1997: MARTIN ODUM PLAYS INNOCENT
LEANING OVER THE DEAD DOG, MARTIN SLIT OPEN ITS STOMACH with a safety razor, then reached in with the gloved hand to cut out the organs and create a stomach cavity. He motioned to one of the fedayeen students, who removed the frame from the hive and gingerly set it down on the road next to the dead dog. “Honey is very stable,” Martin said with a laugh. “Tell him it won’t blow up in his face until it’s detonated.” Using a spatula, he carefully scraped the beeswax from the honeycombs until he had accumulated a quantity the size of a tennis ball, then wired it to the tiny homemade plastic radio receiver and slipped the package into the stomach cavity. Using a thick needle and a length of butcher cord, he sewed up the opening. Rising to his feet, he stepped back to survey his handiwork.
“Any questions?” he demanded.
One of the fedayeen said something in Arabic and the Russian with the heavy gold ring on his pinky translated it into English. “He asks from how far away can we set off the charge?”
“Depends on what equipment you’re using,” Martin said. “A cordless phone or a Walkman will work up to a half a mile away. One of those automatic pagers that doctors wear on their belts can set off a charge five, six miles away. A VHF scanner or cellular mobile phone is effective for ten or twelve miles as long as the weather is good and there is no frequency jamming.”
Martin, trailed by his three students and the translator, set off up the slope and went to ground behind the rusty wreck of a U.N. jeep. They didn’t have long to wait. The Isra’ili patrol, led by a soldier scanning the dirt road with a magnetic mine detector, appeared around the bend. The soldier searching for mines passed his metal detector over the dog and, getting no reading, continued on. The officer behind him came abreast of the dog. Something must have caught his eye—the crude stitches on the stomach, probably—because he crouched next to the animal to have a closer look. Martin nodded at the fedayeen holding the automatic pager that had been rigged to transmit a signal to the plastic receiver inside the dog’s stomach. Below, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it cleared, the Isra’ili officer was still crouching next to the dog but his head could be seen rolling slowly toward the shoulder of the road.
“Comes as news to me that honey can explode,” the Russian whispered, his thick Slavic accent surfacing indolently from the depths of his throat.
The sulfurous stench of the burnt beeswax reached Martin’s nostrils and he had trouble breathing. Gasping for air, he bolted upright in bed and blotted the cold sweat from his brow with a corner of the sheet. His heart was beating furiously; a migraine was pressing against the back of his eyeballs. For a terrible moment he didn’t know who he was or where he was. He solved the second problem first when he heard the hacking cough of the old man two rooms down the corridor of the boarding house and knew where he wasn’t: southern Lebanon. When he figured out which legend he was inhabiting, his breathing gradually returned to normal.
When his plane landed at Heathrow, four days before, Martin had breezed through passport control without a hitch. “Here on business or pleasure, is it?” the woman custom’s agent in the booth had asked. “With any luck, pleasure, in the form of licensed tabernacles and museums, and in that order,” he’d answered. The woman had flashed a jaded smile as she stamped him into the country. “If it’s pubs you’re looking for, you have come to the right corner of the world. Enjoy your stay in England.”
Collecting his valise from the baggage carousel, Martin had started following the signs marked “Underground” when a portly young man with a peaches-and-cream complexion had materialized in front of him. “Mr. Odum, is it?” he’d asked.
“How come you know my name?”
The young man, his body wrapped in a belted trench coat a size too large for him, had ignored Martin’s question. “Could I trouble you to come with me, sir,” he had said.
“Do I have a choice?”
“I’m afraid you don’t.”
“What are you, five or six?”
“MI5, thank you, kindly. Six thinks you’re radioactive, wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”
Martin could see three other men in trench coats closing in on him as he limped behind the young man across the arrival hall and up a flight of steps to a balcony overlooking the hall. Peaches-and-cream stopped before an opaque glass door with the word “Perishables” stencilled on it. He rapped on the glass twice with his knuckles, opened the door and politely stepped aside. Inside, a middle-aged woman dressed in a man’s pinstriped suit and tie was busy calling up file folders on a computer terminal. Without looking up, she inclined her head toward an inner door with the words “Supervisor, Perishables” stencilled on the glass. In the inner office, Martin discovered a black man with a shaven head studying the baggage carousels below through the slats of a partly closed venetian blind. The black man swiveled around in his seat and sank back into it. “I’ll admit it, you don’t look like your average serial killer to me,” he said in a soft purr.
“What does an average serial killer look like?”
“Glassy stare as he avoids your eye, bitten finger nails, mouth drooping open, saliva drooling down the stubble of his chin. Bela Lugosi sort of role.”
“Are you a cop or a movie critic?”
Snickering at Martin’s question, the Supervisor, Perishables began reading from a yellowing index card. “Last trace we had on you, you were a bloke with two incarnations. In the first, you were Pippen, Dante, an Irishman who declined to help us with our inquiries after the IRA blew open a bus in central London. In the second, you were Dittmann, Lincoln, an American arms merchant peddling his wares to the highest bidder in the Triple Border area of Latin America.”
Martin said, “Case of mistaken identity. You’re confusing me with the antiheroes of B films.”
“Don’t think we are,” the Supervisor, Perishables allowed. He arched his brows and took a long look at Martin, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “If we had chairs, I’d invite you to rest your arse on one of them. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“Been sitting from Tel Aviv to here,” Martin said. “Glad to stretch my legs.”
