by Paul Levine
I don’t know how far I was thrown. I remember I could no longer swim. My ears rang and my head throbbed and my limbs were numb. I floated on my back, and then face-down, and then on my back again. Salty waves washed over me, filling my nose and mouth, and I went under. Was I drowning along with the da Vincis and Renoirs and Gauguins? I came up and floated some more, opened my eyes, and couldn’t see.
I rode a breaking wave toward shore, but the riptide pulled me out again. I went under, came up, and bumped into something. I flipped onto my back, looked up, and saw a face peering down at me. Pale, with wet dark hair plastered to her forehead. Her mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
Above me, the sky was aflame. The water stank of oil and diesel fuel, and fire skittered across the surface of the waves. A piece of hot metal brushed my leg. What looked like burning newspaper floated in the breeze.
Again, I looked at her face, Lourdes leaning out of the lifeboat, reaching for me. I couldn’t hear, but in the shimmering light of the blazing ocean I saw her mouth my name. She reached down and tried to hoist me up. She couldn’t do it. I struggled to pull myself over the side of the lifeboat, but fell back into the water.
Finally, she wrapped a line around me and let me float there alongside. She put a hand on my cheek, cupping my head. When she withdrew, her hand was covered with blood and she shrank back.
Then I rolled over again onto my back and watched the flames dance across the water, black smoke billowing into the nighttime sky.
My head stopped throbbing, and I suddenly wanted to sleep. I felt no pain. No fear. No nothing.
28
FALSE DAWN
Dr. Charles W. Riggs makes house calls.
This neither boosts the spirits nor stabilizes the blood pressure of his patients, none of whom has ever survived.
Except me.
I lay in bed sipping papaya juice and reading the newspaper, which was filled with its usual collection of mondo bizarro Miami news. A man getting off a flight from Bogota was stopped by customs agents at M.I.A. when they saw him walking stiffly through the inspection line. A closer look revealed packets of cocaine sewn into his thighs, beneath the skin. Miami’s customs inspectors are a jaded lot. They’ve caught folks who swallow condoms filled with cocaine and have found the drug in every orifice known to man (and woman). But the do-it-yourself plastic surgery was news, even here.
The sportswriters were still ecstatic over Miami getting a major league baseball franchise. More realistic was a columnist who suggested some ingenious promotions, including “Uzi Day,” in which all kids got toy submachine guns, “Cartel Day,” with box seats for drug kingpins, and “John Doe Day,” with free corn dogs for anyone in the Witness Protection Program. Maybe you have to live here to appreciate the humor.
Then there was the usual epidemic of burglaries, as always, with a Miami twist. Stolen lawns were the latest in larcenies. In the middle of the night, thieves roll up newly sodded lawns and cart them away. Mia-muh, you gotta love it or leave it.
A stream of visitors flowed through my coral rock house in Coconut Grove. Granny Lassiter tromped in, carrying bags of groceries. She stocked my shelves with her homemade kumquat preserves and calamondin marmalade, then baked a tart Key lime pie. She whipped up some conch fritters and sauteed fresh shrimp with lychees, ginger, red peppers, and passion fruit. I nibbled at the shrimp, then downed a jelly jar full of her white moonshine and slept for the next twenty hours.
Emilia Crespo brought me a steaming pot of arroz con polio. At least I wasn’t going to starve to death. Emilia stayed in the house, cooking, cleaning, mopping my feverish forehead, and whispering prayers into my ringing ears. Pain radiated from lacerations on my leg-infected by the gunk that floats in our waters-and I looked up at her through a haze. She seemed so far away, and I didn’t know which one of us was drifting. When my head cleared, I told her how the man who killed her son had died an excruciating death. She listened silently, then said something in Spanish and crossed herself.
Charlie Riggs sat by my bed for a week, occasionally peeking under the bandages at my ruptured eardrums, claiming to see all the way through. I insulted him by asking for a real doctor; he told me he had graduated medical school summa cum laude; and I reminded him that was before the discovery of penicillin.
Cindy stopped by, delivering a get-well card signed by four of the eight members of the management committee of the law firm, along with written reminders that my time sheets were incomplete for May and June, thus putting an automatic hold on my draw for July.
I lay in bed and watched news reports of the memorial service for Severo Soto, hailed as a great anticommunist by his old cronies in Alpha 66. The TV camera caught a fleeting glimpse of Lourdes Soto coming out of a Little Havana church, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. I wrote a condolence note, not knowing what to say, filling the white space with platitudes. Two days later, she phoned, asked how I was, and said she would come by the house for a visit. She never did. When I finally called her apartment, a recording said the phone had been disconnected.
I awoke one day to the sound of a glass swizzle colliding with ice cubes and the scent of burnt lemon. Mickey Cumello, my favorite bartender, sat next to the bed, making me a martini with Plymouth gin.
Marvin the Maven stopped in, carrying a box of chocolate-covered cherries, which he proceeded to devour, sucking the juice off his thumb with slurping sounds. Just wanted to cheer me up, Marvin allowed, saying he was looking forward to the retrial of my chicken case next month.
