Murder on Embassy Row (16 page)

Abdu said, “Not true, Mr. Kaldar. When the Americans prohibited us from selling products here, we simply sold them to you. There was a method to our madness. We knew that if Americans could only eat the Russian product they would quickly lose their taste for caviar. What would we do when the boycott was lifted? There would be no market left.”

Everyone laughed. Morizio asked of no one in particular, “Is that true, that Iranian caviar is sold to the Soviet Union and then repackaged for the U. S.?”

“It must be true,” said Kaldar. “We have been told by a journalist.”

Morizio asked Kaldar, “Do the Soviet Union and Iran process caviar the same way?”

“No, the methods may be the same but we Russians have a definite advantage when it comes to the art of applying the salt.”

“What about the art of adding borax?” Morizio asked.

Nordkild answered that question. “It shouldn’t matter to an American, Captain. You won’t allow me to import caviar containing borax because of a ridiculous law enacted years ago.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Morizio said. “Does it taste that much different?”

“Indeed it does,” Kaldar said.

Nordkild said, “There are caviar lovers the world over who would give their right hand to have a supply of caviar with borax rather than salt…” He looked at Sami Abdu and added, “No offense, my Iranian friend.”

“The Europeans have all they want,” Kaldar said, “because there is no such law anywhere but here in America.”

Morizio put his hands in his pocket and shrugged.
“It’d probably taste the same to me,” he said. “I’m not what you’d call a connoisseur.”

Abdu asked, “Did you enjoy it today?”

“What do you mean?” Morizio said.

“Please, Sami…”

Abdu cut Nordkild off. “The pressed sevruga you had has been preserved with borax, not salt.”

“No kidding.” Morizio looked at the table, then said to Nordkild, “If it’s illegal in this country, what’s it doing here?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Nordkild said, referring to Abdu.

Abdu laughed and said, “We’re definitely breaking the law, Captain, although, as you know, the diplomatic pouch is beyond all law.”

Morizio held up his hands. “Hey, I don’t care. This isn’t a borax bust. What do you do, bring it in a pouch?”

Elgin Harris cleared his throat and excused himself. So did Nordkild. Morizio said, “It did taste different. I liked it. Maybe I ought to get a diplomatic pouch of my own.”

“Excellent idea, Captain,” Kaldar said.

Morizio looked around the room and saw other familiar faces from the diplomatic corps, including personnel from the State Department. One of them, Jeb Carter, came up to Morizio, shook hands, and said, “I didn’t know you were a gourmet, Captain.”

“I’m becoming one.”

Carter, who was tall and handsome in an Ivy League way, warmly greeted Harris and Kaldar. They talked about the food at the luncheon, particularly the relative merits of beluga, sevruga, and osetra caviar. It seemed to Morizio that Carter really didn’t care and only used such occasions to keep in touch with diplomats around
the city. Kaldar seemed genuinely interested in caviar and knew a great deal about its history. Morizio mentioned he’d tasted American caviar at Berge Nordkild’s office, and a spirited discussion developed over whether it would ever rival the Caspian Sea’s product.

“The best caviar will always come from the Caspian,” Abdu said.

“Not if the balance of caviar power shifts,” said Carter. “Right now it’s a standoff, isn’t it, Mr. Kaldar?”

Morizio said, “You make it sound like the nuclear arms race.”

“It is similar,” said Kaldar.

Carter jumped in with, “You see, Captain, technology prevails even with something like caviar. The Russians went ahead and developed a synthetic caviar. We had no choice but to develop our own technological capability.”

“You’re joking,” said Morizio.

“Not at all, Captain,” Kaldar said. “It is true. A Soviet professor, Grigory Slonimsky, developed the technique. He uses proteins, drops them in vegetable oil and the proteins break up into little fish eggs that look and taste like caviar once dye and flavorings are added.”

“Fascinating,” Morizio said. He said to Carter, “You say we’ve developed it, too.”

“That’s right, over at Romanoff, but they swear they’ll only use it as a second-strike against the Russians.”

“A balance of power,” Kaldar said.

“Maybe we should stop producing nuclear weapons and fight it out on the caviar battlefield,” said Morizio.

“An excellent suggestion, Captain.”

“It really looks like the real thing?” Morizio asked.