“Yes, well, in Israel you were passing yourself off as Martin Odum, a ruck of a private detective working out of the New York borough of”—he checked his file card—“Brooklyn. That’s quite inventive, actually. Some nonsense about hunting for a missing husband so his wife could get a religious divorce. It goes without saying, knowing your track record, neither our antenna in Israel nor our Perishables division here in London swallowed the cover story. So what are you hawking this time round, Mr. Dittmann? Used one-owner Kalashnikovs? That Ukrainian-manufactured passive radar system they say can detect Stealth aircraft at five hundred miles distance? Nerve gas masquerading as talcum powder? Seed stock for biological agents that cause cholera or camelpox?”
“None of the above.” Martin smiled innocently. “Search me.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He touched a button on a console. Martin could hear a buzzer wheeze in the outer office. The young man with the peaches-and-cream complexion and the woman who had been working on the computer terminal entered the room. “Would you be so kind as to give us the key to your valise, Mr. Dittmann,” the woman asked, “and then disrobe.” The black man came around the desk. Martin could see he was the kind who worked out at a gym often enough to hope the man who was supposed to help the police with their inquiries would resist.
Martin glanced at the woman. “I’m the timid type,” he remarked.
“Nothing you ’ave, guv’nor, she ’asn’t seen,” snapped peaches-and-cream in a mock cockney accent.
The two men concentrated on Martin, stripping him to the skin and going over every square inch of his three piece suit, underwear and socks. The Supervisor, Perishables paid particular attention to his shoes, inserting them one at a time into a contraption that projected an X-ray image of the shoe onto a glass plate. The woman emptied the contents of the valise onto the desk and began examining each item. Toothpaste was squeezed out of its tube into a plastic container that had Chinese writing on the side. Cold capsules were split open and inspected. The small container of shaving cream was emptied and then cut in half with a hacksaw. Standing in the middle of the room, stark naked, Martin tried to imagine the anti-British joke that Stella would concoct out of the episode, but he couldn’t come up with a punch line. Stella was surely right when she said he didn’t have a sense of humor. “I suppose you are going to compensate me for property destroyed,” he ventured as he started to pull on his clothing.
The Supervisor, Perishables took the question seriously. “You go ahead and replace the items in question and send us the bill,” he said. “If you address it to Heathrow, Perishables, it should get here, shouldn’t it, lads and ladies? Everyone knows who we are. Mind if I ask how long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”
“No. Ask.”
Supervisor, Perishables didn’t crack a smile. “How long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”
“My name is Odum. Martin Odum. I’m in Britain to tell anti-English jokes that will spread across the country like wildfire and take people’s minds off the drudgery of day-to-day life. I plan to stay as long as folks keep laughing.”
“He’s certainly original,” the black man told his associates.
Peaches-and-cream accompanied Martin down to the arrival hall. “No hurt feelings, I hope, gov’nor,” he said, falling back into his phony cockney accent and trying to sound ironic.
Following the signs leading to the underground, Martin quickly spotted the two men who were following him, one about fifteen paces behind, the other ten paces behind the first. What gave them away was their habit of concentrating on the windows of the boutiques every time he turned in their direction. As Martin reached the escalator down to the train level, the first man peeled away, the second closed the gap and a third hove into view behind him. The resources they were devoting to keep track of Lincoln Dittmann made Martin feel important; it had been a long time since anyone thought he was interesting enough to lay on a staggered tail. As always in situations like this, Martin was more preoccupied with the agents he didn’t see than the ones he was meant to spot. He took the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and the escalator to the street, then leaned against the side of a kiosk to give his game leg a rest. After awhile he strolled toward Tottenham Court Road, stopping at a chemist shop to buy toothpaste and shaving cream, eventually at a pub with a neon sign sizzling over the door that brought back memories of the Beirut waterfront and Dante’s Alawite prostitute named Djamillah. He settled onto a stool at the dimly-lit end of the bar and sipped at his half pint of lager until half of it was down the hatch. Opening his valise, he slipped the packet of false identity papers into the white silk bandanna, then mopped his brow with it and stuffed it into the pocket of his suit jacket. Hefting his small valise onto the bar, folding his Burberry across it, he asked the bartender to keep an eye on his things while he used the loo in the back. Martin didn’t even bother checking the tails, two outside in the street, one at a corner table in the front of the pub; they were all young, and young meant green, so they would fall for the oldest trick on the books: They would keep their eyes glued to the half consumed glass of lager and the valise with the raincoat on it, and wait for him to return. Depending on their relationship with the Supervisor, Perishables, they might or might not report that Martin had gone missing when he failed to come back.
Martin remembered this particular men’s lavatory from a stint in London a lifetime ago. He’d been on his way to the Soviet Union and stopped off for a briefing from MI6’s East European desk. What cover had he been using then? It must have been the original Martin Odum legend because Dittmann and Pippen came later, or so it seemed to him. In a remote corner of a lobe of his brain he had filed away one of those tradecraft details that field hands collected as if they were rare stamps: This particular lavatory had a fire door that was locked, but could be opened in an emergency by breaking a glass and removing the key hanging on a hook behind it. To Martin’s way of thinking, this clearly qualified as an emergency. He found the glass and retrieved the key and opened the fire door. Moments later he found himself in a narrow passage that gave onto a side street and, as luck would have it, a taxi stand.
