Instead of inviting me in, she guided me around back on a path of pink terrazzo. We were nicely shaded by a loggia of Roman arches, Spanish tile, and wood-beamed ceiling. We emerged in a courtyard with a tinkling fountain, molded columns with pockmarked stucco, and a rose garden surrounded by jasmine hedges.
A small, wiry man sat in a turquoise wrought-iron chair at a matching table covered with papers, clipboards, and ledgers. He wore a white guayabera and had thick black hair swept straight back and a bushy black mustache. He held a fountain pen in his left hand. There wasn’t another hand. The right arm ended in a stump just inside the guayabera sleeve. The left arm was heavily veined with a ragged scar just below the elbow. An unlit cigar was clamped into his teeth. He was weathered around the eyes, his face comfortably creased and lived in.
“Papi, this is Mr. Lassiter,” Lourdes said.
The man nodded but didn’t stand up. He placed the pen carefully into a white marble holder, and extended his left hand. I shook it awkwardly with my right. “Mr. Soto, I’ve heard a lot about you.” It was true. A folk hero to the Cuban refugees, Severo Soto’s fame had spread through the Anglo community as well.
Soto released my hand, nodded, and removed the cigar. “I understand Francisco Crespo has finally killed someone. Not that it surprises me.”
So much for a character witness.
“He’s accused of murder,” I said, taking a seat opposite him. “Lourdes tells me he once worked for Soto Shipping Company.”
The dark eyes locked on mine. “Some years ago, in the freight-forwarding division. It is all in there.”
The voice was remarkably free of an accent. He gestured toward a manila folder. I riffled through some meaningless payroll records and company medical exams. Lourdes Soto had teased me with the concept of inside information. In the week since we first met, she had given me three written reports that didn’t tell me anything new. If she had something useful, she was keeping it to herself. At the same time, she plied me with questions about my progress and strategy. I told her everything I knew, which was nothing, other than my suspicion that Crespo wasn’t nearly as guilty as he claimed to be.
“Could Crespo have been involved in any anticommunist groups?” I asked.
“Crespo is a peasant,” Severo Soto said, “too young to remember Cuba antes de Fidel.”
“Did he have any political leanings?”
“Of course, he was against the comunista s. But was he active? Not that I am aware.”
Lourdes placed a hand on her father’s forearm. “The man he killed-”
“-Allegedly killed,” I reminded them. We all know about the presumption of innocence; we just don’t believe it.
“-was Vladimir Smorodinsky.”
Soto raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word.
“You knew him,” I said.
“A Russian who worked for Yagamata. We have met.”
“Yagamata apparently got him an exit visa.”
Soto nodded. “Yagamata could do that. He has made much money with the Russians. He would do business with the devil if the price was right.”
“He did business with you,” I said evenly.
Soto took a moment to consider whether I had intended el insulto, or whether I was just clumsy at conversation. His eyes were placid. After what he had endured, he had all the time in the world. “ Lo hecho, hecho esta. What’s done is done. I did not realize that the man’s only principles were in his wallet. Claro, I did business with him. We had, Lourdes, what was it, not a partnership, an adventure?”
“Joint venture,” she helped out.
“We shipped cargo for him from Helsinki to Miami. It was supposed to be Finnish wood products, textiles, furniture.”
“But it turned out to be smuggled Russian artifacts,” I chimed in.
Soto appraised me. Who was it who said I wasn’t as dumb as I looked?
“I do not make a habit of speaking of these things to strangers.” Severo Soto looked toward his daughter.
“It’s all right, Papi. My loyalty is to Mr. Lassiter.”
That was news to me, but I nodded my approval.
“I have spent years building the reputation of my firm,” Soto said. “My honor as a businessman is paramount. My relationship with customs, all my import licenses were jeopardized by Yagamata.”
“How?”
“It took me a while to understand just what he was doing. He began his dealings while there was a Soviet Union, prospered through Gorbachev’s perestroika, and now continues with the Commonwealth under Yeltsin. Principles don’t matter. Not when the almighty dollar is your god. With a wrecked economy and political turmoil, his business thrives. Chaos and conflict are honey and wine to Yagamata.”
I waited for him to continue. Sometimes silence is the best question. Overhead, a meadowlark was singing its spring song. I hoped Severo Soto would keep talking.
“He had an entire network inside Russia,” Soto said finally.
“Museum curators, bureaucrats, customs officials, members of various ministries and the Supreme Soviet. Hardliners, reformers, it didn’t seem to matter. For hard currency, his contacts would have dismantled the Kremlin and sold it by the brick.”
“And Smorodinsky?”
“His aprendiz de todo.”
“Jack of all trades,” Lourdes translated.
“Yagamata didn’t tell you Smorodinsky was just a laborer, did he?” Soto asked me.
“No. He said the Russian was a man of culture and a patriot.”
Soto allowed himself a humorless laugh. “Smorodinsky and his brother ran Yagamata’s Leningrad operation. Artifacts would be gathered from all over the Soviet Union and stored in safe houses they arranged. Then somehow-and this was their genius-they managed to ship the goods in small boats from Leningrad across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki. It is not, I assure you, like sailing from Miami to Bimini. How they were able to bribe enough officials to avoid capture by the police, the military, and the KGB is something that always baffled me. Even with Yagamata’s contacts, it was still an impressive feat.”
A wooden door creaked open and a short, swarthy woman in a colorful print dress appeared, carrying a tray that held a silver pot and three espresso glasses.
“Then why bring him here? What good could a Russian do at this end of the operation?”
Soto shrugged. “That is for you and my daughter to determine, though I don’t know what it has to do with your client killing… allegedly killing the man.”
“It might help explain why Yagamata seems willing to have an innocent man convicted of the murder,” I said.
The woman left her tray, and Lourdes poured the hot, syrupy drink for each of us.
“About that, I have no idea,” Soto said.
While the sugar and caffeine were jump-starting my dead batteries, Severo Soto told me about his business and his life. It was a story I already knew. When they were both students, Soto and Fidel Castro were friends with similar ideals. Together, they plotted the doomed July 26, 1953, attack on eastern Cuba’s Moncada Barracks. Soto spent two years in prison, but it did not shake his will. Again he joined Castro and they stood side by side during the revolution, until he became disenchanted with Castro’s brand of socialism. “I did not plan for my country to be the bastard child of the Russians,” he told me.
He commandeered a Cuban patrol vessel and fled to Key West and then to Miami, where he became a major in Brigade 2506 and returned to Cuba, landing on the beach at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The betrayal and cowardice of the United States had stranded him and his men without air support. His friends died around him, bleeding into the sand. He was wounded, captured, imprisoned, and tortured by Castro’s matones. “I did not see the sun for three years,” he said. “The only sound was a high-frequency wail broadcast into my cell twenty-four hours a day at a volume that broke both my eardrums. They gave me comunista propaganda, which I tore up and ate and gave back to them as mierda.”