by Paul Levine
When he asked whether I could identify the assailant, I told the truth for once. When he asked whether I had left anything out, I lied. Then it was my turn. I asked his name, and he handed me a card.
Robert T. Foley and a phone number, area code 703. No gold stars, embossed titles, or even an address. I’ve known some heavy-hitting businessmen like that. Maybe you’re just supposed to know who they are. That might work with Galileo or da Vinci, but Robert T. Foley didn’t mean anything to me.
Socolow was scowling. Silencers meant assassinations, organized crime, or Colombian cowboys. Not just a murder of a nobody in a trailer park. Even worse, a potato silencer was screwy enough to interest the newsboys. Socolow looked straight at Charlie Riggs. “You can buy a silencer on the street for a hundred bucks. Why would anyone use a potato?”
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.
“Maybe he wasn’t going to kill Crespo,” Charlie said, “at least not here. Maybe he wanted to talk to him, didn’t like how it was going, and made a hasty decision. Maybe Jake spooked him by coming to the door. Or maybe it was just a botched robbery.”
Socolow looked around the tiny trailer. “What would you steal from this place?”
Nobody answered him.
“Jake, you know anybody who would want to kill your client?”
I shrugged. Inside my pants pocket a gold bunny rabbit was growing warm. “Maybe Vladimir Smorodinsky had a friend.”
“My thought exactly,” Socolow responded. “Maybe just a revenge killing, one slimeball’s pal knocking off another slimeball. Crespo tell you anything we ought to know?”
“I don’t know any more than you do, Abe.” I’m not sure why I didn’t tell Socolow and his gray-suited friend about the gold rabbit. Part of it had to do with Emilia Crespo. She had trusted me to protect her son, and I had failed. I was responsible. Part of it was Francisco Crespo. He had trusted me, too. He took my advice, and my advice killed him. I had owed him something-everything-and I let him down. Now, it seemed, I owed him even more, and I needed to set things straight on my own.
Finally, part of it was my natural suspicion of authority. I remembered the reporter’s line from Graham Greene’s book about the French-Indochina war. Something about not giving information to the police because it saves them trouble.
Socolow turned back to Charlie Riggs. “Doc?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was the weather. It’s well known that violent crime goes up seven to ten percent during a heat wave.”
“C’mon, Doc. You can do better than that.”
“Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non prohat.”
Socolow squeezed his eyes shut. He looked like he had a migraine.
“A wise man states as true nothing he cannot prove,” Charlie translated.
“Good advice for opening statement,” Socolow agreed, “but I’m looking for some leads here.”
Charlie shrugged and Socolow turned away to speak to one of the cops. Before opening his mouth, Socolow swung back to Charlie Riggs. “Where?”
“Where what?” Charlie asked.
“The potato silencer. Where was it used before?”
“Why, Russia, of course,” the bearded wizard said.
12
ART HISTORY 101
harlie Riggs shoved an oversized book in front of me, tapped the cover with a pudgy forefinger, and leaned back in his chair, chewing a cold pipe.
“Not another one, Charlie. My eyes are bleary, and I need a beer.”
“Perhaps if you’d had a well-rounded education, this wouldn’t be necessary.”
“Hey, I studied every linebacker’s assignment in the split six and knew every cheerleader by the shape of her thighs, so give me a break.”
Charlie tsk-tsked his chagrin at the decline of the liberal arts. We were on the second floor of the downtown library, huddled into a corner with every book Charlie could find on Russian art museums. After five hours, everything looked alike. Still, I worked, looking at pictures and turning pages like a robbery victim scanning mug shots.
I had told Charlie that Soto’s painting looked “sorta, I dunno, modern.” Charlie regarded me skeptically, then gave me a crash course on Russian art at the turn of the century-Korovin, Vrubel, Konchalovsky, Mashkov, and a bunch of other names that were meaningless to me-but that was only the beginning. The Russians were great collectors. Prior to the Revolution, Charlie told me, the nobility had gathered the finest artwork from throughout Europe. So here I was, leafing through books I had successfully managed to avoid in pursuit of more or less higher education. We had finished the Italians, Dutch, Germans, English, and Spanish, and were halfway through the French. I had overdosed on winged horses, Madonnas, and naked women who obviously never took high-impact aerobics.