“Paddington,” he told the driver.
He changed taxis twice more and only gave his real destination to the final driver. “Golders Green,” he said, settling into the backseat and enjoying his fleeting triumph over the warm bodies from five.
“Any particular place on Golders Green?” the driver asked over the intercom.
“You can let me off near the clock at the top. I’ll walk from there.”
“Right you are, gov’nor. You American, are you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s the accent, gov’nor. I know American when I hear it.”
“Actually I’m Polish,” Martin had said, “but I’ve lived in America and it rubbed off.”
The driver had tittered into the microphone. “I can tell someone what’s pulling me leg, gov’nor. If you’re Polish, that makes me an Eskimo.”
Martin had paid off the taxi in front of the Golders Green underground station. Standing under the word “Courage” engraved in the stone monument at the top of Golders Green, he took his bearings, then set off down the broad avenue awash in sunlight and filled with midday pedestrians—Filipino maids pushing old ladies tucked into wheel chairs, teenage boys in embroidered skull caps careening past on mountain bikes, dozens of ultrareligious women wearing wigs and long dresses window shopping in front of stores with signs in English and Hebrew. Martin found a second-hand store run by a Jewish charity and bought himself an old valise that looked as if it had been around the world several times. He made a slit in the frayed silk lining under the lid and hid his stash of documents, then filled the valise with threadbare but serviceable clothing. He came across a second-hand Aquascutum that they were practically giving away because the belt was missing and the hem was in tatters. At a chemists, he bought more toothpaste, a disposable razor and a small tube of shaving cream. On Woodstock Avenue off Golders Green he spotted a ramshackle house next to a synagogue with a sign on the unkempt lawn advertising rooms for rent. He paid the grumpy landlady for a week in advance, stored his gear and went around the corner for a bite to eat at a kosher delicatessen across the street from a church. Midafternoon he walked up Golders Green to the Chinese Medicinal Center for a session of acupuncture on his game leg. When he complained that his leg felt sorer after the acupuncture, the old Chinese man, plucking the long needles deftly out of Martin’s skin, said it was well known that things had to get worse before they could get better. Leaving a ten pound note on the counter, Martin promised he would bear that in mind. Starting back toward the rooming house, he noticed he was able to walk with less pain than before; he wondered whether it was due to the acupuncture needles or the power of suggestion. He bought a phone card at a tobacco shop and ducked into a fire-engine red booth on the corner of Woodstock and Golders Green that had a burnt phone book dangling from a chain. He rummaged in his wallet for the scrap of paper with the phone number that Elena had found on the back of the strudel recipe and, inserting his plastic card, dialed it.
Martin retrieved Dante Pippen’s rusty Irish accent for the occasion. “And who would I be speaking to, then?” he inquired when a female voice came on the line.
“Mrs. Rainfield, dear.”
“Good morning to you, Mrs. Rainfield. This is Patrick O’Faolain from the phone company. I’m up on a pole on Golders Green trying to sort out your lines. Could you do me the favor of pressing the number five and the number seven on your phone, in that order.”
“Five, then seven?”
“That’s the ticket, Mrs. Rainfield.”
“Did you hear it?”
“Loud and clear. Do it once more to be sure, will you, now?”
“Okay?”
“Beautiful. We ought to be hiring the likes of you.”
“Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“Don’t ask me how but your cable seems to have gotten itself twined around your neighbors’ lines. One of them complained she heard cross talk when she tried to use her phone. Did you experience any static on yours, Mrs. Rainfield?”
“Now that you mention it, the phone did seem fuzzier than usual this morning.”
“You ought to be hearing me clear as a bell now.”
“I am, thank you.”
“We spend most of our time climbing up phone poles to fix things that aren’t broken. Now and then it’s gratifying to fix something that is. You get half the credit—it was child’s play once you hit the five and the seven. For my work sheet I’ll be needing your full name and an address to go with your phone.”
“I’m Doris Rainfield,” the woman said, and she gave an address on North End Road, a continuation of Golders Green, behind the railroad station.
“Thanks a mill.”
“Ta.”
Martin pressed the buzzer next to the enormous steel door with “Soft Shoulder” engraved on a brass plaque and looked up into the security camera. There was a burst of static over the intercom. A woman’s nasal voice surfed above the static.
“If you’re delivering, you need to go round to the loading dock in back.”
“Mr. Martin Odum,” Martin called, “come to see the director of Soft Shoulder.”
“Are you the bloke what’s shipping the prostheses to Bosnia?”
“Afraid not. I was sent by a friend of the director’s, a Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov.”
“Wait a min, love.”
The static gave way to an eerie quiet. A moment later the woman whom Martin took for Mrs. Rainfield came back on the intercom. “Mr. Rabbani, he wants to know how you know Mr. Ugor-Zhilov.”
“Tell him,” Martin said, employing the phrase Kastner had used the day they met on President Street, “we’re birds of a feather.”
“Come again?”
“Yes, well, you can tell Mr. Rabbani that I know Samat from Israel.”
There was another interval of silence. Then a discreet electric current reached the lock in the door and it clicked open the width of a finger. Martin pushed it wide open and strode into the warehouse. He heard the door click closed behind him as he headed down the cement passageway lined with calendars from the 1980s, each with a photograph of a spread-eagled movie starlet flirting with nakedness. In the glass enclosed cubical at the end of the passageway, a young woman with pointed breasts and short hair the color and texture of straw sat behind a desk, painting her fingernails fuchsia. Martin poked his head through the open door. “You will be Doris Rainfield,” he guessed.