“Yes, it does,” Sami Abdu said. “I have seen and tasted it. It’s quite good, but its appearance bothers me.
It rolls out of machines like tiny ball bearings, one egg identical to the next.”

Morizio asked Jeb Carter whether he’d seen and tasted it. He shook his head.

Kaldar said, “I have tasted it. Everyone in the caviar community has had that opportunity at one time or another.”

Morizio said, “You learn something new every day. Artificial caviar. Next they’ll be doing it with corn flakes.”

“Corn flakes?”

“My favorite breakfast. I should get back.”

“Me, too,” said Boris Kaldar. “Good to see you again, Captain. Don’t be such a stranger. Stop in for tea or vodka.”

“I will.”

Morizio had wanted to discuss Hafez with Sami Abdu but the Iranian begged off, claiming to be late to a meeting. “But call me,” he told Morizio, handing him his card.

Morizio sought out Nordkild on his way out. “Thanks for having me,” he told the fat caterer. “I enjoyed it, learned a lot.”

“My pleasure, Captain. Ignore what was said about the borax. It was only a single tin, nothing.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Morizio. “If it were cocaine, we might have a problem, but what’s a little borax between friends?”

“Exactly. Good day.”

The full impact of having been electronically bugged didn’t settle in on Morizio until that night. It had been a busy day, too busy to dwell upon it, and he was exhausted from so little sleep the night before. His cold was worse; he couldn’t breathe and his throat felt like sandpaper when he swallowed. On top of everything else, his mother called from Boston to say she’d slipped while grocery shopping and had broken her right wrist. She seemed unconcerned, and dismissed his offer to fly up to see her. “It’ll heal,” she told him. “At least it wasn’t the whole arm.”

“I just want to sleep,” he told Lake. They were at her apartment. She’d cooked bacon, put it on toast, and poured Welsh rarebit over it. That was dinner, along with raw stringbeans and wine. Now, they sat together in bed. He’d brought
The Thirties
with him and was reading Wilson’s accounts of his exploits in New York in the thirties with S. J. Perelman, Philip Wylie, and Dashiell Hammett when his mind was suddenly filled with visions of someone sitting in a car and smirking as
he listened to Connie and him making love. He slammed the book on the bed and swore.

“I know,” Connie said, lowering a newspaper she’d been reading and looking at him. “It’s come home to me, too. I was just thinking about us here, in bed, making love and…”

That often happened with them, thinking the same things at the same time.

“Maybe it wasn’t MPD,” Morizio said. “Maybe it was the State Department, or the CIA. Maybe the FBI wants something, or Thorpe, or Gibronski.”

“We don’t know, Sal, and maybe we never will unless what they heard is used in some way.”

Morizio pulled his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. “Whoever did it knows we know, and they’ve lost their line to us. Does that mean they try to establish another conduit into what we’re doing, or do they let it drop? Did they get what they wanted, or did we foul things up for them too soon?”

She sighed. “I feel like a character out of George Orwell, big brother and all that. I’m afraid to say anything, do anything.”

“We just can’t let it slide, Connie. I want to, want to forget it ever happened, but that’s impossible. I dread the next time I’m with Trottier. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to hold back, not accuse him, blow my stack, and end up suspended.”

“That wouldn’t accomplish anything.” She deliberately changed the subject by saying, “You said you had some interesting stories from the tasting this afternoon.”

Morizio had mentioned only his conversation with Sami Abdu, and that he wanted to follow up on the Iranian journalist’s knowledge of the Hafez family. Now, he told her of the exchange between Abdu, Kaldar, and Nordkild about borax being in the pressed sevruga.
“Nordkild went pale,” he said, laughing, “figured he’d end up arrested for importing illegal substances. I loved it.”

“But you said it was brought in in a diplomatic pouch.”

“Yeah, but I have the feeling that most of it ends up with Nordkild for resale. Nice little part-time business for a diplomat, smuggle in a couple of tins of good caviar with borax, sell it to Nordkild, and let him jack up the price to people who prefer it to salt.”

Lake thought for a moment, then said, “Remember a few years back when that diplomat… he was from some Asian country, can’t remember… they nailed him with three or four hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs in his pouch. They found a few tins of caviar, too. Remember? It was a joke around the department.”

“Vaguely. Do you think James was smuggling and got killed over it?”

