillating trivia because my cover was tourist.

  My cover was slipping. “Would you be interested if someone were asking questions about you?” the desk clerk said.

  “Have some hard currency and tell me about it,” I said. I put ten dollars down.

  “Are you looking for a girl?” he asked.

  “It could be,” I said.

  “If it were me,” he said, “I would look for a different girl.”

  “Why? What do you know about this girl that I shouldn’t be looking for?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He sounded very sure that that was his answer.

  “Who was asking about a man who was looking for a girl?”

  “Two men, big men. Like weightlifters,” he said. That would be unusual in Prague. It didn’t have a muscle beach or a four-page list of aerobic studios in the Yellow Pages. It was a Pilsner and Marlboro kind of town.

  “Do they have names?”

  “They don’t say who they are,” he said.

  “What does that tell you?” I asked him. I put down another ten.

  “State security,” he mumbled—hard words to say.

  “I thought that was all over,” I said. He shrugged. “I read in the Herald Tribune that they dissolved the secret police and they were giving newsmen tours of the old headquarters.”

  “They let go forty thousand,” he said.

  “That’s a lot,” I said.

  “Do you know how many secret police there were?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “There were a hundred twenty thousand,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “You’re very welcome,” he said. The last of the ten-dollar bills had disappeared from the desk. I hadn’t noticed when it went.

  Now I was looking backward as well as forward. I strolled through the Old Town, the New Town, the Jewish Town. There was a Jewish Museum. Much of the collection had been assembled by the Germans. They intended to make Prague the site of the Museum of Extinct Races. Among the exhibits were the drawings and the poems of the children of Terezín, a concentration camp to which 15,000 children were taken. It was where most of them died.

  I had a daughter now and she was part Jewish. Not in any sense of religion or heredity or culture or race that I could discover or decipher. Simply in an added fragility. A signpost of the potential insanity of the world into which she had been born. I, as her protector, was to look upon those tragic sketches and crayon scrawls and understand that my responsibility was wider than collecting the coins that came in from my Laundromat in order to buy her bread and blankets and toys.

  That night I came upon a rock concert.

  I have worked in prisons in New York City. The inmates were bad and sad, full of hate, violence, ignorance, disease, and treachery. Even inside—particularly inside—they stole and lied, oppressed and beat and raped each other. Was it any different in Czechoslovakian prisons? For forty years it was where the best class of people went. Havel had done a five-month stretch seven months before he became president. Before that he’d done four years, 1979 to 1983, and before that, five months in 1977. Along with the other writers, philosophers, singers, and musicians who thought that defiance was a higher form of art than acquiescence or exile. This was their night. The underground was in the open, and the graduates of political prisons were center stage.

  The venue was a strange old hall. It was built down, into the ground. It was not a theater with raked seating—rather an open floor with four levels, like balconies, wrapped around the room. From them you could look down to where the bands played. The crowd thronged in front of the temporary stage. Some people danced. I saw Her among them. I made my way through the packs of people, saying, “Excuse me” in German as I pressed past. Most people understood but didn’t seem to like me particularly for it. So I switched to American and they didn’t understand me but didn’t mind.

  When I got to the dance floor, she was gone. I began pacing through the hall. Then I saw her again. She was going down one stairway while I was going up another. She looked into my eyes. The way I was certain she had in Wenceslas Square. I smiled at her. She smiled back. I hate it when that happens. I used to like it. I could hook myself on a look like that and reel myself right in between a pair of thighs, just like a hawser pulling a ship up snug to its mooring. I was a daddy—what was I going to do with it?

  I turned around and followed her.

  “Hello,” I said. “You don’t know how much I want to meet you.”

  She said something back in Czech, but we were looking at each other, playing games, so it didn’t matter much about the words. Not yet. I tried German. She spoke it some. She asked if I were German. I said I was American. She liked that—she liked Americans. They knew how to dance, she said, and had hard currency.

  True love is something that arises in a mother for her baby, in a father toward a child, in a dog to the first person that feeds him regularly. The thing between men and women is about the other things. Money, power, sex, and money. It gets played with varying degrees of honesty and different levels of decency. By and large, men have the money and power in this world. By and large, women sleep with men who have money and power. It may be communicated in the popinjay display of Georgio Armani suits and Porsche cars, vacations by the sea or down payments on the house that can be a home, but the bottom line remains. Very few men are turned on to women because they have money and power. It just isn’t what makes a prick stiff. Beauty does. Sex symbology does. We all
spend a lot of time insisting that the lies about it are true and that the ought-to-be are realities and crying alone each time we discover that they are not.