The woman looked up, intrigued. “Samat went and told you ‘bout me, did he, dear?” She batted the fingers of her right hand in the air to dry the nail polish. “I like Samat, I do. Oh, he’s one for putting on airs, waltzing in with that topcoat of’is flung over ’is shoulders like it was some kinda cape or other. He looked like the sheik in one of them Rudy Valentino silent period pictures, if you get my drift.”
“I do get your drift, Mrs. Rainfield.”
The woman lowered her voice to share a confidence. “Truth is I’m not Mrs. Rainfield. I used to be Mrs. Rainfield but I got myself legally hitched six weeks and three days back to Nigel Froth, which makes me Mrs. Froth, doesn’t it, dear? Do you recognize the name? My Nigel’s a world class snooker player. Made the quarter finals of the U.K. snooker championship last year, lost to the bloke who came in second, he did, which was a feather in ‘is cap, I’m referring to Nigel’s cap, not the bloke who came in second’s cap. I still use my first husband’s name at the office because that’s what Mr. Rabbani calls me. All the paperwork ‘ere is in the name of Rainfield and he says it’d be a bloody pain in the you know what to switch over.”
Martin leaned against the door jamb. “Does Mrs. Rainfield act any differently than Mrs. Froth?”
“I s’pose she does, now that you mention it. My Mr. Froth fancies me in miniskirts and tight sweaters, he does. Mr. Rainfield wouldn’t ’ave let me outa me house dressed like this. It’s a lot like Samat’s cape, isn’t it, dear? What you wear is who you want to be.” Fluttering unnaturally long lashes, Mrs. Rainfield pointed out the door at the bitter end of the passageway with her eyes. “Through there, then cross the warehouse on a diagonal and you’ll fall on Mr. Rabbani’s bailiwick. His factotum, an Egyptian named Rachid—trust me, you won’t miss him—minds the door.”
“Is Rachid his real name or is it a matter of Mr. Rabbani not wanting to redo the paperwork?”
Mrs. Rainfield giggled appreciatively.
Martin said, “Thank you” and started down the corridors created by stacks of cartons, all of them stencilled with the word “Prosthesis” and “Arm” or “Leg” and a measurement in inches and centimeters, along with a notation in smaller print that the articles had been manufactured in the United States of America. Above Martin’s head, diffused sunlight streamed through skylights stained with soot and bird droppings. A heavy-set man with unshaven jowls and untidy hair, clearly the body guard, loomed beyond the last cartons. A handwritten nametag pinned to the wide lapel of his double-breasted suit jacket identified him as Rachid.
“You carrying?” he inquired, sizing Martin up with eyes that conveyed indifference to the visitor’s fate in the unlikely event he resisted inspection.
Martin played a role he wasn’t accustomed to: innocent. “Carrying what?”
Rachid snapped, “Something the municipal police might mistake for a handgun.”
Grinning, Martin spread his legs apart and raised his arms. The bodyguard frisked him very professionally, passing his hand so high up the crotch that he grazed his penis with his knuckles, causing Martin to shudder.
“You ticklish, then?” the bodyguard remarked with a smirk. He inclined his head in the direction of a door with a neatly lettered plastic placard on it that said “Taletbek Rabbani—Export.” Martin knocked. After a moment he knocked again and heard the scratchy voice of an old man call out weakly, “So what are you waiting on, my son, a hand delivered invite?”
Looking like a parenthesis, Taletbek Rabbani sat on a high stool hunched over a high desk, a thick cigarette dangling from his bone-dry lips, a smog of smoke hovering over his bald head like a rain cloud. An old man who must have been nudging ninety, he was not much thicker that the pencil clasped in his arthritic fingers. A tuft of coarse white hair protruded from under his lower lip and served as a receptacle for the ash that dropped off the burning end of the cigarette. A swell of warm air enveloped Martin as he stepped into the room; the old man kept his office heated to near sauna temperatures. Settling onto a tattered settee with the tag “Imported from Sri Lanka” still attached to one spindly wooden leg, Martin could hear the water gurgling through the radiators. “Taletbek Rabbani sounds like a Tajik name,” he remarked. “If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say you were a Tajik from the steppes of the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. I seem to remember there was a tribal chief named Rabbani who presided over a cluster of mountain villages near the frontier with Uzbekistan.”
Rabbani waved his skeletal fingers to dispel the cigarette smoke and get a better look at his visitor. “You have been to Afghanistan?” he demanded.
“In a previous incarnation I hung out for the better part of a year near the Khyber Pass.”
Rabbani was still trying to get a handle on Martin’s curriculum vitae. “What were you doing, my son, buying or selling?”
“Buying. Stories. I was debriefing fighters going into and out of Afghanistan and writing them up for a wire service.”
An ephemeral smile crossed Rabbani’s age-ravaged eyes. “Wire service, my foot. Only people who hung out at the Khyber Pass were American intelligence agents. Which means you were on the same side as my older brother, the tribal chieftain Rabbani.”
Martin had guessed as much once he’d placed Rabbani’s name; he hoped that this would get him off on the right track with the old codger who, he now noticed, kept his left hand out of sight below the desk. His fingers were certainly wrapped around the butt end of a pistol.
