by Paul Levine
“He was a thief, a smuggler?”
Yagamata very nearly smiled. If he found me amusing, maybe next time he’d send a limo for me, instead of two goons. “The Russians have a far kinder term. Fartsovshchiki, black marketeer. Religious icons, vestments, antique weaponry, a divan from Mikhailovsky Castle, silver bridle chains that may or may not have belonged to a czar, these were his specialties.”
“Still, he was a criminal. If Smorodinsky had a known propensity for violence, it could help Crespo’s defense.”
Yagamata gave me a quizzical look, as if the furthest thing from his mind was Francisco Crespo. “Criminal,” he said, rolling the word around his tongue, “is a relative term. In my country, and yours for that matter, a successful businessman who generously shares his wealth with underpaid public servants is considered a criminal. Yet, in certain Latin American countries, that is the accepted method-indeed the only method-of doing business. When there was still a Soviet Union, everyone looked for ways to circumvent a system no one but the party apparatchiki wanted. It was great sport to battle the government, to get the extra sausage or to steal state property from a factory. The Russians tell a wonderful political joke that is just as meaningful now as when the verkhushka, the Party elite, called the shots. What’s the difference between communism and capitalism?”
I played along and held up my hands.
“Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the opposite.” He laughed at his own joke. “Mr. Lassiter, do you know much about art?”
“No, I don’t even know what I like.”
Yagamata nodded with approval. Maybe he preferred working with a clean slate.
“Japanese art is very simple, very clear. By Western standards, the depiction is unreal, highly idealized, and there is little perspective. If a painter always has his cherry blossoms in bloom, always facing the viewer, always in full color with no shading, the art is mere decoration.”
“And you find Russian art more complex and interesting.”
“ European art. Once Peter the Great came to the throne in the early 1700s, Russia left its Byzantine past behind. Its artists were greatly influenced by those in France, Italy, and Holland. The Russians know fine art and appreciate it. Have you ever been to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg?”
He didn’t wait for me to say no before continuing. “The Winter Palace of the czar. Three million artifacts! Let your mind try to comprehend it. It is impossible.”
I thought about it. “How do they even keep track of it all?”
“Precisely, and if you know anything about the laziness and incompetence of the Russians under the old order, you would know that they do not. Less than ten percent of these works are on display. What is in storage is priceless. What is available for viewing will take your breath away. More than a hundred forty rooms of just Western masterpieces. Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, da Vinci, Rubens, Goya, El Greco, Raphael…”
Yagamata kept going, a roster of first-team All-Pro painters. I didn’t relate to it. Oh sure, I could name the 1976 Dolphins roster, top to bottom, but somehow, it didn’t have the same cachet.
“You know the place pretty well,” I said.
He let out a little snort. “You could live in the Hermitage and not know it well. It is too vast. Too much of the great work is simply not to be found. Even with special privileges, even knowing Russians with blat — connections-they can’t find half of what I wish to have.”
“Have?”
He drained his sparkling champagne. “Have a look at. Unfortunately, you cannot buy them.” He scowled, apparently thinking of the injustice of it. “It wasn’t always so. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks were so strapped for hard currency they sold off a number of priceless pieces. You’ll find more than twenty in your own National Gallery in Washington, thanks to Andrew Mellon.”
There was no doubt Matsuo Yagamata preferred it the old-fashioned way. Pay as you go; buy what you want.
“So you are left smuggling silver bridle chains…”
“I have business associates who take care of the necessities of exporting certain items of value,” he explained in language a clever shyster could admire.
“Like the Faberge egg with the choo-choo train.”
Yagamata looked as if he suddenly regretted kidnapping me for lunch. Off the stern, an osprey with lethal talons swooped low, eyeing our wake, on the lookout for an a la carte lunch. I thought about offering some swordfish belly.
“A gift,” he said.
