by Paul Levine
Damn. Someone must have decided that a fifteen-foot stack of applesauce violated a housekeeping rule. The forklift and my makeshift ladder were gone. I could risk it and try to get down the stairs. Or I could-
“… Tomorrow, then,” Foley said.
They were coming out the door. In a moment, they would turn the corner and face me on the catwalk. I ducked under the railing, dropped my feet over the side and hung there, my hands gripping the cool steel, my feet swinging gently below me. I did not feel like Cathy Rigby.
“This Kharchenko,” Foley said, “can he be trusted?”
They were directly above me. The catwalk swayed slightly with each step.
“Completely,” Yagamata answered. “He is not as intelligent as Smorodinsky, but perhaps that is to our advantage. He follows orders without thinking about the consequences.”
No one was moving. My arms ached.
“When will he arrive?” Foley asked.
“Tomorrow from JFK. He is carrying a cardboard tube with a rather colorful poster of Temppeliaukio Square in Helsinki.”
“And?”
“Inside the poster is Matisse’s Girl with Tulips,” Yagamata said. “Even as we speak, he is on the train, the St. Petersburg Express. He will be in Helsinki in two hours.”
For some reason, I thought of Dr. Zhivago, and an old Russian steam engine belching smoke into a wintry night, red flags crackling in an icy wind.
“I’m only going to say this once, Matsuo. Any more slipups, the whole operation will be scuttled.”
Yagamata replied, but a factory whistle blasted twice, and I couldn’t make out his words. Between the blasts, I heard a name. “Sue Molaynen” maybe. Yagamata’s voice became stronger.
“She supervised the loading of the freighter in Helsinki last week and will pick him up at the airport here.”
“Freighter?” Foley sounded irritated.
“A Polish freighter under lease to one of my companies.”
“What are you doing, stealing the whole damn Hermitage?”
“In due time.” Yagamata laughed. “Perhaps a hundred years. For now, several trailer-size containers of objets d’art, the most we have ever transported. What did you think, Mr. Foley, that we are still carrying baubles inside Matryoshka dolls?”
“I don’t like it,” Foley said. “You take too many risks, and you exceed all authority.”
“Like all bureaucrats, you worry too much.”
My shoulders were on fire.
“I’m not kidding, the strictest inventory control on this shipment,” Foley said, sternly.
“Of course,” Yagamata said.
“I mean it.”
“Of course you do.”
“You are a real piece of work, Matsuo baby.”
“Thank you.”
“Boys,” Lourdes pleaded. “Please stop. We must work together. One misstep and-”
“ Ouch! ”
Her stiletto heel dug deep into the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. Suddenly I was hanging only by my left hand, my body swaying as if in a breeze. For some reason I pictured a paratrooper caught in the trees, the enemy about to spray him with automatic weapons fire.
Commotion above me. “What the hell!” Foley shouted. Severo Soto was yelling at someone. He leaned down and looked at me. “ Maldito! ”
This time it was a man’s foot, and it hit hard, crunching the fingers of my left hand. And then I fell.
I missed the applesauce jars and landed on the fertilizer bags with a thud. I didn’t break, sprain, or twist anything. It was no worse than getting blindsided by the tight end. I just clambered down and started for the loading dock. I wasn’t running. There would be something scaredy-cat about that. But I wasn’t walking either. It was more like the stiff-legged jog we used coming out of the locker room for pregame introductions. Almost a swagger to the gait.
Then the air horn blasted. Over the speaker, I heard Yagamata calling the security guards. Then, it was Severo Soto’s voice, saying something in Spanish I couldn’t understand. In a moment, I saw Carlos doing his best imitation of a cop, gun held in two-hand grip, edging his thin body along a pyramid of tomato paste cans, his back plastered to the wall. What had they told him, BOLO for fast-talking shyster, presumed flippant and dangerous?
I flattened myself to the floor and watched Carlos straining on tippy-toes to see on top of the pallets. A moment later, I heard the ominous rumble of the steel doors, lowering from overhead. Both loading docks-riverfront and parking lot-were sealed off. We were going to be spending some time together, my art-loving friends and me.