“What happened to your brother after the Russians were kicked out?”
“Along with everyone else in the valley, he got caught up in the civil war—he fought alongside Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Taliban when they abandoned their medrassahs in Pakistan and started to infiltrate into Afghanistan. One day the Taliban invited my brother to meet under a white flag in the outskirts of Kabul.” The same smile appeared in Rabbani’s eyes, only this time it was tainted with bitterness. “I advised him against going, but he was strong headed and fearless and shrugged off my counsel. And so he went. And so the Taliban cut his throat, along with those of his three bodyguards.”
“I vaguely remember the incident.”
Rabbani’s left hand came into view, which told Martin that he had passed muster.
“To have been at the Khyber, to remember Rabbani,” the old man said, “you must have worked for the CIA.” When Martin neither confirmed nor denied it, Rabbani nodded slowly. “I understand there are things that are never spoken aloud. You must forgive an old man for his lack of discretion.”
Martin could hear trains pulling into or out of the station next to the warehouse with the rhythmic throb that was almost as satisfying as travel itself. “If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Rabbani, how did you wind up in London?”
“I was dispatched by my brother to England to purchase medical supplies for our wounded fighters. When my brother was murdered, a cousin on my mother’s side profited from my absence to usurp the leadership of the tribe. My cousin and I are sworn enemies—tribal custom prevents me from exposing to you the reason for this feud while there is no representative of my cousin present to defend the other side of the matter. Suffice it to say that it became healthier for me to stay on in London.”
“And you went into the business of selling prostheses with Samat?”
“I don’t know how well you know Samat,” Rabbani said, “but he is a philanthropist at heart. He provided the start-up money to lease this warehouse and open the business.”
“The Samat I know does not have a reputation as a philanthropist,” Martin said flatly. “He wheels and deals in many of the weapons that lead to the loss of limbs. If he is in the business of selling false limbs to war-torn countries, there must be a healthy profit in it.”
“You misread Samat, my son,” Rabbani insisted. “And you misread me. Samat is too young to be interested only in profit, and I am too old. The cartons filled with false limbs that you saw on the way to my office are sold at cost.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You clearly do not believe me.” Rabbani slipped awkwardly off of the high stool and, retrieving two wooden canes that had been out of sight behind the desk, made his way across the room. When he stood before the settee, he hiked the trouser on his left leg, revealing a skin-colored plastic prosthesis with a Gucci loafer fitted onto the end of it.
Martin asked quietly, “How did you lose your leg?”
“I was told it was a land mine.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Some nights fleeting images of what happened surface in my brain: a deafening explosion, the taste of dirt in my mouth, the stickiness of my stump when I reached down to touch it, the feeling I had for months that the leg was still there and I could feel pain in it. The images seem to come from the life of another, and so I have trouble reconstructing the event.”
“Psychiatrists call that a survival mechanism, I think.”
Leaning on one cane and then the other, Rabbani returned to his high chair and hefted himself into it. “I first met Samat when I was buying Soviet surplus arms and munitions in Moscow in the early nineties so that Massoud and my brother could defend the Panjshir. The Russian army units pulling out of their bases in the former German Democratic Republic after the Berlin Wall came down were selling off everything in their arsenals—rifles, machine guns, mortars, land mines, radios, jeeps, tanks, ammunition. Samat, representing the business interests of someone very powerful, was the middleman. It was a period of my life when I felt no guilt about buying and using these arms. I did to the Taliban what they eventually did to me. That was before I myself walked on a land mine. Take it from someone who has been there, Mr. Odum, it’s an exhilarating experience, stepping on a mine. One instant you are attached to the ground, the next you are defying gravity, flailing away in the air. When you fall back to earth you have one limb less and nothing—not your body, not your mind—is ever the same. It was Samat who arranged for me to be flown to a Moscow hospital. It was Samat who came around with my manufactured-in-America artificial leg. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I became another person. Which is why you find me presiding over a warehouse filled with prostheses that we sell at cost.”
“And where does the name ‘Soft Shoulder’ come from?”
“Samat and I were traveling in the U.S. once,” Rabbani explained. “We were driving a large American automobile from Santa Fe, in New Mexico, to New York, when we stumbled across the idea of going into the business of exporting artificial limbs at prices that would make them more easily affordable to the victims of war. We had pulled up at the side of the road to urinate when we shook hands on the project. Next to the car was a sign that read ‘Soft Shoulder.’ Neither of us knew what it meant, but we decided it would make a fitting name for our company.”
The intercom buzzed. Rabbani depressed a lever with a deft jab of a cane and barked irritably, “And what is it now, my girl?”
Mrs. Rainfield’s voice came over the speaker. “Truck’s here for the Bosnia shipment, Mr. Rabbani. I sent them round back to the loading dock. They gave me a certified bank check for the correct amount.”
“Call the bank to confirm it issued the check. Meanwhile get Rachid to supervise the loading.” Rabbani tripped the lever closed with his cane, cutting the connection. “Can’t be too vigilant,” he moaned. “Lot of shady dealers make a lot of money peddling prostheses—they are not happy when someone else sells them at cost.” He pried the stub of the cigarette out of his mouth and lobbed it across the room into a metal waste basket. “When were you in Israel, Mr. Odum?”
“Went there roughly ten days back.”
“You told Mrs. Rainfield to tell me you knew Samat from Israel. Why did you lie?”