“If you were able to describe the painting with any degree of particularity, I could identify it, and I do not pretend to be an expert. Even a basic class in art history-”
“Friday afternoons from three to six,” I said.
“What?”
“Art History 101. Fall semester, every Friday from three to six P.M. Conflicted with road trips and Happy Hour chugging contests. Also kept out the guys who just wanted to meet coeds, which was the primary purpose in the days when we figured a woman’s chastity could be determined by her major.”
“No?”
“Sure. Art majors did and business majors didn’t. Petroleum engineering, no way. Elementary education, maybe, but you had to talk marriage first. The gals in creative writing would, especially during their Anais Ni’n phase.”
Charlie slipped his pipe into a buttoned pocket of his blue chambray shirt, harrumphed, and removed his crooked eyeglasses. He fiddled with the fishhook that held them together, breathed on the lenses, wiped them off on his shirt, and slid them absentmindedly on top of his bushy head. His eyes were weathered, the crinkled face a tanned hide, and he was starting to show his age.
“You miss your nap today, Charlie?”
“I can still outfish and outwork you, and don’t forget it.”
Outthink me, too, he could have said.
Charlie Riggs was as close as I had ever come to having a father, and my look must have betrayed some of the feelings I usually tucked deep inside, because he turned away and slid the glasses back down. Charlie limited his emotions to a healthy academic inquiry, and it wouldn’t do to give him a hug and get misty-eyed over personal feelings. But the truth for me was simple. I loved my Granny who raised me after my father was killed and my mom took off, and I loved Charlie who taught me just about everything worth knowing.
Clearing his throat, Charlie adjusted the reading lamp, tilting the shade so that the light shined directly on a slightly musty copy of the book, French Paintings from the Hermitage. If I didn’t get anything else from the book, I could bench press it a few times and have a healthy workout.
“Don’t you have the Cliffs Notes version?” I pleaded.
“Read,” the doctor ordered.
I groaned, stood up, did a few spinal twists and some deep knee-bends, then dropped to the floor, and just to get the blood flowing, powered through twenty-five one-armed push-ups with each arm. Except for my breathing, I didn’t make any noise, so the librarian didn’t say boo.
Then I sat down, groaned again, and opened the book. I’d already pored through directories of the Pushkin Museum, the State Picture Gallery, the Museum of Modern Western Art, the Gorky Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, and the Petrodvorets Palace. I had seen gloomy paintings of ships on a stormy sea by a Dutch artist, some dead birds entitled Trophies of the Hunt by an artist from Flanders, which must be a place I missed in geography, more virgins with child than I could count, and some fine Italian noble ladies with graceful necks and melancholy pusses.
I studied portraits of generals from the War of 1812, handsome bemedaled chaps with generous mustaches and muttonchops. I looked at Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, but couldn’t remember it fifteen minutes later. I saw The Madonna
and Child by da Vinci and listened to a fine lecture by Charlie Riggs on the High Renaissance style.
“Doesn’t the Madonna’s tender gaze reflect the humanist dreams of the ideal man and a harmonious life?” he queried.
“Took the words out of my mouth,” I agreed.
Now I was looking at a bunch of stuff by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, but I still didn’t find the painting I was looking for.
“What style was it?” Charlie asked for the umpteenth time. “Try to describe it more completely.”
“Green.”
“Green?”
“Like a lawn. And two figures, a man with large hands about to grab a nude woman. That’s all I remember. The faces were not well defined, sort of crude. Like I told you, Soto was going to say more about it, the name of the painter maybe, but Lourdes stopped him.”
I was leafing through some haystacks by Monet, some ripe women by Degas, some still lifes by Cezanne, and a bunch of Tahitians by Gauguin. Still, no husky guy about to pounce.