Then Abe Socolow paid his respects. He brought garlic bagels, cream cheese with chives, and a college football magazine, then stood awkwardly at the foot of my bed.
“What’s going on, Abe?”
“Whadaya mean?”
“What was it the paper said, ‘an explosion of unknown origin’?”
He took off his suit coat, looked up at the ceiling fan, and probably wondered why there was no air-conditioning.
“Why the cover-up?” I demanded. “Why no mention of the art?”
“What art?”
“C’mon, Abe, don’t pee on my leg. Granny was fishing off the rocks at South Pointe day before yesterday. She told me the place was crawling with federal marshals, and a barge was in place, dredging the spot where the freighter blew up.”
“All true.”
“So what’d you find? Did anything survive?”
“Sure.” He allowed himself a snicker. “A couple tons of rocks.”
I propped myself onto one elbow and leaned toward him. There’d been a ringing in my ears and I wasn’t sure I’d heard him.
Socolow pulled a cigarette out of a pack, watched me scowl, and slipped it, unlit, into his mouth. “What was supposed to be the coins turned out to be rocks. Like in your head, Jake. The statues, slabs of concrete. Paintings, just newspapers stuffed into wooden crates.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Outside my window, old mimus polyglottos, the mockingbird, was chirping his song. In my bedroom, Abe Socolow was pacing and berating me. “You’re an okay guy, but a half-assed lawyer, Jake. Where was your due diligence? You never inspected the goods. How’s your malpractice coverage, anyway? If I was in charge, I’d have the government sue you for the two hundred million that’s in Fidel’s bank account.”
Suddenly, there wasn’t anything wrong with my hearing. “You’ve got it backwards, Abe. I didn’t represent the government. I represented Foley. Your guy was Soto. If he hadn’t been so wound up in his revolutionary rhetoric, maybe he would have taken inventory. The last time I saw the art, it was in a convoy of trailer-trucks headed east on the Airport Expressway.”
“Right. Foley went straight to the port, where he intended to put everything on a ship to Cuba. Unfortunately for him, Nikolai Smorodinsky and some pals from the Russian Agency for Federal Security were waiting. They’re all ex-KGB agents still trying to atone for Krvuchkov taking part in the coup. They relieved Foley of the contents of the trailer-truc
ks, which by now ought to be under lock and key in St. Petersburg.”
“Then you knew all along that Foley didn’t have the art.”
“No way.” Socolow pulled out a pack of matches and lit his cigarette. “The Russian government didn’t want to admit that things were so far out of control, so they never told Washington that Kharchenko had gotten out with the biggest load of treasure anyone had ever seen. Of course, we knew it from our sources in Finland and from tapping Yagamata’s phone here. But in the eyes of Yeltsin’s people, the art was never officially stolen, so it was never returned. They simply clammed up and didn’t tell us a thing. Hey, regardless of the form of government, the Russians are still a secretive bunch who hate to be embarrassed.”
“Foley,” I said. “What about Foley?”
Socolow paused long enough to blow smoke in my direction. “Picture him, Lassiter. For an hour or so, he was the richest man in the world. Then he’s left holding nothing but his dick. On one hand, he’s lucky to be alive. The Russians could have killed him. But he looks at it differently. He’s going crazy, figuring how close he came. He has a freighter at the port, but no cargo, at least not until he gets a bright idea.”
I shook the cobwebs out of my head. “He pulls a scam. Even if he doesn’t have the art, he can pretend he does. He loads the freighter with rocks and newspapers and heads to Havana.’’
“Right. Foley tried using his contacts with Cuban intelligence to worm his way onto the island, but they thought he was full of shit, a guy saying he had billions of dollars of art on a Polish freighter that could barely float. So they call their most valuable double agent, one Severo Soto, who confirms Foley’s story because the CIA tells him it’s true. The CIA, of course, was relying on information provided by one Jake Lassiter, who reported that Foley had the art on trucks leaving the warehouse. When Foley turned up in Havana, everybody just assumed he had it, can you fucking believe it?”
The mockingbird was growing louder. Its tune reminded me of a piano concerto. Tchaikovsky maybe. “Of course,” Socolow continued, “by this time, Soto had his own plans.”
“A revolutionary statement,” I said, “a funeral pyre of capitalist treasure.”
“Yeah, turns out he blew himself up on a garbage scow.”
“So, the Russians get their art back, and except for giving two hundred million in foreign aid to the bearded dictator, the mission was accomplished.”
We both thought about it a moment. “What about Foley?” I asked.
Socolow looked for an ashtray and couldn’t find one. He tapped his cigarette into the neck of an empty Grolsch bottle. “Yeah. The last we heard, that shithead was swinging a machete in one of Fidel’s cane fields. As you can imagine, the boys at Langley didn’t shed any tears. Hey, we even recovered a load of stuff from Yagamata’s house. All of it in perfect shape except for some fancy egg that was supposed to have a train inside.”
“Faberge’s Trans-Siberia Railway Egg.”
“Right. You know about it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, with less than complete candor.