Martin understood that a lot depended on how he answered the question. “In order to get past the front door,” he said. He angled his head. “What makes you think I was lying?”
Rabbani pulled an enormous handkerchief from a pocket and wiped the perspiration under his shirt collar at the back of his neck. “Samat left Israel before you got there, my son.”
“How do you know that?”
The old man shrugged his bony shoulders. “I will not ask you how you know what you know. Do me the courtesy of not asking me how I know what I know. Samat fled from Israel. If you came knocking on my door today, it is because you somehow found a record of his phone conversations and traced the calls he made to this address in London, despite the fact that these phone records were supposed to have been destroyed. I will not ask you how you did that—the phone company is not permitted to reveal addresses corresponding to unlisted numbers.”
“Why did you let me in if you knew I was lying about Samat?”
“I calculated if you were clever enough to find me, you might be clever enough to lead me to Samat.”
“Join the queue, Mr. Rabbani. It seems as if everyone I meet wants to find Samat.”
“They want to find Samat in order to kill him. I want to find him in order to save his life.”
“Do you know why he fled Israel?”
“Certainly I know. He fled from Israel for the same reason he fled to Israel. Chechen hit men were after him. Have been since the Great Mob Wars in Moscow. Samat works for the Oligarkh—you’re smart, I’ll give you that, but not so smart that you’ve heard of him.”
Martin couldn’t resist. “Samat’s uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov.”
The old man cackled until the laugh turned into a grating cough. Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. He dabbed at it with the handkerchief as he gasped for breath. “You are a smart one. Do you know what happened during the Great Mob War?”
“The Slavic Alliance battled the Chechen gangs. Over territory. Over who controlled what.”
“At the height of the war the Chechens had about five hundred fighters working out of the Rossiya Hotel not far from the Kremlin. The leader of the Chechens was known by his nom de guerre, which was the Ottoman. The Oligarkh arranged to have him and his lady friend at the time kidnapped. Samat was sent to negotiate with the Chechens—if they wanted their leader back they would have to abandon Moscow and settle for some of the smaller cities that the Oligarkh was willing to cede to them. The Chechens said they needed to discuss the matter with the others. Samat decided they were playing for time—even if they agreed, there was no guarantee they would give up Moscow. He persuaded the Oligarkh that the Chechens needed to be taught a lesson. Next morning people going to work found the body of the Ottoman and his lady friend hanging upside down from a lamppost near the Kremlin wall—newspapers compared it to the death of Mussolini and his mistress in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War.”
“And you call Samat a philanthropist?”
“We all of us have many sides, my son. That was one side of Samat. The other was selling prostheses at cost to provide limbs to land-mine victims. I was one person before I stepped on the land mine and another after. What about you, Mr. Odum? Are you one dimensional or do you have multiple personalities like the rest of us?”
Martin brought a hand up to his forehead to contain the migraine throbbing like the trains pulling into and out of the station. Across the room the old man carefully pulled another cigarette from a desk drawer and lit it with a wooden match, which he ignited with a flick of his fingernail. Once again the smog of a rain cloud rose over his head. “Who is paying you to find Samat, Mr. Odum?”
Martin explained about the wife Samat had abandoned in Israel; how she needed to find her husband so he could grant her a religious divorce in front of a rabbinical court. Puffing away on his cigarette, Rabbani thought about this. “Not like Samat to abandon a wife like that,” he decided. “If he ran for it, it means the Chechens tracked him to that Jew colony next to Hebron. Chechens have long knives and long memories—I’ve been told some of them carry photographs cut from the newspapers of the Ottoman and his lady hanging upside down from a Moscow lamppost. The Chechens must have been knocking on Samat’s door, figuratively speaking, for him to cut and run.” Rabbani hauled open another drawer and retrieved a metal box, which he opened with a key attached to the fob of the gold watch in his vest pocket. He took out a wad of English bank notes and dropped them on the edge of the desk nearest Martin. “I would like to find Samat before the Chechens catch up with him. I would like to help him. He does not need money—he has access to all the money he could ever want. But he does need friends. I could arrange for him to disappear into a new identity; into a new life even. So will you work for me, Mr. Odum? Will you find Samat and tell him that Taletbek Rabbani stands ready to come to the assistance of his friend?”
“If Samat is being hunted by the Chechens, helping him could come back to haunt you.”
Rabbani reached for one of the canes and tapped it against his false limb. “I owe Samat my leg. And my leg has become my life. A Panjshiri never turns his back on such a debt, my son.”
Martin pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the desk and fanned the stack of banknotes as if it were a deck of cards. Then he collected them and shoved them into a pocket. “I hope you are going to tell me where to start to look.”
The old man picked up the pencil, scratched something on the back of an envelope and handed it to Martin. “Samat came here after he left Israel—he wanted to touch base with the projects to which he was especially attached. He stayed two days, then took a plane to Prague. There is an affiliate in Prague—another one of Samat’s pet projects—that’s doing secret work for him on the side. I met one of the directors, a Czech woman, when she came here to see Samat. She gave me her card in case I ever visited Prague.”
“What kind of secret work?”
“Not sure. I overheard the woman talking with Samat—the project had something to do with trading the bones of a Lithuanian saint for sacred Jewish Torah scrolls. Don’t ask what the bones of a saint have to do with Torah scrolls. I don’t know. Samat was very compartmented. The Samat I knew exported prostheses at cost. There were other Samats that I only caught glimpses of—one of them was concocting a scheme at the address I gave you in Prague.”
