False Dawn jl-3

by Paul Levine

  “Could Crespo have been involved in any anticommunist groups?” I asked.

  “Crespo is a peasant,” Severo Soto said, “too young to remember Cuba antes de Fidel.”

  “Did he have any political leanings?”

  “Of course, he was against the comunista s. But was he active? Not that I am aware.”

  Lourdes placed a hand on her father’s forearm. “The man he killed-”

  “-Allegedly killed,” I reminded them. We all know about the presumption of innocence; we just don’t believe it.

  “-was Vladimir Smorodinsky.”

  Soto raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word.

  “You knew him,” I said.

  “A Russian who worked for Yagamata. We have met.”

  “Yagamata apparently got him an exit visa.”

  Soto nodded. “Yagamata could do that. He has made much money with the Russians. He would do business with the devil if the price was right.”

  “He did business with you,” I said evenly.

  Soto took a moment to consider whether I had intended el insulto, or whether I was just clumsy at conversation. His eyes were placid. After what he had endured, he had all the time in the world. “ Lo hecho, hecho esta. What’s done is done. I did not realize that the man’s only principles were in his wallet. Claro, I did business with him. We had, Lourdes, what was it, not a partnership, an adventure?”

  “Joint venture,” she helped out.

  “We shipped cargo for him from Helsinki to Miami. It was supposed to be Finnish wood products, textiles, furniture.”

  “But it turned out to be smuggled Russian artifacts,” I chimed in.

  Soto appraised me. Who was it who said I wasn’t as dumb as I looked?

  “I do not make a habit of speaking of these things to strangers.” Severo Soto looked toward his daughter.

  “It’s all right, Papi. My loyalty is to Mr. Lassiter.”

  That was news to me, but I nodded my approval.

  “I have spent years building the reputation of my firm,” Soto said. “My honor as a businessman is paramount. My relationship with customs, all my import licenses were jeopardized by Yagamata.”

  “How?”

  “It took me a while to understand just what he was doing. He began his dealings while there was a Soviet Union, prospered through Gorbachev’s perestroika, and now continues with the Commonwealth under Yeltsin. Principles don’t matter. Not when the almighty dollar is your god. With a wrecked economy and political turmoil, his business thrives. Chaos and conflict are honey and wine to Yagamata.”

  I waited for him to continue. Sometimes silence is the best question. Overhead, a meadowlark was singing its spring song. I hoped Severo Soto would keep talking.

  “He had an entire network inside Russia,” Soto said finally.

  “Museum curators, bureaucrats, customs officials, members of various ministries and the Supreme Soviet. Hardliners, reformers, it didn’t seem to matter. For hard currency, his contacts would have dismantled the Kremlin and sold it by the brick.”

  “And Smorodinsky?”

  “His aprendiz de todo.”

  “Jack of all trades,” Lourdes translated.

  “Yagamata didn’t tell you Smorodinsky was just a laborer, did he?” Soto asked me.

  “No. He said the Russian was a man of culture and a patriot.”

  Soto allowed himself a humorless laugh. “Smorodinsky and his brother ran Yagamata’s Leningrad operation. Artifacts would be gathered from all over the Soviet Union and stored in safe houses they arranged. Then somehow-and this was their genius-they managed to ship the goods in small boats from Leningrad across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki. It is not, I assure you, like sailing from Miami to Bimini. How they were able to bribe enough officials to avoid capture by the police, the military, and the KGB is something that always baffled me. Even with Yagamata’s contacts, it was still an impressive feat.”

  A wooden door creaked open and a short, swarthy woman in a colorful print dress appeared, carrying a tray that held a silver pot and three espresso glasses.

  “Then why bring him here? What good could a Russian do at this end of the operation?”

  Soto shrugged. “That is for you and my daughter to determine, though I don’t know what it has to do with your client killing… allegedly killing the man.”

  “It might help explain why Yagamata seems willing to have an innocent man convicted of the murder,” I said.

  The woman left her tray, and Lourdes poured the hot, syrupy drink for each of us.