“The egg was in Yagamata’s gallery, but the insides were missing, and so was Yagamata. I don’t suppose you know anything about that.”
When given a choice, I prefer not to lie. Sometimes I stall. “About what?”
“About the train…”
Sometimes I evade. “What would I know?”
“… and Yagamata.”
And sometimes I just tell the literal truth. “His love for the art was obsessive. I always thought he might lose his head over it.”
Socolow scowled, told me he had work to do, and left.
I swung my stiff legs over the side of the bed and tried to sit up straight, fighting off the dizziness. I reached under my mattress and pulled it out, a shiny twenty-four-carat gold choo-choo train. There was an engine, a tender, and five coaches. Each car was connected to the next by a tiny gold hinge, and they folded together like a penknife. A pretty piece, all right. It took a brilliant artist to conceive it, great craftsmen to execute the handiwork. It was one of a kind, and probably could not be duplicated today. But I couldn’t imagine killing for it, and I wouldn’t want to die for it. Enough people already had.
T wo weeks later, Charlie Riggs said I’d been an invalid too long. He wanted to get me out on the water. I said no thanks.
He tried to entice me with an invitation to chase bonefish in the flats off Key Largo. I declined because of the lobster mobsters. For two days each summer, just before the commercial season begins for the spiny lobster, every jerk with an outboard motor gets to trample the coral and shoot spears at all living creatures in our shallow waters. Not that it’s legal to spear, hook, or trap the little crustaceans. You’re supposed to catch them by hand or hand-held net. You’re not supposed to take egg-bearing females and undersized lobsters of either sex. But these bozos don’t care, and I wasn’t about to get speared, shot, or just plain annoyed while fishing.
So why did I let Charlie talk me into a ride on his old Boston Whaler?
To talk.
We said to heck with the flats and headed into the ocean in fourteen hundred feet of water, seeking a measure of solitude. Charlie had the binoculars out looking for osprey and frigate birds feeding on small fish at the surface. In the food chain hereabouts, the dolphin-the bluish gold fish, not Flipper the marine mammal-chase tiny fish to the surface where the birds eat them.
We follow the birds and find the dolphin, which, with any luck, will be in Granny Lassiter’s frying pan by sundown.
I used a light spinning rod baited with a yellow feather and came up with some seaweed. Charlie used mullet and got a strike from a five-pound dolphin. It jumped, fought, ran, fought some more, skipped along the surface, then gave up. Charlie hauled it in, wriggling, and tossed it into the cooler. “ Coryphaena hippurus, a magnificent animal. Fast and full of fight.”
I was still casting when Charlie pulled in his second one, a blunt-headed iridescent blue female. I leaned back and rested awhile, watching Charlie enjoy himself. After a moment, I said, “I still can’t figure it out.”
“A little more wrist,” Charlie advised.
“Not that. What was I doing, trying to help Francisco Crespo or find out something about myself?”
“Either way, you tried to make a difference.”
“And either way, I still couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Every time I thought I knew, they changed the players or the rules.”
Charlie chuckled. “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream. The new world order makes it even more confusing, Jake. It’s hard to realize, but old enemies are on the same side now. Still, there will always be loners like Foley and Yagamata, who are just in it for themselves, and an occasional throwback like Soto who thinks he can change the world by force. Most everybody else seems willing to let individuals control their own destiny.”
“But I didn’t do anyone any good. I didn’t save Crespo or Eva-Lisa. I didn’t save anyone.”
“Sure you did, Jake. You saved yourself.”
W e stayed the night at a rundown motel on the Gulf side, then got up at four A.M. for a second try. Except for the slap of water against the hull, it was quiet as a tomb as we headed out the channel. A velvet black sky was filled with diamonds, and a feathery breeze blew from the southeast. Charlie and I sat looking at the heavens in the silent comfort that two good friends can savor without self-consciousness.
When we reached what Charlie promised would be a hot spot, I baited my hook. Charlie tamped tobacco into his pipe and scratched at his beard. “You see my matches?”
“Too dark,” I said.
After a few moments, on the horizon to the east, an orange glow cut through the darkness.
“False dawn,” I said.
“No. That’s the real thing. Sun’s coming up.”
“Too early, Charlie. That’s the phony one. I remember.”
“Twenty bucks,” Charlie said, goad
ing me.
“You’re on. In the meantime, tell me one of your stories I haven’t heard in a while.”
Charlie harrumphed. “Ever tell you about the Doomsday Rock?”
“What’s that, an engagement ring?”
“An asteroid big enough to cause an explosion a billion times bigger than Hiroshima.”
“Where is it?”
“Nobody knows. But theoretically, it has to be out there, hurtling toward us right now. The Earth gets hit by one every five hundred thousand years or so. The blast causes a dust cloud that changes the climate, kills off the plant life. It’s probably what did in the dinosaurs. To demonstrate the effect, imagine my bait box is an asteroid.” He leaned over and picked up the box. “You see this, Jake?”
“Of course.”
“Thought so,” he said, laughing.
I reached for my wallet, handed the old buzzard two tens, and told him to finish his story.
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