“We’ve gone over this before. He certainly got rich after he left Iran, and that hostage’s claim that he’d struck some sort of a deal with the Ayatollah might have some credence. What did we decide it could be, drugs, oil, caviar? Nobody gets murdered over a tin of caviar.”

“A thousand tins? Ten thousand?” Morizio said. “A tin retails for around two hundred bucks. Smuggle in ten thousand tins, sell it at a hundred a tin and you’ve got a million dollars. Not bad.”

“But why would anyone buy from such a source?”

“We slapped the lid on all Iranian products after the hostage take-over, remember?”

“Right, but James didn’t need money. His wife’s loaded.”

“And his pride was empty. That’s what I got from your talks with Mrs. James and her mother.”

“I don’t know, Sal. What about Paul?”

“He knew. What else can I assume?”

“And they’d brutally murder him to preserve a caviar business? Doesn’t play for me.”

“Try drugs.”

“Try oil.”

“Nothing illegal about selling oil.”

“Depends on how you do it. There’s nothing illegal about selling TV sets unless you get them off the back of a truck.”

“We should find out more about James’s oil company.”

“Want me to?”

“You’re out of it.”

“Like you say, Sal, it’s tough giving orders to somebody you sleep with.”

He smiled, punched his pillow into the configuration he wanted, and snuggled his head into it, saying from that position, “I didn’t tell you about how the tasting ended up. Did you ever hear of synthetic caviar?”

“No.”

“You have now.” He told her about it. “There’s a synthetic everything, all plastic. What a world. Kiss me good night, I’m fading fast.”

She leaned over and kissed his ear. He purred. “Synthetic, Sal? Little ball bearings popping out of a machine?”

“That’s right.”

“James died in a bowl of caviar.”

“So?”

“No ricin found in it, just in his body. What if the poison were inside some synthetic eggs, all wrapped up nice and tight until somebody takes the fateful bite? Crunch! Dead!”

He opened his eyes and sat up. “And what’s left doesn’t read in lab tests because it’s inside. It’s possible.”

“Sure it is.”

“It’s dumb.”

“No, it’s not. It is possible, Sal, really possible. At least we can check it.” She got out of bed and pulled a phone from her desk to bedside.

“Who are you calling?” he asked.

“Forensics. Maybe Jill Dougherty’s on late.”

She was. Lake said to her, “Jill, I’m asking a big favor, and you can say no if you want, only if you do I’ll never speak to you again.”

“With some creeps around here that’d be a promise instead of a threat. What do you want?”

“I want to come down and run some of that caviar Ambassador James was eating when he died through another test.”

“Now?”

“Right now. I can be there in a half hour. Slow tonight?”

“Got a full house, but they won’t disturb us.”

Lake smiled and shook her head. “Can we do it? It will have to be strictly off the record, unofficial.”

“Will you and your Italian friend support me for the rest of my life if I’m out on the street because of it?”

“Count on it.”

“Sure, come on down, but if we suddenly get busy, keep walking.”

“See ya.”

Morizio asked to go with her but Connie stood firm against it, saying, “One, there’s no sense in having us show up together. Two, you have a rotten cold. And three, you’ll scare Jill off. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Go to sleep.”

Morizio slept fitfully until she returned four hours
later. She woke him up and said excitedly, “Sal, it checked out. There was artificial caviar in with the real thing.”

He wiped sleep from his eyes and sat up. “You’re sure?”

“Positive. We ran water over it, really turned on the pressure. The real eggs crushed but the artificial didn’t. They looked exactly the same as the real thing, Sal, incredible.”

“How many?”

“A dozen. There must have been more but he ate them.”

“Ricin?”

“Yes. The artificial eggs are hollow and filled with it. Jill ran a preliminary patch test on it. It’s ricin all right, no question about it.”

Morizio got up and put on his robe. “That’s how he got it, huh?”

“Evidently.”

“Who did it?”

“Anyone with access to the caviar he ate.”

“Comes back to Hafez, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe, but why would he have a supply of artificial caviar filled with ricin?”

“Or anybody, for that matter. It’s supposed to be a deep, dark secret but they agreed at lunch that anybody who spends time around caviar has seen and tasted the phony stuff. The Iranian, Abdu, said he’d tried it.”