“What purposes?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. But he didn’t have to. I was catching on. “You’re doing the same thing again, aren’t you?”
Still, he was silent.
“Do the new bureaucrats in the republics know you’re setting them up, too? Do they know you’re wired when they make the deals?”
“What we do is in the American national interest. We have bought a certain amount of loyalty there, and we take precautions to assure that our friends stay that way.”
The curtain went up, and on the stage, some European peasants in a colorful village were dancing up a storm. “You’ve bought the whole country,” I said, “just like you used to do in Latin America and Africa and Asia and anyplace else that was for sale. You’ve turned the Soviet Union into just another banana republic.”
From behind us, a loud “Shuush!” I turned around and smiled at a large woman who was slicing a salami and wagging her finger at me.
On the stage, a guy in a brown vest and tights seemed to have a thing for a pretty village woman in a blue dress. “So what went wrong?” I whispered.
“Yagamata got greedy.”
“Again! Why were you still using him?”
“All was forgiven. As it turned out, the coup attempt was the best thing that could have happened for us. So Yagamata was sort of an inadvertent hero, and we needed him as the middleman for the Japanese buyers. But the bastard wasn’t satisfied with his broker’s commission, and with the country in chaos, he smelled an opportunity. He started skimming the artwork, making his own deals with the Russians for unauthorized pieces, selling to collectors who are security risks.”
“But you’re helping him! I heard you back in Yagamata’s warehouse.”
Foley dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I had to find out what he was up to if I was going to stop him. Now that the operation’s been canceled, my job is to terminate the transfers by any means possible and get the stuff back to Russia before any more damage is done.”
I was trying to watch the ballet and listen to Foley at the same time. After a while, I figured that the guy in the brown vest was really a nobleman traveling incognito. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell the village gal that he was engaged to a babe dressed in scarlet with a feather in her hat. The fiancee made quite an entrance, what with the blaring of horns and the approach of the hunters. At the same time, the nobleman had some competition from a local guy, a dude in Philadelphia Eagles green. While they were debating who gets the girl by doing some agility drills and pointing their lingers gracefully at each other, Foley leaned close. “Do you have any idea how much money is involved?”
“I’ve heard a billion dollars tossed around.”
He snickered under his breath. “A couple years ago, some amateurs walked into the Gardner Museum in Boston and used knives to slash a bunch of paintings out of their frames. They left behind Titian’s Rape of Europa and the best works of the Italian Renaissance. But they got Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee and some other first-rate work. It was a lousy thirty-minute heist. It was worth two hundred million.”
I let out a short whistle, and behind me, the large woman smacked my head with her forearm, or was it her salami?
“Peanuts, Lassiter. The Hermitage has hundreds of rooms, each more valuable than the entire Gardner collection. Add to that all the other museums in all the republics and figure what I’m talking about. Even with a discount if they glut the market, figure ten billion, twenty, nobody knows.”
On the stage, the scam was up. The brown-vested nobleman had left his fingerprints-actually his coat-of- arms-on a royal sword. The village girl didn’t care for the deception or the nobleman’s fiancee, so she committed hara-kiri with the sword. It made me think of Yagamata.
“What’s Yagamata want?” I asked Foley.
“Everything! He’s stripping the damn country bare. He makes Robert Vesco look like a shoplifter at K mart.”
The curtain fell, and the lights were coming up. “Halftime,” I said. “Let’s get a hot dog and a beer.”
W e had arrived at the theater early. I had stationed myself at an angle to the main entrance with Foley standing in front of me, his back to the door. It was supposed to look as if we were in deep conversation. In reality, I had a clear view over his shoulder of everyone entering the theater, while I was barely noticeable. I stood there in my striped pants and shiny black shoes, my strangling collar, my eyes darting back and forth looking for the stocky Russian.
We stood there, talking about the Dolphins, the Heat, and the new baseball team, the Marlins. Foley told me it was hard to keep up with sports, as he’d been stationed in Panama, Grenada, Managua, Guantanamo, and more recently Helsinki in preparation for Operation Riptide. I looked at him closely, the creased face, the stony eyes behind the rimless glasses. About forty-seven, forty-eight maybe. “I figure you were in the military during Vietnam,” I said.
“You can call me Major Foley, except Foley isn’t the name, of course. But you’re right. Army intelligence. I had a couple dozen VC working for me out in the bush. Troop movements, enemy strength, that sort of thing. Know what my cover was?”
“Stand-up comedian?”
“World Health Organization gynecologist. Really. I wanted to be a dentist, but we didn’t have the tools. Someone in the Saigon station came up with a whole set of OB-GYN tools, or at least enough for me to keep in the pocket of my smock. You know, you could take somebody’s eye out with the speculum.”
“Don’t tell me you delivered babies.”
“Nah. I’d do a cursory exam, nothing I hadn’t seen before, then let the nurse figure the rest out. When we moved the operation to Pleiku, I ran a whorehouse. Built a secure room for interrogations and made a profit for the Company.”
As I listened, my eyes scanned the sidewalk. I watched as the locals queued up, tickets in hand. I was looking for a brush-cut, husky Russian partial to brown suits. I didn’t see him. The patrons were turned out in what Granny Lassiter would call their Sunday best. On opening night, many of the locals wore their formal duds. Others, the trendy Miami Beach crowd, favored black leather, or black capes, or black silk. It didn’t seem to matter as long as the color was black. The Russians, many of whom worked in the new restaurants and clubs, were freshly scrubbed but not as flashy. I studied the crowd pushing toward the theater. No Kharchenko.
“Was it true what you said back at Nikki’s place?” Foley asked, as we kept up the patter.
“About what?”
“Your father was killed when you were a kid.”
“Yeah. I was raised by my Granny. She taught me how to fish, drink, and curse. Went up north on a football scholarship, saw mountains and snow the first time in central Pennsylvania, then made the Dolphins as a free agent. Hung on as a second-stringer and special teams player for a few years before I got into night law school.”
“My father was killed in Korea,” Foley said, his voice trailing off. “All I ever wanted to do was serve my country. Never thought I’d be breaking and entering museums. There he was fighting the communists, and here I am buying them off. At least they used to be communists. It’s getting confusing out there.” He moved closer to me. “You know what they do when you graduate from spy school?”
“Spy school?”
“Well, Foreign Studies School.”
“Give you a cyanide pill to put in the heel of your shoe,” I guessed.
“They hand you a diploma, just like getting your B.S. in phys ed, or whatever you studied…”
“Theater.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Except when you walk off the stage, you give it back. An agent takes all the diplomas, puts them in a trash can, and they burn them all. We are anonymous workers for democracy and our way of life, Lassiter. We’re the goddamned last best hope for mankind.”
I would sleep better knowing that.
I ntermission,” Foley told me, as the lights came up. “Not halftime. A theater major should know that.”
I knew. We continued our reconnaissance starting at the snack bar at the rear of the mezzanine. An