  “About that, I have no idea,” Soto said.

  While the sugar and caffeine were jump-starting my dead batteries, Severo Soto told me about his business and his life. It was a story I already knew. When they were both students, Soto and Fidel Castro were friends with similar ideals. Together, they plotted the doomed July 26, 1953, attack on eastern Cuba’s Moncada Barracks. Soto spent two years in prison, but it did not shake his will. Again he joined Castro and they stood side by side during the revolution, until he became disenchanted with Castro’s brand of socialism. “I did not plan for my country to be the bastard child of the Russians,” he told me.

  He commandeered a Cuban patrol vessel and fled to Key West and then to Miami, where he became a major in Brigade 2506 and returned to Cuba, landing on the beach at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The betrayal and cowardice of the United States had stranded him and his men without air support. His friends died around him, bleeding into the sand. He was wounded, captured, imprisoned, and tortured by Castro’s matones. “I did not see the sun for three years,” he said. “The only sound was a high-frequency wail broadcast into my cell twenty-four hours a day at a volume that broke both my eardrums. They gave me comunista propaganda, which I tore up and ate and gave back to them as mierda.”

  Lourdes’s mother didn’t know if her husband was dead or alive. Then one day Severo Soto was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter, drifting north on a raft of inner tubes in the Gulf Stream due east of the Fontainebleau Hotel. It had taken four years to claw and chew through a limestone wall in his cell. His teeth were reduced to nubs, but he clambered through an eighteen-inch hole and made his way to the sea.

  When Soto showed up again on Calle Ocho, Lourdes was five years old and did not know her father. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Before long, Soto was gone again, leading Alpha 66 on its fools’ mission to stir up an anti-Castro rebellion. Captured in the Escambray mountains with grenades and automatic weapons, he was again imprisoned, the most famous of the plantados, the political prisoners.

  When he was finally released and joined his family a final time in Miami, Soto was a legendary hero in Little Havana. Cuban millionaires, burdened by their guilt and awed by Soto’s steely determination, set him up in the shipping industry. With business funneled his way, it did not take long for him to prosper.

  “You know the stories of our exilado s,” he told me. “The lawyers who spoke no English and began here pushing brooms in your banks…”

  “Then ended up owning the banks,” I added.

  He nodded. “The Cubans are an industrious people. But dreamers, too. We dream of a Cuba Libre.”

  I didn’t think he meant a rum and Coke.

  “Papi is president of the Cuban Freedom Foundation,” Lourdes said. I knew that from the newspaper. The Foundation was a middle-of-the-road organization, not as liberal as those dialogueros who would begin negotiations with Castro, not as fanatic as those Omega Sevens who would stick nitroglycerine in Fidel’s cigar if they could. “If Castro falls…” Lourdes caught her father’s sharp glance. “ When Castro falls, the Foundation will likely be installed as the first free government in Cuba. Since Papi is president of the Foundation…”

  Soto dismissed the idea with a modest wave of his hand. “It will not be a position to be coveted, Mr. Lassiter. Cuba is in a state of complete economic collapse. The country faces what Fidel calls the zero option, now that the Russians can no longer furnish suffici
ent fuel and food. All consumer goods are rationed. So many of the industrious people have escaped the island, who is there left to rebuild? My friends all vow they will return. But will they? Like me, they are old men. And what of their children? Are they ready to forgo their shopping malls and their cable TV? I assure you, the president of a free Cuba will have his hands full.”

  Soto sipped the rest of his cafe Cubano, then pushed his iron chair away from the iron table. When he stood, I figured it was time for me to go, but he didn’t seem in a hurry.

  “I am proud of what I have accomplished here, Mr. Lassiter. And I will keep my vow to return to a free Cuba. But on my own terms and in my own way. The Cuba of my past is gone forever. The job of rebuilding will be a massive undertaking.”

  “Our government will surely help,” I said.

  He scowled. “We cannot base our recovery on American largesse. The politics are too uncertain. Who is to say who will control the White House and the Congress when the time comes? Who can forget the treachery at the Bay of Pigs? The Americans can never be counted on. They have allowed the butcher to remain in power for more than thirty years. We must be self-sufficient and prepare for every eventuality.”