I stretched my arms over my head, intertwined the fingers of each hand, and cracked my knuckles with the clatter of a cue ball on a break. “Damn, I’m tired,” I announced, a tad too loud, and a young woman in a ponytail working at a nearby carrel gave me a grad student’s indignant glare.
Charlie didn’t notice. He was gazing into the stacks, his eyes unfocused. “The ugliness of murder and the beauty of art.” He sighed.
“What?”
“The irony, Jake, that the clue to man’s brutality may be buried in such works of beauty.” He pointed his empty pipe at the pile of books. “When I see all this, my first thought is how far we’ve come. Five million years ago, our ancestors were tree-dwelling apes in tropical rain forests. The strongest males ruled by either killing or banishing their rivals. When the climate cooled, the apes came out of the trees, stood erect, and foraged for food, mostly seeds. Still, the largest and fiercest controlled the others by force. Another two million years or so later, the climate cooled again, and the australopithecines developed. They were meat eaters, and despite their evolution and loose society, they were still violent toward one another.”
I wasn’t sure where Charlie was going, but between his discussion of hungry apes and images of Cezanne’s fruit platters, I realized my stomach was growling. “I’m sure there’s a point to this, Charlie.”
“They are the forebears of our genus, Homo. They developed into man.”
Charlie withdrew a packet of cherry-flavored tobacco from a buttoned shirt pocket and tamped a wad into the bowl of his pipe. “We’ve come so far as a species,” he said. “We’ve built bridges and machines that fly out of the solar system. We compress a billion bits of information onto an infinitesimal wafer. We produce ageless works of beauty, such as you see before you, and yet…”
I was starting to catch on. “We still kill each other. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Charlie?”
My old friend didn’t say a word, so I must have gotten it right. I thought about Vladimir Smorodinsky and Francisco Crespo, two men descended-like all of us-from Charlie’s tree-dwelling apes. I thought of Francisco’s body lying face up, bound and bloodied, on the bed. I was the one to tell his mother, hold her as her knees gave out, sit with her as she cried, and listen all night as she remembered Francisco as a nino in Cuba, when the air was still sweet with future promise.
“Can you find who did this to my son?” she had begged me.
I told her the truth. I didn’t know, but I could try. I showed her the gold rabbit. She had never seen it before.
Now I thought of Smorodinsky, too. Somewhere, did he have a mother crying in the night? Or a brother. What was it Matsuo Yagamata had said? Something about Smorodinsky’s brother being well versed in Russian art. And Severo Soto knew something, too. He told me the two brothers ran Yagamata’s St. Petersburg operation.
Only he had used the old name, Leningrad. An operation that had to do with art. Then Soto proudly showed me a painting his daughter didn’t want to talk about.
Which is why we were in a library looking at pretty pictures.
Because you have to start somewhere.
“Do you think, Charlie, that your line of work has made you cynical?”
“Why? Because I have concluded that evolution of our species stopped somewhere short of true civilization?”
“That, for one thing.”
Charlie Riggs produced an old-fashioned wooden match maybe six inches long and flicked it with a brown thumbnail. The tip burst into a flame of red phosphorous, and Charlie lowered it into the bowl of his pipe, while drawing air through the stem. Nearby, the grad student raised her head and squinted at us from above the top of her carrel, a turtle peeking out of its shell.
“Really!” she whisper-shouted. “You’re not allowed-”
“The smoking ordinance doesn’t apply to him,” counseled the lawyer who lurks inside of me. “He’s grandfathered in.”
Charlie exhaled a cloud of sweet tobacco and said, “We kill, and like the apes, not only for food. We kill our own kind. We kill for greed and anger and lust. Five million years of evolution, and the beast is still within us.”
“C’mon, Charlie. Don’t be such a curmudgeon. Enjoy what we have. Life’s too short.”
He smiled and jabbed at me with the bowl of his pipe. “Hippocrates said it first,” he told me.
“Said what?”
“ Ars longa, vita brevis. Then Longfellow picked up the expression.” Charlie dropped his voice into a deep rhythmic chant:
“‘Art is long, and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.’”