  She had beauty. The whole Western world is a continuous scream for attention by extraordinary-looking women in magazines and on film. I don’t remember when it was exactly, but I remember my incredible relief when I realized that nobody looks like that. It takes hairdressers, makeup artists, stylists, retouchers, color labs, lighting technicians, airbrush artists to create women who look like that, and then only from certain angles. They don’t come that way out of the box. This one came close. It was the cheekbones mostly. It was the eyes primarily. It was the lean frame and the way she held it. It was her hair. Or it was her teeth.

  I told her I had a pocket full of dollars and D marks.

  She said, “Let’s dance.”

  We danced. I bought her a beer. She said, “There’s something I want—will you buy it for me.” It was not a question. So we left and got into a taxi. We wound through downtown Prague and stopped at an old building near Faust’s house. She told the cab to wait. We got out. We went down dark stairs to a basement. She rang a buzzer hidden in the shadows. There was no answer. She rang again and again. Then we heard a rustling noise behind the door and someone peered out at us through a peephole. I didn’t know what this was—whether we were scoring smack or going to a secret conclave of the last of the Communist Party. A voice from behind the door spoke in Czech. From the tone I guessed that it said, “It’s late—go away.” The girl spoke back, wheedling and commanding.

  With a grudge and creak the thick old door swung open. An old man, more asleep than awake, stood there. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek. He grumbled but led us through a twist of halls, entered a basement room, and turned on the lights. We were in Palmer’s East. Racks of lingerie—cotton, silk satin, skimpy, sexy, flannel and comfy hung in this capitalist underground with bare gray stone walls. There was a mirror-topped table with perfumes. I looked around, frankly astonished, and noticed a video camera mounted up in the corner to watch for shoplifters.

  The little man came up to me and spoke while she looked around. She was very happy, holding up skimpy things and posing with them in front of the mirror. Touching them and fondling the prices. He asked if I spoke Czech, I suppose. I said, in German, that I spoke English and German.

  “I only take dollars and deutsche marks,” he said.

  “Austrian schillings?”

  “At a slight discount,” he said, and smiled for the first time.

  I looked at the price tags.

  “Add fifty percent, sonny,” he said. “You’re in the East Bloc.”

  “People could just drive to Vienna,” I said, “they can do that now.”

  “Sure, now,” he said. “But this is more romantic. And in Vienna they won’t open up in the middle of the night for you.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “In Austria closing time is closing time.”

  The cadence was more Yiddish than German—the attitude was Orchard Street. That’s the strip of New York’s Lower East Side that can still pass for a scene in a film about Jewish immigrants. “You’re Jewish,” I said.

  “I’m a tailor,” he said. “That’s the real secret. I can make it fit. I can fix it if it goes wrong. We do that in the East. We have to. In the West, you just throw it away and get another one.”

  “I like this,” she said, and she held it up in front of her. It was off-white, laces in the front between the breasts, cut high in the thigh. “I have good legs,” she said, by way of explanation. She turned sideways to me and lifted her skirt to her waist. She did have good legs. Very long. And a good ass. She dropped her skirt and smiled at me.

  “She’s not really a good girl,” the old man said.

  “I got that,” I said.

  “She’s not even what she seems,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Are you taking that one?” he asked her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, caressing it.

  “Chinese silk,” he said, “the good old-fashioned kind. An excellent choice. It is like a costume for a great drama.”

  “I like that,” she said.

  “I know,” the old man said. “Someday you will find a stage that suits you.”

  She pouted at him, but smiled when I handed him $750. It was the sort of thing I’d really wanted to get for Marie Laure the day we bought the McLaren stroller. Except that for Marie Laure we would have selected an item that featured the breasts more and the length of leg less.

  “You kids have a good night,” he said as we went out the door. “And mister …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful.”

  She put her arm through mine. “I like the way you bought that,” she said. “I can tell a lot about a man by the way he buys. Some men flinch at prices. Then I know that they are straining themselves, and why should a man have to strain to have me? So I let him go. Some men are eager to show that they can get me more and more, that they have lots of money. That’s fun”—she leaned against me—“but vulgar and I cannot tolerate vulgarity for very long. You did very well, so now you take me home.”

