I wasn’t sure where Charlie was going, but between his discussion of hungry apes and images of Cezanne’s fruit platters, I realized my stomach was growling. “I’m sure there’s a point to this, Charlie.”
“They are the forebears of our genus, Homo. They developed into man.”
Charlie withdrew a packet of cherry-flavored tobacco from a buttoned shirt pocket and tamped a wad into the bowl of his pipe. “We’ve come so far as a species,” he said. “We’ve built bridges and machines that fly out of the solar system. We compress a billion bits of information onto an infinitesimal wafer. We produce ageless works of beauty, such as you see before you, and yet…”
I was starting to catch on. “We still kill each other. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Charlie?”
My old friend didn’t say a word, so I must have gotten it right. I thought about Vladimir Smorodinsky and Francisco Crespo, two men descended-like all of us-from Charlie’s tree-dwelling apes. I thought of Francisco’s body lying face up, bound and bloodied, on the bed. I was the one to tell his mother, hold her as her knees gave out, sit with her as she cried, and listen all night as she remembered Francisco as a nino in Cuba, when the air was still sweet with future promise.
“Can you find who did this to my son?” she had begged me.
I told her the truth. I didn’t know, but I could try. I showed her the gold rabbit. She had never seen it before.
Now I thought of Smorodinsky, too. Somewhere, did he have a mother crying in the night? Or a brother. What was it Matsuo Yagamata had said? Something about Smorodinsky’s brother being well versed in Russian art. And Severo Soto knew something, too. He told me the two brothers ran Yagamata’s St. Petersburg operation.
Only he had used the old name, Leningrad. An operation that had to do with art. Then Soto proudly showed me a painting his daughter didn’t want to talk about.
Which is why we were in a library looking at pretty pictures.
Because you have to start somewhere.
“Do you think, Charlie, that your line of work has made you cynical?”
“Why? Because I have concluded that evolution of our species stopped somewhere short of true civilization?”
“That, for one thing.”
Charlie Riggs produced an old-fashioned wooden match maybe six inches long and flicked it with a brown thumbnail. The tip burst into a flame of red phosphorous, and Charlie lowered it into the bowl of his pipe, while drawing air through the stem. Nearby, the grad student raised her head and squinted at us from above the top of her carrel, a turtle peeking out of its shell.
“Really!” she whisper-shouted. “You’re not allowed-”
“The smoking ordinance doesn’t apply to him,” counseled the lawyer who lurks inside of me. “He’s grandfathered in.”
Charlie exhaled a cloud of sweet tobacco and said, “We kill, and like the apes, not only for food. We kill our own kind. We kill for greed and anger and lust. Five million years of evolution, and the beast is still within us.”
“C’mon, Charlie. Don’t be such a curmudgeon. Enjoy what we have. Life’s too short.”
He smiled and jabbed at me with the bowl of his pipe. “Hippocrates said it first,” he told me.
“Said what?”
“ Ars longa, vita brevis. Then Longfellow picked up the expression.” Charlie dropped his voice into a deep rhythmic chant:
“‘Art is long, and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.’”
I was just about to applaud when a shadow crossed the table.
“I’m going to report the both of you,” the grad student hissed at the county-approved decibel level. “Talking and smoking! Why don’t you go to a tavern?”
“Excellent idea,” I agreed.
She huffed off, clutching a book to her breasts, and Charlie puffed on, oblivious, still thinking about homicidal apes and the brevity of life, I supposed.
“Hey, Charlie. We can’t solve mankind’s problems. Let’s just figure out who murdered Francisco Crespo.”
The old wizard’s eyes cleared. “ Cui bono? Who stands to gain?”
“Somebody who couldn’t let him reveal who ran that forklift through Smorodinsky, and why.”
“And what is there that links Crespo and Smorodinsky?”
I walked through it. “Both men worked for Yagamata, a guy who likes Russia and collects priceless art. Crespo attacked Smorodinsky, but somebody else finished him off. Somebody killed Crespo using a fairly ridiculous Russian method of silencing the gunshot. A lady P.I. with black hair and molten eyes offers her help and her body without the usual preliminaries…”
Charlie raised his bushy eyebrows. “ Mores,” he sighed, shaking his head.
I’m not the kind of guy to kiss and tell, but in retrospect the loving of Lourdes seemed more business than pleasure. “The P.I.’s father is Severo Soto, who also employed Crespo and happens to be a Russia-hater. So Crespo is linked to both Yagamata and Soto.”
Charlie beamed. When a student passes his oral exams, the teacher is pleased. “What conclusions have you reached?”
“None yet. You’re the one who taught me not to jump too fast. The wise man keeps his trap shut, et cetera, et cetera.”
He nodded happily, and I kept thumbing through the book of French paintings when I stopped at two naked men on a lawn. The same green, the same muscular build with few facial characteristics. The men were rolling balls across the grass. “Charlie, there’s something about this one. It’s the same artist, I’m sure.”
“ A Game of Bowls by Henri Matisse,” he said. “Part of the French collection at the Hermitage.”
I scanned the next few pages. Some nudes, a red room, a blue tablecloth, a bouquet of bright flowers. All by Matisse. And then there it was. The man, oversize hands extended, reaching toward the naked woman who tried, futilely, to crawl away.
“ Satyr and Nymph,” Charlie Riggs said, studying the page.
“Russia and Cuba,” I told him.
C harlie ordered his hog snapper broiled and well done. I chose yellowtail sauteed with a mess of onions and green peppers. We were at Tugboat Willie’s on the Rickenbacker Causeway, halfway between the city and Key Biscayne. The fish was fresh, the beer cold, and a breeze riffled the palm trees as we sat on the front porch, the sun a forest fire setting in the west.
“We could tell Socolow,” I suggested weakly, hoping Charlie would veto the idea.
“Tell him what?”
“What we know from our research.”
“Which is what?”
I had drained my first beer and was working on the second. “The artwork, Charlie. Matsuo Yagamata shows off a gold choo-choo train inside an egg that’s supposed to be in a Moscow museum. It’s probably worth more than two million, based on the sale of the Pine Cone Egg for a million eight at Christie’s in Geneva a couple of years ago, and the train is funkier. Then there’s Severo Soto, one of our town’s most famed anticommunists. He keeps a priceless painting by Matisse in his study. Only problem, the painting is owned by the Russians and, last time anyone checked, it was in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Francisco Crespo, whose idea of jewelry is a Timex watch, dies holding a miniature gold rabbit, which you say was made by the same artist who made Yagamata’s egg-”
“Carl Faberge.”
“And was worn as a pendant by an empress…”
I reached for one of the books Charlie had checked out of the library. He had marked the page. There was a photo of a small gold bunny holding an egg made of flecked aventurine. It was an Easter gift to Empress Alexandra in 1913. I was convinced that Crespo was not the empress’s distant cousin to whom the bunny would have passed.
“So what does it all mean to you?” Charlie asked patiently.
“It’s confusing. All this Russia stuff. Two men dead. Famous art popping up all over. I don’t know. It doesn’t add up.”
Charlie sipped at a glass of wine. For the occasion, he had chosen something white, light, and French, believing, I supposed, that Matisse had joined us at the table. Between sips, he dug into his dried-out fish and asked, “Who’s in charge of the Crespo investigation?”