The party at Yagamata’s house. The way he had stage-managed our privileged view of his precious egg. I could have sworn he said he bought it. But I couldn’t quite remember. And it would be awkward to ask who gave it to him. Still, if it had anything to do with Smorodinsky, I needed to know more.
“A generous friend,” I probed.
“The Russian people are indeed generous.”
He left it hanging there and I didn’t know how to grab it. After a moment, I said, “The liberalizing of the economy under Gorbachev must have helped your exporting business.”
“ Perestroika was irrelevant to what I do, Mr. Lassiter. Politics is irrelevant. What was it your Will Rogers said? ‘All politics is applesauce.’ There was always a profit motive in the Soviet Union, at least among those who knew how to manipulate the system. Before the liberalization, the masses would say of the Party leaders: ‘They preach water, but they drink wine.’ It was only a matter of time before the leaders were toppled. For me, there were methods of doing business before Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and there will always be methods. You cannot stop what the Russians call spekulatsiya, speculation and profiteering, under any system. There was always a free market in the Soviet Union for those who knew how to push the right buttons. The failed coup, the dismantling of the Union, the destruction of the Party, it’s all applesauce.”
The yacht was slowing, and the water had calmed. Hard shafts of sunlight danced off the bay. “You like them for it, don’t you? Sort of what you do, spekulat…”
Yagamata’s brow furrowed with just a hint of surprise, like maybe I wasn’t as dumb as he thought. I should shut up. It’s better if they think I could be used for a blocking sled.
“I have great affection for the Russians,” he said. “They have a finely tuned sense of the human dilemma. Far superior to the Japanese, I must say.”
“And Smorodinsky. What can you tell me that will help my client?”
“Nothing, Mr. Lassiter. Vladimir Smorodinsky was not a violent man. And in many ways that even he did not understand, he was true to his principles and a patriot. Perhaps too much so.”
“I don’t understand.”
We were in the quiet waters of the channel with the old Mediterranean homes of Star Island visible off the bow. The skyline of downtown Miami-built with loot from failed savings and loans-dominated the horizon. Yagamata took off his sunglasses and turned to me. The nosepiece had left little red dents alongside his nose. His eyes were black and bottomless.
“It is not necessary that you do,” Matsuo Yagamata said.
6
A TROUT IN THE MILK
Entrapment,” Cyrus Horner said, his cigarette dancing in the corner of his mouth, spraying ashes on his chest. “Plain and simple. Female cops got no business working massage parlors.”
I studied the A-form while Horner kept yammering away. He paced in front of my desk, banging his right fist into his left palm, cursing the police, the courts, his probation officer, and his three ex-wives. Horner was one of those scrawny guys with a potbelly. He was bald on top with pale wispy hair covering his ears. His sideburns were so far out of date they had just come back into style, and his Hawaiian shirt was decorated with pink roses, some of which had cigarette holes in the blossoms. His eyes were tiny black pebbles, his skin the color of curdled milk. Naturally, he considered himself irresistible to women.
“I been a regular at the Feather Touch for years,” Horner was saying, “so I know all the girls, a
nd they know me. Some of them, you gotta cajole a little.”
“Cajole? Like with compliments?”
“No, like with Ulysses S. Grant.”
Outside, a rare spring thunderstorm pelted the high-rise windows. The vultures, which circled the courthouse all winter, were no longer soaring in the updrafts. Like the tourists, they had returned to the north. The ugly birds make their summer home in Hinckley, Ohio, where their diet probably consists of leaves and field mice. In Miami, they feast on beheaded goats from Santeria sacrifices and drug lords stuffed into garbage bags.
Cindy, my secretary, stuck her headful of copper-colored curls into the office. She wore studded jeans, black shoes with stiletto heels, and a purple T-shirt emblazoned I LIVE FOR LOVE. She was chewing a wad of Juicy Fruit when she asked, “Would you gentlemen like some coffee?”
Why did she roll her eyes when she said gentlemen?
“Doughnuts?” she inquired. “Danish…”
She shot a look at Horner and seemed to make a mental note to disinfect his chair.