I was just about to applaud when a shadow crossed the table.
“I’m going to report the both of you,” the grad student hissed at the county-approved decibel level. “Talking and smoking! Why don’t you go to a tavern?”
“Excellent idea,” I agreed.
She huffed off, clutching a book to her breasts, and Charlie puffed on, oblivious, still thinking about homicidal apes and the brevity of life, I supposed.
“Hey, Charlie. We can’t solve mankind’s problems. Let’s just figure out who murdered Francisco Crespo.”
The old wizard’s eyes cleared. “ Cui bono? Who stands to gain?”
“Somebody who couldn’t let him reveal who ran that forklift through Smorodinsky, and why.”
“And what is there that links Crespo and Smorodinsky?”
I walked through it. “Both men worked for Yagamata, a guy who likes Russia and collects priceless art. Crespo attacked Smorodinsky, but somebody else finished him off. Somebody killed Crespo using a fairly ridiculous Russian method of silencing the gunshot. A lady P.I. with black hair and molten eyes offers her help and her body without the usual preliminaries…”
Charlie raised his bushy eyebrows. “ Mores,” he sighed, shaking his head.
I’m not the kind of guy to kiss and tell, but in retrospect the loving of Lourdes seemed more business than pleasure. “The P.I.’s father is Severo Soto, who also employed Crespo and happens to be a Russia-hater. So Crespo is linked to both Yagamata and Soto.”
Charlie beamed. When a student passes his oral exams, the teacher is pleased. “What conclusions have you reached?”
“None yet. You’re the one who taught me not to jump too fast. The wise man keeps his trap shut, et cetera, et cetera.”
He nodded happily, and I kept thumbing through the book of French paintings when I stopped at two naked men on a lawn. The same green, the same muscular build with few facial characteristics. The men were rolling balls across the grass. “Charlie, there’s something about this one. It’s the same artist, I’m sure.”
“ A Game of Bowls by Henri Matisse,” he said. “Part of the French collection at the Hermitage.”
I scanned the next few pages. Some nudes, a red room, a blue tablecloth, a bouquet of bright f
lowers. All by Matisse. And then there it was. The man, oversize hands extended, reaching toward the naked woman who tried, futilely, to crawl away.
“ Satyr and Nymph,” Charlie Riggs said, studying the page.
“Russia and Cuba,” I told him.
C harlie ordered his hog snapper broiled and well done. I chose yellowtail sauteed with a mess of onions and green peppers. We were at Tugboat Willie’s on the Rickenbacker Causeway, halfway between the city and Key Biscayne. The fish was fresh, the beer cold, and a breeze riffled the palm trees as we sat on the front porch, the sun a forest fire setting in the west.
“We could tell Socolow,” I suggested weakly, hoping Charlie would veto the idea.
“Tell him what?”
“What we know from our research.”
“Which is what?”
I had drained my first beer and was working on the second. “The artwork, Charlie. Matsuo Yagamata shows off a gold choo-choo train inside an egg that’s supposed to be in a Moscow museum. It’s probably worth more than two million, based on the sale of the Pine Cone Egg for a million eight at Christie’s in Geneva a couple of years ago, and the train is funkier. Then there’s Severo Soto, one of our town’s most famed anticommunists. He keeps a priceless painting by Matisse in his study. Only problem, the painting is owned by the Russians and, last time anyone checked, it was in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Francisco Crespo, whose idea of jewelry is a Timex watch, dies holding a miniature gold rabbit, which you say was made by the same artist who made Yagamata’s egg-”
“Carl Faberge.”
“And was worn as a pendant by an empress…”
I reached for one of the books Charlie had checked out of the library. He had marked the page. There was a photo of a small gold bunny holding an egg made of flecked aventurine. It was an Easter gift to Empress Alexandra in 1913. I was convinced that Crespo was not the empress’s distant cousin to whom the bunny would have passed.
“So what does it all mean to you?” Charlie asked patiently.
