Lassiter 03 - False Dawn (36 page)

“This is the issue in my life, Lassiter. How do I want to spend the next twenty years?”

“How about breaking rocks at Leavenworth?” I suggested, helpfully.

He kept going as if I weren’t there. “I’ve been anonymous my entire life, and I like it that way. Army intelligence, then the Company. Do I really want my picture on the cover of
Newsweek
, the guy who pulled off the biggest heist in history?”

I hadn’t been subjected to this much Socratic questioning since night law school. “With that notoriety, you’d be stuck in your hacienda here for the rest of your life. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? What good is all the money in the world if you don’t really have your freedom?”

Foley whispered something to the young woman, handed her a wad of bills, and patted her arm. She rewarded him with a dazzling smile, stood up, and headed inside toward the powder room or wherever Foley told her to go. Overhead, a three-quarter moon glistened behind the swaying palm fronds.

“That’s part of it, sure,” he said. “I’d rather be in Switzerland or France, a dozen places. Lassiter, I’ve been all over the world, and believe me, this place isn’t in the top ten. You ever ride a Harley through the Alps in August?”

I allowed as how I hadn’t, having spent many summers doing three-a-days on a swampy practice field.

“Ever sail your own sloop through the Greek Isles?”

“No, but I’ve foot-steered a nine-foot sailboard in the shadow of the Virginia Key sewage plant.”

He looked around the outdoor nightclub. Colored lights spelled out “
Tropicana
” on a torch-lit upper stage. At the table next to us, half a dozen German diplomats were arguing boisterously about the
baseball-spiel
they had seen that afternoon at Jose Marti Park. The rich aroma of expensive Cuban cigars wafted our way in the evening breeze.

“This is pleasant enough for a few weeks,” Foley said. “A few months maybe, but forever?”

“You’d be the world’s richest prisoner,” I agreed, “a captive of your own success.”

The tables were beginning to fill. Above us, I could see the silhouette of dancers backlit behind a flimsy curtain. “And what if Castro falls?” I asked. “What if the next government is run by Severo Soto, which really means by Washington?”

He removed his rimless glasses and wiped them on a napkin. He wore his gray civil servant’s suit—old habits die hard—despite his new status as an international thief and potential billionaire. “Soto’s brains were fried a long time ago, but you’re right about one thing. I’d be crazy not to consider the political situation here. What if Castro pulls a double-cross? Takes his fifteen percent commission, then makes a deal with the West to ship me back in exchange for some tractors. Or what if he dies and the next head Red doesn’t like the way I part my hair? The Politburo just bounced Carlos Aldana, the number three commie, the other day. It’s just too volatile here. What if they hold free elections and beautiful Cuba”—he gave it the Spanish pronunciation,
Coo-ba
—“decides to become the fifty-first state?”

“Then you’re fucked, Foley.”

I must have been smiling. He said, “Don’t be so happy about it, or you won’t get your fee.”

And I thought this was a
pro bono
case. “My fee?”

A smile added lines to his creased face. “How’s ten million sound?”

“Like a symphony,” I said.

As if on cue, a trumpet sounded. Women in multicolored feathery costumes began descending stairs to the main stage. The music blared, and the stage was a procession of bare limbs and exposed breasts. Under the feathers, the costumes were scanty, halter tops and bikini bottoms cut high on the hips. Long-legged women of varying hues began swaying to a Brazilian beat. A tall cinnamon-skinned woman swiveled to the front of the stage, holding a cordless mike, and began singing in Spanish.

Foley watched the stage without noticeable interest. Achieving his goal seemed to leave him empty. All that loot and maybe he felt, so what? For a lot of us, it’s that way. Striving for the goal is often better than attaining it.

“Don’t care for the show?” I asked.

“They haven’t changed the acts since Meyer Lansky used to sit over there, his back to the wall.” He gestured toward a corner that had a commanding view of the stage. “Like falling into a time warp, Vegas thirty years ago.”

His mind was drifting. But then so was mine. Did he say ten million? “What do I have to do for the money?”

“Be my lawyer, for chrissakes. Negotiate the deal. I’ll give everything back in return for full immunity plus a finder’s fee or a reward, whatever you want to call it. Keep me from being the most famous thief on two continents.”