Carlos turned a corner, raising and lowering his gun with arms locked straight in front of him as he doubtless had seen on TV. He had his left hand cupped under his right, rather than in front of it, where each hand could neutralize the other, steadying the gun. I started moving the other way. I doubted Carlos could shoot straight but would rather not test my theory.
The warehouse had no windows, and best I could tell, the only doors were locked tight. But the building was huge, and they had to find me first. I was near a raised cubicle at the intersection of two walls. A stenciled sign said: INVENTORY AND MERCHANDISE CONTROL. I took my own inventory. Nothing useful on the desk, not a telephone, not even scissors. What looked like a janitor’s closet was nearby. Maybe I could fight them off with a mop.
The door was unlocked.
Inside were wires and switches, the electrical controls for the building. I grabbed a handful of wires and yanked them out of their little sockets. On the wall was the circuit breaker panel. I opened it, reached in, and popped all the breakers. The heavy-duty air-conditioning wheezed and clunked to a halt. The lights blinked off; I was in total darkness.
Footsteps echoed on concrete, but in the cavernous warehouse I could not tell the direction. Yagamata would try to find the electrical room, so I kept moving. I tiptoed cautiously into the blackness, taking care, trying to remember the tomcat stalk an outdoorsman once taught me: high slow steps, heel down first, roll onto the ball of the foot. I was doing fine. I didn’t wake any sleeping bears or fall into any rushing streams. But then I smacked into something.
“ Cono! ” the something yelled. It was Carlos, tumbling to the floor. I didn’t move. He couldn’t see me, because I couldn’t see him. A nerve-shattering cl-ick warned me that he had cocked the hammer on his. 357 Magnum. My breathing sounded like a locomotive in my ears. Silently, I reached into a pocket, took out a quarter, and tossed it into the darkness. It landed with a ping on the concrete, and Carlos fired a shot that made my ears ring. The flash from the barrel was just below me. He was sitting on the floor at my feet. With the noise still echoing, I took off the other way and turned what I thought was a corner, but slammed into a metal rack, banging my bum knee hard. I backed up, tried to figure where the middle of the aisle would be, then started moving slowly, my arms in front of me, feeling the air.
A soft noise.
A buzzing.
Louder now.
Two small headlights swung around a corner. In the blackness, the lights blinded me. I was caught in their glare, frozen like a startled deer. The lights grew in size, the forklift closing the distance. I turned and ran, chasing my shadow, which loomed twenty feet in front of me.
Thirty miles an hour. That’s how fast Crespo told me they went. Me, I never ran an hour in my life. On my best day, it took me four point eight two seconds to run forty yards. On this day, rapidly shaping up as my worst, I may have trimmed half a second off my time.
The lift closed on me, someone shouting from behind. I looked back over my shoulder. It hung there five yards away, then closed the gap. We were coming to an intersection of rows. Let’s see how that baby corners. I faked left and took the corner right like a wide receiver on a deep post, trying to make a hard L-cut. My turn was a little flabby around the edges, but it was better than the guy behind me. The lift banged into a metal rack, sending sparks into the darkness. It stopped, backed up, and sta
rted again. I had gained twenty yards but was losing steam. With the air-conditioning off, the air went stale and the warehouse was a sweatbox. I was having trouble with my breathing, and there it was again, behind me. I thought of Smorodinsky, impaled on the wall. I thought of Cary Grant in North by Northwest, being chased by the crop duster. If I got out of this, I was going to buy Lourdes Soto a drink and ask “how a girl like you got to be a girl like you.”
Slanting to the right, I tried to calculate how much room there was on either side of the forklift. I couldn’t outrun it, but maybe I could pivot out of its way, reverse my field, and take a poke at the driver as he went by. It was probably no more difficult than kicking a ball through the uprights, then running and catching that sucker before it hit the ground.
