Paul Levine - False Dawn

“ Where! ” Foley demanded.

Kharchenko was gagging, spitting up blood and yellow phlegm, but trying to talk, too. Foley leaned close, listening. Kharchenko’s lips moved. Foley smiled and patted the Russian affectionately on the top of the head. Then he stood, hitched up his formal black trousers, drew his right knee to his chest, then kicked Kharchenko flush on the temple, toppling him sideways. By the time the Russian hit the floor, a purple stain had appeared beneath the skin where his meningeal artery had ruptured. Quickly the stain spread under his ear and across his face.

The room was silent except for a faint pinging as Empress Alexandra’s pearls dropped, one by one, from Kharchenko’s bloody lips and rolled merrily across the gleaming marble floor.

The street was dark, the pavement potted with craters. Overhead, a jet whined on final approach to Miami International Airport. It was an area of warehouses, loading docks, freight-forwarding companies, and import-export firms servicing Latin America. In the middle of the night, the buildings were dark as tombs, locked and shuttered.

We looked for a warehouse painted army green with a sign that said simply, Inter-American Casket Company. Maybe the name was Kharchenko’s little joke. Was he burying communism here, or merely discouraging thieves? Foley drove the Plymouth with Yagamata in back and a dog-tired me riding shotgun. Without a shotgun. Foley kept swinging the car over the curb, shining his headlights on the darkened buildings. Finally, he spotted something, hit the brakes, and killed the lights.

Foley was out of the car first, running his hands over a corrugated metal door secured by a padlock. That was it. No guards, no alarm system. Just a padlock I wouldn’t trust to keep my Schwinn from being kidnapped at Bayfront Park.

Foley opened his trunk and dug out a flashlight and tire iron. He popped the padlock, and I pulled up on the handle. The door rumbled open, and a blast of cool air hit us. Pitch black. From somewhere inside, the whirr of a massive air-conditioning system.

Foley shone a flashlight on the wall, found a switch, and hit it. Overhead, bright lights blinked on, blinding me. I jumped when I heard the sound behind me, but it was only Foley closing the door.

Along one wall were wooden cartons of various sizes, sheets of Styrofoam packing material, rolls of twine and brown wrapping paper. Lettering in Spanish indicated the cartons contained Peruvian pottery. Some of the cartons were already filled, others open and empty. Waiting.

The rest of the warehouse was a jumble of colors and textures, gilt and glitter. It was filled from floor to thirty-foot ceiling with gold and silver, paintings and artifacts, statues and coins, icons and gems of all descriptions. The treasure spilled out of boxes and overflowed onto the floor, in cartons, on the walls, and on makeshift tables made of sawhorses and plywood. A czar’s ransom in riches.

“One of my favorites,” Yagamata said, pointing at a painting. “Cezanne’s Lady in Blue.” He stepped closer and spoke to it. “Why are you so sad, pretty lady? Don’t you want to return to the homeland?”

“How many trucks will it take?” Foley asked.

Yagamata ignored him. He was studying a painting of dusky-skinned women eating fruit by a lake. “ Sacred Spring. Gauguin offered it for sale in Paris, and no one would buy it, not for twenty francs. Foley, have you ever been to Tahiti, or is there too little mendacity there to interest you?” He chuckled and walked slowly along a table where paintings lay scattered like brilliant playing cards. “Perhaps this is more to your liking.” He gestured to an oil painting of dead, bloodied birds, surrounded by riding gear. “ Trophies of the Hunt by Hamilton. On the other hand, for my taste, there is nothing lovelier than a full-bodied nude.” He pointed again, this time to a dim, greenish painting of a woman toweling off a bare, ample hip. “ After the Bath, by Degas. Contrast that, for example, with Three Women by Picasso.”

Foley looked at the Picasso dispassionately. “I like my babes a little rounder,” he said. “I’ll take the Degas.”

Yes, you will, I thought.

Yagamata roamed across the warehouse, touching this and that, talking mostly to himself. “Look what the fools have done. They’ve mixed the French with the Russians. Malevich’s Flower Girl next to Matisse, and Goncharova’s Laundresses, about to be packed with a Chagall.” He clucked his disapproval and moved on. “Foley, do you know what Khrushchev said the first time he saw the avant-garde art of the modern Russian painters? That was thirty years ago, and there was the tiniest breeze of liberalization blowing through Moscow. At an exhibition in the Manezh, the czars’ old riding school, Khrushchev spat at the paintings. ‘Dog shit,’ he called them. ‘A donkey could do better with its tail.’ Ah, how long ago it seems. The dark ages. Do you know that Gorbachev was the Russians’ first leader since Lenin to have a university education? A lawyer by training.”

“I’ll bet Gorby never watched a chicken autopsied in a courtroom,” I said.

Yagamata looked puzzled. “Perhaps not, but he and Yeltsin carved up the bear, didn’t they?” His laugh seemed full of regret. “I shall miss my trips there. I could spend a month just touring the Hermitage and never grow tired.”

“Then you decided to bring it all here,” Foley said.

“Yes, I think I did, without quite knowing it.” Yagamata stopped in front of a small painting propped against a metal rack. A woman in a red-and-blue robe stared with adoration at a naked baby in her arms. “Da Vinci’s Madontia with Child, one of his early works. Do you sense that the perspective is off, the child far too large?”

Foley grunted. He seemed to be taking inventory. Yagamata moved on, and we followed him through the cavernous room. On the floor, jewelry filled a huge, dark pot. Emerald bracelets, diamond pins, gold cuff links and chains, pearl buttons, ruby brooches jumbled together. “What is more valuable,” Yagamata asked himself, “all these trinkets or Tamburlaine’s bronze cauldron which holds them?”

Yagamata stooped to study the writing on a box. “ Tauride Venus, Russia’s first classical statue. A gift from the Pope to Peter the Great. The Hermitage alone has twelve thousand sculptures and a million coins. Do you know I still get lost there? I never enter the buildings without a compass. Foley, even if we tried, none of us could live long enough to steal it all.”

Nearby were half a dozen other sculptures not yet boxed.

Yagamata ran his hand over the smooth white stone of one, a man and woman embracing. “Rodin’s Romeo and Juliet. Frankly, I prefer his Cupid and Psyche. Ah, there it is.”

He walked past the statues and picked up a solid gold dinner plate from a long table. The plate was on a stack with perhaps twenty others. Boxes of gleaming flatware sat under the table. “From the banquet hall at Petrodvorets, the White Dining Room. Gold dinnerware to serve four hundred.”

Stacked on a wooden platform was a variety of jewelry. Lockets of enamel and gold, a clock of different colored golds, a desk set of rock crystal. Small animals carved from agate, others shaped from nephrite and silver. Pendants and necklaces, rings, and pins, filling boxes three feet deep.

And then the eggs.

Inside a glass egg, a rider on a horse. Yagamata saw my expression. “Faberge’s Alexander the Third Equestrian Egg,” he said. “Nice, but compare it to the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg made the next year to celebrate Nicholas’s accession. Here’s the Madonna-Lily Egg and the Winter Egg, which everyone thought was lost during the Revolution. Good Lord, Foley, have you ever seen such beauty?”