Martin glanced at the paper, then held out a hand. Rabbani’s bony fingers, soft with paraffin-colored skin, gripped his as if he didn’t want him to leave. Words barely recognizable as human speech bubbled up from the old man’s larynx. “I see things from the perspective of someone who is knocking at death’s door. Apocalypse is just around the corner, my son. You are looking at me as if I belong in an asylum, Mr. Odum. I am in an asylum. So come to think of it are you. Western civilization, or what is left of it, is one big asylum. The happy few who understand this are more often than not diagnosed as crazy and hidden away in lunatic bins.” Rabbani struggled for breath. “Find Samat before they do,” he gasped. “He is one of the happy few.”
“I’ll do my best,” Martin promised.
Making his way back through the aisles toward the front of the warehouse, Martin passed three lean men wrestling cartons onto a dolly. Rabbani’s bodyguard, Rachid, stood apart, watching them with his unblinking eyes. The three men, all clean shaven, were dressed alike in orange jumpsuits with the insignia of a shipping company sewn over the zipper of the breast pocket. As Martin walked past, they raised their eyes to scrutinize him; none of them smiled. There was something about the men that troubled Martin—but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Mrs. Rainfield waved from her cubical as he headed down the cement corridor toward the front door. As he reached it a discreet crackle of electric current sizzled through the lock and the door clicked open. Out in the street, Martin waved cheerfully at the security camera over his head. He was still trying to figure out what it was about the three shippers that had caught his eye as he started up the street in the direction of Golders Green and the rooming house.
The three men in orange jumpsuits piled the cartons so high on the dolly that the topmost one began to teeter. Rachid jumped forward to keep it from falling to the ground. “Watch what you are doing—” he started to say. He turned back to find himself staring into the bore of a silencer screwed into the barrel of an Italian Beretta. It was aimed directly at his forehead.
Rachid nodded imperceptibly, a Muslim authorizing the assassin to end his life. The man in the orange jumpsuit nodded back, acknowledging that Rachid was the master of his destiny, and squeezed the trigger. There was a muted hiss from the handgun, which recoiled slightly as a neat puncture wound materialized in Rachid’s forehead. The second man caught him under the armpits and lowered the body to the cement floor. The third man crossed the warehouse to Mrs. Rainfield’s office and rapped his knuckles on the glass door. She motioned for him to come in. “What can I do you, dear?” she asked.
He produced a silenced pistol from the zippered pocket of his jumpsuit and shot her through the heart. “Die,” he replied as she slumped onto the desk, her lifeless eyes frozen open in bewilderment.
Back in the warehouse, the two other men knocked on the door of Taletbek Rabbani’s office and entered. One of them held out the manifest. “Mr. Rabbani, there are two cartons of size six foot-prostheses missing,” one of them said as they approached his desk.
“That is absolutely impossible,” Taletbek Rabbani said, snatching up his canes and pushing himself to his feet. “Did you ask Rachid—” He became aware of the handgun fitted with a silencer inches from his skull. “Who are you?” he whispered harshly. “Who sent you?”
“We are who we are,” the man with the gun responded. He wrenched the canes out of Taletbek’s hands and, grabbing him by the wrists, dragged him across the warehouse, a Gucci loafer trailing at the end of the plastic prosthesis, to a stanchion near the body of Rachid. The man who had shot Mrs. Rainfield brought over a spool of thick orange packing cord and tied the old man’s wrists. Then he lobbed the spool over an overhead pipe and pulled on the cord until Taletbek’s arms, stretched directly above his head, were straining in their shoulder sockets and the toe of his good foot was scraping the cement. The man who appeared to be the leader of the team approached the old man.
“Where is Samat?”
Taletbek shook his head. “How is it possible to tell you something I myself do not know?”
“You will forfeit your life if you refuse to help us find him.”
“When you arrive in hell, I will be waiting for you, my son.”
“Are you a Muslim?” the leader inquired.
Taletbek managed to nod.
“Do you believe in the Creator, the Almighty? Do you believe in Allah?”
Taletbek indicated he did.
“Have you made pilgrimage to Mecca?”
Rabbani, his face contorted with pain, nodded again.
“Say your prayers, then. You are about to meet the one true God.”
The old man shut his eyes and murmured: “Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah.”
From the inside of his boot, the leader of the team of killers drew a razor sharp dagger with a groove along its thin blade and a yellowing camel bone handle. He stepped to one side of the old man and probed the soft wrinkles of skin on his thin neck looking for a vein.
“For the last time, where is Samat?”
“Samat who?”
The leader found the vein and slowly imbedded the blade into Taletbek’s neck until only the hilt remained visible. Blood spurted, staining the killer’s orange jumpsuit before he could leap out of the way. The old man breathed in liquidy gasps, each shallower than the previous one, until his head plunged forward and his weight sagged under the cord, pulling his arms out of the shoulder sockets.
Martin dialed Stella’s number in Crown Heights from the booth and listened to the phone ringing on the other end. It dawned on him that he was looking forward to hearing her voice—there was no denying that she had gotten under his skin. “That really you, Martin?” she exclaimed before he could finish a sentence. “Goddamn, I’m glad to hear from you. Missed you, believe it or not.”