“… burglary tools?”
“Cindy, scram!”
She shrugged and ducked out of the room and into her cubicle. Cindy’s secretarial skills are limited-with three-inch fingernails, she does not so much type as slash at the keyboard-but she is smart and loyal. For years, Cindy has been trying to persuade me to upgrade my practice. This is hard to do when your clients are con men, real estate developers, and doctors accused of malpractice. It is sometimes difficult to tell which group has the most accomplished perjurers.
“One time, the Feather Touch gets this new girl,” Horner was saying, his cigarette wagging at me, “Lucinda from Loxahatchee. And she won’t do nothin’. ‘Whatsa matter,’ I say, ‘you don’t touch genitals?’ She goes, ‘Sure, genitals, Jews, it don’t matter none, long as they pay.’”
Granny Lassiter was right; I should have been a civil engineer. Build roads, she said, something solid. Instead, here I was listening to Cyrus Horner-part-time grifter, professional whiner-bemoan the sorry state of our law enforcement community.
“Entrapment,” he repeated. “I had no predisposition to commit a criminal act.”
Whew. Your three-time losers sure know the lingo. I grabbed his file and spread the contents across my desk. “The room was bugged, so they have tapes and transcripts plus video and still photos. Want to see?”
I gave him a moment to add it up. Addition was not his strong suit.
“They have a warrant?” he asked.
“Didn’t need one. It was their place, not yours, so you didn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“I had a reasonable expectation of a blow job.”
“Tell it to Chief Justice Rehnquist. Maybe you can change the law.”
He flicked ashes on my carpet. “I studied some law, you know.”
I figured. Our prisons have excellent libraries.
“I got a well-rounded education,” he continued. “I was on the fencing team in school.”
“Really, like with sabres and foils?”
“Nah, like with tires and TV’s.”
Why didn’t I listen to Granny? “C’mon, Cy. You’re avoiding the issue. We should be talking about a plea.”
He kept pacing; I stared out the window. Heavy gray thunderheads hung over Biscayne Bay, obscuring the view of Miami Beach, Fisher Island, and Virginia Key. If there were any windsurfers out there, they were using their masts as lightning rods.
“All right, let’s see what they got.”
I opened a manila folder and poured out a dozen eight-by-ten glossies. They made me think of Lourdes Soto, lady PI and long-lens photographer. What had she come up with, anyway? And why had she scouted me out? Just looking for some new business, or was there something more?
Horner came around the desk, leaned over my shoulder, and belched, giving me a whiff of tobacco and sour mash whiskey. I spread the photos in front of him. They had been shot from a peephole in the ceiling. Horner lay on his back, wearing only a Fruit-of-the-Loom athletic shirt and black socks that barely reached his ankles. A woman in a blond wig and a camisole sat on the edge of the bed, a bottle of oil in one hand, a fifty-dollar bill in the other. If Horner had been excited, his brain forgot to tell his loins.
“Hey, that’s libelous!” he blurted out.
“What?”
He jabbed the photo with a nicotine-stained fingernail. “That picture’s taken out of context.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jeez, shooting me all limp like that. When I get an erection, I gotta take out a building permit.”
A flash of lightning streaked across the bay, striking behind the warehouse area at the port. Horner moved back in front of the desk and slumped into an old leather chair. He used a seventy-nine-cent lighter on another cigarette. I don’t know what happened to the first one. He either swallowed it or tossed the butt behind the credenza when I wasn’t looking. His Hawaiian shirt had flapped open, and his belly-hairier than his head-peeked out at me. A delayed thunderclap rattled the windowpane.
“You could cop a plea. Soliciting for prostitution is only a second-degree misdemeanor.”
“No can do. I’m on probation.”
I found the rap sheet the state attorney’s office had been kind enough to provide. “I remember the B.R.C., but what’s the fraud conviction?”