“You’ll need complete transactional and use immunity.”

“That’s all your department. You figure it out, transmit the offer, do the paperwork, and guarantee me it’ll stick. Got it?”

A fat round seed fell off one of the towering trees and
plop
ped onto the table, just missing my beer. “You haven’t told me how much you want.”

“What do you think it’s worth, Lassiter, finding and returning the priceless heritage of a nation?”

“How about a Boy Scout merit badge and a thank-you note from Yeltsin?”

Above us, the dancers had changed costumes. The same amount of legs, breasts, and buttocks were showing, but now the band was playing “The Girl from Ipanema.” A table of what looked like Saudi sheiks behind us was humming along.

“I’m not greedy,” Foley said, “and this is standard procedure. Insurance companies pay off all the time to get back precious art. I deserve to be compensated. First, get my expenses covered. That includes your fee plus what it cost me to get the stuff here. Bribes, shipping, something for Castro for letting me in. Figure forty million.”

I used a pen to make notes on a cocktail napkin. “Forty million for shipping and handling.”

“So my services got to be worth two hundred million, don’t you think?”

“You’re the client,” I said. “It’s your call.”

“Two hundred million,” he repeated, weighing the words, one at a time. He seemed to like their heft. “So start playing lawyer, Lassiter. You know how to structure the deal?”

Unlike a lot of Miami lawyers, I don’t specialize in money laundering. Still, I know the basics. “I’ll set up a Cayman Island trust with ownership controlled by a limited partnership on the Isle of Man. A Bahamian corporation can be the general partner, with you owning all the stock. The money will be wired to the trust, and you can make transfers from there to Switzerland or wherever you want to live.”

“Good. Get to it. I’ve got clerical help, word processors, fax machines, everything you need. The art will be on a ship in international waters. I get the money on execution of the documents, at which time I’ll give them the coordinates, so they can take immediate delivery. Nobody tries to screw anybody, all on the up-and-up. Make sure the paperwork is airtight.”

“It will be. A confidentiality agreement, because the last thing you want is publicity. A waiver of the government’s right to seek injunctions against transfer of the funds. No frozen accounts, no civil liability of any kind, and of course, complete immunity from criminal prosecution.”

Foley studied me. “Can it be done?”

“Sure, on paper at least.”

His laugh had no pleasure in it. “This isn’t make-believe, Lassiter. This isn’t some cute trick like getting a judge to sign an attachment order. This is real. This is money and power, life and death. Take it seriously, pal. Take it goddamn seriously. Understood?”

“If you’re looking for a guarantee, you need a new lawyer. I can draft the prettiest contract you’ve ever seen. All the words will be spelled right, and every copy countersigned in triplicate. But if your old buddies in Washington or Moscow want to put a bullet in your head on the ski slopes some day, I can’t stop them. Understood?”

“Just get me the money, Lassiter, and I’ll take my chances.”

On the stage, a comedian was finishing his act, drawing respectful applause. My Spanish was just good enough to understand the setup and miss the punch lines. I finished my beer. The comedian took his bows, and bullfight music began, a matador waving his red cape at a scantily clad woman who must have been the bull. Foley signaled the waiter for the check, and almost immediately the black-haired young woman reappeared, slinking between tables into the seat next to him. “So, Lassiter, you know what I want?”

“Two hundred million,” I said, figuring that was the answer to the question: Just how much money does one man need?

I
t has been agreed by the bureaucrats,” Severo Soto told me, his voice dripping with disgust. “Your government will give Foley his money and the Russians their art.”

Funny how he always called it
my
government, always distanced himself. From the beginning, he had planned to return to his homeland, had never become an American citizen.

“Everyone should be happy,” I said. “In a roundabout way, the plan succeeded. The thefts have been stopped, the reformers saved from embarrassment.”

We stood on a street corner in Old Havana near the ornate Grand Theater. Soto was leery of talking business in the hotel room. Hundreds of men and women on Chinese bicycles streamed past, headed for work. A skinny teenage boy in torn sneakers approached us, offering to exchange pesos for American dollars at triple the exchange rate. I picked up a few one-peso notes as souvenirs and studied one of them. Beneath the inscription,
Entrcida a la Habana 8 de Enero de 1959
, Fidel Castro rode triumphantly atop a tank, surrounded by his soldiers. One of Fidel’s compatriots, a bearded warrior, held a (lag and wore crisscrossing bandoliers. To me, he looked like a young Severo Soto.