More yelling behind me. No more time to think. I planted my left leg and pivoted. I heard the snap before I felt it, the knee giving way. I spun into a pallet of bottled barbecue sauce, my hands gripping the wooden frame to keep from falling. My back was pressed against the pallet, my arms outstretched, my knee throbbing. The forklift growled past me, braked hard, spun around, and came back. It stopped three feet in front of me, its headlights bleaching me in their malevolent glare. I heard the hydraulic whoosh of the lift and saw the blade raise to my chest level. Then the ugly machine moved forward, at first slowly, then with a charge. I raised my arms as the blades slashed into the pallet on either side of my rib cage. Behind me, bottles shattered, and what I hoped was barbecue sauce ran down the back of my legs. My chest was pinned to the front of the forklift, my back to the splintered wood pallet.
The driver turned off the ignition, leaving the headlights on. My lungs wanted oxygen, but the lift was crushing my ribs in a mechanical bearhug. I watched the driver dismount, peel off a pair of gloves, and walk into the twin shafts of yellow light.
“My father was right about you,” Lourdes Soto said, softly. “You are the kind of man who touches a stove to see if it is hot.”
15
THE POISON IS IN THE TAIL
But I don’t like Washington in the summer…” I said.
Robert Foley didn’t seem to care.
“… or the rest of the year, for that matter.”
He sat on the vinyl sofa, reading a newspaper, ignoring me. His tie was at half mast, and his white shirt wrinkled. His creased face was pale and drawn. Maybe baby-sitting for me was a tiring job. Around us, a potpourri of government agents went about their tasks. There were customs inspectors in uniform, DEA agents in plainclothes, one with a German shepherd, and a variety of federal employees wearing photo ID badges and toiling at various secretive tasks in that governmental tempo that is somewhere between slow motion and a dead halt. In the center of the room, a dozen cubicles each contained eight miniature television monitors. Bleary-eyed women scanned the screens, occasionally whispering into their headsets. We were deep in the bowels of the airport in a restricted federal area. The sign on the door said simply, SPECIAL SERVICES.
I was watching the inside of the door when Foley said, “You don’t have to go with me. Leave now if you want. I’ll get you a cab.”
“Uh-huh. Only the cab driver has a different kind of license, right?”
“What?”
“A license to kill.”
“Lassiter, you see too many movies. We haven’t done that sort of thing in years. At least not domestically.”
On the wall was a panel with numbers one through fifty. Four or five numbers were blinking at once. Another lighted panel showed arriving and departing international flights with a matching number from one to fifty.
“Okay, I think I’ll leave now,” I told him. “I need to put some ice on this knee.”
Foley went back to his newspaper.
I stood, straightened my bum leg, and said, “Well, I guess this is good-bye. Next time you’re in Miami, do me a favor. Don’t call me.”
“Oh, you’ll be seeing me at the trial.”
“What trial?”
Foley put down the newspaper, creasing the folds as if it were the flag at Arlington. “Yours, pal. For the murder of Francisco Crespo.”
The board showed a flight arriving from Bogota. Three numbers started blinking. Had I heard him right? He couldn’t have said what I thought he said.
“Your prints are all over that trailer, Lassiter. You tell us a cock-and-bull story about a man dressed in brown running away. There were a hundred people in that park, and nobody saw your mystery man.”
“A hundred people from south of the border, but not one green card in the bunch. Of course nobody saw anything.”
Foley beamed. He looked genuinely happy. “Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way. Three witnesses saw you go into Crespo’s trailer and heard two muffled popping sounds maybe a minute later.”
“Bullshit! It was the other way around. I went in after-”
“That’s not what the witnesses say.”
I sunk back into the sofa. My knee throbbed. “I take it back. There’ll be three green cards in that park by next week.”
“Sorry, Lassiter, but you’ll be indicted for second-degree murder. As the English say, a nasty bit of business.”
“You prick! You bastard! You scum-sucking pig!”
Around us, various civil servants stopped to watch. Or did they just slow their tempo another nanosecond? The German shepherd padded over and sniffed my leg for contraband, or maybe just to see if I was edible.