  The cab was waiting and she gave it the new address. It was in the district called Hradčany beside the castle and up on the hill. It had a terrace looking down at the river and the Charles Bridge. She opened the French doors to show me. I’d seen the view before. The last time she had been in Kodacolor, naked in the foreground, nipples popping hard in the winter night. Wendy Tavetian, just as naked, beside her, laughing. Then Hiroshi Tanaka between them. Both of them now dead.

  “You must have a regular boyfriend, or lover,” I said when I stepped back inside. The house was beautiful. It was a rich man’s house. Everything said so. Size. Location. Furnishings. Level of maintenance. The Toshiba TV and VCR. The sound system. The paintings on the wall. Czechoslovakia had rejected communism. But only ten minutes earlier. It seemed too soon for rich entrepreneurs to have emerged. Who had paid for this house? And how? Apparatchik or black marketeer? Buried gold from before the revolution?

  “Dance with me,” she said. The compact disc player was a Phillips. The rest of the sound system was Pioneer. She played Mark Almond’s version of “New York State of Mind,” cooler and jazzier than Billy Joel’s saxophone, as slow as sex on Sunday morning.

  I took her in my arms. The night was warmer than it should have been. The breeze brought in the earthy smell of soft coal from the crooked-chimney landscape of Prague’s roofs. It was a town where bartenders carried pitchers of beer out from the pub to the workmen down the street at lunchtime, the way I’d heard they’d done in the days of old New York. Czechoslovakia’s present was so like our past. Full of hope and dreams. Simple aspirations.

  “Tell me about New York,” she said.

  I knew she wanted to hear about a New York that looked like Woody Allen’s Manhattan, that glittered and was as rich as Gershwin tunes. A New York that lit up the night with glamour, not with crack pipes. She wanted to know about limos and Breakfast at Tiffany’s—not the stink of a homeless man so foul that the odor emptied a subway car at rush hour and somehow there was no money in all of the U.S.A. to get him a simple shower and change of clothes. It wasn’t that the town that held Wall Street ran on greed. That was expected. That was accepted. That was—the whole world had just decided—desirable. It was that the dollar was going down. It was the D mark and the yen on the rise, and the men who were buying art this year were from Germany and especially Japan. She was, after all, original Czech art. She really was.

  “Whose house is this?” I asked.

  Her head was on my shoulder. “Do you want to see me in your present?” she said, her breath soft and moist on my neck. She leaned back from the waist, her hips pressing against my hips, her eyes playing with my eyes. She let go of me, grabbed the package, and disappeared into another room. The disc ended. I went over to change it. I selected Billie H
olliday.

  I know two things about sexual fidelity. One is that it is a form of insanity. A social pathology. True commitment and a child had made this more obvious rather then disproving it. I could understand the Muhammadan four-wife concept. No woman can give a child the attention it deserves, a man the attention he wants, and get the rest she needs herself. Or the Italian way—men who are compulsively loyal to their family, attached to their children with bonds of steel, and are expected to try to fuck anything that moves. The Japanese are very old-fashioned in their embrace of the double standard and their separation of family and sex. Especially, Mike Hayakawa had told me, if they can get out of town.

  The second thing I knew about sexual fidelity was that the lack of it had ruined every relationship I’d ever had and if I slept with this woman I would either become a liar or lose Marie Laure, likely sooner rather than later.

  She came out in her present, a white satin ribbon around her neck, and white spiked heels. She left the front laces loose and untied, so that one side of the thing fell away from a breast. I’d seen her breasts before. In Kodacolor. But that didn’t lessen the impact at all. Or eliminate the slight tease of the way the nipple played hide and seek with the fabric. It just made me want to see it as stiff as it had been on the winter night when she’d played whatever she’d played with Wendy Tavetian and Hiroshi Tanaka. The high heels and high cut on the thighs emphasized just how long and elegant her legs were. As she had promised. Billie Holliday sang “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.” Her voice was hoarse.

  “You have to tell me,” I said, “who this house belongs to.”

  “It belongs to the people,” she said, like it was a dirty joke. “All the property belongs to the people.”

  “I know an American girl used to come here,” I said. “Her name was Wendy.”

  “Kiss me,” she said. “I feel sweet.”

  I moved toward her. She came toward me. Her body and her clothes were the lightest colors in the room. The effect was a sex dream that glowed. High heels, rounded calves, the long soft line of her inner thighs running up to the point where the satin between her legs covered her mound. I reached out my hands to hers. She took them and moved slowly to me. I stepped back, to look at her, afraid of her. She smiled. She released my hands and pulled the silk down from her shoulders until both breasts were fully exposed. They were as perfect as a pair out of a guidebook to sin.