I said, “I thought the money might have been a problem.”

“They would have paid even more. Money is unlimited to bury mistakes.”

“Cheer up. Mission accomplished. Castro won’t get his hands on the billion dollars that could save his economy. You can wait for him to fall.”

Soto pulled a cigar from his guayabera pocket. A Partagas corona. I had watched him buy a handful in the hotel lobby. Most
exilado
s refuse to smoke them until Fidel is toppled.

“I have been waiting more than thirty years. How long can a man wait?”

For a moment, I thought he was reading my mind. But he was talking about Castro, not the cigars.

Soto said, “Returning the art, restoring the status quo, does nothing to aid the just cause of the Cuban people. “

I remembered what Foley told me at the ballet. Soto was the one who wanted to drive the nail into the coffin of communism. “Hey, be happy with a wash. It’s better than Castro getting all that loot.”

We walked past the Floridita Restaurant where, Miami Cubans say, a bartender first mixed rum with lime juice and sugar. The sign above the entrance read,
La Curia del Daiquiri
. We passed old stucco apartment buildings pockmarked with age and neglect. We crossed a street of wooden bricks that had to be three centuries old. A jacaranda tree blooming with purple flowers gave us an umbrella of shade at a street corner. Best I could tell, no drug dealers lurked under the branches. From a courtyard not fifty yards off a main street, a bare-chested man was pulling a bucket of water from an underground cistern.

An open truck stopped in front of one of the restaurants that cater to hard-currency tourists. Skinned pigs gleamed yellow in the sun; hundreds of flies buzzed over the carcasses.

“The people have no meat, but
La Bodeguita del Medio
can feed the
turistas
all the pork they want.” Soto puffed on his cigar and blew aromatic white fumes in my direction. “Do you care for lunch?”

I wasn’t feeling hungry just then.

We had walked several more blocks when Soto said, “It is a crime to return the art.”

Funny, I thought it was a crime to take it.

“Do you know what we could do with the proceeds from just a fraction of the paintings and gemstones?” Soto asked.

“You could give this city a coat of paint.”

“I could equip an army, or I could feed the island for a year. I could build factories and roads and hospitals. Or I could make a revolutionary statement the world would never forget.”

Now what did that mean?

The old dreamer. An errand boy, his daughter called him. Burned out, Foley said. But Soto wasn’t reminiscing about past glories. He was looking to the future, and again he was carrying a gun. When he closed his eyes, he must have seen sugar cane workers abandoning the fields and streaming into the mountains, lean men in fatigues cleaning their weapons in a tropical downpour. He heard rifle bolts clicking into place, smelled cordite and gun oil, felt the tingle of quickened heartbeats.

“Do you have a sense of irony?” Soto asked. He tossed his cigar into the street. “The art was the product of corruption. The Russian peasants starved so that the Romanovs could have diamond eggs. Is it not ironic that the handiwork of such evil could now be used for the benefit of the people?”

“But it won’t be used at all. It’s going back to the museums. No more art for wheat. No more sting operations. Socolow got the word, remember. The U.S. doesn’t want to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.”

Soto barked a humorless laugh. “
Sí
, just as your government didn’t want to interfere in Guatemala in ’54, but that didn’t stop the CIA from overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz. Just as you didn’t want to interfere in Panama in ’64, but U.S. troops still killed a score of protesters, to say nothing of the illegal invasion of that sovereign country in 1989 in order to kidnap General Noriega. How far does American respect for sovereignty extend? Not to Libya, Cuba, or Iraq. I am sure Sukarno of Indonesia and Nkrumah of Ghana would have been surprised to learn that the U.S. doesn’t interfere in their internal affairs. What would Allende say if he were alive to say it?”

Nobody ever called me a knee-jerk patriot, but all this America bashing was getting on my nerves. I was also beginning to wonder if coming back to Cuba had jarred a screw loose in the old man’s head. “I’m no expert on world affairs, but you’re leaving out a lot of the good.
My
government also gave you a job and a home and the freedom to say what you want. Frankly, I’m worried about your priorities down here.”