“Why would I shoot Crespo?”
“Ah, yes, motive. Hard to get a conviction without one, but why should I tell you your business? Some dispute over fee splitting. Crespo wanted a bigger cut of the cases he sent your way. You brushed him off. He threatened you with exposure and disbarment. You warned him once. He persisted. You offed him.”
“You bullshit artist! I never split a fee with Crespo or anybody else.”
“Then how do you explain the letter written in your own hand?”
“What letter?”
He opened a thin briefcase and removed a one-page photocopy. “Exhibit A,” he announced.
I grabbed it. My handwriting all right. A curt little note telling Crespo to lay off or he’d regret it. And my signature at the bottom, a forgery so good even I couldn’t tell it wasn’t real.
I balled up the note and tossed it back at Foley. “That’s why you had me write out a statement, you fuckhead.”
He took an identical copy from his briefcase and admired it. There seemed to be half a dozen copies. “The exemplar was quite useful, I admit.”
“Who’s going to believe this? What kind of asshole would write a letter like that?”
He smiled and put the letter back into the briefcase. “I believe that’s what you lawyers call a jury question.”
“I ought to kick your ass.”
“Go ahead. Assaulting a federal officer is pretty tame stuff compared to the trouble you’re in.” He smiled again and leaned toward me. “Of course, I could help you out. I could see to it that Socolow never gets this letter and those wetback witnesses all end up working in the Post Office in Corpus Christi.”
“Who do I have to kill?”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. All you have to do is sign a confidentiality agreement. Not a word about Operation Riptide to anybody, ever.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Why not have your handwriting guy just sign it for me, save the trouble?”
“Not for this one. We’ll go to the Farm at Langley, videotape the signing, have you state for the record you’re not being coerced, that sort of thing.”
“What makes me think you’ve got the statement all typed up and neatly bound in blue-backed paper inside your government-issue briefcase?”
He opened the case and beamed. “Because you recognize efficiency and grudgingly admire it.”
He handed me a three-page document, which, by golly, was stapled to a blue backing with a gold government seal. I skimmed it. “You prick, Foley. This isn’t a confident
iality agreement. It’s a confession to the murder of Francisco Crespo.”
“Best confidentiality agreement I know. It goes in the safe in Langley. It’ll never see the light of day as long as you keep your mouth shut. You talk, or do anything contrary to our interests, the confession will be in Socolow’s hands quicker than shit through a goose.”
“Or the next Socolow, or the one after that. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. You guys would have something over me for the rest of my life.”
“Hey, nobody promised you a rose garden. I’m just trying to help you out here. So think about it.” He looked at his watch. “Flight leaves in ninety minutes.”
I asked Foley if I could use the phone to call my secretary. He grunted an okay and told me I was free to call the Prince of Wales if I wanted. I used an unmanned desk out of Foley’s earshot and caught Cindy at home.
“What is it, boss? I’m late for ladies’ night at the Crazy Horse.”
“Sorry to make you miss the Chippendales.”
“Nah, it’s the lifeguards from Daytona Beach, all those tan lines.” The line buzzed with faraway static as she paused. “Whadaya mean, miss…?”
“You remember how to write a writ?”
“Now?”
“C’mon, Cindy. I need a writ of prejudgment attachment under Chapter Seventy-six, and I need it quick.”
“Courthouse is closed, el jefe.”
“Call Judge Boulton at home. Prepare a short complaint, emergency motion, and affidavit. You swear to it. If you’re indicted for perjury, I’ll get you a good lawyer. The property to be attached is a one-page document belonging to me. At least, it seems to have my signature on it. An original and some copies, I don’t know how many, so plead it broadly. The document is a letter with no monetary value, so we don’t need to post a bond. The tortfeasor, one Robert T. Foley, is about to flee the jurisdiction, which gives us the statutory basis for prejudgment relief. Unless we secure the property now, the normal process of the court will be for naught, blah, blah, blah. Get it?”