  With that he motioned toward the loggia and we began circling the house once again, this time with Soto leading the way. Before we turned the corner, he stopped and pointed to a small freestanding building in the shade of two live oak trees. At one time it would have been maid’s quarters. “Would you like to see my study?” he asked.

  “Papi,” Lourdes moaned. “Mr. Lassiter is a busy man.”

  Papi didn’t care. “Indulge an old man. I want to show your friend something of beauty besides my only daughter.”

  The building was a one-story wooden box with pink Bahama shutters. Soto fished in his pocket and produced a key ring. It took three keys to unlock the door and a three-number combination to turn off the panel alarm inside the door.

  Twelve, thirty-one, fifty-eight.

  I don’t know why I watched him do that and immediately committed it to memory. Maybe it was something about the number. Or maybe I was a cat burglar in another life.

  It was just one room, dark and cool. An old window air conditioner wheezed in the corner. A brown leather chair, its hide cracked, sat at a mahogany desk. A crystal decanter of cigars was perched on a matching credenza. The desk was cluttered with papers and photographs in brass frames. One was in black and white, a much younger Severo Soto and a slender, pale woman with full lips who had been kind enough to bequeath her complexion to her daughter. Next to it was a color shot of a teenage Lourdes in what looked like a prom dress. Her hair was longer, her smile innocent and hopeful.

  “My quince party,” she said, catching me spying.

  “Over here,” Soto said. He flipped on a light switch and pointed toward the wall facing the desk.

  It was an oil painting of a nude man, practically featureless, bent over a nude woman on all fours, who was trying to crawl away. The man’s hands were large and grasping, the woman’s head bent in shame. The colors were vivid, the grass a deep green that seemed to stain the woman’s bare feet, the sea a rich blue. “Do you know much about art?”

  No, I thought, but I’m learning. I shook my head.

  “What does the painting say to you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s very powerful. Almost frightening in a way. I just don’t know enough to judge its quality.”

  “It is a very well-known work, Mr. Lassiter. One of my favorites, in fact, by-”

  “Papi!” Lourdes practically stomped her foot. “It is not like you presumir.”

  “Forgive me. I am indiscreto, and I embarrass my daughter.” Severo Soto stared hard into the canvas. “What is important is the art itself, what it says, what we can learn from it. To me, the man in the painting is Russia. The woman is Cuba. And every day of my life, Mr. Lassiter, I force myself to watch what he is about to do.”

  8

  I HATE BUDWEISER

  The ramshackle building sagged in the middle and slouched on weathered pilings in the soft earth alongside an Everglades canal. An aging frump without makeup or girdle, Mississippi Jack’s was jammed with workers from the limestone pits, an Anglo-Hispanic-black crew that may have lived in segregated neighborhoods but drank more or less together in a place where you could feel, and occasionally hear, the dynamite blasts from the nearby rock pit.

  I had pulled my ancient but amiable convertible into the muddy parking lot and found a spot next to an oversize Dodge Ram pickup that was hauling an airboat. I wore old jeans, boots, and a shirt that celebrated the joys of eating oysters raw.

  The “L” in the neon Schlitz sign was dark and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Faded photos of the winners of the latest turkey shoot hung haphazardly inside the door. The jukebox rumbled with “Honky Tonk Woman” followed by “If It Don’t Come Easy.” Fishing corks plugged bullet holes in one wall and the hide of a sixteen-foot alligator decorated another. There was one pool table, the green felt stained from decades of spilled beer. The waitresses were sturdy sedans no longer on warranty and wore jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts tied around ample waists. The bartender paid off winners of a stud poker video game with two six-packs or a sawbuck-take your choice-and if the boys from the state beverage commission didn’t like it, screw them.