“Missed you, too,” he said before he knew what he would say. In the strained silence, he imagined her tongue flicking over the chip in her front tooth.
She cleared her throat. “What do you say we get the business part of the conversation out of the way first. Yes, there was an autopsy. For obvious reasons, it was done by a CIA doctor. The FBI man who Kastner dealt with when he needed something sent it to me, along with a covering letter. In it he said the police found no evidence of a break-in. The doctor who performed the autopsy concluded that Kastner’d died of a heart attack.”
Martin was thinking out loud. “Maybe you should get a second opinion.”
“Too late for another autopsy.”
“What does that mean, too late?”
“When nobody claimed Kastner’s body, the CIA had him cremated. All they gave me was his ashes. I walked halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge and screamed out the punch line from one of those old anti-Soviet jokes that Kastner particularly liked—’Be careful what you struggle for because you may get it’—and scattered the ashes in the river.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I hate when you say Uh-huh because I’m never sure what you mean by it.”
“I don’t mean anything. I’m just buying time for my brain to work things out. Did you get to talk to Xing in the Chinese restaurant?”
“Yes. He was very suspicious until I convinced him I was a friend of yours. He was annoyed you hadn’t come back for the funeral of the Chinese girl your bees killed.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said you were busy detecting and he seemed to settle for that. The girl—”
“Her name was Minh.”
“Minh died in great pain, Martin. The police who investigated it decided her death was an accident.”
Martin offered up a short laugh. “The honey exploded by accident.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Did you find out what she was wearing when the bees attacked her?”
“The Daily News story said she was wearing a white jumpsuit with the sleeves and legs rolled up. A pith helmet with mosquito netting attached to it was found near her body.” A police cruiser with a screaming siren tore past Martin, drowning out all conversation. When it quieted down Martin could hear Stella saying, “Oh, I see.”
“What do you see?”
“The rolled up sleeves and legs—it was your jump suit, wasn’t it? Do you think … could it be that someone … oh, dear.” Stella lowered her voice. “I’m frightened, Martin.”
“Me, too, I’m frightened. Seems as if I’m always frightened.”
“Did your trip work out for you?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Not right now.”
“Want me to fly over and meet up with you? Two heads are better than one, remember. Two hearts, also.” He could almost hear the slight gasp of embarrassment. “No strings attached, Martin, it goes without saying.”
“Why do things that go without saying get said?”
“To avoid confusion. Hey, you want to hear a good Russian joke?”
“Save it for when we meet again.”
“I’ll settle for that.”
“For what?”
She said it very quietly. “For our meeting again.”
Another police car could be heard coming down Golders Green, its siren wailing. Martin said quickly, “Bye.”
“Yeah. Bye. Take care of yourself.”
“Uh-huh.”
The police car was almost abreast of Martin and Stella had to shout to be heard. “There you go again.”
Martin found a pub at the top of Golders Green and slid into a booth at the back. The waitress, a skinny young thing with one ear and one nostril and one eyebrow pierced and her navel visible below her short T-shirt, came around with the menu printed in chalk on a small blackboard. Martin ordered the special of the day and a half-pint of lager. He was sipping the lager and waiting for the special when there was a commotion in the front of the pub. People abandoned the bar and their tables to gather under the television on an overhead shelf. The screen was not facing the back of the pub so Martin couldn’t make out what was being said. When the waitress came around with the pot pie and chips, he asked her what was happening.
“People’ve been murdered in a warehouse stone’s throw from ’ere. Most exciting thing that’s ‘appened on Golders Green in a month of Sundays, don’t you know. That’s what all them police sirens was about.”
Martin went around to the front of the pub and caught the end of the news item. “A warehouse, located immediately behind the train station, was the grisly scene of the multiple murders,” the male anchor said. “According to municipal records, the warehouse was being used as a depot for prostheses being shipped by a humanitarian group called Soft Shoulder to war ravaged countries.” The female anchor chimed in: “We’re now being told that three bodies were removed from the warehouse. They were identified as a Mr. Taletbek Rabbani, aged eighty-eight, an Afghan refugee who directed the humanitarian operation and who bled to death from a knife wound to his neck while tied to an overhead pipe; his associate, an Egyptian known only as Rachid, who was killed by a single shot to the head; and a secretary, Mrs. Doris Rainfield, who was also shot to death. A fourth woman is missing and police fear she may have been kidnapped by the team of hit men when they fled the scene of the crime. She was identified as Mrs. Froth, and was said to be the wife of the well known snooker player Nigel Froth.”
Returning to his table, Martin found he’d lost all appetite for the pot pie. He raised a finger and caught the waitress’s eye and called, “Whiskey, neat. Make that a double.”
He was nursing the whiskey and his bruised emotions when he suddenly remembered what it was about the three men in orange jumpsuits at the warehouse that had troubled him. Of course! Why hadn’t he seen it sooner? They had all been clean shaven. The upper halves of their faces had been ruddy, as if they’d spent most of their waking hours outdoors. But the lower halves had been the color of sidewalk—one of the men had razor nicks on his skin—which suggested that they had only recently shaved off thick beards in order to make it more difficult to identify them as Muslims.
Martin closed his eyes and summoned up an image of Taletbek Rabbani suspended from an overhead pipe while an assassin stabbed him in the neck. Trying to pick up Samat’s trail, the Chechens, beardless in London, had come back to haunt the old one-legged Tajik warrior sooner than he’d imagined.