“Rubbertech, Inc., a franchise I promoted. Strictly legit. Sold condom machines to restaurants, convenience stores, what have you. I should have told the investors about a little problem we had with the machines.”
“Stolen, right?”
“Nah, nothing like that. My ex-brother-in-law made them in the tool shop when he was doing thirty months at Avon Park. Only problem, the damn machines put a little hole in the package as it came out the slot.”
“In the package?”
“Well, in the condoms, too, about two out of three. Hey, you bat. 333, you’re in the Hall of Fame, right?”
I flipped to the next page. I had seen longer rap sheets, but few as eclectic.
“What about the grand larceny?”
“Complete railroad job, a kangaroo court. I was selling prints of the Last Supper for four grand per set and advising customers to donate them to a church and take a nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-dollar charitable tax deduction.”
“Nineteen thousand…”
“Yeah. If it’s more than twenty grand, you gotta have an independent appraisal. This way, I give them my appraisal certificate from the Church of the Shining Sun. The rectory’s in my garage.”
“You’re a preacher, too?”
He gave me a sly grin and let me see a matched set of yellow incisors. “They call me Brother Cyrus.”
Another peal of thunder, but Horner didn’t flinch. Maybe he answered to a Higher Authority. “Look at it this way,” he said. “If you’re in the thirty-one-percent tax bracket, I could save you twenty-two hundred on a four-thou investment. The IRS gets pissed off, and the Justice Department flips a coin with the state attorney. Tax fraud or grand larceny. The state attorney won.”
I watched two raindrops race each other down the outside of my windowpane. I put my money on the juicy, oblong one, but the thin guy seemed to pick up a tailwind.
“Brother Cyrus, if you want me to try the case, we’d better prepare your testimony.”
His beady eyes lit up. “Great. I love testifying. I’m very affluent, you know.”
J udge Herman Gold had retired eleven years ago, but that didn’t keep him off the bench. With our crowded dockets and the propensity of our criminal judges to be removed from office in the wake of bribery scandals, we need retired judges to help out. Some of the old judges have forgotten more law than most of us ever learned. That could have been true of Judge Gold, but he’d also forgotten most everything else. Hardening of the arteries had left the bulb a bit dim. There he was, perched on his high-back chair, peering into the cavern of the courtroom, a wizened bald buzzard of eighty-on
e, wearing his custom-made, minilength fuchsia robes, yapping at court personnel, keeping order in the snake pit.
“A tango!” the judge demanded.
“A tanga, Your Honor,” replied Sally Corson, a proper young assistant state attorney in a blue suit and white silk blouse. “It’s a Brazilian bikini, and it’s illegal on state beaches.”
She held up state’s exhibit one, and if you had good eyes, you might identify a red piece of string as the bottom of a bikini. The evidence tag was at least twice as wide.
“Illegal?” the judge demanded. “Says who?”
“The legislature, Your Honor. No buttocks or breasts on state-owned beaches. Chapter eight forty-seven.”
The judge was shaking his head. “ Meshuga. Ay, Marvin, what do you think?”
In the first row of the gallery, Marvin the Maven consulted with Saul the Tailor. “If she’s a shayna maidel, a Kim Basinger, what’s the problem? If she’s zaftig, a Roseanne Barr, I’d throw the book at her.”
Judge Gold nodded judiciously. At the defense table, a young woman who was demurely dressed in a knee-length skirt and long-sleeve blouse looked from the judge to Marvin and back again. Alice in Wonderland couldn’t have been more confused. At least her lawyer had the good sense to dress her for court. It’s one of the first rules. If you can manage it, even a murderer should look like a choirboy. When I was a young lawyer, I once forgot to give my dress-for-acquittal lecture to a weightlifting champion charged with aggravated assault. He showed up in a muscle-T that depicted Darwin’s ascent of man-an ape, a Neanderthal, and finally, good old homo sapiens moving up the evolutionary ladder. The jury thought he most resembled the ape, and he got two years to plan his next wardrobe.