  The bongs and clangs of a pinball machine competed with the twang from the jukebox. The voices were husky southern drawls, but pockets of the room erupted in occasional bursts of rapid-fire Spanish and inner-city jive. A gray haze of cigarette smoke drifted toward a ceiling of unpainted two-by-fours and kept the termite population to manageable levels. On the men’s room wall, above a machine that dispensed condoms for a quarter, a poet had scrawled, “Encase your porker before you dork her.”

  There were no ferns. Or guys with white-on-white shirts, power ties, and red suspenders. Or talk of Aspen, tax-free municipals, or selling short.

  Mississippi Jack’s was not the Harvard Club.

  The waitress wiped our table with a wet towel, then stood, head cocked, hip shot, and smiling. About forty, she had a round face and a headful of bleached yellow curls that made her look like a happy poodle. “You’all here for the catfish fry or the gator hunt?”

  “The beer,” I said. “Pitcher. Whatever’s on tap.”

  “How ‘bout some swamp cabbage to go with that? Got a vat simmering in the back.”

  So that’s what I smelled. “Plain or fried?”

  She raised an eyebrow. I didn’t mean to sound like Chef Paul, just wanted to know what I was getting into.

  “Any way you want it. We cook it with salt pork and milk, a dash of pepper. Personally, I like it plain in a cup, but you want it fried up with fritters, you got it. You want it another way, go talk to the cook after he sobers up.”

  I turned to my drinking buddy. “Francisco?”

  He was shaking his head.

  “Maybe we’ll just stick to the beer,” I told her.

  I have nothing against eating the boot of the sabal palm tree. In a little bottle at the French grocery, soaking in vinegar, they call it heart of palm. It’s not as elegant hereabouts, but it’s the same raw ingredient.

  She brought Budweiser. American beer is weak and watery, and like network television, is calculated to appeal to the most folks while offending the fewest. It’s the lowest common denominator of brew, and like so many of our products, competes not on its quality, but on its image as created by Manhattan video slicksters. Best I can tell, there’s no beer that will help me dunk a basketball or attract a bushel of beach bunnies, so I go for the taste when I have a choice. Not that I’m a beer snob, which is an oxymoron rivaling “honest lawyer.”

  Still, the Dutch beer Grolsch is my all-around favorite for savoring full flavor. I like it at forty-two degrees, not out of the ice chest. Americans drink their beer too cold and too light. The Yankee brews are laced with rice malt or corn malt, bland substitutes for barley. There are excepti
ons. Brooklyn Lager with its burnt amber color and molasses aroma is strong enough to go head-to-head with the spiciest chili. The wheaty, oaky Anchor Steam from San Francisco can hold its own with barbecue. Boston’s Samuel Adams has a bittersweet hoppy taste that washes down peanuts and jalapenos. But that’s about it for the American beers. The only time I’ll go for a light beer is with some broiled red snapper or other delicate victuals. Then I’ll choose one of the German weiss beers made from wheat. With a steak, I’ll try a Dos Equis if there’s no Grolsch around. Tsing Tao, the sweet Chinese beer, is fine for Szechuan or Hunan food, and a Guinness stout with its nutty hop aroma and burnt-oak flavor goes well with dessert.

  Today, though, the talk was more important than taste, and after turning down the swamp cabbage, I didn’t want the waitress to consider me a citified sissy:

  “Hey, Jim Bob, feller out here wants to know if we serve beer from Holland.”

  “No, but if’n he wants, I’ll stick a tulip up his ass.”

  Crespo drained his first glass without taking a breath. If he was feeling any heat from the upcoming trial, he didn’t show it. “ Diez anos?”

  “That’s the offer now. A plea to manslaughter. Ten years, you’d be out in three.”

  He poured himself another beer from the chipped pitcher. Budweiser was fine with him. I fished some boiled peanuts out of a bowl. From Jaw-ja, the waitress told us. You were supposed to scatter the shells on the floor. I did what I was supposed to. “Of course, you’d have to cooperate.”

  Crespo looked at me with wary eyes. His face had healed nicely with only traces of scars on his leathery skin. Small and ferret-faced, he still managed to look dangerous. You wouldn’t be surprised to see him pull a switchblade from an ankle sheath.