“Where is the rabbit?”
“The veal porcini, too, and the pasta is very good. But no rabbit on the menu.”
“Don’t jerk me around, Lassiter. Where is it?”
I laughed and took a bite of the oiled bread. Foley removed his wire-framed glasses and cleaned them on the napkin. He was still wearing the gray suit, or its twin brother. Maybe they’re standard issue for federal agencies. He was in his late forties and looked in shape, a lean body and a creased, outdoorsy face. He stared hard at me. “The rabbit,” he repeated.
“The rabbit jumped over the moon,” I said.
“Do you find this funny?”
The waiter brought the menus, but Foley waved him off before he could tell us the specials. I said, “You’re a spy, right? Like in the movies. A spook? And here we are at Domenico’s in Coral Gables, but the waiters are speaking Italian, so maybe it could be some place in Rome, and you ask, ‘Where is the rabbit,’ like it’s some code. So I answer… Oh, never mind.”
Foley didn’t crack a grin. Maybe it wasn’t that funny after all.
“I’m not a spy,” he said with apparent boredom. “I compile reports on subjects of concern to national security.”
“Like a Marielito killed in a trailer park?”
“I am not at liberty to tell you the parameters of the investigation.”
“And I’m not at liberty to show you my gold bunny rabbit.”
The waiter returned and I ordered the antipasto and the veal with mushrooms and pine nuts. Foley asked for coffee, black. When the waiter left, Foley lowered his voice. “You’re withholding evidence in a homicide.”
“Out of your jurisdiction. That’s Socolow’s problem.”
“I’m going to be your problem, pal, if you don’t cooperate.”
“I’m willing. I just want to know what’s going on. That’s why I called you, and that’s why I told you about the rabbit.”
He gave a little snort that was supposed to be a laugh. “That’s all you want? Information is my stock in trade.”
“Okay, so deal with me. Who killed Crespo?”
“Who gives a shit?”
“I do. And so do you, or you wouldn’t have shown up at the scene.”
He shrugged. “Crespo murdered a Soviet national we’d had under surveillance. It relates to an ongoing investigation of an international criminal conspiracy.” Foley grudgingly peeled off a piece of Italian bread and took a dry bite. “That’s all I’m going to say, got it?”
“Crespo didn’t do it. He was set up to take the fall, and for a while, he went along. When he didn’t-”
“Not my jurisdiction, remember? Go tell Socolow.”
“But Crespo was innocent. Somebody else killed your Russian. Doesn’t that interest you?”
The waiter brought the antipasto and Foley’s coffee. I sliced a piece of buffalo mozzarella that was relaxing on a sliver of juicy red tomato.
Foley sipped at his coffee and said, “I’m more interested in what he was doing while he was alive.”
“Then you should be investigating Yagamata. He called the shots. You’ve got to know that.”
Foley looked at me over the rim of the cup. “Like I said, I’m through talking. You have something for me, give! If not, I’ve got other things to do.”
I was nibbling at the marinated mushrooms when it dawned on me. “I get it. You are investigating Yagamata. That’s what you can’t tell me, right?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of an ongoing investigation.”
“Then I can’t tell you about the bunny rabbit…”
“Suit yourself.”
“Or,” I said, dropping a line into the water, “the priceless artwork that should be in Russia but is showing up right here in Mia-muh town.”
They may train them not to show emotion, but the central nervous system doesn’t always listen. His eyes gave a little blinkety-blink behind the glasses. “What art?” he asked, a mite too delicately.
“A Faberge egg that’s supposed to be in Moscow, not in a mansion on Palm Island. A Matisse that’s in the Hermitage according to the guidebooks, but is hanging in an exilado ’s study in Little Havana. Not to mention the trinket I told you about, the gold rabbit once worn by an empress.”
He screwed up his face, adding some new lines. He drained his coffee. “Okay, Lassiter, let’s take them one at a time. Did Crespo give you the rabbit pendant?”
In a manner of speaking, he handed it to me, I thought. “Later. First, tell me what’s going on.”
He sat there thinking about it. Finally he said, “You know anything about art?”
Now where had I heard that before? “Sure, I’ve been taking a crash course.”
“Yeah, well, it better include some arithmetic.”
I gave him my big-dumb-guy look. It isn’t hard to do.
“Dollars, Lassiter. Very major dollars. At Christie’s in New York not long ago, a Japanese industrialist named Ryoei Saito paid eighty-two million dollars for Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Cachet. A few days later, at Sotheby’s, he bought Renoir’s At the Moulin de la Galette for seventy-eight million. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. Vinnie and Pierre must really be pissed.”
“Two paintings, Lassiter. A hundred sixty million dollars! And legitimate sales are just the tip of the iceberg. You know anything about the international trade in stolen art?”
“Only what I read in the papers. There was a story about a guy on a tour in a Paris museum who cut a Renoir out of the frame, rolled it up, and walked out. Then, there was that soldier from Texas who picked up the German stuff during the Second World War.”
“Child’s play. I’m talking about the organized theft and distribution of two billion dollars a year in art and antiquities.”
“Billion with a ‘b’?”
“Everything from a Roman sarcophagus that was on loan to the Brooklyn Museum, to the Decadrachm Hoard, two thousand Greek coins that date from 500 B.C. Plus classical paintings by the masters.”
“Who would buy that kind of stuff? It doesn’t sound as marketable as a stolen CD player or a set of steel- belted radials.”
He looked at me as if I had cut a few too many classes. I had.
Foley said, “The museums buy stolen art all the time. Sometimes, they know. Sometimes, they close their eyes. Once in a while, they even give stuff back. The Getty did it recently with a sarcophagus of Hercules. The San Antonio Museum was loaned a marble statue of the goddess Demeter that was smuggled from Istanbul to Munich, which is the headquarters of the stolen art trade. Private collectors like Yagamata don’t care where they get the stuff, as long as it ends up in their house.”
“I still don’t understand the CIA’s involvement,” I said. “Why isn’t it the FBI, like with stolen securities?”
“When a foreign government asks for our help…” He let it hang there.
“You’re not talking about Roman antiquities here, are you? You mean the Russians.”
He managed to smile without breaking his face. “One of the ironies of the liberalization in the Eastern bloc is the increase in Western-style crime. Before, with travel restrictions, smuggling was virtually impossible. Now, Karl hides priceless paintings in his suitcase when he goes from East to West Berlin to visit his cousins. There are criminals with shopping lists from Western collectors. Do you know Table with a Goblet by Picasso?”
“No, but if you hum a few bars…”
“A couple of months ago, thieves broke into the National Gallery in Prague. The security there was laughable, simply no experience with sophisticated, organized crime. Anyway, the wiseguys made off with four Picassos, estimated value thirty million. In Czechoslovakia, there were over five hundred burglaries of churches in the first twelve months after the Communists fell. Chalices, paintings, candlesticks, Stradivariuses, everything that wasn’t nailed down. In East Germany, it’s just as bad. You’re probably not familiar with the sixteenth century statues of saints at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Prenzlau.”
“Not intimately.”
“Well, don’t go looking for them, because they’re gone. Same thing with the bronze nymph and seahorses
