murder. I need to bring Kharchenko in. There are witnesses who got a look at his face. Put him in a lineup, and maybe I could get him indicted for murder. Especially if I can show a link between the two deaths.”
“Meaning what?”
“Motive. To know why Crespo was killed, I need to know why Smorodinsky was killed. You’ve got to tell me what Yagamata and the brothers Smorodinsky were up to.”
She kept her eyes on the island. “You really do not know, do you?”
“All I know is that my government is trying to stop the theft of art treasures from Russia. Something about our protecting the reformers from being embarrassed.”
She laughed. “Who told you that?”
“Robert Foley. He’s with the-”
“CIA. I did not think Mr. Foley had such a delicious sense of irony.”
“I don’t get it.”
I hadn’t finished my first one, but she topped off the glass with the potent drink and gave herself one, too. “There is something very sweet about you,” she said, softly. Before I could thank her, she added a footnote. “But something so naive, too. Our job is not to stop the thefts.”
“No?”
“Of course not, Mr. Lassiter. We are the thieves.”
I had put away two more glasses of the red stuff when Eva-Lisa told me she would cut the vaihtaa if I would chop the wood. She grabbed a machete and disappeared into the overgrowth at the side of the house, while I contented myself swinging a short-handled hatchet at some birch logs that had never hurt anybody. I luxuriated in the weight of the hatchet, the stretch in the muscles of my arm and back with each swing, the satisfying thwack of steel on wood. I chopped enough to keep the Haavikko clan toasty all winter, at least a Florida winter. A few moments later, Eva-Lisa walked out of a stand of pop ash trees. She was carrying a handful of leafy branches, maybe three feet long.
She came up to me, shook the leaves in my face, and smiled. “It is a shame the white birch tree doesn’t grow here. Its branches have just the right amount of give for the vaihtaa.”
I looked at her, not fully understanding.
“You’d be surprised how some gentle switching can heat you up.”
Actually, I didn’t think I would be surprised at all.
I carried the wood into the sauna. The interior was light pine, sparkling clean. An anteroom contained a shower, wooden pegs in the wall to hold our clothes, white fluffy towels, and benches I carved from ash trees. I found some old newspaper for kindling and a box of foot-long matches. The fire began slowly, the dry wood crackling with flames under a pile of gray volcanic rocks. Eva-Lisa filled a bucket with cool water and brought it into the sauna, closing the door tightly, letting the heat build, while we sat in the adjacent changing room. Another bucket contained bottles of Finnish beer, olut, on ice. A horse frolicked on the label. The beer was for later. Good, the coach always told us to replace our bodily fluids.
We sat on a bench studying each other. She started unbuttoning her blouse. “Do you believe the naked body is beautiful?”
“I have a suspicion yours is, but mine has railroad track scars across both knees, a crosshatch over my rotator cuff, and one toenail that’s permanently purple from turf toe.”
“In America, they believe we have sex in the sauna,” she said evenly.
“Oh?”
She had slipped out of the blouse and loosened the web belt on her khaki shorts. “But we don’t.”
“No?”
She let the shorts slide down her long legs, kicked them off in a graceful motion, and hung them on a wooden peg with her blouse. “No, it is far too hot. Besides, the sauna is a spiritual place. The heat will cleanse the body and the mind.” She unfastened her bra and tossed it aside, her creamy breasts tumbling free. She stepped out of her panties and smiled at me.
I could feel the warmth from the other side of the pine walls. At least, I think that’s where it came from. In a moment, my clothing was crumbled in a corner of the room. I was ready to partake of the heat. I wasn’t sure about my body, but just then, my mind needed a good cleansing.
W e were sitting on mats that covered the wooden benches inside the sauna. The fire glowed white hot. Eva-Lisa used a ladle to pour water on the rocks, sending waves of steam toward our faces. Each breath scorched the inside of my nose, each burst of steam seemed to melt my fingernails. But if she wouldn’t cry uncle, neither would I. A small window overlooked the bay. Outside, the orange flames of the bonfire glittered off the smooth surface of the black lake. The moon ducked behind silvery clouds.
“I don’t understand why the CIA would be in the business of stealing Russian art treasures,” I said, exhaling the words in gasping breaths. “And why are they doing business with a crook like Yagamata?”
She looked toward me, cheeks rosy, but vital signs apparently within normal limits. “Yagamata is a broker between your government and various Japanese and German millionaires who purchase the artwork.” She ran a hand through her sweat-streaked hair. “Originally, the plan was to eradicate the old hardline communists, to assure that the reformers have complete control. What was it Foley used to say? ‘To drive the coffin nail into the godless heart of communism.’”
“Sounds like J. Edgar Hoover. But that stuff’s out of date now.”
“It started a year or so before Yanayev and his friends attempted the putsch. The CIA never believed that perestroika would work. The old guard-the Party, the military, the KGB-would wait for near chaos, then overthrow Gorbachev and crack down. Operation Riptide was intended as a preemptive strike against the hard-liners so that the reformers could create a capitalistic state subservient to the U.S., Japan, and the European Community. Before it could happen, however, the eight little dwarfs tried their takeover.”
“So the CIA was right.”
“Sure,” she said, “except they never figured the coup would fail. In three days, those old Reds accomplished what the West couldn’t do in seventy years. They destroyed the Party, dissolved the Union, and freed the republics.”
“I still don’t see what stealing Russian pictures has to do with politics. To me, it just looks like a burglary.”
“You are missing the subtlety of it. The museums, the ministries of culture were appendages of the Party, which every Russian knew to be corrupt and self-serving. Long before Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, your CIA was trying to discredit the Communist Party. What do you think an aroused populace would have done when they learned that the Party elite and their appointed bureaucrats were on the payroll of the West?”
My look must have told her she had lost me, so she continued. “How do you think we get the icons, the Faberge eggs, the French paintings, the diamond-studded artifacts out of Russia?”
“Federal Express?”
She whacked the vaihtaa across my shoulders. The blood rose to the surface. If I kept sweating, I could box bantamweight by morning.
“Bribery, of course,” she said. “What the verkhushka didn’t know is that it was a gigantic sting operation. Some of the bribes got paid in cash, but the really large sums were deposited into numbered Swiss accounts. The accounts could be traced to government leaders, everybody from local officials in St. Petersburg and Kiev to bureaucrats in nearly every republic, to hard-liners who used to have lunch with Gorbachev. All the CIA operatives were wired. Vladimir and Nikolai, Kharchenko, even Yagamata. They videotaped money changing hands, just like your… Amway.”
“Abscam,” I said.
“It went so close to the top you wouldn’t believe it. Does the name Pugo mean anything to you?”
“A French car assembled in Yugoslavia?”
“Boris Pugo was Gorbachev’s Interior Minister.”
I remembered the stories. “Right, one of the clowns who took part in the coup. Didn’t he commit suicide?”
“Now do you understand the significance of this?”
I let out a whistle. “It ain’t borscht.”
“But do you understand?”
